A secular Franciscan & student of René Girard reflecting on how we desire according to the desire of the other.
"Most High, glorious God, cast Your Light into the darkness of my heart, and grant me a right faith, certain hope and perfect charity, sense and understanding, Lord, so that I may know and do Your holy and true command." - St. Francis of Assisi: Prayer before the Crucifix
God alone can teach us to love God. All we can do is prepare
the inflammable substance as best we can and, as the physicists say nowadays,
wait for the chain reaction. All we can do, within the limitations of our
miserable egotism, is listen for and help along that feeble cry which struggles
to say, Father! Abba!
The conversion of the mind is difficult enough, but how much
more so the conversion of the heart! For the love of God is total, embracing
all things, and jealous; it is at once personal and transcendent. It beckons us
to that path which leads to His heart of hearts, for God is love. He is not too
weary after all the miracles, nor all the miseries in which we founder, nor all
the extremities through which our fortunes lead us, to reveal Himself to us as
our one hope of salvation. - Paul Claudel, I Believe in God (appearing in The Magnificat)
A wonderful poem by William Stafford, from Smokes’ Way (1983) puts into words the experience of walking a labyrinth.
When God watches you walk, you are/
neither straight nor crooked. The journey stretches out, and all of its reasons/ beat like a heart. Coming back, no triumph, no regret, you fold into the curves,/
left, right, and arrive. You touch the door. The road straightens behind you./
It is now. It has all come true.
Gil Bailie elaborates further on the poem: "Our lives meander all over taking different turns, running into dead ends and reverses and suddenly, with God’s grace we arrive at where we are going. We touch the door and the path straightens out behind us. I have a friend who says that if I met myself back when I was 20, he would not recognize me, but I would recognize him. Well, the door for us is the Cross and the scriptures straighten behind us. When we touch that, then we go back and read it again. We read it for the second time and we say: Christ is the answer and the Cross is the cure. Now we can see what is happening in this story."
And now, as Simone Weil reveals, we take our place at the mouth of the labyrinth:
"The beauty of the world is at the mouth of the labyrinth. The unwary individual who on entering takes a few steps is soon unable to find the opening. Worn out, with nothing to eat or drink, in the dark, separated from his dear ones, and from everything he loves and is accustomed to, he walks on without knowing anything or hoping anything, incapable even of discovering whether he is really going forward or merely turning round on the same spot. But this affliction is as nothing compared with the danger threatening him. For if he does not lose courage, if he goes on walking, it is absolutely certain that he will finally arrive at the center of the labyrinth. And there God is waiting to eat him. Later he will go out again, but he will be changed, he will have become different, after being eaten and digested by God. Afterward he will stay near the entrance so that he can gently push all those who come near into the opening" (1951, Waiting for God, pp. 163-164).
The eleven circuit Bon Secours Labyrinth is the focal point of a one-acre sacred space surrounded by tall shade trees, plants, flowers and meditation benches.
My first experience with a labyrinth was here at the Bon Secours Center during a Shalem Institute "Soul of the Executive" program in October 2000. During the first residency, a 6 day retreat, I walked the labyrinth 4 times, each time coming away a bit disoriented as my memories were being stirred and quieted at the same time. Each leaving of the center of the labyrinth I sensed a fear, as in a loss of balance with an unsettling peace, not one I had been accustom. Over time and with spiritual direction I came to realize that this dis-ease was "me" being displaced at the center of the universe - of the labyrinth if you will. A major part of this disorientation was that my memories were being transformed, so as they were no longer "my" memories but Christ's in which I shared. I admit that It seems all so scary as I came to understand what St Paul proclaimed, "It is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Galatians 2:20). The re-visualizing of my memories is nothing short of this "I" that clung to a false security formed by this world - putting "me" at the center, to the constitution of a new "I" in Christ, now alive through His life, death and resurrection at the center. So as Simone Weil describes, I too, after exiting the labyrinth, found myself near its entrance ready to nudge the next passerby into the mystery.
Excerpt from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The words of the deceased Priest and Monk, the Elder Zossima
"Mother darling,"
he would say, "there must be servants and masters, but if so I will be the
servant of my servants, the same as they are to me. And another thing, mother,
every one of us has sinned against all men, and I more than any."
Mother positively smiled at
that, smiled through her tears. "Why, how could you have sinned against
all men, more than all? Robbers and murderers have done that, but what sin have
you committed yet, that you hold yourself more guilty than all?"
"Mother, little heart of
mine," he said (he had begun using such strange caressing words at that
time), "little heart of mine, my joy, believe me, everyone is really
responsible to all men for all men and for everything. I don't know how to
explain it to you, but I feel it is so, painfully even. And how is it we went
on then living, getting angry and not knowing?"
The
beauty of the world is at the mouth of the labyrinth. The unwary individual who
on entering takes a few steps is soon unable to find the opening. Worn out,
with nothing to eat or drink, in the dark, separated from his dear ones, and
from everything he loves and is accustomed to, he walks on without knowing
anything or hoping anything, incapable even of discovering whether he is really
going forward or merely turning round on the same spot. But this affliction is
as nothing compared with the danger threatening him. For if he does not lose
courage, if he goes on walking, it is absolutely certain that he will finally
arrive at the center of the labyrinth. And there God is waiting to eat him.
Later he will go out again, but he will be changed, he will have become
different, after being eaten and digested by God. Afterward he will stay near
the entrance so that he can gently push all those who come near into the
opening.
From Roman Catholic Spiritual Direction blogFr. John and Dan Burke talk about common struggles with confession and how we can better understand and enter into the grace of this sacrament.
(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"
This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.
Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about "teaching you how to think". If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your scepticism about the value of the totally obvious.
Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."
It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.
The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.
Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.
Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.
Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education--least in my own case--is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualise stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.
As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master".
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.
And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.
By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.
But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.
Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.
But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.
Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.
You get the idea.
If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.
The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.
Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.
But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.
This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.
The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.
It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
"This is water."
"This is water."
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.
His epitaph is Athanasius contra mundum, “Athanasius against the world.” We are proud that our own country has more than once stood against the world. Athanasius did the same. He stood for the Trinitarian doctrine, “whole and undefiled,” when it looked as if all the civilised world was slipping back from Christianity into the religion of Arius—into one of those “sensible” synthetic religions which are so strongly recommended today and which, then as now, included among their devotees many highly cultivated clergymen. It is his glory that he did not move with the times; it is his reward that he now remains when those times, as all times do, have moved away. - CS Lewis
Saint Athanasius of Alexandria
From Pope Benedict XVI, General Audience
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
Continuing our re-visitation of the great Teachers of the ancient Church, let us focus our attention today on St Athanasius of Alexandria.
Only a few years after his death, this authentic protagonist of the Christian tradition was already hailed as "the pillar of the Church" by Gregory of Nazianzus, the great theologian and Bishop of Constantinople (Orationes, 21, 26), and he has always been considered a model of orthodoxy in both East and West.
Athanasius was undoubtedly one of the most important and revered early Church Fathers... (f)or Athanasius was also the most important and tenacious adversary of the Arian heresy, which at that time threatened faith in Christ, reduced to a creature "halfway" between God and man, according to a recurring tendency in history which we also see manifested today in various forms.
In all likelihood Athanasius was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in about the year 300 A.D. He received a good education before becoming a deacon and secretary to the Bishop of Alexandria, the great Egyptian metropolis. As a close collaborator of his Bishop, the young cleric took part with him in the Council of Nicaea, the first Ecumenical Council, convoked by the Emperor Constantine in May 325 A.D. to ensure Church unity. The Nicene Fathers were thus able to address various issues and primarily the serious problem that had arisen a few years earlier from the preaching of the Alexandrian priest, Arius.
With his theory, Arius threatened authentic faith in Christ, declaring that the Logos was not a true God but a created God, a creature "halfway" between God and man who hence remained for ever inaccessible to us. The Bishops gathered in Nicaea responded by developing and establishing the "Symbol of faith" ["Creed"] which, completed later at the First Council of Constantinople, has endured in the traditions of various Christian denominations and in the liturgy as the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed.
In this fundamental text - which expresses the faith of the undivided Church and which we also recite today, every Sunday, in the Eucharistic celebration - the Greek term homooúsiosis featured, in Latin consubstantialis: it means that the Son, the Logos, is "of the same substance" as the Father, he is God of God, he is his substance. Thus, the full divinity of the Son, which was denied by the Arians, was brought into the limelight.
In 328 A.D., when Bishop Alexander died, Athanasius succeeded him as Bishop of Alexandria. He showed straightaway that he was determined to reject any compromise with regard to the Arian theories condemned by the Council of Nicaea...
Despite the unequivocal outcome of the Council, which clearly affirmed that the Son is of the same substance as the Father, these erroneous ideas shortly thereafter once again began to prevail - in this situation even Arius was rehabilitated -, and they were upheld for political reasons by the Emperor Constantine himself and then by his son Constantius II.
Moreover, Constantine was not so much concerned with theological truth but rather with the unity of the Empire and its political problems; he wished to politicize the faith, making it more accessible - in his opinion - to all his subjects throughout the Empire.
Thus, the Arian crisis, believed to have been resolved at Nicaea, persisted for decades with complicated events and painful divisions in the Church. At least five times - during the 30 years between 336 and 366 A.D. - Athanasius was obliged to abandon his city, spending 17 years in exile and suffering for the faith. But during his forced absences from Alexandria, the Bishop was able to sustain and to spread in the West, first at Trier and then in Rome, the Nicene faith as well as the ideals of monasticism, embraced in Egypt by the great hermit, Anthony, with a choice of life to which Athanasius was always close.
St Anthony, with his spiritual strength, was the most important champion of St Athanasius' faith. Reinstated in his See once and for all, the Bishop of Alexandria was able to devote himself to religious pacification and the reorganization of the Christian communities. He died on 2 May 373, the day when we celebrate his liturgical Memorial.
The most famous doctrinal work of the holy Alexandrian Bishop is his treatise: De Incarnatione, On the Incarnation of the Word, the divine Logos who was made flesh, becoming like one of us for our salvation.
In this work Athanasius says with an affirmation that has rightly become famous that the Word of God "was made man so that we might be made God; and he manifested himself through a body so that we might receive the idea of the unseen Father; and he endured the insolence of men that we might inherit immortality" (54, 3). With his Resurrection, in fact, the Lord banished death from us like "straw from the fire" (8, 4).
The fundamental idea of Athanasius' entire theological battle was precisely that God is accessible. He is not a secondary God, he is the true God and it is through our communion with Christ that we can truly be united to God. He has really become "God-with-us"...
Lastly, Athanasius also wrote meditational texts on the Psalms, subsequently circulated widely, and in particular, a work that constitutes the bestseller of early Christian literature: The Life of Anthony, that is, the biography of St Anthony Abbot. It was written shortly after this Saint's death precisely while the exiled Bishop of Alexandria was staying with monks in the Egyptian desert.
Athanasius was such a close friend of the great hermit that he received one of the two sheepskins which Anthony left as his legacy, together with the mantle that the Bishop of Alexandria himself had given to him.
The exemplary biography of this figure dear to Christian tradition soon became very popular, almost immediately translated into Latin, in two editions, and then into various Oriental languages; it made an important contribution to the spread of monasticism in the East and in the West...
Moreover, Athanasius himself showed he was clearly aware of the influence that Anthony's fine example could have on Christian people. Indeed, he wrote at the end of this work:
"The fact that his fame has been blazoned everywhere, that all regard him with wonder, and that those who have never seen him long for him, is clear proof of his virtue and God's love of his soul. For not from writings, nor from worldly wisdom, nor through any art, was Anthony renowned, but solely from his piety towards God. That this was the gift of God no one will deny.
"For from whence into Spain and into Gaul, how into Rome and Africa, was the man heard of who dwelt hidden in a mountain, unless it was God who makes his own known everywhere, who also promised this to Anthony at the beginning? For even if they work secretly, even if they wish to remain in obscurity, yet the Lord shows them as lamps to lighten all, that those who hear may thus know that the precepts of God are able to make men prosper and thus be zealous in the path of virtue" (Life of Anthony, 93, 5-6).
Yes, brothers and sisters! We have many causes for which to be grateful to St Athanasius. His life, like that of Anthony and of countless other saints, shows us that "those who draw near to God do not withdraw from men, but rather become truly close to them" (Deus Caritas Est, n. 42).
The ever popular notion that one discovers their true identity in and/or by Nature tantamount to navigating a very slippery slope. Maybe the best way to come at this is to simply say that in Nature there is an instinctual level of communication yet the reality of human existence does not take form until something else takes place; meaning and our ability to symbolize our experiences rather than simply respond to it. The Word and thus, naming reveals the mystery of reality. Mystery in this sense is not so much as unknown but unfathomable, something like love, there is so much more to be appreciated. So something other than communication happens here and language is our way of bringing meaning to our existence. Stumbling blocks akin to slippery slopes are often examples of our fallen relationship with another, a teacher or model where, by a knee jerk tendency in naming something, we explain it away rather than to find a way to rest in the tension of the mystery of naming something so to grant access to its wonder bringing us into a deeper relationship. Therefore the idea or image that some have that Nature is a mother to us just does not work - a sister, yes, but not a mother. G.K. Chesterton observed:
The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn mother to the worshipers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved. - Orthodoxy, pg. 168-169
In the wisdom of St Thomas Aquinas: "Since grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it, natural reason must be subject to faith, just as the natural tendency of the will is guided by charity." This is so important when we discern certain orientations as they brush up against matters of faith and of being human. Again it is necessary to rest in the mystery of naming something to find how Grace is working in our nature. Pope Benedict XVI wrote in Caritas in Veritate:
“One aspect of the contemporary technological mindset is the tendency to consider the problems and emotions of the interior life from a purely psychological point of view, ... In this way man’s interiority is emptied of its meaning and gradually our awareness of the human soul’s ontological depths, as probed by the saints, is lost. The question of development is closely bound up with our understanding of the human soul,insofar as we often reduce the self to the psyche and confuse the soul’s health with emotional well-being. These over-simplifications stem from a profound failure to understand the spiritual life, and they obscure the fact that the development of individuals and peoples depends partly on the resolution of problems of a spiritual nature.”
To contemplate on this spiritual nature that Benedict refers to we must accept the challenge to heighten our religious sensibilities. This doesn't necessarily mean a more complex study like I love to meander through, but one can take a page out of The Story of a Soulfrom the mystical heart of St. Thérèse's Little Way, where she explains that Jesus does not demand great actions from us but simply surrender and gratitude, the keys to human freedom. Contrary to any notion (or rather myth) of freedom in Nature, where in reality we are reduced to reciprocal-response creatures, St. Thérèse'sLittle Way illuminates a relational model of being where we are predisposed for the other and God. Here, freedom in Christ, a surrender and gratitude brings an openness and willingness to journey with God exploring the numerous and varied voices operating on us and to reach beyond those 'other' voices to discover the portal that leads to Christ, who is our fulfillment. With our Baptism in the Holy Spirit we find our being in Christ so to relax into (graciously surrendering the controls to God) into an imitation of Him whose self-donating nature allows us to reach out to our sisters and brothers in a state of meaning, purpose and solidarity. Without God, the Transcendent Other however, and to the degree we reject or even neglect God, we are swayed toward an atheism of indifference and relativism, oblivious to God and are at risk of becoming oblivious to the values sustaining life. Caught in something resembling a soap opera or grade-B movie, our life without the breaking-in of something-larger-than-we-are is emptied of any inner peace and our relationships become frail and often filled with resentment. Our soul becomes parched and very quickly, emptied of our sense of worthiness - our lives becoming mere shadows of a self not able to substantiate between a real or a virtual existence. Nature is perfected in Grace, so too the human nature must be perfected through on-going spiritual formation. This unfathomable mystery of formation is actually found in its simple signposts directing us toward becoming fully human. The signposts of spiritual formation are: induction, habits, and time. So breaking free from the soap opera life of a tit-for-tat existence we are led by others into something over time. Hence, Grace perfecting nature.
Formation needs to be nourished by a diet of study and piety that fuses into apostolic action. Like most diets spiritual formation is a struggle where temptations that are distracting and demeaning blind us from our goal. So it is important to remember our need to go beyond reason to where we surrender to faith that sustain us. Fidelity, fidelity, fidelity is the key to spiritual formation. A great source to help stay true to God's meaning and presence in one's journey is a spiritual director. They can help one stay focused in Christ always mindful that the journey is relational. The service of spiritual direction fosters a spaciousness, a width and breath in order to build up our nature in the communion of Christ. Allowing Grace to perfect nature.
For Francis there was never any "escape from the desperations of natural life, but in a transformation in his spiritual understanding of the interwoven meaning of suffering and love. He came to see that the whole of creation, and each of its varied creatures in their distinct strengths and struggles, reflected and revealed the perfection of the Creator. If all things are from one Father, then all are kin and worthy of solicitude and appreciation. It was not nature in the abstract that he loved but every differentiated being in its particularity and individuality. Likewise, he loved not humanity in the abstract so much as individual human beings. He described this love as courtesy, a tender affection and concern for others as precious and unique, as creatures beloved of God; and his courtesy was born not of magnanimity or largesse (with their implicit sense of superiority) but of genuine humility of heart. He became the “little brother” (the Order of Friars Minor is the official name of his followers), placing himself in a position of neediness before others. Not so much a giver of gifts as a “giver of giving,” Francis provided the invitation to give by putting himself in circumstances that drew forth the generosity of others — and with it, their self-respect."
Here is a concept we should spend our entire life working toward: A "giver of giving" - being an invitation to give by drawing forth the generosity of others - and with it their self-respect. So "self-respect" is not something we muster up from within our selves through autonomous self-will or individualism... self-respect is rather a gift received. Imagine that.
The basic meaning of the word recollected is "to be unified, gathered together." A glance at our life will show how much we lack this aptitude. We should have a fixed center which, like the hub of a wheel, governs our movements and from which all our actions go out and to which they return; a standard also, or a code by which we distinguish the important from the unimportant, the end from the means, and which puts actions and experience into their proper order; something stable, unaffected by change and yet capable of development, which makes it clear to us who we are and how matters stand with us. We lack this; we, the men of today lack it more than did those who lived in earlier ages.
This becomes evident in our attempts to pray. Spiritual teachers speak of distractions that state in which man lacks poise and unity, that state in which thoughts flit from object to object, in which feelings are vague and unfocused and the will ineffective. Man in this state is not really a person who speaks or who can be spoken to, but merely an uncoordinated bundle of thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Recollectedness means that he who prays gathers himself together, directs his attention to what he is doing, draws in all thought--a painstaking task--so as to dedicate himself to prayer as a unified whole. This is the state in which he may, when the call comes to him, answer in the words of Moses, "Here I am."
The distractions in prayer come from the disjointedness of life. Some may claim that there seem to be more distractions today because there is a greater amount of information flowing in constantly. We cannot be focused on any issue for more than a few minutes at a time IF we allow ourselves to react to all of that information. And who can argue this claim. However the symptom of this carving-to-overdose on any and everything is our sense of emptiness - a lack of ontological density. From my mentor Gil Bailie:
However one understands the breakdown in the sense of being centered, of having a focus for one's life, the remedy abides somewhere in the mystery knowing that there is something greater here - in the very mystery of faith. Faith is a gathering up of all the me's into something larger than a self.
“Faith is the finding of a ‘You’ that upholds me and, amid all the unfulfilled…hope of human encounters, gives me the promise of an indestructible love that not only longs for eternity but also guarantees it. Christian faith lives on the discovery that not only is there such a thing as objective meaning but that this meaning knows me and loves me, that I can entrust myself to it like [a] child.” Pope Benedict XVI
To truly practice the Art of Praying in today's fast-paced, distracted and scandalized culture we may want to allow less of the world to intrude into our thoughts and instead hone in on and become participants in all things of beauty, truth and goodness.
This short scene in the movie, LINCOLN is a glimpse into scandal. A new book on scandal, Beneath the Veil of the Strange Verses Reading Scandalous Texts byJeremiah L. Albergdefines scandal: "as those events, scenes, and representations to which we are attracted at the same moment that we are repelled. The scandalous is that which excites without satisfying, seduces without delivering, and promises without fulfilling. In one word it summarizes René Girard's analysis of mimetic desire as the doomed-to-be-frustrated reaching for the skanalon, the object of scandal." (Link here to an excerpt from René Girard's I See Satan Fall Like Lightning.)
Alberg notes that we are confronted with a stark choice: "either turn away from scandal completely or become enthralled and thus trapped by it."
When watching the movie I thought this scene cuts to the truth of scandal and thus do we turn away from the corpses or get enthralled and trapped in the tragic. Or, as Alberg says, do we allow scandal to open us up to journey beyond the tragic and death to a deeper truth?
[Lincoln rides slowly on the frontline outside of Petersburg, Virginia, saddened by the sight of all the dead and wounded soldiers; later he meets Grant at his headquarters in in Petersburg; they sit outside on the porch] Abraham Lincoln: Once he surrenders, send his boys back to their homes, their farms, their shops. Ulysses S. Grant: Yes sir, as we discussed. Abraham Lincoln: Liberality all around, not punishment, I don't want that. And the leaders, Jeff and the rest of 'em, if they escape, leave the country while my back's turned, that wouldn't upset me none. When peace comes it mustn't just be hangings. Ulysses S. Grant: By outward appearance, you're ten years older than you were a year ago. [Lincoln, looking very tired, nods his head] Abraham Lincoln: Some weariness has bit at my bones. [he pauses for a moment, thinking] Abraham Lincoln: I never seen the like of it before. What I seen today. Never seen the like of it before. Ulysses S. Grant: You always knew that, what this was going to be. Intimate, and ugly. You must've needed to see it close when you decided to come down here. [Lincoln stands, puts his hat on and shakes Grant's hand] Abraham Lincoln:We've made it possible for one another to do terrible things. Ulysses S. Grant:We have won the war. Now you have to lead us out of it.
With the glorious resurrection and forgiveness of Easter upon us and with Pope Francis' exclamation of the meaning of God's Love in his Easter speech it seems a great time to throw out a challenge for the day (if not a lifetime). First let us soak up the Easter meaning in the words of Pope Francis:
What a joy it is for me to announce this message: Christ is risen! I would like it to go out to every house and every family, ...
Most of all, I would like it to enter every heart, for it is there that God wants to sow this Good News: Jesus is risen, there is hope for you, you are no longer in the power of sin, of evil! Love has triumphed, mercy has been victorious! The mercy of God always triumphs!
What does it mean that Jesus is risen? It means that the love of God is stronger than evil and death itself; it means that the love of God can transform our lives and let those desert places in our hearts bloom. The love God can do this!
This same love for which the Son of God became man and followed the way of humility and self-giving to the very end, down to hell – to the abyss of separation from God – this same merciful love has flooded with light the dead body of Jesus, has transfigured it, has made it pass into eternal life. Jesus did not return to his former life, to earthly life, but entered into the glorious life of God and he entered there with our humanity, opening us to a future of hope.
What a great way of describing the Transformative effect of the Risen Lord and how His Forgiveness is the way of opportunities, the way of "opening us to a future of hope." The idea of this opportunity to re-imagine God's Love comes after watching Evan Almighty, a warm & fuzzy modern day version of the story of the flood and Noah building the ARK.
So first let us get re-acclimated to the story - Gen 6:9-9:17 ...
Now "opening us to a future of hope," watch the clip from the movie where Al Mighty masterfully creates a safe space within the heart of downcast Joan Baxter so she has an opportunity to wrestle with a different version of love.
Al says, "...lot of people didn't get the point of the story. They think it is about God's wrath and anger... They love it when God gets angry... " Joan asks, "Well, what is the story about, the ARK?" Al Mighty responds, "... well, I think it is a love story, about believing in each other, ... everyone entered the ARK side-by-side." He then continues, "...sounds like an opportunity. Let me ask you something. If someone prays for patience, do you think that God gives them patience or does He give them the opportunity to be patient? If one prays for courage does God give them courage or the opportunity to be courageous? If someone prays for the family to be closer do you think God actually wants them to have warm fuzzy feelings or does He give them opportunities to love each other?"
Now let us ponder the opportunity: If the story of the ARK is NOT about God's wrath and anger but rather it is a love story then could it be that wherever we interpret God's wrath in scripture that we are actually projecting our own violence in place of, or to avoid, God's Love?
As I understand Pope Francis' Easter message as saying that we first need to allow a safe space to be created in our hearts to bloom so that our eyes may be opened so as to witness just who it is we are wrestling with. Instead of reading the flood story as representing God's wrath and anger; what if we read Gen 6:11-12: "Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence,"... full of violence: the earth was flooded with OUR resentment, wrath & anger; OUR violence. ... Humm, so are we not like the disciples on the road to Emmaus as we reflect on Pope Francis' message? What does it mean that Jesus is risen? ... it means that the love of God can transform our lives and let those desert places in our hearts bloom!
The Emmaus Road Story sheds the light of Easter on a way of reading the texts of the Old Testament - Jesus as Interpreter. What we get from the disciples' encounter along the road to Emmaus is that the teaching of Christ is being passed from those who are being forgiven to those who are being forgiven. God so loved us that He give us an opportunity to approach the flood narrative in Genesis (and all of Scripture) through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
You know that just a few days ago on Good Friday, we have Jesus left alone yet still faithful to the God of life, not giving in to the flood of voices shouting, "Away with him! Away with him!" Are not these voices the desperate cries of those stuck in the abyss of separation from God, as Pope Francis referred to in his Easter message?
* Let us look deeper, isn't Jesus swept up in the flood of our violence? In fact, isn't he the victim of it? For three days, at least. But, no! The cross and tomb are really his ARK! Being sealed up in the tomb has really been his ARK of salvation. For in three days, Jesus emerges as the only one to truly survive the flood of violence. And this time God's act of salvation will be the one to finally change history - which is to say, Jesus' imitation of God's self-emptying Love, the empty tomb, opens us to a future of hope. This hope is not some 'me-and-Jesus' myth of pop-Christianity rather, Jesus Christ is risen to begin life, to begin creation, AGAIN! By this Gift of being forgiven, we are presented the opportunity to start anew. He does so as the One who can help us go beyond the floods of violence so we may reach the shore of forgiveness - a spaciousness in the heart, a place where there is no rivalry suggesting that the true purpose of forgiveness is the creation of a new WE - not just a new me, but a new us. Now THAT is an ARK of salvation.
Just as 'Al Mighty' called Evan Baxter (Noah) out of the rising tide of violence, so too with Jesus' help, we can survive the scandal and dictatorship of today's relativism that cause so many to be swept up into the abyss of separation from God. Increasingly, the scandal of relativism, like floods of violence, get people all worked up easily sweeping them into the abyss, but do not despair, there are the remnant who resist and stay faithful.
Going back to the opportunity laid out before us, pause and reflect on the rising conflict(s) in your own life - at home; at work; even now in our nation. Be aware how easy is it to get swept up with the chorus singing; Crucify him, crucify him.
At one point in the movie Evan was abandoned: just like Noah and just like Jesus, we too can expect that lonely feeling as we try to remain faithful when so many are caught up in the violence of our culture's relativism when God's Love is proclaimed.
This same love for which the Son of God became man and followed the way of humility and self-giving to the very end, down to hell – to the abyss of separation from God – this same merciful love has flooded with light the dead body of Jesus, has transfigured it, has made it pass into eternal life. Jesus did not return to his former life, to earthly life, but entered into the glorious life of God and he entered there with our humanity, opening us to a future of hope.
God alone can teach us to love God. All we can do is prepare
the inflammable substance as best we can and, as the physicists say nowadays,
wait for the chain reaction. All we can do, within the limitations of our
miserable egotism, is listen for and help along that feeble cry which struggles
to say, Father! Abba! 
