Words Fail Me

The supreme test, however, of our confidence in God lies perhaps, in those moments of complete inner darkness in which we feel as though we were forsaken by God. Our heart feels blunt; our prayers for strength and inspiration  sound hollow, they seem plainly to be of no avail; wherever we look our glance perceives but our impotence and, as it were, an impenetrable wall separating us from God.

We doubt our being called; we appear to ourselves rejected and abandoned by God. It is in such moments, when we are most tempted to part with our confidence in God, that we need it most. An ardent belief in His love; a steadfast conviction that He is near to us even though we are, or imagine ourselves to be, far away from Him; an unbroken awareness that ‘he has first loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins’ (1 Jn 4:10)—these must carry us across the chasm of darkness and lend us strength to blindly let ourselves fall into His arms.

Our confidence in God must be independent of whether we experience His nearness, whether we sense the enlivening touch of grace, whether we feel being borne by the wings of His love. Has not God too much overwhelmed us with graces to allow us to forget them even for a moment? How could our present aridity obscure the irrevocably valid proofs of God’s grace, or make us doubt the primary truth that God has created us and redeemed us out of love, and that there is no darkness that cannot be lit up by His light?

Dietrich von Hildebrand, Transformation in Christ

Reflection – Another great post from a great man and Christian. I do a lot of spiritual direction, you know—it’s probably the single biggest work I do, time-wise—and I can verify the immense truth of this passage not only from my own life but from the lives and testimonies of many of ‘my’ people. It really and truly is when everything falls apart, inwardly and spiritually, that our confidence in God and our life of faith is most tested, and in that test, most strengthened.

I write this, though, and read von Hildebrand’s well-chosen words, realizing that it is precisely at those moments, precisely during those times of inner darkness and turmoil, that the words of others are of little avail, that words themselves (much as pains authorial me to say it) can do very little to illuminate and console. Words fail us, at such moments.

No, it is part of the suffering of this time that does indeed come to every faithful individual sooner or later, that when we are most deprived of the interior light of our own intellectual certainty or sense of confidence in God, it is precisely then that the light of truth and confidence of others can do little to help us.

But while this is a heavy thing—there’s no question about it, it is heavy—it is not a sad, gloomy thing at all. God is, as it turns out, bigger than our little minds and our little hearts. God’s grace, while more often than not working in concert with our frail, pale humanity, can indeed operate in the depths of our beings when all our human resources and human capacities fail utterly.

And in fact, this is the great moment when we learn this truth. And there is no other real way to learn it. Reading it in a book or on a blog (ahem) is all well and good and may help us vaguely, but we don’t know that God is God, real and alive and active and utterly sovereign over all, until we have been left with nothing else and all consolations and interior conviction of this has been taken away by this or that circumstance.

This is, as I understand it, what John of the Cross means by his dark nights, although I would caution both myself and anyone else that there is a great deal more to that saint’s doctrine than any of us can understand until we have gone up that mountain as he did.

But it remains a simple fact, albeit a searing, soaring, terrible one, that God must, and God does, plunge us into this kind of darkness, and that until he does so, we are paddling around in the shallows of faith, coming to God because he makes us feel good or gives us this or that blessing. When God is not making us feel good at all and seems to be giving us nothing, and we still come to Him… that is when true faith and true love begin to flourish in depth and in truth in us.

So that’s a nice little light thought for you for a mid-November day. Year of Faith, folks, drawing to a close, and there we have it—the way of faith and love in this world.

Doing the Splits in a Post-Modern Age

There are many religious Catholics whose readiness to change is merely a conditional one. They exert themselves to keep the commandments and to get rid of such qualities as they have recognized to be sinful. But they lack the will and the readiness to become new men all in all, to break with all purely natural standards, to view all things in a supernatural light.

They prefer to evade the act of metanoia: a true conversion of heart. Hence with an undisturbed conscience they cling to all that appears to them legitimate by natural standards. Their conscience permits them to remain entrenched in their self-assertion. For example, they do not feel the obligation of loving their enemies; they let their pride have its way within certain limits; they insist on the right of giving play to their natural reactions in answer to any humiliation.

They maintain as self-evident their claim to the world’s respect, they dread being looked upon as ‘fools of Christ’; they accord a certain role to human respect, and are anxious to stand justified in the eyes of the world also. They are not ready for a total breach with the world and its standards; they are swayed by certain conventional considerations; nor do they refrain from ‘letting themselves go’ within certain limits. There are various types and degrees of this reserved form of the readiness to change; but common to them all is the characteristic of a 

merely conditional obedience to the Call and an ultimate abiding by one’s natural self.

Dietrich von Hildebrand, Transformation in Christ

Reflection – This is one of those books you can easily pick up, open at random, and find a passage that makes you go, ‘hmmm. Well, that’s enough for me to think about for one day!’ I just did that, and the above is the proof.

It is always tempting, of course, when we read something like this, to immediately start making lists of all the Christians we know who are just like this and who really need to get their act together, and boy wouldn’t it be good if so-and-so read this book…

Yeah. One more manifestation of the refusal to change and become a new man, that is. This is really a matter of our own examination of conscience, our own need to really search out what is happening in our own hearts and minds. Where am I specifically saying ‘no’ to the transforming work of Christ? Where do I cling to my own natural ways of doing things, my own petty selfishnesses and egoisms? Where in my own life is it, in my own quiet way, ‘my way or the highway’, without any regard for the will and work of Christ?

Tough questions, and we all have to engage them according to our will to do so. I think the key to much of this is to renounce forever the attitude of spiritual complacency. There is nothing quite so toxic to the soul as the attitude that ‘I’ve done enough. I’ve gone as far as I need to. I’m OK.’

We are made to live a divine life, to live as Jesus lived: to have absolutely no bounds to our love, our mercy, our desire for the good, our willingness to serve, our detachment from our selves, our readiness to suffer and even die for our brothers and sisters. Until we’re there, we’re not there – we have not done enough, not gone as far as we need to, we are not OK.

This has always been vitally important—remember what I wrote yesterday about how it is the mediocrity of Christian witness that impedes Christian mission and evangelization. But I would hold that this half-hearted, ‘one foot in the world, one foot in the Gospel’ approach is getting even more problematic as the world gets further and further away from Gospel attitudes.

If half of us (at least) is adopting the standards and mores and general attitudes of the world and the other half (at best) is adopting Christian standards, this is going to get more and more uncomfortable as the two diverge. We will be rather in the position of doing the splits willy nilly, and are likely to break something up in there.

In an earlier age, the conventions of the world (which have never been all that great) at least included some of the precepts of conventional morality and decency. This is less and less the case, and a Christian with a fundamental allegiance to worldly attitudes in a post-modern world is more and more incoherent and fragmented. And incoherent and fragmented is no way to go through life, son.

So we have to choose. We always have, and the division of the ‘spirit of the world’ and the Spirit has always been a profound one. Von Hildebrand is a tough, challenging author, and I fully intend to keep throwing him up on the blog because he does bring that element of uncompromising challenge to the fore. Lots more to be said on this subject, but that’s enough for now, I think.

Why the World Does Not Believe Us

Christ, the Messiah, is not merely the Redeemer who breaks apart the bond, and cleanses us from sin. He is also the dispenser of a new divine life which shall wholly transform us and turn us into ‘new men’… Though we receive this new life in Baptism, it may not flourish in us unless we cooperate.

A strong desire must fill us to become different beings, to mortify our old selves and re-arise as new men in Christ. This desire, this readiness to ‘decrease’ so that ‘He may grow in us’ is the first elementary precondition for the transformation in Christ. It is the primal gesture by which man reacts to the light of Christ that has reached his eyes: the original gesture directed at God.

It is, in other words, the adequate consequence of our consciousness of being in need of redemption on the one hand, and our comprehension of being called by Christ on the other. Our surrender to Christ implies a readiness to let Him fully transform us, without setting any limit to the modification of our nature under his influence.

Dietrich von Hildebrand, Transformation in Christ

Reflection – A new author on the blog, the great lay theologian of the 20^th century who had such an influence on Popes John Paul II and Benedict, who wrote that “When the intellectual history of the Catholic Church in the twentieth century is written, the name of Dietrich von Hildebrand will be most prominent among the figures of our time.”

This quote comes from the beginning of his great work Transformation in Christ, and lays out a principle thesis of his work—that Christ came not merely to work an external change of redeeming us or wiping away our guilt, but to work a complete change in the whole person, a complete transformation from being one sort of being to another sort of being altogether.

We can miss this quite easily, can’t we? Especially since (let’s be honest) the behavior, the actions of so many Christians are not measurably different from the actions of non-Christians. The transforming effect of the sacrament of baptism is a doctrine we have to, alas, take on faith much of the time. We see little of this effect in our communal church life. It’s not that Christians are any worse than the mass of humanity—we’re not—but really, we truly are supposed to be better.

We have the Holy Spirit of God living within us. We have Christ himself daily attending us to shape us, form us, teach us, and communicate his life to us so that we can live as Jesus lived and lives. All of this by the will and gracious love of God the Father. We really should be better than we are.

It does in fact come down to our willingness to change. God is a gentleman; He doesn’t coerce us, doesn’t force Himself upon us. Indeed, He can’t, since the whole transformation He is offering us is a matter of us becoming lovers in the pattern of Christ the Lover of Mankind. Love that is coerced is not love; it is literally a contradiction in terms to speak of ‘coerced love.’

So, what’s the holdup, anyhow? God is offering us all sorts of gifts and new life and abundance of grace, poured out freely in Jesus Christ, in the sacraments of the Church, a gift and grace sure to transform our lives and make them glorious. What’s the holdup? Oh yeah… it will hurt, a bit. It will be hard, somewhat. It will take us beyond what we think we can do, just a little… like a few trillion miles little.

I am reminded of an interview Catherine Doherty gave to Radio Canada, the French language TV network (yes, our TV network is called ‘radio’ – you gotta problem with that?). At one point she explained it very simply, that everyone was afraid, and that was the problem. Afraid of what, the interviewer asked her. “De la peine, mon cherie!” she immediately answered. Of pain, my dear… and she has the most luminous smile on her face as she says it.

Christ wants to transform our life, and the promise of Scripture is that this will make our life radiant and beautiful. But we look at a crucifix and we know that too is part of the process… and we’re not sure. We vacillate, we hesitate, we say yes, we say no, we say later, we say let me think about it some more…

And Christians go on, for the most part, being fairly indistinguishable from the general population, and the world remains deeply unconvinced that there’s anything especially true or compelling about the Gospel, because they don’t see anything especially true or compelling about the way we are living.

Sorry to be a bit of a downer today. But there’s no reason to be downhearted about it. The answer is as close as turning to Jesus right now and saying, ‘please, Lord, let’s do this! Change me, and let’s start today! How can I love more, today, be more like you, today? Show me, Lord, and make it happen.’ It’s pretty much that simple. So… let’s all do that, OK?