'What Will Bring Us Happiness?', Many Say

The past eight Wednesdays I have gone through my book Idol Thoughts, laying out the traditional doctrine of the eight thoughts that take us away from God, from the happiness He promises us. The eight ‘idols’ that promise us happiness on their terms, but which of course are false in their promises.

Having established in the book that happiness is not found in the satisfaction of the body (gluttony), in the body of another (lust), in material security (avarice), or in revenge (anger), in getting one’s way (despondency), in oblivion (acedia), in human respect (vainglory) or in mastery (pride), an obvious question arises.

Namely, so what is it, then? If all of these thoughts are the idol thoughts, the lying thoughts that tell us false things about happiness, what is the true happiness? As the blog title says, ‘Get To The Point’, Lemieux. What will bring us happiness, many say? (Psalm 4).

OK, it’s the Eucharist, then. Satisfied? Well, you should be.

That is, it is God and the possession of God which is the happiness of the human person. Everything the thoughts seem to promise us, all the drives and desires of our natural humanity that they distort due to our fallen condition, all of this is fulfilled in a perfect and everlasting way by our communion with God.

Ultimately, heaven. But here on earth, Holy Communion. He gives Himself to us as food and drink, and so heals our gluttony. His Body is given to us in an intimacy of communion beside which sexual intercourse pales in comparison, and so heals lust.

His gift of Himself to us assures our life in the most profound security—goodbye, avarice! He is the Divine Justice, and comes to heal all the evil and injustice of the world, and so meets our anger with the power of mercy. He does not give us our own way, or oblivion, but rather shows us that what we really want is really real, and is found in Him and in the path of love and communion in this world—take a bow, despondency and acedia. You both had a good run.

In His gift of Himself to us in this way He ‘validates’ our existence in the most radical sense possible, pays us direct personal and intimate attention and lavishes us with Himself—no need for vainglory. And in all of this we become true sharers of His Divine Life, truly ascend through, with, and in Him to the heights of heaven itself—so, pride – what were you offering us again?

All that the lying thoughts promised us, He gives to us, all in that little Host that is the whole of Himself, the whole of His life. It is not a symbol. It is not some strained metaphor. It is not some vague abstraction. It is Jesus, really and truly Jesus, and because of that, ‘It’ is God Himself, giving Himself to us here and now in the most profound way possible.

In all the discussions of who can receive communion and who cannot, I am sometimes grieved that there is little sense that the gift of the Eucharist is what it actually is, what we all say we believe it to be. And so it is worth making great sacrifices to receive it. Worth making radical changes in one’s life. Worth losing everything, if need be. Worth ‘selling all you possess and following [Him]’, as I read somewhere or other. There seems to be little sense of that in the conversations going on in the Church now—at least I haven’t heard anyone put it so baldly.

People may object at this point (it’s OK – I don’t mind!) that when they receive the Eucharist they don’t ‘feel’ all of the above. Don’t feel entirely happy, shall we say. That they tried all of that Catholic stuff, and IT DIDN”T WORK. So then what?

The question of ‘feelings’ in the spiritual life is a tricky one. We know that we cannot gauge life in general simply by how we feel about it at any given moment (and of course ‘feelings’ are always of the moment). At least, people who are not entirely foolish know this.

But at the same time, a happiness that has no reference to any kind of experience is a bit unreal, to say the least. The Eucharist will make you happy! But I don’t feel any better or different. Well, it’s not that kind of happiness! Uhhh…. OK? Not terribly satisfying.

While there are complexities in all this, some of which go into physical, chemical, and psychological depths I am neither prepared nor qualified to discuss, there is one aspect I am qualified to discuss. Namely, that some of our dissatisfaction with Jesus lies in the fact that we approach the Eucharist still in the grips of the thoughts. In other words, that we come to Jesus in hopes that He will gratify us in our selfish pursuit of self-directed, self-defined, self-ordered happiness. ‘Prosperity Christianity’ – the idea that we should have faith in God and in Christ so that He can make us rich and successful… according to our lights, our desires, our hopes and dreams.

When really, we should have faith in God and in Christ so that He can make our lives successful and yes, rich… but according to His ideas under those headings, which may be a bit different from the world’s.

At any rate, I see from my word count that I have written quite enough for one day, so I had better wrap this up. And that’s it for my little tour of Idol Thoughts. I do encourage you to buy it – American readers may prefer to use this link. Next week in this space we will begin to look at the Year of Mercy – you may be surprised to know that I have some thoughts about that subject. Until then!

Despicable Me

I have been going through the chapters of my book Idol Thoughts on Wednesdays, on the eight thoughts that lead us away from God, that are in simple fact ‘other gods’, other ways of seeking happiness in this world.

We have come to the eighth thought, the granddaddy of them all, that is pride. In the book I liken pride to the ‘big bad’ in the modern crime movie—the villain who is at work directing all the lesser villains who are merely his minions (Despicable Me! But these minions aren't quite so cute and loveable...).

Pride is like that with the other seven thoughts—all of them essentially tend towards pride or spring from pride, and are strengthened in us by the amount of pride we have. As the Eucharist is the source and summit of divine life in us, so pride is the source and summit of all that is death in us.

Pride, fundamentally, consists in exalting ourselves above our true place. The Latin word for it, superbia, communicates that well—basically, ‘over-ness.’ When we consider ourselves to be more than we are, that is the simple form of pride.

Simple, but what complex forms it takes in all of us. There are the crude forms of pride, easy enough to recognize—dominance, arrogance, bombastic crude power trips. But it can be, and usually is, much more subtle in us.

There is the quiet steady assumption that we are always right, that our judgments, our way, our take on things are simply reality. God is the One whose word fashions the universe, who spoke and it came to be. It is a terrible arrogation of the divine prerogative when we believe our own ‘words’, spoken or interior, actually are the first and last word of what is.

There is self-centredness, which has a hundred faces. There is the steady consistent reference of all things in our lives back to ourselves—everything in this world considered and evaluated on the sole basis of ‘how it affects me’. In properly spiritual matters, I see this when people say they ‘like’ this Scripture passage or they ‘don’t like’ that one, for whatever reason. But the Bible is the Word of God—it is verging on, if not outright, blasphemy to speak of it that way – this Word of God is great, that one not so much, and so forth…

Pride is a tricky, subtle thing, and none of us should ever imagine we are free of it. It is a shape-shifter in the soul, but always singing the same tune: I-me-mine-I-me-mine… always putting ourselves at the center of all things.

And of course it is then the secret source of the strength and persistence of the other seven thoughts. God has laid out for us a way of happiness and blessed life in this world. The path of love received and given, life received and given, the human person made to be a receptacle of divine life, and in that receiving becoming a lover of all creation as God is the Lover of all.

Pride looks at all that outpouring of divine life and love and says, “Yeah, no thanks. I have a better idea! Seven better ideas, in fact.” And off we go on the paths of gluttony, lust, avarice, anger, despondency, acedia, vainglory. All the alternative plans for happiness that don’t involve all this silly God business (does He even exist, anyhow?).

Pride seems very alluring and compelling. Well of course we are the center of our own life—what else is possible? It’s only human to put yourself first in the order of things! What else can we do, and why would we? Isn’t it pathological to efface oneself and put anything else ahead of one’s own being?

Such is pride’s story when it is hauled out into the clear light of day and forced to defend itself. And it is a load of hooey. The truth is, we are made by God, made for God, made essentially for a life of communion with God, receiving and giving, giving and receiving. And out of that, loving, loving, loving our neighbors as the duties of our state of life direct us. The ‘self’ is simply that which exists to be this place of reception and seat of action, the necessary ‘I’ which can enter into communion with the divine ‘Thou’, and thence with all other ‘thous’ we encounter.

And in this, we are truly exalted, truly elevated above our station, but by God, not by our own efforts. We enter into and become sharers in the life of the Trinity, the very life of God made accessible to us in Jesus Christ. Pride, which is all about self-exaltation, actually closes us up in ourselves and dooms us to a small, narrow, constricted little life bounded by our own limitations and ambit… and we really are very small little creatures, it turns out.

The only way to actually climb the ladder of being and become a ‘Great Person’ is to embrace the radical humility of the gift, to paradoxically accept that we are nothing, can do nothing, have nothing of our own… and in that find ourselves mysteriously opened to the one who is Everything and gives us everything He is. And our lives become in that humility and that openness an entry into the Dance of Love which is the very inner life of the Trinity—radical exaltation following upon radical abasement and self-emptying.

As I always say at the end of these Wednesday posts, I actually have quite a bit more to say about all this, but then you wouldn’t buy my book if I said it all here, would you? So you can read the rest of my thoughts here. Have a great day!

It's Been The Ruin Of Many A Poor Boy

On Wednesdays we have been going through the chapters of my new book Idol Thoughts, exploring the eight traditional logismoi, or thoughts, that take us away from God. The list came down to us in the West as the seven deadly sins, but I prefer to talk about the older list and the language of thoughts. Before we actually launch into sinful actions, it is our prior thought patterns that get us into trouble, right?

One reason I like the older list is because of today’s thought, which doesn’t appear on the list of seven. This is the thought of vainglory. Gregory the Great, who gave us the list as we know it, collapsed vainglory into pride, but the two actually are different things, and the difference is instructive.

Vainglory is the idea that happiness lies in the good opinion of other people. Pride couldn’t care less about other people and what they think, since they are inferior beings, but vainglory cares intensely about such matters. What matters with vainglory is not what you are or what you do, but what people think about what you are and do.

Vainglory has many manifestations. There is the more obvious form of it—attention seeking, spotlight hogging, the person who needs to be ‘the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral’. There is the desperate hunger to be popular, to be liked, to be well thought of—in my own country of Canada this is a major factor in the pressure to either not hold or at the very least not express unpopular political opinions. Indeed, much evil goes unchecked in the world because of this form of vainglory—we just want everyone to like us.

In personal relationships, there is the inordinate desire to be loved, to have that special person look at us in that special way—again, the important thing is not our being or our deeds, but the good regard of the other. How many women, in particular (and sometimes men, too) sacrifice their true selves, their beliefs, their principles, because of that need for love?

And then there is the burning desire to have one’s contributions acknowledged, one’s gifts appreciated, one’s work valued. The need to be thanked. The need to not just do what is right but to have someone notice that we are doing what is right and say ‘Hey, good job, you! You are doing what is right! Kudos to you!’

And then, when that thanks, that little bit of attention or appreciation is not there—rage. Bitterness of spirit (those bastards didn’t even say thank you, after all I did for them!), withdrawing into self-pity, and so forth.

Or, if we are given that appreciation, we begin to crave it more than we want to simply do what is right and good. And we start to tailor our good deeds towards that end. Playing to the crowd, pandering. One of the most serious manifestations of this is the popular preacher, teacher, or writer who may at first have been successful because he was writing and delivering a message he believed in, that meant something to him, and strove to do it well for the sake of the message.

But the applause of the crowd is a heady drug, and it has, in the words of the song, been the ruin of many a poor boy—the message starts to get distorted, the focus shifts from the content to the one delivering the content, the ego waxes strong. Success is more spiritually dangerous than failure, and it has ruined many.

Vainglory has a thousand faces, from the gross seeking of fame and honor to the quiet wish that somebody would just say thank you once in a while. And it is a tenacious weed in the soul, one that takes a very long time to eradicate. It’s roots go deep and are tangled with many things that are good and righteous in us.

Vainglory is so powerful because it has a core truth to it. Truly, we are meant to receive the valuation of our life from another. We are not meant to be our own judges—in fact, we cannot be. And it is the core of pride, subject of next Wednesday’s blog post, that we make ourselves that.

We are meant to stand under judgment, and some part of us hungers for that. Something in us wants, indeed needs to be told by another what good our life is. But vainglory goes badly awry when it locates that other in flesh and blood, in the crowd or in that one person whose opinion matters to us. It is not the other whose good opinion will make us happy, the rather The Other.

Strictly speaking, our eternal happiness lies in holding the good opinion of that Other, of God. Vainglory is ‘vain’, that is empty and pointless, because it leads us nowhere and cannot secure us the happiness we seek. True glory—the glory of God, the eternal light of heaven which already is vouchsafed to us in the gift of sanctifiying grace and which will be ours after death in consequence of God’s particular judgment of us, is the real thing, the real happiness of the soul.

As I always say around here, I have much more to say on the subject, but I do want you to buy my book, so I will leave it there for now. May we spend today concerned not for the good opinion of man but with pleasing God who alone can make us happy.

Nightmare on Your Street, Part Seventeen

On Wednesdays I am going through my book Idol Thoughts,  presenting the classic Christian doctrine of the ‘eight thoughts’ that draw us away from God and from life, and what to do about them.

Much of the list corresponds to the more familiar ‘seven deadly sins’, of which it is the historical progenitor. But we are now in the thoughts that vary from that later list. Last week we talked about despondency, the settled conviction that happiness means getting one’s own way, and hence the glumness that pervades life when we so often don’t.

But there is an even deeper thought that can sadden us in an even more destructive way. Namely there is the thought that happiness is… well… not. That is, there is no such thing, not really, not in any lasting way. Not to speak of.

This is the crushing, paralyzing, soul sapping thought of acedia, which oddly has never had an adequate English word to describe it. I guess we English speakers just (sigh…) can’t be bothered to come up with a word for it.

It really is what ‘sloth’ used to refer to, but that word has come to mean exclusively physical laziness, which is quite a different thing, really. Acedia is a spiritual ailment more than a bodily one, and in fact can be expressed by an intense physical busyness and workaholism.

Acedia is the settled conviction that nothing is any good, anyhow, that there is no real point in striving for true and lasting happiness, that there is no heaven awaiting us, no real victory over sin and death in this life or the next, and so there is no value whatsoever in striving for such a victory through any real spiritual effort.

Acedia is the great ‘why bother?’ of the soul. Pray? Why bother? Fast? Really, why bother? Good works? Why bother? Practice virtue, resist temptation, repent of sin? Why bother, why bother, why bother?

Much of this goes on at a sub-conscious level. Of all the thoughts, acedia has the least actual truth to it—the other thoughts take great strength from the fact that they are all partial truths and so quite persuasive. Acedia has almost no truth to it, and so often lurks in secret underneath the level of conscious reflection.

But it is the thought that fuels so much of our sinful behavior. We know—most of us, if we have a scintilla of good sense—that stuffing our faces, hoarding riches, and messing around sexually will not really make us happy, not for more than a moment anyway. But we are constantly falling into those sinful deeds and others because acedia is constantly thrumming in the sub-basement of our soul its deadly refrain: ‘why bother, why bother, why bother’. We know those things won’t make us happy, but we do them because nothing else will make us happy, either, so why not have a bit of pleasure right now?

Acedia is the silent killer of the soul, the cancer that chokes off its life. Acedia is the abortionist of the soul, killing spiritual life and growth in its nascent beginning. Acedia is the atheist of the soul, loudly and obnoxiously proclaiming that there is no God, no point, nothing at all worth pursuing on the spiritual line.

Acedia is in all of us, to some degree or another. The only people who are entirely free of it are wholly transformed saints, and if any such people are reading this blog, they know quite a bit more about the subject than I do. Because the path to sainthood means having to do battle against acedia for years, truly. It is a tenacious foe, hard to kill, like Jason or Freddie or one of those other horror movie villains, perpetually back for one more sequel (Nightmare on Elm Street XXVII! Friday the 13th XXXII!), one more slash of the knife to our spiritual selves.

So when we speak of a ‘remedy’ for acedia we are not talking about quick fixes. There ain’t no such thing. The remedy for acedia is fundamentally perseverance and habit. Establishing a routine, a way of life, a fixed commitment to pray at certain times, fast on certain days, dedicate oneself to apostolic charity and love according to what is suitable for one’s way of life. To simply do these things, and when (as is near-inevitable) we fail to do these things, to promptly begin to do them again.

This, and the grace of God we dispose ourselves to receive as we simply ‘show up’ each day in prayer, fasting, and works of mercy, is the radical surgery, the radiation therapy, the chemotheraphy of the soul shrinking the tumor of acedia so that ultimately it can do us no damage, even if it still there in a reduced state, still muttering its insane little refrain of why bothers at us.

We have to endure that, for as long as it lasts, but that too can become a spur in us to fidelity and perseverance, and an atoning suffering borne for all our brothers and sisters who live lives of quiet desperation, who are so utterly in the grip of acedia that they don’t even know what it is, since it is the assumed fact of life—the sky is blue, grass is green, and nothing is any good in the end anyhow.

I have quite a bit more to say about this subject, but will leave the rest of it for the readers of my book to discover for themselves. For today, let’s fight the good fight against acedia, say our prayers and do the good that is before us today, en route to the Good that is awaiting us in God’s heart.