People Before Profits?

All our activities in this world should have as goal the forming of community. The building of this world, the effort to make it a better place to live in, our individual works and enterprises, all must have this goal in view, otherwise they depart from God’s order.

Ruth Burrows, To Believe in Jesus

Reflection – ‘Write your blog posts while ye may…’ My time in Vancouver is going to be quite heavily scheduled, it seems, and there will be some long stretches of no blogging at all as I travel hither and yon without benefit of wifi. So, I thought I would do what I can in the days I have.

We are reading this fine book for our post-lunch spiritual reading at MH, and these particular sentences jumped out at me with considerable emphasis as I read it. It really does seem to me that in two relatively short sentences, 48 words, Burrows has encapsulated the entire social doctrine of the Catholic Church.

All our activities in this world have as their goal the forming of community. That is a very penetrating insight. And, while perhaps many reading this have never heard it put that way, it really is hard to argue against it, if one is starting from a point of Catholic theology.

Take, for example, an aspect of life people associate least with this formation of community, namely the running of a business. So a man or woman starts a business: they have a product or service of some kind, develop it to the point where people will pay money for it; they secure facilities, hire employees, advertise, market, execute; the business, if it is successful grows or at least turns a profit; the business owner and the employees are able to live off of the revenues/salaries they earn.

There – did I get it right, more or less? I have never operated a business, but that’s the gist of it, isn’t it? I probably forgot the part where they have crushing bank loans and spend the first few decades maxed out on debts and so forth. But that’s the basic thing, right?

So what does that have to do with the formation of community? That’s where this business is either in God’s order, or it is not. How does the owner treat the employees? Merely as cogs in a wheel, or as human beings? Yes, human beings who have to do the jobs they are hired for or be let go, but nonetheless, there is a difference between treating people like dirt and treating people like… well, people. And everyone who has had bad bosses and good bosses knows exactly what that difference is.

How do those running and working in the business treat their clientele? Like wallets that happen to be attached to human beings, or like human beings first, revenue sources second? Again, we all know the difference, and it does not need to be belaboured. Is the idea to gouge the customer out of every cent possible, or to provide a real good or service at a fair market price?

And so on and so forth. Every business exists in a matrix of other businesses and corporate entities, a life of a community. Do the business owners see themselves as a vibrant part of that community, someone who by virtue of being a profitable business can make a real contribution for the good to the life of the community, or is it just a sort of robber baron attitude where the idea is to bleed the community dry and get out of town before the crash happens?

The whole Catholic understanding of commercial life is indeed summed up by the (I admit) rather over-simplified and hackneyed phrase ‘people before profits’. Not, I would stress, ‘people instead of profits’, but ‘before’. Obviously, a business that does not turn a profit is a business that will not exist next year, with consequent harm and loss of employment to everyone involved in it. Business owners have to be able to earn a profit, but not at the expense of the human dignity and rights of others. That is what makes community, you know – always privileging the person over the thing, ‘who’ over ‘what’. And if the profits have to be a bit smaller in consequence of that privileging, so be it.

So that’s just one example of this—an entire book could be written (not by me, though – this is definitely not my bailiwick!) to show how these few words of Burrows really present the whole social vision of the Church. Politics, family life, the whole matrix of human activity in all its variety—all is subordinated to the building up of the human family, the human community, or it is alienated most seriously from God’s order.

Of course, this means that an awful lot of human activity in our world today is indeed so alienated, and we have a lot of work to do to re-humanize and evangelize the world in its social realities. Today, at least, let our activities be at the service of that task.

The Key to An Exciting, Glorious Life

And yet we do [today] seem to be going to the opposite extreme [from past over-emphasis in religion on the value of suffering]. Obligations no longer bind if they involve suffering, if there is strain or difficulty. People walk out of a marriage, out of religious life, out of the priesthood, because there is an apparent lack of fulfillment; life is felt to impose a burden which we are free to throw off.

Accepting the will of God at whatever cost, certain that he gives us the strength whatever we feel, this is to follow Jesus and be his disciple. One feels that there is a great deal of frivolity nowadays, a lack of seriousness in the face of life. Yet think of the gravity of our life-span, how much is at stake.

We have only one life to live. It is easy to think we are doing God a favor, that there is an alternative to total commitment. Is there? What is it?

Ruth Burrows, Guidelines for Mystical Prayer, 22

Reflection – This will be my last Ruth Burrows post for now – time to move on to other writers. I would encourage anyone who has enjoyed these excerpts to pick up the book – I am barely scratching the surface of it in this series of posts.

Yesterday she (and I) wrote about the centrality, not of suffering, but of love in our faith. It is love that redeems, not suffering, yet Christ’s love is expressed in his embrace of our pain on the Cross. There is a deep unbreakable connection between love and being willing to suffer for the beloved.

It has become almost a cliché to write as she writes here about the breakdown of commitment in the modern world. It is worth noting that this book came out in the mid-70s, when the culture of divorce and non-committal commitment was still fairly new. Now, it has become a relative norm, with many avoiding the ugly messiness of divorce by the simple expedient of never getting married, and of course the plunge in numbers of candidates for priesthood and religious life is well documented. I realize that this whole phenomenon of our modern world, so drearily familiar to us, is a complex one, not resolvable into facile explanations or solutions.

But it does seem to me that in the face of it, a serious presentation of the spirituality of the Cross of Christ is needed. That life is in fact about total commitment, that it is love and love alone that is the force of redemption and hope in the world, and the love is not expressed in sentimental bromides or sensual escapades but in the daily choice to commit, to live, to suffer for the sake of the beloved—this needs to be said loudly, forcefully, and repeatedly today.

‘There is a great deal of frivolity today, a lack of seriousness in the face of life.’ Indeed. You have noticed, perhaps, that I have not mentioned on this blog that most pressing subject that has captivated the whole attention of the free world, the most riveting issue of our times which has had such a devastating effect on us all. I refer, of course, to Miley Cyrus’ booty.

No, somehow I have not seen fit to mention that. Somehow, with a very real possibility of World War III breaking out in Syria, with Christians being slaughtered in Egypt, with apocalyptic scenarios genuinely threatening on all sides, the particular dance moves busted by pop starlets on MTV just seems… well, frivolous, and shows a lack of seriousness in the face of life.

God is always calling us to a total commitment, a serious taking on of life and its challenges, joys, sorrows. In that, there is great room for laughter and fun, celebration and good cheer, but always in the context of living a serious life of consecration to love and truth, as Christ lived.

I don’t know how to communicate to the young people currently coming of age in our world how utterly essential it is to make a life commitment. Many do, of course (we have six new applicants coming into Madonna House next Sunday!), but many more are finding it very hard to get there, and there is a great loss in that for them and for all of us. Because this is the key to a glorious, happy, exciting, consequential life. It is a cross-shaped key, indeed, but that’s just the way it is. And with that, my own commitments are calling me (time for prayers!), so I will leave it at that for today.

The Most Urgent Question of Our Times

‘The cross is little understood today,’ a spiritual person remarked sadly. Has it ever been understood? In the past you got a stress on suffering which perverted Christianity into ‘crosstianity’, the idea that you are only pleasing to God when you are suffering, and the more suffering the better.

All sorts of errors lie behind this attitude and what a blasphemous caricature of God! Fear and hatred of matter—one becomes spiritual the more one is removed from matter and this means the body and the emotions-which is utterly unchristian because inhuman; together with the notion that we are redeemed by suffering, that since Christ suffered we must suffer too… [But] it was love that redeemed us, love that did the Father’s will no matter what the cost, love that was total surrender.

It was through suffering but it was not the suffering itself that brought us to the Father. It is because suffering is a fact in human life from which there is no escape that Christ suffered. He suffered because we must suffer. He accepted our human lot and transformed it into the path to glory.

Ruth Burrows, Guidelines for Mystical Prayer, 21-22

Reflection – It is quite possible that one of the most urgent and pressing needs for clarification and correction today in our culture is our attitude towards and understanding of suffering. Today and tomorrow on this blog I have some good simple teaching from Burrows on the matter which give at least the beginnings of insight into it.

The reason, of course, that this is so urgent today is that the world (in my estimation) is heading into a period of intense tribulation and turmoil. This is not apocalyptic speculation on my part. Economists and political analysts have sounded the warnings here, not wild eyed prophets.

Essentially, the prosperous nations of the world are going bankrupt, and there is no sustainable way forward. Demographic winter is coming, with an rapidly aging population of Baby Boomers facing a crisis in both health care and social security that is simply unresolvable, and far too few young people faced with shouldering the financial and human burden of this unsustainable system.

The reason euthanasia is being pushed so hard in so many jurisdictions is that those who have crunched the hard numbers are well aware that our health care system cannot possibly cope with the number of sick elderly people there will be in the next twenty years. ‘Kill ‘em all’ is, for some at least, a viable course of action. I won’t even touch here upon the global political-military scene which is alarming at best.

All of which to say that our attitude towards suffering is a relevant, nay urgent, matter in the year 2013. Hard times are coming. So Christ’s choice to redeem us through, not suffering, but love, is something we need to contemplate.

It is true that we can focus on the sufferings of Christ to an unhealthy degree. As Chesterton put it, “He died on a cross; he did not live on one.” A morbid focus on suffering and death makes for a gloomy, weird religion. But… he did suffer. And it was his love for us that brought him to that, and it was indeed the depth of love expressing itself in his embrace of suffering and death that redeemed us all.

Suffering is indeed an inevitable feature of human life. No one gets through this world unscathed by it. We need to go deeply into the fact—the sheer fact—that God has done something to suffering by His entering of it to change what it is, what it means, what it does to us, where it can take us.

Suffering and death without God are simply defeat, futility, tragedy. Suffering and death with God are transformed into a way of love in the world, and so become the path to glory.

We don’t really know what the next decades are going to bring us, although the one thing we do know is that there will be a great number of elderly people who will lack adequate medical care. But once we get that Christ has entered our human lot with its joys and its pains, that God’s love and God’s life has penetrated to the very heart of the human tragedy, and that suffering is not simply suffering, but is a sharing in God’s redeeming love, then we are equipped to face whatever the world will throw at us, and move with confidence and faith into the glorious future God opens up for us in his gracious merciful love.

God's Labour and Ours

I fear many a sincere person is seeking an ‘experience’, an exalted state of consciousness. But this ‘experience’ is not God. God is surely knocking on his heart, but can he hear him? God’s mystical intervention would mean the collapse of that proud human structure.

Gone the fine control of the mind, gone the sense of being a special person, a superman, a spiritual man. Is it likely that one who has maintained this magnificent goal is likely to make the right choice? This is rather an extreme case but it highlights the choice facing everyone living a serious spiritual life.

God wants to intervene. Will we let him? Everything depends on the answer. Yet how much serious direction has been and still is geared, in reality, not to seeking God’s will in order to surrender to him in fulfilling it, but to self-perfection, self-glorification.

The whole work of [the first stage of the spiritual life] is to do God’s will, that is, fulfill the law. Man is always tempted when doing the works of the law to live by the law, whereas the true disciple of Christ lives by the spirit. He cannot live by the Spirit unless he keeps the law; the Spirit will drive him to an every more perfect fulfilling of the law. But the deadly temptation is to live by the law and make it alone our security.

Ruth Burrows, Guidelines for Mystical Prayer, 19-20

Reflection  - Happy Labour Day weekend! I rather suspect that blog traffic will drop a fair bit the next few days, as people are rightly stepping away from their computers and stepping towards their friends and families for end of summer barbecues and parties.

Oh… you’re still here? OK, then. Burrows here does a fine job threading the needle of law and Spirit, our work and God’s work. We must keep the law. Christianity is not a lawless chaotic religion where you just do as you please. God wrote a moral law, and God communicated his moral law, first and imperfectly in the Jewish Scriptures, then perfectly in the words and deeds of Jesus now transmitted to us faithfully by His Spirit alive in the Church. We must keep that law, and repent sincerely when we fail to keep it, which we all do to some extent.

But living by the Law means putting the whole emphasis of our spiritual life into that dynamic, into that project. There is a law, we are to keep the law, we fail, we succeed, we fail, we succeed… and that’s all there is to the story. But that’s not even the half of the story, from a proper Christian understanding of it. That’s really a small part of the story. The real story is the action of the Spirit, the movement of God, the work of God in you and in me. Not opposing the law, but perfecting it, but perfecting it along wholly different lines.

It’s all about relationship, about communion with Jesus and with the Father in and through Jesus. It’s all about having no security, no ‘goodness’, ultimately no way in life except the way of Jesus and our living, real communion with Him. And in that perspective, we come to see that it’s all about mercy, because we do all fall short of the mark, we do all fail in charity and justice and purity, and the more our lives become taken up with our relationship to Jesus, the more our lives are lives of mercy—mercy received and mercy given.

And in this, then, our whole life becomes a living out of the first beatitude, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. It is this deep spiritual perspective that is so often lacking in our conversations these days, and why we so often don’t get very far with each other. The whole of life is not a business of self-justification, of proving ourselves and our group ‘right’ and the other person and the other group ‘wrong’. Our whole life is abandonment to the mercy of God, because everyone’s wrong, and everyone’s right (a little bit), and ultimately it is God who sets us all right where we are wrong and strengthens and purifies us where we are right.

In this, we are all together, even if there are serious and protracted areas of disagreement or conflict, painful at times. The deeper spiritual perspective, the realization of what Burrows is trying to communicate here, means that all of us come as poor men and women before the living God and need his radical intervention to unmake and remake us all, without exception.

That’s God’s work. Our work is to, indeed, keep the Law as best we can, so as to dispose ourselves to this divine work. So… happy Labour Day weekend, I guess. Labour well, and let’s rest from our labours a bit so that God’s labours can be achieved in full in us all.