Getting Even

I have been dedicating Wednesdays on the blog to going through the chapters of my new book Idol Thoughts, my presentation of the ancient doctrine of the 'eight thoughts', in later tradition become the seven capital sins, and how to overcome them with the help of lectio divina, the prayerful disciplined reading of Sacred Scripture.

It is not my intention in these blog posts to give the whole content of the chapter--that would be, well, unproductive in terms of getting people to buy the book. Rather, I'm just giving an overview and perhaps a thought or two that didn't make it into the book itself. 

We are now on thought number four. The first three thoughts were all matters of simple desire, gone awry in our fallen natures. Gluttony for food, lust for sex, avarice for security through wealth--all of these are matters of wanting what we want, and the sad fact that we don't always want exactly what is good for us or what will truly make us happy.

The next three thoughts are all concerned with what happens to us when we don't get what we want. Where do our thoughts go, when the original simple thoughts of desire and possession are thwarted? The first place our thoughts go in these moments is towards the thought of anger. 

This is not the raw emotion of anger. Emotions come and go in us and in themselves have little moral significance. But the thought of anger is the thought, confronted with something that is wrong in our lives or in the world, that happiness lies in getting even. Revenge, payback, doing unto others what the others just done did to you, and then some--this is the project of the angry mind. The absolute conviction of the one who has bought into that thought is that 'I cannot be happy, cannot find peace, until I have paid back mine enemies with a mighty smiting.'

This thought does not always come with temptations to physical violence attached to it. There are all sorts of ways we seek payback. There is the whole dreary project of score keeping, the careful tallying up of exactly what everyone is or is not doing, so as to make sure that perfect justice is always being observed in all fields of life.

There is the passive aggressive project - moods, silent treatments, making darn sure the person knows you are displeased with them, not that you intend to tell them why or what they should do about it. They should know! There is verbal abuse, nagging, pick-pick-picking at people until in desperation they just give in and do whatever it is you want. And just plain coldness, withdrawal, the deliberate intention to hurt someone who hurt us, even if it is just by the frigid refusal of any basic warmth or humanity. And oh... a whole host of other angry, vengeful ways--we're not, most of us, the Count of Monte Cristo hatching elaborate schemes to ruin the lives of our enemies, in other words.

Anger is a deep thing in the world today. Be it the truly monstrous evil being done by actors like ISIS and Boko Haram, or the increasingly vicious political climate in our own countries, there is a spirit of anger in the world and every one of us has to address it, first in our own hearts, lest we succumb to its allure. And it does have an allure. Anger comes from something in us that is so deep and true that it has great power in us.

Namely, anger comes from our innate sense of justice, which in turn comes from our being made in the image of God the All Just One. It is indeed a matter of 'getting even', of restoring balance and order to an off-kilter, unjust world. The lie of anger, however, is that we attain justice through violence, through exerting our will on others to deal out reward and punishment as we see fit.

It doesn't work. Never has, never will, not on the personal level nor on the societal or international level, either. The revenge motive, coming so deeply out of this sense of justice in us, has done nothing in human history but beget more evil, more unbalance, more violence, more wrongs that in turn need to be avenged in an endless cycle that leads to mass graves and killing fields.

It is a hard lesson that may take many years for us to learn, but the only way our lives can be a force of healing, restoration, and justice in the world is the path of suffering love, of sacrificial generosity, of forgiveness and mercy. In particular, to be vigilant in our mercy and love for our 'enemies', whoever they may be, and for our neighbour--that is, the small group of human beings who are in our immediate proximity.

It is this and this alone that brings order into the world, this and this alone that 'evens up' an uneven world. And it starts at the level of the individual, of you and me and the choices we are going to make today, in the face of whatever injustice or frustrations we encounter today. Vengeance or love -- what will it be?

And you can read the rest of my thoughts, and the path of the Gospel laid out for us in these matters, in my book, if you would like to buy it! Have a great day, and remember - don't get mad, get even!

Have I Got A Book For You!

Our Thursday commentary on the Mass and its application to daily life has reached one of the peak moments of the liturgy, the solemn proclamation of the Gospel. That this particular Scripture reading is different from the other two is obvious—it is preceded by an acclamation, often involves a procession with candles and even incense, and is reserved for the ordained clergy (properly, the deacon, but in the absence of one, a priest).

That we surround the proclaiming of the Gospel with such ritual solemnity communicates to us that here, Christ Himself is speaking to us. Here, God Himself has come down from heaven to directly communicate His truth and His will to us. It is not that the rest of Scripture is not inspired by God—it most certainly is—but that the Gospels truly are the words and deeds of God-made-flesh and so are indeed the core of the canon, the central Word of God, taken together with His living presence in the Church, by which we understand the entirety of Revelation.

And so it is proclaimed, week in and week out, day in and day out at daily Masses—the whole of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John laid out for the Church throughout the course of the three-year liturgical cycle. The Gospels, hopefully so familiar to the readers of this blog that I don’t have to go on and on about their content, are of course told in narrative form—stories, speeches, parables, miracles, conversations, arguments. All the normal way of telling the tale of who a person was and what He did in his life.

But in this, flowing through all of it, there is the revelation of a Person and Who He Is, and what He does continually in our lives, in all of our lives, in the life of the world. Written (as it must be) in human words and using human concepts and categories, the Gospels nonetheless contain the Divine life, the Divine presence. In them God draws very near to us and instructs our minds and hearts, and not only instructs them but shapes them, heals them, unites them to Himself. There is power in the Blood, the old hymn says. There is power in the Word, too.

And so when we come to talk about how to live this out, it is actually kind of hard to know what to say. We live it out… well, by living it out! God says ‘forgive, and you will be forgiven.’ So… we forgive those who have hurt us. Right? God says ‘if anyone asks for your cloak, give him your tunic.’ So… give to the point where it hurts. Right?

Don’t leave it as words on a page, or words you hear in Church, or you will be like the man building his house on sand (Mt 7:26), and we know how that turned out (Mt 7:27!).

But to be able to live them out, we have to be so familiar, so intimate with the Gospels. They have to be our second nature, so constantly present in our lives that whenever there is any serious decision to be made about any matter (or even just the daily grind and the choices it brings us continually), the words of Christ come to mind almost instantly, almost automatically.

So… we have to make the reading of the Gospels a daily event, a daily encounter with God in Christ in the sacred page. It can be as simple as having a missalette on hand and reading the Gospel of the day, or a sequential reading starting at Matthew 1 through to John 21 and then back again. Whatever—if Christ’s words and deeds are not continually informing our words and deeds, then our lives become continually less and less Christian. If His words and deeds are our daily ‘food for thought’, then our lives can become more and more a reflection of His life, and so we become a living Gospel for others.

It is so much the essence of our lives, if we are indeed His disciples, are indeed Christians. Along with the other, greater peak of the liturgy, which is the reception of His life into our life, His being into our being in the reception of Holy Communion, the receiving of the Gospel into our minds and hearts is the sine qua non of discipleship, that without which we cannot really say we are His.

Not to be pounding the book sale thing too hard, but that is indeed what I have just written an entire book about—how our own thoughts and ideas are all fatally flawed, and how the Thoughts of God, mystically and mysteriously communicated to us in the words of the Gospels, are the great healing of our own disordered thinking.

But you don’t need my book (shocking admission from an author!). You need The Book; I need The Book – the world needs The Book! And the best way to bring The Book to the world is for you and me to read it and live it and show it in how we treat people, so that just maybe our faithless confused world may once again ‘take and read’ and believe that God has indeed revealed Himself in Christ and made the path of life and salvation available to the whole human race.

Bacon, Bliss, and Beatitude

On Wednesdays on the blog I have been going through my book Idol Thoughts, on the patterns of thinking that lead us away from the freedom and joy that comes from life in God into other illusory ways of seeking and finding happiness.

This very ancient doctrine of these thoughts, eight in number, and their power over us was later adapted to the doctrine of the seven deadly sins, and the lists have a lot of overlap. So today we come to the thought of gluttony.

Gluttony is not simply over-eating, or enjoying food for that matter. God made food not only to nourish the body but to delight the palate. It would be silly, not to mention impossible, for us not to enjoy food that tastes good. Gluttony may well lead to the practice of over-eating (and as I say in my book, I do indeed struggle with this thought, and so am a little bit over-weight as a result), but the thing itself resides not in the body, but in the mind.

It is the fixed certainty that happiness lies in the immediate satisfaction of the body. That there is nothing worse than to be hungry, to have a physical need unmet, to be uncomfortable in one’s own flesh.

Gluttony is in itself the least serious of the thoughts and leads to what generally are the least serious sins, but there is a dynamic within gluttony that must be mastered if we are to ever break through this immediate grasping for instant happiness, bacon-bliss, so to speak.

Namely, the dynamic in which we have a desire, see the object of our desire, grab it, stuff it in, and are satisfied. I want-I see-I grab-I stuff-yay! That is the dynamic that can run through all of our desires, all the thoughts of our minds, and it is a powerful illusion, a dreadful mistake. It is expressed in its most immediate form in our relationship to eating, as well as how we navigate our way through the next thought, lust. But it applies to all of the thoughts – as long as desire runs rampant and unchecked in us, we are seriously impaired in our journey to true happiness.

This is because true happiness does not come from the immediate satisfaction of desire. God and our communion in love with Him is our true happiness, and He is not a consumer product that we can grab and stuff in to ourselves. He comes to us, gives Himself to us, but that is quite a different affair.

And so, fasting. This is why fasting is an integral part of every religious tradition. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists all fast. I believe that there is a spiritual intuition in all the serious wisdom traditions, borne out by lived experience, that some degree of physical hunger breaks us through the level of the superficial and the immediate to transcendent reality.

In our Christian faith, this means communion with God through Jesus Christ, expressed in its fullest and deepest aspect through the gift of the Eucharist. This is why the Church asks us to fast before receiving communion, even though at the moment the fast asked of us is so minimal that there is no actual experience of hunger involved in it (I maintain that this is a pastoral problem). And why we have a season of fasting before we celebrate the great feast of the year, Easter.

A modicum of hunger, a small experience of that emptiness, that slight weakness, that little bit of ache—this is vital to the spiritual life. And to never, ever be hungry—to live our relationship with food in such a way that our bodies are continually full to the brim—this has a deadening effect in our lives. This is not a particularly Christian observation – the united testimony of all the world religions happens to agree on this point.

And so, ‘blessed are the hungry, for they shall be filled.’ (Luke 6: 21). We have to enter a little bit into the reality of hunger now, so as to be filled later. To want now, so as to want nothing (Psalm 23:1) later.

Anyhow, I have quite a bit more to say on the subject, and you can read all about it, if you so desire.

Learning How To Read

I'm going through my new book Idol Thoughts weekly on the blog, chapter by chapter. Chapter Three is entitled "How To Read This Book" (I've gotten a lot of ribbing about waiting until the third chapter to give that particular instruction).

Basically it is a chapter about how to do lectio divina, the prayerful meditative reading of Sacred Scripture. That is 'the Book' I want people to read, more than I want you to read me. But I do go into how Idol Thoughts is structured. The following eight chapters each take on of the eight 'thoughts' that lead us away from God and from happiness. Each chapter explores that thought, what it looks like, what it does to us.

And then, along with some basic spiritual practices that combat the thought (e.g. fasting for gluttony, almsgiving for avarice), I present three or four Scriptures that pertain to that thought and write a short meditation on each. I end each chapter by giving a longer list of Scriptures for further prayer and meditation of the reader. The general idea is that this book is a practical 'how-to' manual on the use of lectio divina to combat the thoughts and purify the mind of their influence. I encourage readers, if they are particularly convicted by one or another of the thoughts, to really take those provided Scriptures to heart and use them as a focussed program of prayer and reflection.

This whole business of lectio divina is so vital today, though. So many people don't know God. Even believing Christians seem to struggle with feeling this. While God is infinite mystery beyond mysteries, He has come close to us, though, and His Word is given so that we can at least begin to know HIm in this life.

A big problem today is that we don't know how to read. I'm not talking about actual or functional illiteracy, although that is a thing. I'm talking about our tendency to read in ways that the Internet has taught us--not reading, but skimming. Not really able to take in a text that has some depth of meaning, but flitting about from text to text gathering the superficial meaning we can gather without much effort or concentration.

We have descended from the heights of lectio divina down past even a normal lectio humana to the level of lectio animalia - a reading simply for immediate stimulation and satiation of appetite for intellectual input. No real engagement, no real deep analysis, no real encounter with the other through the miraculous medium of the written word.

Well, this doesn't work one little bit for the Bible. God's Word is not a consumer product that we can use and discard. God's Word is not a listicle, a blog post, a tweet, a status update to scroll past. And when we treat it that way, we do ourselves deep harm, as we have the illusion that we have 'read the Bible' without ever really reading it at all. Many of the Internet Atheists who like to pretend that they know all about the Bible and how dumb it is have approached it only in that way--scouring it only for ammo to use in their futile war against God and religion.

Lectio divina, then, first asks of us one thing, and that is to slow down. We have to read the Bible slowly these days, since we are so used to frenetically reading everything else. We have to take just one or two verses, read them slowly, repeatedly, not trying to 'figure them out' first, but just letting the words breathe, letting them live, letting them speak to us. This may take a long time, since our minds are so revved for this constant superficial level of reading.

Only after quite a time of this ponderous, slow reading should we move into analysis, into thinking about it, into 'meditation proper'. And even then, the meditation should always lead us back to the text, back to the living encounter with the One who is in the text, mysteriously, into prayer. Nothing is sadder than a Christian who gets more enamoured of their 'brilliant' thoughts and daydreams about Scripture than they are of the Sacred Text itself.

Reading, pondering, meditating--all of this is to lead us into a genuine contemplation of the written text we are with, a simple, reverent, awed beholding of the Truth who is Jesus within it. And this contemplation naturally leads to prayer, to conversation, to the simple worship of our hearts and minds in grateful praise. And this prayer and worship must then shape our lives, our choices, our decision, or it remains fruitless.

So that is how to 'read this book' - not Idol Thoughts (although, ahem, I do recommend you read it!) but The Book. And our reading of The Book is the vital need of our time, of any time really. We need to be re-Worded by the Word, so that our words and deeds are a living Gospel for the world.

So I give lots and lots of helpful examples of how to do that throughout my book, and I hope it helps you as it already seems to be helping many people.

'Whoever God Loves Never Ceases To Be'

Happy Feast of the Assumption, everyone. Mary is assumed body and soul into heaven as the first fruits of the Resurrection, and heaven and earth rejoice at the sight. We are celebrating the day in full Madonna House festive style, which I will tell you about tomorrow, God willing.

Meanwhile, I thought for my blog today I would share a bit of my licentiate thesis on the theme of the Assumption. It’s a bit longer than usual, and just a bit ‘high brow’, but it’s a while since I had anything like that on the blog, and highbrow or not, it’s really such a beautiful dogma of our faith, ancient in origin, recent in infallible promulgation, entirely joyful and lovely. So, after the jump, here it is:

Here's Something To Think About

It's time for a new series on the blog! As I may have mentioned once, twice, or an odd dozen times, I have recently published a new book: Idol Thoughts: The Captivity of the Mind and Its Liberation in Christ. It is already selling quite well, so I hear, and I have received much positive feedback from its early readers.

So of course being a rapaciously greedy author who wants to rake in all that cold hard royalty cash (and all the professional authors reading this will burst into peals of merry, yet somehow bitter, laughter here. The only reason the cash is hard and cold is because it is actually spare change), I want to promote the book on the blog a bit more.

I do want to get the book out there, of course, and so I want to talk about it a bit, without of course sharing reams and reams of text from it (which would be counter-productive since I, uh, do want people to buy the thing).

So I am going to write a series of twelve blog posts, corresponding to the twelve chapters of the book. This post will match up, roughly, with the first introductory chapter. So what is this wonderful, ground-breaking, enthralling book about? (Humility, of course!)

Idol Thoughts is basically a popular presentation of an very ancient doctrine, coming from the Desert Fathers of the 4th and 5th centuries of the Middle East. These guys were the true pioneers of Christian spiritual doctrine and practice, and laid down for the rest of the Church a basic pattern of prayer, fasting, and self-mastery that has been the ascetic way of the Christian every since.

One of them, Evagrius Ponticus, was a man of learning and so wrote systematically about their eremetical life. He developed a doctrine of the eight logismoi, or thoughts, that took human beings away from God, away from true life, away from happiness and sanity. A great deal of the spiritual practices of the desert were about the mastery of these thoughts and the transformation of the mind and heart into the truth of the Gospel.

Evagrius' disciple John Cassian would take this doctrine of the thoughts to Western Europe where he went to establish monastic life, and his writings were foundational in our Roman Catholic spiritual theology. A couple centuries later, Pope St. Gregory the Great would tweak the list a bit, pare it down from eight to seven, and called them the Capital Sins. And so we have the familiar list.

I am resetting the clock in this book to bring back that original list, and the original name of 'thoughts'. Partly it is because I like the older list better. Also, I like the terminology of 'thoughts' better - these things are only sins when we give our wills over to them, but the thoughts run wild in us even before that, and live in us often unrecognized as fixed patterns of belief that color our whole judgment of reality.

I think in our psychological age the doctrine of the thoughts and their effect on our human thriving is an easy sell for people. We all know about the 'stinkin' thinkin' that if you are a recovering alcoholic, say, 'leads to drinkin'! We all know that people can sabotage themselves in a thousand different ways by patterns of negative and self-defeating thoughts, that before our lives go off the rails behavior-wise, so often the real damage has begun in the mind, in the false beliefs and bad judgments we allow to rule in us.

So this ancient doctrine of the logismoi is about due for a resurgence in our therapeutic culture. Now I maintain in the book that these eight thoughts are fundamentally idols, in that each of them proposes a scheme of happiness that is not God, that is an alternative to God. And they are lies, in that real and abiding human happiness comes only from our living communion with God made possible in Jesus Christ.

And so, as I develop in the book, one of the surest ways to fight the thoughts of man and their illusory idolatrous promises is with the Thoughts of God--the words of Scripture and especially of Jesus Christ in the Gospels. So my book, while being about the thoughts, what they are and what they do to us, is also about lectio divina, the ancient practice of praying with Scripture in a structured meditative way. Specifically, for each thought I provide a welter of appropriate Gospel texts to meditate on and provide some simple meditations on a few of them, just to get you started.

It's all about the purification and transformation of the mind and of the inner person, out of which by God's grace we can choose wisely and well how to live in the world. So we will be looking each Wednesday in the weeks ahead at the eight thoughts and what to do about them: gluttony, lust, avarice, anger, despondency, acedia, vainglory, and pride. And don't forget to buy my book, y'all.

This Little Piggy Goes to Market

Arise — go! Sell all you possess. Give it directly, personally to the poor. Take up My cross (their cross) and follow Me, going to the poor, being poor, being one with them, one with Me.

Little — be always little! Be simple, poor, childlike.

Preach the Gospel with your life — without compromise! Listen to the Spirit. He will lead you.

Do little things exceedingly well for love of Me.

Love... love... love, never counting the cost.

Go into the marketplace and stay with Me. Pray, fast. Pray always, fast.

Be hidden. Be a light to your neighbour’s feet. Go without fear into the depth of men’s hearts. I shall be with you.

Pray always. I will be your rest.

The Little Mandate of Madonna House

Pray, fast. Pray always, fast. Last week in our journey through these words that are the heart of MH spirituality and way of life, I focussed on these same words, but wrote about the aspect of prayer and its essential role in our life.

But what about fasting? What is it, and why is it? Why is it important? Is it? How does it fit in with going into the marketplace, being plunged into the human situation and its bargains and trade-offs, its cold calculations and tragic compromises? Why is fasting a right Gospel response to our being deeply immersed in the affairs, concerns, joys and hopes, sorrows and distress of all men and women, all of humanity?

I write about this in my book Idol Thoughts. Fasting essentially is a matter of establishing a spiritual order, or rather healing a deep spiritual disorder in us, by a bodily action. It bears witness, therefore, to the essential unity of our bodies and our spirits, that the two are not and cannot be at odds with each other, but form a single reality, a single person. What we do in our bodies directly affects our souls and vice versa.

The disorder that is then expressed in the more unsavoury aspects of the marketplace—the buying and selling not of goods and services, but of personal integrity and dignity—is essentially the disorder of idolatry. Human beings are inveterate idolators. That is, we look everywhere else but to God for our happiness. Whether it is sex or food or power or revenge or riches or fame or chemical stimuli or a host of other variations on those themes, we slip into idolatry as soon as we complete the sentence ‘Happiness is…’ with something other than God, something other than our living communion with the Father in our Lord Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Food is one of the lesser idols, in many ways, but our habit of overeating is nonetheless a sort of anti-sacrament of this false religion of happiness. That is, we have all sorts of desires and hungers in us, too many to count really. But when we keep shovelling ‘it’ in, when every little twinge of physical hunger is immediately filled by some morsel of food (or perhaps rather more than a morsel), then our bodies are telling our spirits that there is no happiness available outside of creatures and what they can give you.

So this little piggy goes to market, then! Off we go, confirmed by our bodies in our spirits that what we really need to be happy is to get whatever our grubby little hands can lay hold off and take it to ourselves by whatever means necessary.

Fasting, then, is the great sacramental of the true religion, the truth about human happiness and fulfillment. By choosing to embrace a little bit of hunger (we’re not supposed to starve ourselves), by choosing to have just that bit of weakness, just that bit of unsatisfaction in our flesh, we form our spirits in the deep truth of our need for God, and of God’s faithfulness in meeting that need.

Fasting is hard. Our world today is all about instant gratification, instant quelling of need. Many of us were raised in such an ethos, and so self-control, embrace of moderate hunger does not come easy to us. But the spiritual profit is huge.

And in the context of this part of the Mandate, our going into the marketplace, fasting is utterly essential. How can we preach the Gospel of divine love and mercy, of the God who meets us in our need and brings us to the happiness of the kingdom, if we are busily stuffing ourselves with whatever we think we need? Our witness to the Gospel will be hollow and unconvincing, if we are not ourselves living by the faith we profess.

So that is why we fast, essentially. The other benefits of fasting are very good and real—the mastery of the passions, the virtue of self-control and discipline, even the physical health benefits of not always being full up. But Christian fasting is essentially evangelical and kerygmatic, proclaiming the sufficiency of Christ and of God to a world mad with consumption and worshipping of creatures. So… let’s watch what we eat today, OK?