Getting to the Point: grace

Showing posts with label grace. Show all posts

Monday, February 16, 2015

The Prayer of the Innocent Man

Vindicate me, O Lord, for I have walked in my integrity,

and I have trusted in the Lord without wavering.

Prove me, O Lord, and try me; test my heart and my mind.

For your steadfast love is before my eyes, and I walk in your faithfulness.

I do not sit with men of falsehood, nor do I consort with hypocrites.

I hate the assembly of evildoers, and I will not sit with the wicked.

I wash my hands in innocence and go around your altar, O Lord,

proclaiming thanksgiving aloud, and telling all your wondrous deeds.

O Lord, I love the habitation of your house and the place where your glory dwells.

Do not sweep my soul away with sinners, nor my life with bloodthirsty men,

in whose hands are evil devices, and whose right hands are full of bribes.

But as for me, I shall walk in my integrity; redeem me, and be gracious to me.

My foot stands on level ground; in the great assembly I will bless the Lord.

Psalm 26

Reflection – The Monday Psalter delivers up to us today for the first time a certain genre of psalm that poses a very specific problem for us in prayer. Namely, the psalm that loudly and long proclaims the total innocence and uprightness of the psalmist, on account of which the Lord simply must deliver him from harm and take care of him.

This is, of course a great challenge for us who know very well that we are not quite so innocent, that we do not always walk in integrity, trust without wavering, and all those other good things the psalmist most sincerely claims for himself here. Alas, sometimes yes, sometimes no, and so we have (among other things) the sacrament of reconciliation to cleanse us of sin.

Well, what are we to do with this psalm, then? Ignore it? Edit it from future editions of the Bible? Scoff at it, deconstruct it, implicitly or explicitly deny that it is an inspired text just as much as ‘the Lord is my shepherd’ or ‘Praise the Lord, all you nations, acclaim Him all you people’—the psalms, in other words, that may flow more readily from our mouths?

The Church has never seen fit to do that, and indeed Psalm 26 appears in its allotted place in the Liturgy of the Hours, the second psalm of Friday Daytime Prayer, Week One. It is a psalm, in fact, that lends itself to corporate liturgical prayer more than private recitation, perhaps, and in that calls us to a contemplation of some fairly deep theological and spiritual truths.

Of course we have to start with Christ in this. He, along with His Mother, is the One who prays this psalm without reservations or complications. He is the integrated one, the faithful one, the innocent one, and so this psalm first pulls us into the very prayer of Jesus Christ to God His Father. The only way we can really pray this psalm is to pray it as an expression of our unity with and in Jesus.

But this, then, means that this psalm (which most of us probably are hardly aware of and certainly don’t count as one of our favourites) factually pulls us right into the internal dialogue of the Trinity. It is a very human earthy psalm—as always there are enemies about, and the wicked, and it is all very much a psalm set in the battlefield of the world. But in that—and in the fact that God the Son became an earthy man and entered that battlefield—the very life of the Trinity, the ineffably mysterious and unknowable inner being of God is made present to us.

And when we come together as the Church, not as simple individuals with our own struggles and failures, sins and virtues, but as the Body of believers, this psalm does become ours indeed, and in fact without reservations or hesitation.

We become innocent and faithful, with integrity and sincerity of heart, not by nature or by our own actions and perfections, but by grace. This psalm is a psalm of justification by faith and by grace—sola fides and sola gratia—but our belief is that it is a real justification, a real cleansing and purification, something that really does change us and is not simply a legal fiction.

This psalm, above all then, calls us to a searching examination of conscience that flows from an awareness of just what a gift has been given us, just how much the life of God has become the life of redeemed humanity, just how much Jesus has deigned to share His righteousness with us. So… are we walking that way? Rather than letting us off the hook or allowing us to be slack and passive in our spiritual and moral life, this psalm is a clarion call to integrity and to purity of heart, mind, and body.

Let’s pray it, then, and know what we are praying, what gift has been given us, and what standard of life and conduct this gift calls us to, today.

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

The Spirit of Chaos, Or Making A Mess In The World

It’s Wednesday, and so time for the ‘papal examen’ once again. I have been taking the Wednesdays to go through the Pope’s wonderful address to the Curia before Christmas, which many took as a scathing rebuke of ‘those guys in the Vatican’, but which have decided to regard as ‘a mighty fine examination of conscience for all of us.’

We are at the fourth of the fifteen ailments he listed in that talk. It is thus:

The disease of excessive planning and of functionalism. When the apostle plans everything down to the last detail and believes that with perfect planning things will fall into place, he becomes an accountant or an office manager. Things need to be prepared well, but without ever falling into the temptation of trying to contain and direct the freedom of the Holy Spirit, which is always greater and more flexible than any human planning (cf. Jn 3:8).

We contract this disease because “it is always more easy and comfortable to settle in our own sedentary and unchanging ways. In truth, the Church shows her fidelity to the Holy Spirit to the extent that she does not try to control or tame him… to tame the Holy Spirit! … He is freshness, imagination, and newness”.

Now, this one is a bit of a challenge for me to write about. Anyone reading this who knows me personally might accuse me of many crimes against God and humanity, but would probably never accuse me of being hyper-organized in them. Getting everything planned out to the last detail is not exactly my normal modus operandi. Uh… yeah, no.

That being said, let’s look at this. I live in community with a couple hundred people, and do a fair bit of spiritual direction besides, so while I personally err on the side of barely managed chaos, I am certainly familiar with the phenomenon of excessive organization. I would have to say, mind you, that Madonna House tends to avoid this particular trap in general. It’s a very well-organized, well-run community, but we have learned over the years that the Holy Spirit not only wants but demands room to move in our common life.

Whenever we have erred on the side of getting things a little too planned out, God seems to delight in throwing us a curve ball—essentially whatever we planned just blows up in our face. We have experienced this over the decades so many times that most of us in MH develop a pretty good sense of when we have organized things just enough and need to stand back and leave the rest to God.

I think it is fear and a lack of faith that might drive this excess of planning, this desire to have everything nailed down. There is always, in Christian life, an absolute need really to allow the Holy Spirit to work things out. We cannot plan things so well as to be assured of a good outcome. So often, when we try, we slip into a subtle egoism: what we are seeking is not God’s will and the kingdom of heaven, but our own little ideas about what is supposed to happen.

I see this struggle in lots of circumstances and situations. Perhaps most sympathetically and understandably, I see it in the many good Catholic families I know. Mothers and fathers worry about their children—that is the nature of things, and a good nature it is. But it is a dreadful mistake to let that worry devolve into trying to control every aspect of the child’s life, of the family’s life, and to believe that if we just get everything organized rightly, establish the home in perfect spiritual and physical order, then the kids will be all right, and grow up to be good virtuous Catholic men and women.

Well, no. Human freedom and God’s grace are these irreducible realities in every human life. And this is not a bug, but a feature, as they say in the computer industry. Human virtue and human sanctity grow out of the mysterious encounter of the human soul with the Spirit of the living God, not from having everything super-organized. And we have to allow room for that encounter to happen, messy and chaotic as that may make our lives at times.

Waiting on God and waiting on one another. Whether it is in a family, a religious community, or the Roman Curia, this is the deep patience of the Gospel that we need to ensure that it is God’s will and God’s kingdom, not our will and our puny little kingdom, that we are building with our lives.

So it is a matter of not fearing that chaos, that seeming disorganization. In truth, there is a deeper order, a more profound organization that is occurring when we choose not to plan everything out all the time: the choice to live under God’s authority and listen to the Spirit in our daily lives, and so have our own souls in right order before Him.

Monday, January 5, 2015

Chthonic Phlebotomized Syzygy - Or The Point of Success in Life

May the Lord answer you in the day of trouble.

May the name of the God of Jacob protect you.

May he send you help from the sanctuary

and give you support from Zion.

May he remember all your offerings

and regard with favor your burnt sacrifices.

May he grant you your heart's desire

and fulfill all your plans.

May we shout for joy over your salvation,

and in the name of our God set up our banners.

May the Lord fulfill all your petitions.

Now I know that the Lord saves his anointed;

he will answer him from his holy heaven

with the saving might of his right hand.

Some trust in chariots and some in horses,

but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.

They collapse and fall,

but we rise and stand upright.

O Lord, save the king!

May he answer us when we call.

Psalm 20

Reflection – Well, reviving the Monday Psalter here with a new psalm for the new year. Tying this in to the blog’s new theme of ‘getting to the point’, it seems to me that the ‘point’ of this psalm, both the intention it is moving towards and the central truth it circles around, is a very simple and straightforward one. And yet, perhaps one we can easily miss the point of, or go off point on if we are not vigilant.

Namely, that success comes from the Lord. Success does not come from physical strength, cleverness of intellect, comeliness, personal charm, wiles, or a really cool Kickstarter campaign. The essential biblical revelation—indeed, a large portion of the Old Testament is dedicated to this theme—is that success comes from the Lord.

In the earlier stage of revelation, this is shown by God giving the smaller army, the weaker tribe, the disadvantaged peoples triumph over their foes. This is not unlike the way we spell out the alphabet in a kindergarten class with foot-tall letters in bright primary colors, with pictures of apples, bees, and cats. One does not start teaching children to read with words like phlebotomy, syzygy, and chthonic.

But of course in the normal course of things physical strength and strategic wiles do lead to victory in battle, intelligence, charm, and good funding do lead to prosperity, physical beauty and charm to social and romantic achievements.

And if you call those things ‘success’, then yes, perhaps success is only indirectly from the Lord who distributes those gifts in the first place. But—and here comes the ‘chthonic phlebotimized syzygy’, so to speak—that is not what we consider success.

Success for a Christian can have and must have only one meaning—to live as Christ lived, which means to live in Christ’s heart and allow him to transform our hearts into his. If we believe what we say we believe (the words of the Creed we profess each Sunday), there is no other measure by which to measure what a successful human life looks like. Wealth and social standing, physical beauty and pleasure, even the love and affection of family and friends—all of this passes away left to its own natural rhythms. It is only caught up into the mystery of Christ and become a sharer in the victory of Christ over death that our lives and everything in them are made fruitful not just for a few years of fleeting time, but for eternity.

And success is from the Lord. It is God who gives it, not we who achieve it. God who works it, not human strength or human cleverness. A work of grace, and only in a tertiary and ancillary fashion a work of human beings. If we miss this—what success is in the first place, and how to attain it in the second—we are already off on a bad foot, already missing the point and unlikely to attain it.

Psalm 20 keeps us roundly, thoroughly, utterly focussed on the point, and on what we need to do to attain it, and that is a very simple thing. We need to ask. “Ask, and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened,” (Matt 7:7). And asking, desire it. And desiring it, trust that the Lord desires it. And from all that, choose here and now, today, to do what a ‘successful’ person would do (i.e. live and love as Christ, best you can). And that, my brothers and sisters, is the point.

Sunday, October 26, 2014

Cynicism: An Anti-Christian and Blasphemous Cop-Out

To avoid rash judgment, everyone should be careful to interpret insofar as possible his neighbour's thoughts, words, and deeds in a favourable way. Every good Christian ought to be more ready to give a favourable interpretation to another's statement than to condemn it. But if he cannot do so, let him ask how the other understands it. And if the latter understands it badly, let the former correct him with love. If that does not suffice, let the Christian try all suitable ways to bring the other to a correct interpretation so that he may be saved.

Catechism of the Catholic Church, 478

Reflection – This little snippet from the CCC popped up somewhere on my Facebook news feed the other day, and I jumped on it immediately as blog fodder. I’ve been toying with the idea of periodically having some basic catechetical stuff on the blog from time to time—not as a regular feature, but once in a while.

This paragraph should be required reading for everyone before going on the Internet. One of the most harmful, toxic patterns of discourse I have seen on the ‘net over the years is the strong tendency to assume the worst of people, to interpret every thought, word, and deed of another, especially another that you do not like, in the most negative terms possible.

This is a sin against charity, it is widespread in our online discourse, and it is poisonous. It derails the most innocuous and positive discussions into cycles of random hostile accusations and counter-accusations and defenses, and renders it impossible to actually discuss an issue, because everyone gets worked up discussing the inner hearts and minds (about which we can know nothing) of the people putting the issue forward.

Cynicism, in other words, is deeply anti-Christian and deeply evil. It is destructive of community, of the search for truth and goodness, and undermines the hard work of forging a genuinely good and beautiful path of life in the world, of restoring the world to Christ, as we put it in Madonna House.

Cynicism is also a cheap cop-out. It is true that sometimes people have base motives for their words and deeds—of course! But the cynic who makes a blanket judgment that everyone has base motives for his or her words and deeds, or at least everyone that the cynic himself disagrees with or dislikes is taking the easy path indeed.

The truth is, people are complicated, and life is complicated, and there is such a tangled mess of good and evil, virtue and sin, honesty and hypocrisy in almost every human heart. But the goodness, the virtue, and the honesty are no less real than the evil, sin, and hypocrisy. And that is the fundamental mistake of the cynic—an unwarranted and illogical assumption that the good in a person is just window dressing, just exterior practice, and that the ‘real person’ is only shown when their moral failures and perfidy is exposed.

I think cynicism, while it is among the basic stances of the human person, is exacerbated by certain forms of Calvinist theology. The doctrine of total corruption of the human person, the idea that it is our sins that name us, define us, and that only God’s grace is any good whatsoever, and his grace is merely an external application of forgiveness on (essentially) a rotten putrid corpse of sinful corruption—all of this will of course engender a deeply jaundiced and cynical view of reality.

This is not Catholic theology. We never have believed in total corruption, but have always held that there was some capacity for natural goodness in the human person. And we believe that God’s grace is actually transformative, working on the interior of the person to actually make them good and loving. And so in our dealings with one another we must be charitable, not because it is ‘nice’, but because otherwise we may inadvertently but very seriously sin against the Holy Spirit and commit a most profound act of blasphemy—that of denying the possibility of grace acting in a person to truly make this person good.

Cynicism is, as I have said is a cheap cop-out, a childish refusal to engage in the real complexity of life and its nuances. And so, as we engage with one another on-line and off-line, let us try to remember:

“Everyone should be careful to interpret insofar as possible his neighbour's thoughts, words, and deeds in a favourable way. Every good Christian ought to be more ready to give a favourable interpretation to another's statement than to condemn it. But if he cannot do so, let him ask how the other understands it. And if the latter understands it badly, let the former correct him with love. If that does not suffice, let the Christian try all suitable ways to bring the other to a correct interpretation so that he may be saved.”