Getting to the Point

Make a joyful noise to God, all the earth;

Sing the glory of his name; give to him glorious praise.

Say to God, “How awesome are your deeds!

Because of your great power, your enemies cringe before you.

All the earth worships you; they sing praises to you,

Sing praises to your name.”

Come and see what God has done:

He is awesome in his deeds among mortals.

He turned the sea into dry land; they passed through the river on foot.

There we rejoiced in him, who rules by his might forever,

Whose eyes keep watch on the nations--let the rebellious not exalt themselves.

Bless our God, O peoples, let the sound of his praise be heard,

Who has kept us among the living, and has not let our feet slip.

For you, O God, have tested us; you have tried us as silver is tried.

You brought us into the net; you laid burdens on our backs;

You let people ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water;

Yet you have brought us out to a spacious place.

I will come into your house with burnt offerings;

I will pay you my vows, those that my lips uttered

And my mouth promised when I was in trouble.

I will offer to you burnt offerings of fatlings,

With the smoke of the sacrifice of rams;

I will make an offering of bulls and goats.

Come and hear, all you who fear God,

And I will tell what he has done for me.

I cried aloud to him, and he was extolled with my tongue.

If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened.

But truly God has listened; he has given heed to the words of my prayer.

Blessed be God, because he has not rejected my prayer

Or removed his steadfast love from me.

Psalm 66

Reflection – Well, I cannot tell you what a sigh of relief I had when I looked up where I had gotten to in the psalms as I resume this running commentary on them. It would have been a distinct bummer in the Octave of Easter to have had one of the psalms of lamentation or imprecation or some such thing.

As it is, we have Psalm 66, one of the truly great psalms of jubilation, and no better psalm could be found for this Easter Friday. While debates have broken out on the Internet as to whether or not we can eat meat today (my current best understanding is that today is not a day of fasting, but remains a day of abstinence, but I’m not going to the bank on that one), nonetheless it is Easter today, the one great Easter Day that lasts eight days.

And so we are to rejoice, rejoice, rejoice. Christians, do not allow yourself to be mindlessly tugged along by the secular world which considers Easter to be over now—it was that thing with the long weekend last week and the chocolate bunnies and eggs. No, no, a thousand times, no!

Easter itself is eight days long. EIGHT WHOLE DAYS – so don’t stop celebrating the feast of Easter in full until we are on the far side of this coming Sunday. And the Easter season lasts until Pentecost – this year, May 15. It is a season of joy; try to keep that joy going, in some regard.

The Lord has done great things for us—this is what Psalm 66 so beautifully expresses. ‘Come and see what God has done’ – this is the spirit of Easter. And this is the root of Christian joy. It is not some superficial and ultimately silly business of trying to whip ourselves up into an emotional state of frothy good cheer. It is not the Dionysian project of excess and alcohol-fuelled revelry. It is a matter of keeping our eyes, hearts, minds fixed on what God has done for us.

Jesus and His Resurrection, ultimately, and what this means for us—hope of eternal life, the gift of His Spirit, and all that good stuff. But also… the sun. The moon. Trees. Rocks. Dirt. Bugs. And… uhhhh… people! Yeah, that’s a good one – people! And, well, you get the drift. Everything. Everything that is, in the order of creation. And everything He is doing, in the order of grace.

Keep our eyes, hearts, minds fixed on all that stuff all the time. Gratitude flows from that, and from gratitude praise and worship of our God, and from praise and worship of our God, joy. Maybe it’s a quiet reserved joy (we’re not all extroverts bubbling over with our emotions), maybe it’s a more whoop-de-woo kind of joy – no matter.

Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me,

for in you my soul takes refuge;

in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge,

 until the destroying storms pass by.

I cry to God Most High, to God who fulfils his purpose for me.

He will send from heaven and save me,

he will put to shame those who trample on me.

God will send forth his steadfast love and his faithfulness.

I lie down among lions that greedily devour human prey;

their teeth are spears and arrows, their tongues sharp swords.

Be exalted, O God, above the heavens. Let your glory be over all the earth.

They set a net for my steps; my soul was bowed down.

They dug a pit in my path, but they have fallen into it themselves.

My heart is steadfast, O God, my heart is steadfast.

I will sing and make melody.

Awake, my soul! Awake, O harp and lyre!

I will awake the dawn.

I will give thanks to you, O Lord, among the peoples;

I will sing praises to you among the nations.

For your steadfast love is as high as the heavens;

your faithfulness extends to the clouds.

Be exalted, O God, above the heavens.

Let your glory be over all the earth.

Psalm 57

Reflection – We have been trodding slowly through the ‘gloomy 50s’ in the book of psalms—an unbroken succession of psalms lamenting evil in the world and the sufferings of the psalmist in the face of that evil. I am somewhat amused that, as hard as I have found it to write about these psalms week after week, they have proved to be very popular posts, three of them currently being among the ‘top ten’ posts of the last month. I guess ‘gloom sells’ is the take away lesson here.

Well, the gloom is starting to lift and the light is dawning – the psalmist here is still afflicted, still besieged by enemies. But… ‘awake my soul! Awake, O harp and lyre! I will awake the dawn.’ Something is changing; deliverance is coming.

The destroying storms come, and the destroying storms pass by. There are all sorts of dangers about—lions, spears, arrows, sharp swords, pits—but somehow the psalmist is unharmed. Terrible things happening around him, but not in him, where the song of praise to God never ceases.

Well, this takes us somewhere. Because of course we all know that in the so-called ‘real world’ (whatever that means, exactly) sometimes bad guys do find the mark, right? I mean… well, I guess I don’t need to drive the point home too hard after the week the world has had. The spears, arrows, and sharp swords (guns and bombs) don’t always go amiss. What about that? What about then? Where is God? What are we to do? How does this psalm apply to that reality?

It seems to me that we can go very shallow here (‘oh, it’s all good you know – la la la!’) or we can go very deep. Let’s leave aside the shallowness, which is self-refuting. The depth of it is that if we are in God—really, truly in Him—then our bodies can be pierced with bullets and blown apart by explosives, and in truth this does not harm us. It hurts us—may indeed kill us—but fundamentally it does us no harm.

If we are in God—truly, deeply, really in Him—then the death of our bodies do us no harm. The pain of injury, the pain of loss and grief, deep injustice, terrible confrontation with evil, miserable times of sorrow and tribulation—all of these are real, and are just awful to endure.

But… they hurt us, but do not harm us. If we are in God. If God is our life. If we have by His grace placed ourselves so utterly into His care and His mercy (‘Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me’) that our true life, our true self, our whole being is there.

This is not some shallow silly consolation—well, it’s all gonna work out in the end, ya know! This is the deep consolation of faith, the deep truth of God and Jesus and eternal life and heaven. The consolation of the Spirit. This psalm is not just whistling a happy tune in the dark of night; it is a solemn testimony that the dawn is coming, no matter what. Dawn is coming; God is coming. God is here. In the blackest of black nights, God is with us. And so we praise Him, glorify Him, call out to Him for mercy, and keep going no matter what.

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!

Wednesdays on the blog I am going through the ‘eight thoughts’, the subject of my new book Idol Thoughts. These are the typical patterns of interior dialogue that the desert fathers identified as the principal opponents to the work of the Holy Spirit in us—hence idols we worship in lieu of God insofar as we give our allegiance to them. My book shows what each of these thoughts are, and how to pray with the Gospels as one way of being liberated from their tyranny in our lives.

This list of eight thoughts was adapted to the familiar ‘seven deadly sins’ in later Roman Catholic teaching. We have already looked at the first four thoughts, and so far they have corresponded to the list of seven—gluttony, lust, avarice, anger.

But with thought number five we depart from the rest of that list—sloth, envy, pride—somewhat. Pride is still there, but vainglory takes the place of envy, and sloth is broken up into acedia (more on that next week) and today’s thought, despondency.

So what’s that about? How is ‘sadness’ a thought that blocks the work of the Holy Spirit in us? Isn’t it just a normal emotion, one of the spectrum? Isn’t it healthy to be sad when sad things happen? What could the desert fathers mean by characterizing it as a moral problem?

We have to distinguish the simple emotion of sadness from the thought of sadness. Still more do we have to strongly state that the disease of clinical depression is something quite other than those. The desert fathers knew all about depression, although of course they didn’t have the name for it. They speak of a causeless sorrow that engulfs the human person, against his or her will, and which they are powerless to overcome. They are quite clear in their writings that this is not the thought of despondency.

Nor is the simple emotion that thought, either. Emotions come and go and we have little immediate control over them—they are not in themselves morally significant. The thought of despondency is something quite different. It is, essentially, the fixed conviction that I cannot be happy unless I have things my own way. Happiness is getting what I want, and so when I don’t get what I want (which, not being God, happens to me fairly often), I will be sad.

Pouting, in other words. Sulking. We may do it in adult ways (the spectacle of a grown man weeping openly or throwing himself on the floor if he doesn’t get his favourite coffee cup is fairly rare), but nonetheless there is little to separate us from the toddler on this point. I want what I want, when I want it, as I want it. And I will be miserable, and make everyone else miserable, until I get it. Such is the driving force of the despondent soul.

Now of course all of this is sheer and utter nonsense, and a moment’ clear thinking is sufficient to show it. For one thing, if it is truly necessary for happiness that one gets exactly what one wants, then in any normal living situation we must end up in a state of practically mortal combat. What I want will only coincidentally be what you want, and quite often be quite different. So only one of us can be happy at any given moment, if the above notion of happiness prevails. Despondency thus links arms with anger and life becomes a pitched battle for dominance, and nobody ends up especially happy.

There are people whose lives are ruined by the thought of despondency—people who end up so bitter over the hand they were dealt, constantly complaining, never satisfied, always finding something wrong in any day, any situation, and focusing on that with laser precision. And we all know other people who, in spite of fairly serious afflictions and tragedies in their lives, someone come through to a place of joy and peace, hard-won perhaps, but all the more real for that.

Most of us fall somewhere in between, with little flashes of despondency, large or small veins of self-centredness and childish self-will lacing through our person. But the truth all of us need to return to is that happiness has nothing—nothing at all!—with getting one’s own way. Happiness lies in coming to love God’s way, in growing to see that our life, our real life, is to live in a communion of love with God in which ‘what we want’ is more and more purified and simplified to wanting what God wants.

And the great surprise twist ending of not just our life, but the life of the whole cosmos, is that what God wants is, in fact, to fulfill every desire of our hearts in the right way, a true and good way, and that the path He sets for us of obedience and surrender, trust and abandonment, is in fact the path to perfect self-fulfillment, to having everything just the way (uh huh uh huh) we like it, forever.

As the Bible ends ‘every tear will be wiped away’ (Rev 21:4) – sadness ultimately is done away with in the kingdom, but the path to that kingdom is to forget about ourselves and our own ideas and follow the Lamb wherever he goes (Rev 14:4).