Day 48: Spiritual and Religious

I have little patience with confessors who try to convince penitents not to feel bad because what they’ve done isn’t really a sin.  In making such comments they think they are offering comfort, but truly I feel that they are denying their penitents the experience of God’s forgiveness and mercy, which is far greater comfort than any false sense of our own innocence can give.

I do not understand the distinction between spiritual and religious.  For me religion has always been the mode of accessing the spiritual – that is what religion is about.  But without the support of religion, spirituality becomes paralyzed, like an engine with no car to run. 

I think when people try to access the spiritual without the structure of religion, the spiritual simply becomes therapeutic, serving only our need to feel good about ourselves, even if this “good feeling” does happen to include a sense of communion with and love for others. 

Religion, however, reminds us that the spiritual also entails real, concrete, and often difficult obligations to others and to God: obligations to be at a certain place at a certain time, obligations to behave in a certain way towards others, even an obligation to ourselves – to go to church even when we don’t feel like it, to feed our souls even when we don’t feel like eating. 

Spirituality turns us inward and lifts our souls to heaven; religion grounds the spiritual and reminds us of our responsibilities here on earth.  Religion without spirituality is dead, but spirituality without religion is impotent.

Day 47: A Sacrament of Poverty

The Eucharist is the sacrament of poverty.  Mother Teresa writes: The Eucharist and the poor are nothing more than the same love of God.  The Eucharist is God impoverished, stripped of the trappings of divinity and made into a piece of bread.  A piece of bread!  The cheapest, simplest, most basic, most common, and yet most insignificant type of food.  Not content to divest Himself of His power and become merely human, Christ humbled Himself even more and became a piece of bread to nourish humans.  Can we truly understand what it means that Christ became bread?  

If we can see Christ in a piece of bread, then why can we not see Him in the poor - who, after all, are at least human beings created in God's image!  If we see that Christ humbled Himself to give Himself as nourishment to others, then why do we not follow His example and give our whole lives in nourishing other people?

When we receive the Eucharist we are receiving poverty.  Even if we do not understand it, we are, in the act of eating Christ impoverished as a piece of bread, expressing solidarity with the poor, the hungry, the homeless, the mentally ill, the lonely, the elderly - all the poor who live their lives unrecognized as Christ among us, just as to faithless eyes the Eucharist appears only as a piece of bread.

Seeing with the eyes of faith means more than seeing Christ in a piece of bread.  It also means seeing Christ in the most debased, the most filthy, the most impoverished, the ugliest of human conditions.  

That is why Christ coupled the Last Supper with the washing of feet, something only the lowest of servants would do.  Christ is calling us both to see Him in those who serve us, and He is calling us to imitate Him in His poverty.  He is calling us to recognize that the poor are our servants and that we must let them serve us by serving them.  Mother Teresa also writes that the poor have given her far more than she gives them.  But she could only receive what they had to give by first giving herself to them.

What is beautiful about Mother Teresa is her recognition that spiritual poverty is worse than material poverty.  By spiritual poverty she means: loneliness, a sense of worthlessness, a sense that you no longer have anything to offer the world.  The great crime of material poverty is that it so often leads to spiritual poverty, especially when we live in a society that tells us the poor are mere "leeches," the mentally ill are to be feared and shunned, the homeless and unemployed are simply "lazy," and so on.  We do not see the poor as people who have things to offer us.  And so we ignore them, and we plunge them into spiritual poverty.

When Mother Teresa offered rice to a poor woman with eight children, the woman took half the rice and went to share it with another poor family who was hungry.  Mother Teresa says: "I did not bring them more rice that night because I wanted them to experience the joy of loving and sharing."  Mother Teresa recognized that it was vitally important to that poor woman to experience herself as someone who had something to offer someone else.

It is not your money that will save the poor.  It is your love.

Mother Teresa is clear that love was not given to us to make us "feel good."  Love, if it is true, is supposed to hurt.  We are called to turn each act of love into an act of suffering service, and we are called to turn each act of suffering into an act of love.

Days 38-46: Wisdom through Suffering

Augustine says that a philosopher is not a man who is wise but a man who loves wisdom. 

Ambrose says that we believe fishermen, not dialecticians.

The fishermen whom we believe are philosophers in the truest sense of the word, because they loved wisdom, and they recognized it when they saw it, or rather when they saw Him.

The problem with so many philosophers today is that they become dialecticians, in love with their own arguments and ideas.  They no longer have the humility to love wisdom itself, because love of wisdom entails the acknowledgement that there are things you will never understand.

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What is the value of fasting?  I think of the female medieval mystics, who were known both for their great charity, and for their great fasts.  How do they fit together?

Our Church teaches that we are all “in this” together.  We rejoice when others rejoice; we mourn when others mourn.  As part of one Body, if one member suffers we all suffer. 

Members of our body are hungry now.   They are poor, naked, homeless, sick, cold.  When we fast – whether from food or from other material comforts – we manifest in our own lives the truth that the hunger and the suffering of the poor are also our hunger and our suffering.  This is the meaning of solidarity. 

When I suffer the hunger and deprivation of the fast that I have chosen, I should be remembering the ones who have no choice but to suffer hunger and deprivation.  The pang in my flesh should make present to me the obligations I have to those who suffer out of necessity. 

As long as other members of Christ’s body are suffering, so too am I suffering, whether I realize it or not.  The choice to fast is my choice to realize it and to live out this realization.

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When we confront suffering, we have a choice.  We can choose to turn inward, towards selfishness, towards hopelessness, towards hatred.  Or we can choose to confront it with an attitude of love, hope, faith.  We can choose to make it into something that transforms us into a gift given up for others. 

God has made this choice possible by offering Himself on the Cross.  But He does not excuse us from the responsibility of choosing.

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I read this recently: “We are always receiving God’s mercies.  Many of them we don’t understand – some are painful, some are unbearable – but they are all God’s mercies.  We just ask that He please give us a few more of the tender ones.”

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Cardinal Carlos Maria Martini, S.J., writes that Peter’s problem was that he wanted to be the Lord’s savior.  How much insight does that give into Peter’s personality throughout the Gospels!  He was a man of action, and he wanted very much to be doing something for the Lord.  Build a tent, wash feet, fight, die.  We find Christ throughout gently rebuking him.  It is my job to serve you, Christ says.  It is my job to save you.  Let me save you, for you cannot save yourself, and you certainly cannot save me.  Peter becomes wise only when he acknowledges that his ability to serve the Lord comes not from himself, but in fact from the Lord he wishes to serve.

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Thus the fisherman attains wisdom through suffering.  First, suffering the wounds to his pride: realizing he cannot save Christ, realizing that all the ways he had thought to fight for what was right had failed, and realizing that he could not even trust himself to be loyal to his dearest friend.  Then, suffering on account of love: enduring hardship for the sake of the One who saved him.  The first kind of suffering brings grief; the second brings joy.

I think Christ acknowledges the grief that accompanies death to self, and I think He understands our need to mourn this death.  When Peter heard the cock crow, he wept.  There is no escaping the wounding of our ego, the recognition of our dependence on others, the acknowledgment that we cannot control our circumstances or even wholly understand ourselves.  

But then Christ calls us to transform this death to self into self-gift of love.  Don't languish in the mourning of your own incompetency.  Christ has taken your inadequacy and transformed it into Himself.  He has saved you, and if you give your wounded pride to Him He can restore you.  Die to self, and Christ can live in you, and in Christ's life in you you will find joy.

Day 37: Neither Do I Condemn

All sin is akin to adultery, because it all involves taking what rightfully belongs to God and giving it to other 'gods.'  All sin is breaking covenant with God.

Thus when Jesus forgives the adulteress in John 8, He is really forgiving all of us.  We stand with that adulteress, who has given herself to men who are not her covenanted spouse.

Of course He is also telling the scribes and Pharisees that they are adulterers, like the woman they are prepared to stone.  But He is also offering them forgiveness, just as He offers the adulteress forgiveness.  In forgiving the adulteress, He forgives us all.

He is the only one who has the right to throw a stone, for He is the sinless one.  He, after all, is the cuckold.  Hear God's cry of rage against His faithless spouse in Ezekiel 15.  But in Christ this rage has gone: all that is left is compassion and mercy.  The cuckold does not abandon His adulterous wife.  Neither do I condemn you. . . It is a moment of reconciliation.  Christ is fulfilling God's promise to "remember the covenant He has made" and to "make atonement" for all His faithless wife has done.  It is in accordance with this remembrance of His mercy that Christ declares the woman innocent of her crime.  He is not simply declaring this woman innocent; He is declaring His people innocent.

This Gospel is paired with the story of Susanna in the Book of Daniel.  Susanna is innocent, unlike the woman in John's Gospel. But remember: in John's Gospel Jesus' words pronounce the adulteress innocent despite her guilt.  In both tales, innocent blood is spared.  Susanna is innocent of wrongdoing according to the Law, but the adulteress is innocent because of Christ's gracious action on her behalf.  

The fact that the elders in Susanna's story are the ones who are truly guilty - the true adulterers - underscores Jesus' implication about the scribes' and Pharisees' unfaithfulness.  The desire of the scribes and Pharisees to find a trumped-up charge to bring against Jesus also parallels the perjury of the elders in Susanna's case.  The point is clear: when we pass judgment on and condemn others, we perjure ourselves.  Because in the act of judging others, we imply that we are innocent - that we are "sinless" - when we are not.  We are all complicit in each other's crimes.

When we judge others, we second-guess the God who has refused to condemn them.  We put our judgments before God's.  One of the worst sins is smug self-righteousness.  Such self-righteousness can be found both in those who moralize and impose their codes of behavior on others, and in those who take refuge in God's promise of forgiveness as an excuse to persist in sinfulness.  The devil is at work in this, again using things that are good - moral judgment, trust in God's mercy - and turning them to his evil purposes.  The only cure is in humility: an awareness of ourselves as we truly are before God.  Only when we are humble will we have the clearness of vision to condemn the sin (both in ourselves and others) out of love for the sinner (both ourselves and others).  

Day 36: And Jesus Wept

The Mass is a re-presentation of salvation history.  The story of redemption encapsulated for our participation in it.

In the Eucharist we witness the Incarnation: Christ born again in a piece of bread.  He offers Himself - the Word of God - in Scripture and in the sacred meal we share.  He dies again when we receive Him - descends into the bowels of our own sinfulness, dies like the seed that must give its life so that we may live.  And He rises again in us, when we, now part of His Body, go forth to be His hands and feet and eyes and ears in the world.

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Today's readings are astonishing.  The Gospel contains that famous verse: And Jesus wept.  Et lacrimatus est Iesus, says the Vulgate.  The passive form in the Latin emphasizing the helplessness of Jesus in the face of His sorrow.  Jesus was made to have wept.  

Yet Jesus was not helpless in the face of this despair.  Why should Jesus weep?  He knew that He would raise Lazarus from the dead.  He says to His Apostles: This illness is not to end in death.  Yet Lazarus does die.  The point is that, though the illness will not end in death, the illness must bring Lazarus through death: Lazarus must die before He can be raised.  And this death is still something that causes Christ sorrow.  Christ does not offer the grieving sisters any blithe platitudes.  Christ is perturbed at their grief.  Christ weeps with them.

The faith and loyalty of Martha and Mary are put here to an awful test.  Already they have been tempted, perhaps, to anger that Jesus did not do more to save their brother.  They bring Him their reproach: if you had been here, our brother would not have died.  Yet they also never lose faith in Him.  Despite His apparent neglect of them, they still offer Him their love and faith.  Their interaction with Jesus is a model for us.  God welcomes us to share our sorrows with Him, to ask our questions.  Why did this have to happen?  Where were you, God, in the midst of this tragedy?  But the sisters invite us to share their faith: they trust that, somehow, the will of God will take place.  They do not ask Jesus to raise their brother: they simply say, Whatever you ask of God, God will give You.  They put their sorrows and their questions and their fears into Christ's hands, and entrust their fates to Him.

Jesus' prayer at Lazarus' tomb is a model for us as well.  I thank You for hearing Me.  I know You always hear Me.  Can we make this prayer our own?  Can we know that God hears us, even when He seems to be silent?

The faith of the disciples, too, plays a role in this tale.  The story is bracketed by the disciples' fear for Jesus' life: if He goes to Bethany, so near to Jerusalem, He risks being stoned to death.  They try to talk themselves and Jesus out of going to Bethany.  Fear of the death makes them afraid to seek God's glory.  But Thomas utters the words: Let us also go to die with him.  Thomas' words follow Jesus' Let us go to him, meaning Lazarus.  Thomas demonstrates his willingness to follow Jesus on His life-giving mission, even if it means his own death.  When Jesus asks us to go sacrifice our lives for the Lazaruses of this world, can we say with Thomas: Let us also go?

Make Jesus' tears our own: weep at the injustice of death, weep with compassion for those who mourn.  Make the words of Martha and Mary our own: If you had been here. . . but whatever you ask of God, God will give you.  Make the words of Jesus our own: I thank You for hearing Me.  I know You always hear Me.  Make the words of Thomas our own: Let us also go to die with You.  Know that God hears our sorrow and our pain, and follow Jesus into the depths of that sorrow, trusting that He will bring out of it life and joy.

Day 34: Guilt Like Love

The problem with excessive guilt over sin is that it holds us back from the only thing that can work to conquer sin: loving and joyful action.

It is a trick of the devil to use something so laudable – a sense of contrition about sin – for evil purposes – to prevent us from doing good in the world.  We must not let a sense of guilt for what we’ve done wrong keep us so mired in self-centered despair that we do not do the good we can do.

Make no mistake: guilt in and of itself is not bad.  The Church has been accused of fostering guilt in people, and so the Church should.  Without guilt, we are content to continue sinning.  Indeed we lose all sense of sin and responsibility for our sins.  But healthy guilt is an impetus to good action.  It impels us to act in ways to combat sin.  It strengthens our resolve to do what is right.  It helps us to see our distance from God and urges us to move closer to Him.

But guilt that is not tempered by a sense of God’s mercy, guilt that is focused inward – on our evil – and not on God’s goodness, is unhealthy.  This kind of guilt makes us so afraid of our sins that we are afraid to act.  It makes us fear ourselves so much that we feel any step we take will lead to a fall. 

Unhealthy guilt is born of hatred – self-hatred.  Healthy guilt is born of love – love of God.

Every day I pray for God to reveal my sins to me.  Because I know that they are there, whether I have the insight to acknowledge them or not.  But I pray for this not because I long to feel despairing and despondent about myself.  I pray for this because I know that my sins are keeping me from God, and I do not want to be kept from God.  I love Him and I want to be as near to Him as I can.  I want Him to reveal to me anything that is keeping me from Him, especially my own sinfulness, so that I can work with Him to remove them from my heart.

If you pray like this, pray too to have the courage to face yourself as you really are.

Day 33: The Grace of Weakness

. . . in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me.  Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me.  But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. (2 Corinthians 12: 7-9)

I've come to accept that there are some vices I will always have.  I will always struggle with impatience.  I will struggle with having a bad temper.  I will struggle with despair and feelings of hopelessness.  Like St. Paul, I've "pleaded with the Lord" to take these things away from me.  And as with St. Paul, the Lord hasn't. 

It's taken me a while to accept even these vices of mine as vehicles of God's grace.  But they have been.  They "keep me from becoming conceited" and relying on my own virtue.  They make me turn to God.  They provide opportunities to ask for and accept forgiveness.  They have filled me with gratitude that God still deigns to love a weak, imperfect being like myself.

For a long time I was enmeshed in an unhealthy cycle of falling, hating myself for falling and beating myself up about it, struggling to get up, resolving never ever ever to fall again, then falling again and beating up myself even more.  The problem is, this made sin and redemption about me.  I wanted to get up on my own.  I carried the burden of my sin by myself.  I wanted to be punished for my sin.

God does not want us to be happy about sinning.  He wants our vices and sins to be "displeasing" to us.  Accepting yourself as a sinner does not mean accepting sin as "okay."  Simply because it is unavoidable does not make it any less abhorrent. 

But when we try to overcome sin on our own, we are rejecting God's grace and God's love.  Why can't we see God standing right beside us, with His hand outstretched to us, trying to lift us up?  Why can't we see that Christ has already carried the burden of our sin for us?  Yes, God wants sin to be displeasing to us.  But He also wants us to hand those sins over to Him, because He is the only one strong enough to bear their weight and defeat them.  He wants us to see our sins and to hate them, but He also wants us to know that our sins are but tiny drops that dissipate in the ocean of His goodness and His mercy.   

The whole process of redemption is a journey.  So long as we are on earth, our positions relative to God are never fixed.  At times along the way, God will make us feel the weight of our sins and our vices, so that we will turn to Him.  At other times God will give us moments where we so clearly experience His love and mercy.  Just read Psalm 22, which takes us through such a journey, beginning in despair and ending with triumph in God. 

We must recognize both these moments as moments of grace, of God's presence.  When we feel the weight of our sins, God is there with us.  When we feel God's mercy, God is there with us.  We cannot linger too long in either of these moments.  We will become overwhelmed with despair in the first; we will become too content and perhaps too proud in the second.  We must accept these moments as God presents them to us, trusting always that He is acting for our benefit and looking for His grace in all things.

Know that you will sin.  Know that you will fail and you will fall.  Know that these will be moments of sorrow for you - thorns in your flesh, to disturb and distress you.  Accept that sorrow and that distress: they are signs that you love God.  But know too that God has made avenues of grace open to you when you fall, and those roads are never closed.  And accept that grace and that mercy: they are signs that God loves you.