Category Archives: Virtue

Theology of the Body and Fat Shaming

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Long before Freud and Jung, there was Moses.  The account of the Fall not only reveals theological truths, but anthropological truths as well.  If we are not careful, we can over-spiritualize it and miss the deep psychological truths that would otherwise be difficult for us to discover.  The velocity at which our first parents hit the ground from their lofty fall left them and all of their progeny with a form of altitude sickness we call Original Sin.  While shaking the proverbial cobwebs from their heads, Adam and Eve instantaneously became aware of the fact that they were naked and felt afraid (Gn 3:7-10).  In short, they experienced shame and no longer comfortable in their own skin.  Photoshop and makeup cannot cover over the fact that our flesh and our spirit are at war with each other and all of us experience this conflict to varying degrees.  There is a universality to our discomfort that we label generically as “shame.”  Only at the General Resurrection will the fa…, err, big boned lady sing her song of conquest.  Still, freedom in Christ can be found in what we do here and now.  It is in this spirit that I would like to examine our latest cultural crusade—the elimination of  fat-shaming.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, fat shaming is “the action or practice of humiliating someone judged to be fat or overweight by making mocking or critical comments about their size.”  Our crusaders have even given it a label—Sizeism.  As a partial diagnosis, eliminating cruelty towards those who are deemed overweight is a battle worth fighting.  While on the surface the obese person appears to be lacking in self-control, the reasons for an individual person being overweight are usually more physically and psychologically complicated than that.  Rash judgments and cruelty often serve only to pull the scabs off of an already wounded person.

Notice however that in the definition, “critical comments” are included in the list of offenses.  Even doctors, whose job it is to make critical comments about one’s physical health, are lumped in with the offenders.  What this reveals is that while the diagnosis may be accurate, the cure is not.  Our cultural crusaders always rely on their lone panacea—“embracing your brokenness”—critical comments even when done in the spirit of fraternal charity have no place in their medicine cabinet. The solution they propose is to affirm our coping mechanisms and rationalizations with the hopes that we will all become shameless.  As Catholics, especially those who have been schooled in St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, we can offer a  more effective antidote to shame.

The Experience of Shame

During his Catechesis that became the Theology of the Body, the saintly Pontiff offered an extended discussion on the experience of shame.  He starts, naturally enough, at the beginning with the first man and woman prior to the Fall.  They are described as being “naked without shame.”  In order to understand this primordial experience, we must first grasp that shame is a relational reality.  A person has no reason to be ashamed of his nakedness when he is alone in the shower.  Instead shame occurs in relation to another person.  Our first parents felt no shame, not because they had no flaws in their bodies (even though this is true), but because their bodies fully revealed who they were to one another.  Eve had no worry that Adam would see her as an object of pleasure, but instead as a subject to be loved.  In short she had no reason to cover up.  Likewise with Adam.

With the Fall came a change both within the man and woman and between them.  This led to two different experiences of shame.  No longer gifted with self-mastery, the body and spirit are at odds which JPII calls this immanent shame.  It is best described, as we said at the beginning, as a constant awareness of discomfort in our skin.  No matter how much we devote ourselves to beautifying our bodies, we never can quite be satisfied.  The second dimension of shame is what the Pope calls relative shame.  This sense of shame is essentially a fear that the other person will not recognize and affirm the truth of the person revealed in our bodies.

While shame is experienced as a negatively, it should not be viewed wholly as such.  Even though it was an effect of the Fall, God left it there for our benefit.  Immanent shame is a constant reminder that all is not yet right within us.  Likewise relative shame is a form of protection against being used as an object for enjoyment.  This is the most obvious in relation to sexual values, but it has bearing on the topic at hand.  A person who is overweight may, because of shame, be driven towards dressing modestly, so that they do not get made fun of (i.e become an object of another person’s self-entertainment).  Because of the negative experience of shame, they are driven towards a good thing which will in the long run help to restore them to genuine freedom.  The modest person is always more free than the immodest, regardless of whether they are thin or fat.

The Benefit of Shame

Fat-shaming is so psychologically damaging because it fails to recognize the person as a subject that craves love and sets them up merely as an object to be used.  This is why it must be seen for what it is—an attempt to exploit the universal experience of shame to somehow reduce its effects in the abuser.  But the shame that the person experiences, even if it is agitated, is not caused by the abuser but part of his fallen experience.  So even if it were eliminated completely within society, the shame would still be there.  There can be no return to Eden to a shame-free life.  The only remedy is found in mitigating the twofold effects of shame.  To grow more comfortable in our own skin, we must cultivate virtue, especially temperance and its daughter, modesty.  Self-mastery neutralizes many of the effects of shame.  Modesty, especially in an immodest culture, empowers many of those who are held in the grips of shame.  Plus-sized models who model immodest clothing like the petite ones only promote shamelessness and leave many women feeling trapped.  One cannot both say that the beauty is more than skin deep while simultaneously bearing more skin.

In his book Love and Responsibility, then Fr. Wojtyla said that “shame is swallowed up by love, dissolved in it…” Only genuine love can alleviate the effects of relative shame.  Genuine love sees the body as a person and thus has no desire to use that person.  But only the person who has cultivated the virtue of purity has the capacity to receive that love.  Purity not only protects us from experiencing lust, but also prepares us to receive true love.  This message of purity is drowned out in a culture dedicated to shamelessness only making it all the more vital to living a life marked by true freedom.  Fat-shaming is a real problem, but only by “looking through the veil of shame” can we hope to offer a real solution to those who are crippled by fear and shame.

American Barbarism

Church and State, Culture, Virtue

Perhaps it is the apocalyptic mood brought on by the impending visual collision of the sun and the moon, but after the events this weekend in Charlottesville, I can’t help but wonder whether we are witnessing the end of civilization.  That is, I am not looking up to the sky for the end of the world, but up north to Charlottesville as the definitive sign that Americans have made the final leap away from civility and into barbarism.  A protest that was met by a counter-protest (was there another protest in there somewhere?) turned deadly and no amount of outrage will stop the barbarian invasion that is already underway.  We have met the enemy, and the enemy is us.  As Lincoln once prophetically uttered, “… Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!–All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.  At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

While many of those men and women who populated the White Supremacist “protesters” resemble the savage Germanic invaders that sacked Rome, barbarians were found in both camps.  It is not savage behavior that marks the barbarian per se, but the unwillingness to engage the other in a reasonable conversation according to reasonable principles.  In short, the barbarian is the one who kills civility by rejecting the role of human reason in human affairs

We Are All Barbarians Now

It is easy to see how the white supremacists fit the barbarian bill—there is no reasonable argument that can ever justify their position.  It is evil through and through.  But how can we say the other side, in protesting against this evil is also barbaric?

In his book, The American Cause, Russell Kirk says that for any people to remain civilized, they must have a defined body of principles upon which they all agree.  That is, there are always two ways to compel a man—by argument and by force.  Compelling by argument means that there are a set of foundational principles, those that brought the people together, that can be applied to compel another person as to why a thing should be a certain way.  This is why Fr. John Courtney Murray said that “civilization is formed by men locked together in argument.”  That is, the disagreement is over the application of the principles.  Once the principles themselves are called into question then there is no way to argue and force must be used.  A nation without principles is one that is uncivilized.

Kirk says that these principles fall into three main bodies, two of which are moral and political.  The moral principles have to do with what they think of God and human nature.  The political have to do with their ideas of justice and injustice.  That is, American civilization has always been bound by “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”  Take away this self-evident creed and you take away any basis for civilization.

The Roots of American Barbarism

And herein lies the root of American barbarism.  America is a Christian nation and we have rejected that.  The debate over whether the Founders themselves were Christian or not is inconsequential.  The point is that they were so informed by Christian morality, that even if they may have actively undermined it at times, they still framed with a Christian mentality.

“All men created equal.”  Where would such an idea come from except from Christianity?  At no time was this ever believed until Christianity took hold of the world.  Personal sovereignty?  Only because Christianity teaches that authority itself comes from God and man is free so that only with the consent of the governed can one rule over another.  Right to the “pursuit of happiness?”  Human nature is a fixed entity by God such that only certain activities lead to genuine thriving.

What Charlottesville represents is the civilizational suicide that Lincoln warned against.  The irony is not lost on me that his memorial statue is the latest to be defaced. We can reject our slaveholding past without rejecting the Founding altogether.  Instead we have rejected the great principles that this country was founded upon and now find ourselves unable to engage in an argument.  We forget that it was the proper application of the Founding principles that put an end to slavery.  As if this wasn’t destructive enough, we are all barbarians now because we have rejected God and made human nature whatever we want it to be.

The point is that the counter-protesters had no ground to stand upon to say that the White Supremacists were wrong.  If human nature is malleable then we aren’t created equal.  If this is the case, then who is to say that whites aren’t better than African Americans or Jews?  With no Big Daddy in the sky watching over us and judging us, we cry out when Big Brother Donald Trump sits on the fence pointing fingers at both sides. What we saw in Charlottesville is just a harbinger of things to come.  There will be more and more protests and with no other way to engage, more tragic endings like we saw.

Lead Us Not into Temptation?

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In his personal memoirs, the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung described how he finally broke from Christianity because of Jesus’ apparently inconsistent portrait of God as simultaneously “love and goodness” and “tempter and destroyer.”  It is reasonable to think that Jung might not be alone in his conclusion, especially considering that each time we pray the Lord’s Prayer we ask that God “lead us not into temptation.”  The implication is that He has the power to either tempt us or lead us away from it.  Whether we recognize it or not, there is a certain mistrust of God that cannot be totally put away until we deal with what seems like a messy contradiction.  Putting temptation within the proper framework will not only help us to address the intellectual difficulty surrounding the issue of temptation, but, more importantly, help us to see why they are a constituent element in our quest for holiness.

What God Desires

In constructing the frame, we must first start with a proper understanding of what God wants for each one of us.  God is not content with merely bestowing the divine life upon us.  He does not merely want to give us grace so we can go to heaven and be with Him.  No, if you can imagine it, He wants so much more.  He is not looking for test subjects for some cosmic social experiment, but sons and daughters who can stand on their own two feet and run towards Him.  He wants His glory to shine from every pore of our being but He also wants to bestow upon us the dignity of having worked for it.  Eternal life is a free gift, but He won’t cheapen it by asking for nothing in return.

Rather than getting bogged down in an explication of the mystery of man’s free will and God’s grace, we will accept as a given that they are cooperative powers.  When God plants the seed of eternal life (i.e. sanctifying grace) in our souls, He also implants the supernatural virtue of charity.  Now each of our natural virtues as well as the two theological virtues of faith and hope has charity as its center of gravity.  As the virtues increase, our capacity to harness the Supreme Goodness that is God’s life increase with it.  It is, to borrow a principle from St. Thomas, grace perfecting nature.

Grace and Nature

It seems that a digression is in order regarding this important Thomistic principle because it is relevant to a proper understanding of all that I just said.  Often it is paraphrased as “grace builds upon nature.”  This is more than just “saying the same thing.”  If you tell me “grace builds upon nature” I think, “I just need to try harder to be good” and God will give me grace.  It is as if I can achieve a certain amount of natural goodness and then God will give me grace.  In other words it is my hard work that comes first then grace.  Grace becomes essentially a superfluous add-on.  This is just a subtle form of the old heresy called (semi-)Pelagianism which denied original sin and taught that holiness was ours for the taking.

What I have proposed is not “becoming the best version of yourself”, that is a good natural life, but instead a path to an abundant supernatural life.  It is grace that comes first.  No amount of work on our part can change that.  Without the initial installment (ordinarily through Baptism) or a re-installment (through Sacramental Confession), we can never get there no matter how good we are.  Heaven is not the natural result of a good life, it is the supernatural consequence of a holy life.  All holy people are good people, but not all good people are holy.  It is grace at the beginning and then grace all the way through.  Grace perfects nature, not builds upon it.

What we are talking about then is our cooperation with grace through a growth in the virtues and how this is achieved.  The classic definition of a virtue as the firm and habitual dispositions toward the good needs to be examined.  We instinctively get the habitual part, understanding that it requires more than solitary acts that look like virtue to actually be virtuous.  We mistakenly think then to grow in virtue we just need to keep repeating the act.  For an increase in virtue however the first part, that is the firmness, is what needs to be emphasized.  It is only an act done with greater vehemence that wins the increase in virtue.

Temptation from its Proper Perspective

Only when we grasp God’s desire for our personal perfection and what that perfection consists in, we can look at temptation in a proper light.  Temptation is not so much a push to do something bad, but an opportunity to love and do what is good all the more.  It is an indispensable means for a growth in virtue.  Lacking any resistance, we are content with feeble acts of virtue because they “get the job done.”  Virtue is often compared to a muscle with a “use it or lose it” mentality.  But God is calling us to be spiritual bodybuilders, becoming huge in our holiness.  Muscle grows with an increase in resistance and so it is with virtue.  It might not be the only way to increase the intensity of our virtuous acts, but it is the most effective.  “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” is not just a mission statement from Jesus, Life Coach, but a command from the one Who always equips us to fulfill it.

Addressing Jung’s objection that I opened with will also help us to see how best to make use of temptations.  It is not God who tempts but instead He is the one Who allows temptations to occur for our own good.  If there is no opportunity for growth then He will not allow it.  This truth is so important to hold onto, especially in the midst of strong temptations.  What you shouldn’t hold onto is the hackneyed Christian maxim that “God does not give you more than you can handle.”  This is not only not true, but also counterproductive.  God absolutely gives us more than we can handle, but He never abandons us, spotting us in our spiritual workouts.  But like a good spotter, He only gives us enough help for us to keep the bar moving and does not pull it off of us.  Even in being overcome, we still have the opportunity to grow.  No saint was devoid of humility, a virtue that only grows with more intense acceptance of humiliations.

Before closing I should mention one thing that may not be clear from what I have said.  It seems that if God has allowed a temptation to occur for my good, then I must simply face it head on.  Fleeing from them means that I will have missed the opportunity for growth.  Fleeing in the face of temptation, especially those of the flesh, is one of the ways in which we grow in virtue.  The rapidity and vehemence in which we avoid what would be evil is exactly what causes our growth.

We can see why it is that God then never frees us from temptation wholly.  As Sirach says, “when you come to serve the Lord, prepare yourself for trial” (Sir 2:1).  “To be human,” Aquinas says, “is to be tempted, but to consent is to be devlish.”  We do not pray to be freed from temptation in the Lord’s Prayer, but instead that we may not be led into temptation, that is, to consent to it.    Unfortunately, Jung was wrong.  Temptations come from a loving Father, Who wants nothing more than our perfection.

The Hidden Vice

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Soren Kierkegaard once remarked that envy was hidden and unconscious for most men.  This might explain why we find the seeds of it scattered throughout our culture.  There is the advertising industry for example which is built entirely on the goal to stir envy for things that we don’t really want except for the fact that other people have them.  So deeply embedded is envy that it is even institutionalized in the pitting of the poor against the rich (or women against men or nearly every other class conflict) in a quasi-communistic class struggle that our liberal democracy has adopted.  Therefore, it is instructive to shine a light on the havoc this vicious habit can create in our lives.

Envy has long been considered to be one of the Seven Deadly Sins, or, more aptly named Seven Capital Sins.  These “sins” are called Capital sins not because they are sins per se, but because they act as motivating forces for the actual sins we commit.  In short, one does not commit envy, but instead commit a sin because you are envious.  Envy is like a tree that produces rotten fruit.  Until we expose the roots of the tree, we will never be rid of its fruit.  The tree of envy is known by its tendency to, as St. Thomas says, experience “sorrow in the face of another’s good.”

The Sorrow of Envy

While this definition is correct, it needs to be nuanced a bit so that we do not chop down the wrong tree.  There is a holy envy that St. Thomas calls zeal in which we experience sorrow not because another person has something, but because we don’t.  We look at some good that another person has that we know we do not have and our sorrow moves us to work zealously to obtain that good thing.  In other words we grieve not because the other person has the good, but because we don’t.

Envy, on the other hand, grieves simply because the other person has that good.  It has a competitive quality about it in that the other’s greatness seems to subtract from my own.  This is why envy follows on the heels of pride and is the “second sin.”  Lucifer committed the sin of pride and then begrudged mankind for the good that he had lost.  It is by the envy of the devil, death entered the world, and they who are allied with him experience it” (Wisdom 2:24).  The first sin of man was pride, “to be like God.”  The second sin was “crouching at the door” (Gn 4:7) when sadness over God’s favor toward Abel, led Cain not to “do well” but to kill his brother.

It is ultimately envy that led directly to the death of Our Lord.  As Venerable Fulton Sheen articulates, “Annas was envious of His innocence; Caiaphas was envious of His popularity; Herod was envious of His moral superiority; the scribes and Pharisees were envious of His wisdom…And in order that He might no longer be person to be envied, they reputed Him with the wicked.”  Envy was the cause of the death of Peter and Paul and a cause of division in the early Church.  When the Corinthian community begins to form factions, Pope St. Clement sends them a letter reminding them just how deadly envy can be.

There are two reasons why envy is an especially strong temptation for us as 21st Century Americans.  The first is that we are a people that is obsessed with equality.  When everyone is equal in all ways, envy will seem justified and you will hardly recognize it for what it is.  If we are all equal, then we must do all that we can to level the playing field.

I alluded to the second reason earlier when I mentioned about the competitive nature of envy.  In a world that is mostly governed by a philosophical materialism, envy will seem like merely a recognition of the truth.  If life is a zero sum game then what you have actually takes away from what I have.  If I am poor it is because you are rich—you have taken more than your fair share and there is nothing left for me.  But most of life is not a zero sum game, especially when it comes to spiritual goods (which tend to be the things we envy most) related to personal character.

Because envy remains somewhat hidden to us, we may only recognize it by its effects.  When I see another person’s greatness somehow diminishing mine, there will always be the accompanying temptation to detract that person.  Somehow dragging another person down acts as a way of raising ourselves up.  If we step back and see truthfully however we will acknowledge that we can only envy those when we think better than ourselves in some way.  As Pope St. Gregory says, “We witness against ourselves that the other is better” (Moralia of Job, 84).  Knowing this, we should be very slow to make judgments about other people.  Envy causes us to find chinks in the armor of everyone we meet looking for ways in which we are superior to them.  It also explains why we often don’t like someone else, even though we cannot explain why.  “There is just something about them I don’t like” usually means “there is just something about them that makes me envious.”

This tendency to misjudge another person that accompanies envy is also a good reason why we should be very slow to believe things that we hear about other people (Fulton Sheen goes so far as to say we should not believe 99% of what we hear about other people).  Envy is the most common cause of gossiping and one of the reasons why we should avoid entangling ourselves in it.  It is also the reason why you can’t go wrong thinking the best of another person until you have hard evidence to the contrary.

The Antidote to Envy

While the Devil essentially says to mankind, “As I envied you, so now you must envy one another,” Our Lord offers the antidote to envy, “As I have loved you, so must you love one another.”  Vices can only be overcome by an opposing virtue so that envy is overwhelmed by charity.  When tempted to envy, we should perform some charitable act towards that person.  It can be as simple as saying a prayer for them or offering a kind word to or about them.  Fasting or making some other sacrifice for that person, especially that the gift we envy might flourish, can remove any traces of envy in our hearts.  Once we have skin in the game, that is invest in the person and their gifts by making a sacrifice, we cannot help but to root for them.

Dante, in the Purgatorio, offers us a second virtue to overcome envy.  As he meets the envious in the Second Terrace of Purgatory, he finds them scrambling about, deprived of the gift of sight by having their eyes sewn shut with iron wire.  They become like blind beggars depending upon each other to avoid falling off the Mountain.  In this way they learn to rejoice in other’s goods.  In being forced to depend upon each other they learn magnanimity.  The magnanimous person has a “large soul” in that they can rejoice in the good of another as if it were their own.  The magnanimous person is not offended by natural or even supernatural inequality, but simply rejoices in the good that is to be found.

In each of the terraces of the Mount of Purgatory, Dante also proposes a Marian example of the virtue.  For envy he offers Our Lady’s intercession at the Wedding of Cana as the example.  It is Our Lady’s magnanimity that causes her to see the threat to the joyful celebration and take the concern (“Woman how does your concern affect me?”) on as if it were her own.  This is why the 12th Century Saint Bernard of Clairvaux once counseled “If you are tossed upon the waves of pride, of ambition, of envy, of rivalry, look to the star, call on Mary the star of the sea.”

Our Lady, Star of the Sea, pray for us.

On Social Justice

Moralilty, Politics, Virtue, ,

Over the last couple of years, the protest movement has gathered so much steam that there seems to be an organized protest over nearly everything.  One California company has even gone as far as to offer their employees paid time off to participate in protests as a form of social justice.  The fact that these “social justice” protests result in destruction of property, violence and any number of offenses against justice shows that these protest movements are actually counter-productive at best.  They are based on a cart before the horse principle in which the participants and organizers (assuming at least some good will on their part) assume that once “just” social structures are in place, then the people will act justly.  Until this happens, they may need to “make a mess,” to borrow a phrase from the liberal manifesto Rules for Radicals to grab people’s attention, but that should eventually settle down.  But the cart of social justice can only be pulled by the horses of just individuals.  That the protestors are unjust while screaming for justice shows just how convoluted our thinking about justice has become and how necessary it is to develop a more complete understanding of justice.

Justice is the firm and habitual disposition to give to each person his or her rightful due.  Or, put more succinctly, justice is the habit of giving to each what is owed to them.  In short, to “owe” another person means that we are giving, or more accurately restoring, to them something that they already own.  Those more classically schooled will recognize in the “firm and habitual disposition” the definition of a virtue.  Justice is one of the four virtues (along with prudence, temperance and fortitude) on which all the other virtues depend.

The Interiority of Justice

It merits a reminder as well that because justice is a virtue, this means that it is primarily something interior to the person and not exterior.  Just as the person who habitually lies is a liar, so too the person who habitually acts justly is just.  The “environment” helps us to be more or less just, but it is the individual man who is just.  When a critical mass of individuals are just, a social justice follows.  Men without the virtue of justice, no matter how just the social structure, will always tend to destroy that structure.  That is precisely what we see in the protest movement—injustice committed in the name of justice.  While this might be a glaring example, the same can happen when the leaders are not just men either.

As the definition suggests, justice is meant to govern relationships and so to speak of “social justice” is a bit of a tautology.  This is why it remains a fuzzy concept for many of us and often just ends up being a mask for a political movement.  The Church has always viewed it as the cooperation of just men who form, maintain, or re-form social institutions that serve the common good.  Justice rules (i.e. social justice) a community when three fundamental structures of communal life are in proper order—individuals one to another (commutative), society to individuals (distributive) and individual to society (legal justice).  In his book on Justice, Josef Pieper has a helpful diagram to keep these straight.

 

The first form of justice is called commutative justice.  Commutative justice is usually what we think of when we speak of justice.  It governs the relationship between two people and assumes a certain level of equality between the two.  Being equals, they must equally bear the burden of any social exchange.  A person needs a pair of shoes from a cobbler and exchanges a just price, say $10, for the shoes.  Anything less than that then the buyer would be guilty of an offense against commutative justice.  Anything more and it would be the cobbler who violates commutative justice (As an aside, I will post on the Church’s teaching on just price, so for now just assume that $10 is a just price). It is also commutative justice governs the duty of restitution.   If a person steals from another, then they violate commutative justice and the guilty party must make some restitution to restore to the victim that which is owed.

Because many people think only in terms of commutative justice, many injustices occur because groups of men have obligations towards individuals.  In truth, while commutative justice is based on a principle of equality, men are not equal in all ways.  This is why the Church also speaks of distributive justice.  Distributive justice is not based on equality, but based on proportion, according to need, merit, circumstance, etc.  What properly belongs to man through distributive justice is a proportionate share in what is common to everyone, that is, to each man must be given a proportionate (not equal) share of the common good.

A classic example helps us to see how these first two forms of justice work.  Suppose there are two brothers, ages 2 and 16, and they approach their parents because they want candy.  There is only a single bag of M&Ms left and so the parents must divide the bag between the two.  Rather than counting the M&Ms and splitting them evenly, the parents give the 16 year old  2/3 of the bag and the 2 year old, 1/3.  They give unequal distribution because of their ages and amount of candy they should eat.  This is distributive justice.

Just as in the example the parents, who govern the good of the family, chose the allotment of M&Ms, it is the custodian of the common good in society then that determines the proper proportion.  For society as a whole this would be the State, or more properly understood, an individual that has the power to determine the allotment.  So, it is not the State that is just or unjust, but individuals holding power within the State that act justly or unjustly.  This simply reiterates the point about when the emphasis is on just structures and not just men, justice is almost never achieved.

Social Justice

Social justice is often equated with distributive justice because it is viewed mainly as a problem of distribution and the focus mainly remains on this dimension.  However, those who desire social justice ought to focus more on the relationship between the individual and society that St. Thomas calls legal justice. In short it is the individual, not focusing so much on his rights, but on his duties to society that creates social justice.  It is, to borrow from JFK’s famous speech, to “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”  If each man were to focus on contributing to the common good and not just his own private goods then social justice would reign.

What all of this brings to the forefront is that the protest movements as they are practiced now are truly protesting against social justice.  In attempting to raise the awareness of injustices, they do harm to the common good.  Anyone who reads Martin Luther King Jr’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, can’t help but be struck by his thoughtful reflection upon what is just.  It was only because he had spent time thinking about justice that he was able to envision what it would look like.  He and his fellow co-founders of the Civil Rights Movement refused to counter injustice with more injustice.  Instead they kept their eyes focused on the common good (the focal point of his I Have a Dream speech) and how a more just society could be formed.  Destroying property, trampling on the good of the free speech of others, and destroying public order all creates less social justice not more, no matter how many days of paid leave they are given to protest.

On Roasting and Empathy

Virtue, ,

For those of us who are parents, coaches or teachers of teens, we cannot help but be struck by what has become an unparalleled capacity for cruelty that this generation of teens seems to have tapped into.  To be clear from the outset, this is not an essay about bullying, although it is related to this capacity in its truest form.  Our focus on bullying has become merely another way in which we help to create more victims so much so that we have come to label even the smallest amount of confrontation as “bullying.”  This is about a much deeper issue and that is the depths of cruelty that seem to be part and parcel of the life of teens.  Witness the latest teen pastime, Roasting.

Roasting is different from making fun of someone.  A certain amount of that is healthy, and especially in young men it is a sign of affection.  That is mere ribbing.  Even when it is not entirely good-natured, it usually stops when someone gets salty or sensitive.  Roasting on the other hand is something much more than ribbing.  Roasting is, as the Urban Dictionary describes it, the “act of verbally assaulting someone until you hurt their feelings, sometimes to the point of making them cry.”  Victory doesn’t occur with the zinger or burning the other person, it is in roasting them, that is, submitting them to slow and painful abuse.  Its purpose is not simply to embarrass but to keep going until you actually hurt the person or you drive the person to hurt himself.    Roasting is, in essence a Luciferian monologue intended to push a person over the edge.

This phenomena of Roasting leaves Parents, Teachers and Coaches at a loss, especially because even those who we would label as “good kids” engage in it.  It will remain an enigma until we are willing to name it for what it is and confront its chief cause.  Children and teens of this generation have failed almost universally to develop empathy.

When I make fun of someone else, my ultimate reason is because it brings me some pleasure.  That pleasure is reduced to the degree that I realize that it came at the price of causing another person pain.  In short, empathy either stops me from doing it, or at least from taking it so far.  Empathy is a sub-virtue of the virtue of charity by which a person habitually enters into another’s feelings, needs and thoughts. It is the habit of seeing things through the eyes of another person.  Empathy, first and foremost, assumes that one has learned how to “read” another person.  Until that ability matures, the person can only know their own pleasure.

How do we learn to “read” another person?  In normally developing children it is through face to face contact with other people.  They watch the reactions of other people to events and begin to read what they are thinking and feeling through those reactions. They learn that not all communication is verbal and learn how to pick up on these non-verbal cues.  They learn what approval looks like and what disapproval looks like.  They even learn that a person who is crying may be overcome by joy and not sadness.

The seeds of empathy are planted where there is presence.  Remove the presence and the tree of empathy never grows.  It is presence that is in danger in our digital age.  Children spend an inordinate amount of their time looking at screens instead of real live faces.  Even if their parents are “present” their faces are mostly looking down at their screens.  Communication occurs, not through conversation, but through texting and instant messenger.  Emoji are a cheap counterfeit to the real life need for a smile or a frown (did you know there is even a roasting emoji?). Growing up digital may have many advantages, but until we are aware of the pitfalls, we put our humanity in danger.  The digital threat to empathy is perhaps one of the greatest dangers we face.  Empathy is one of the most important social virtues and a loss of empathy leads not just to Roasting but things that are much worse.  We are raising our children to be cold and will only continue to exacerbate the problem as long as we remain addicted to our screens.

This mass deficiency of empathy in the young is a major theme of a book that every parent should read called Reclaiming Conversation.  The author, Clinical Psychologist Sherry Turkle, discusses some of the unintended consequences of going so digital, so fast.  As the name suggests, one of those consequences is a loss in conversation. What makes her book particularly good is the healthy dose of realism.  For most of us, ditching digital is not an option.  But rather than give ourselves over to it completely, we need to be aware of the places where we are particularly vulnerable and do things to protect ourselves.  In practice this means finding ways to unplug for longer periods of time with the express intention of having healthy conversation.  She uses Thoreau as her conversational model; the same Thoreau retreated to Walden and set up three chairs in his house—“one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”  It starts with unplugging long enough to have healthy conversation with God (solitude), with those who are important to (friendship) and then to those outside our inner circle.  Although inefficient, face to face conversation is something that makes us human and is good for us.

It isn’t just Roasting in the young that is a problem.  There are many signs that adults too are losing the ability to empathize.  We say many things over email and text that we would never say in person because we have failed to realize that there is a person on the receiving end.  Rather than using text and emails as a tool to facilitate conversation we have come to use it as a replacement.  It may be easier to “deal” with someone who, but Jesus never said we should “deal with your neighbor” but to “love your neighbor.”  Love requires face to face interaction.  Practically speaking we should never argue or apologize over text or email.  Instead we should make it a policy to have conversations, especially hard ones, face to face.  Our humanity might depend on these simple practices.  We need to put down our phones so that we can take up our conversations.

On the Idolatry of Money

Money, Spiritual Life, Virtue, Work

The strange thing about idols is that they usually travel in our blind spots.  We may very well be aware of their dangers, but fail to see that we have succumbed to them.  This is true especially when it comes to the idolatry of money.  We may agree, for example, with Pope Francis that “the worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1-35) has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money,” but think that it is the greedy rich people’s problem and not necessarily our own.  The plank is firmly implanted in our own eye and unless we submit ourselves to some self-examination we may remain permanently blinded to what has always been viewed as one of the Seven Capital Sins.

The Role of Money in Exchange

A word first on the reason many of us our blind to this particular vice.  St. Thomas Aquinas, building on the economic teachings of Aristotle, thought that the marketplace was governed by two different types of exchanges which he called natural and unnatural.  A natural exchange was one in which one good was traded for another.  This might be a barter system or a money as medium of exchange system.  A cobbler needs to feed his family and so he might trade a pair of shoes for a cow or he sells the shoes so that he could buy the cow.  In either case the end of the cobbler’s transaction was to obtain a cow.  It may be that he chooses to save the money so he can purchase the cow later, perhaps when business is slow, but his purpose is always clear—to obtain something he needs to feed his family.

An unnatural exchange, on the other hand, is one in which money ceases to be a medium of exchange but instead becomes the end.  The cobbler sells the shoes with the goal of making money and to get rich.  He does not have any particular end in mind, even if it is to save for some future hardship.

What also makes an exchange unnatural is when one or both participants has an irrational end in mind.  All exchange should be governed by needs and rational wants.  The needs are obvious but a rational want represents something that may not be strictly needed but is a reasonable thing to purchase.  A second pair of shoes may be a reasonable want, a tenth pair, not so much.

When a commodity is the end of an exchange there is a certain protection against greed.  One may desire only so many things.  There is only so much room to store them.  There are only so many loaves of bread we can eat.  There are only so many pairs of shoes we can wear.  Our desire may be unreasonable, but there is a natural limit to how much we will desire.

Money is completely different.  Our desire for money is infinite.  There is no natural limit on how much we can desire.  For the rich, their “net worth” becomes merely a game to see how high they can go.  This, of course, only happens when money becomes an end instead of a means.  When we see it merely as a means to purchase those things we need and rationally want, we will be satisfied with only a certain amount.

Love of Money as a Capital Sin

Scripture tells us that the “love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Tim 6:10) and Tradition labels it as one of the Seven Capital Sins.  The latter are not sins in the classical sense, but more like motivations that gives rise to the actual sins in our lives.  Objectively speaking one may commit the sin of murder, but the personal motivation is always rooted in one of these seven capital sins.  We may murder because of wrath or we may murder to grow rich.  The act is the same, but the motivation differs.

Understanding this helps us to root out the actual sins in our lives.  When our motives change, our acts change.  Love of neighbor will only replace love of money when we see it for what it is.  Watch yourself over the next few weeks and see how often money motivates you; not by money as being able to purchase things that you need or rationally want, but just the idea of having more money.  Whenever I do this exercise I am always surprised by how easily I have fallen into the trap again.

Covetousness, that is a love of money, remains hidden to most of us because it is woven into the fabric of the culture.  Our economy is structured such that money is the end.  It is not about producing goods that people need and rationally want, but creating a desire for consumption.  Advertisers try to convince us we need something.  This is all motivated by a love of money.  Most people work, not because it provides for needs and rational wants and fulfills them as persons, but because they want to be rich.  When you are swimming in water, it is hard not to get wet.  The first step is to recognize that the water is what is making you wet and find ways to stay out of the pool.  Examining our motivations and ways that we personally contribute to the culture of consumption will help to purify us from this dangerous idol.

What also makes money a particularly deadly snare as an idol is the fact that it can rob us of our trust in God. Money is usually a sign of security for most of us. After all, money can buy all the things we need, or so the thinking goes. Money contributes to the lie that man lives on bread alone. It is not without accident that when religious fervor was stirred in the hearts of Americans during the Second Great Awakening that the motto In God We Trust first appeared on coins. It is a stark reminder that our security is in God and not in money. Our Lord called the poor in spirit, those who put their trust in God and not in money, as blessed.

Self-Help and the Spiritual Life

Spiritual Life, Virtue, Work

Is there anything more demonstrative of the true American spirit than the self-help industry?  From How to Win Friends and Influence People to Tools of the Titans, America has always been a ripe market for self-help.  It has grown into a $10 billion industry.  Part of the appeal is that they appear to fit a primal need—each of us is haunted by an awareness that we are not what we are supposed to be and need some outside help. Always pragmatic, Americans assume that there must be a technique to fix the problem and buy the latest “life-changing” self-help book.  Even after reading the best ones, we are still plagued by a nagging sense that all is not quite right inside.  Off we go to the next book.  But one has to wonder, with over 630,000+ self-help books  on Amazon offering different techniques, is the problem really a technical one at all?  What if the problem is in our constitution such that no amount of self-help will completely fix it?

Within the Christian tradition we have a name for this fundamental flaw and we call it Original Sin.  We used to all know this, but many of us have forgotten it.  As Chesterton said, Original Sin is “the only part of Christian theology that can be proved.”  In an age where we abhor theory and demand practicality, all men agree on the doctrine of the Fall regardless of whether they profess it or not.  What they deny it in theory, they find in practice—each of us “do not do the good they want to do” (Romans 7:19).

Most of us are familiar with the term Original Sin but struggle to articulate exactly what it is.  Adam and Eve were created by God with supernatural gifts including the very life of God which we call sanctifying grace.  Adam and Eve had perfect integration of their faculties.  They could see the Good clearly in their intellect, they were able to will it and carry it out with a bodily intensity in the passions.  The passions followed the will which followed the intellect which followed God, the Supreme Good.

Falling from such a height, not only removed the supernatural gifts, but left the human nature they would hand on to their progeny damaged.  Their souls were no longer integrated.  The intellect was darkened, the will weakened and the passions ran amok, no longer obeying intellect and will.  In other words, Adam and Eve’s offspring were not just worse off because they lost sanctifying grace, but also because human nature itself was damaged.  Naturally, this leads to the question why God allowed man to Fall from grace, leaving him worse off than if He had never graced him to begin with?

The Self-Help Trap

God left man worse off to protect him from a bigger fall, that is, plunging into the self-help trap.  Without this inner brokenness we could actually help ourselves.  The only problem is that we would help ourselves to become something less than we were meant to be, namely “partakers of the Divine nature” (2 Pt 1:4), “God’s children now” (1 Jn 3:2).  With the stain of Original Sin, we are always aware of a lack that cries out ultimately for God.

The self-help trap denies not only Original Sin, but the height from which we fell.  It is meant to help us “improve,” but what does this mean?  Progress is only progress if we know where we are going.  We must know our purpose or destination before we can say whether something has improved our chances of reaching it.  Each self-help program promises “success” but success is highly dependent upon the author’s definition.

One of the other post-Fall pitfalls is that we are prone to self-deception.  We begin to look at what is normal (what everyone else is like) and the norm (what we were made for) and think “I am mostly OK, just need to work on few things.” Self-help only feeds this.  We will always choose to improve in areas that either require the least amount of work or based on some idol we have set up.

In the minds of many well-meaning Christians, Christianity is the self-help program that actually works.  Pope Benedict XVI pointed out this trap Christians can fall into in his first encyclical Deus Caritas Est  when he said “[B]eing Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction” (DCE, 1).  There are a number of evangelists that present the Gospel as a self-help program that actually works.  The danger in doing this however is that it doesn’t work when it is lived as an ethical system.  Christianity morality is hard and all but impossible without first having an encounter with the living Christ.  To the world, Christian morality makes no sense. It only makes sense once we trust Christ completely.  With trust comes the willingness to do whatever He tells us.

Christianity and Self-Help

The opposite of Christianity is not atheism but radical self-help.  They both start at the same place—a willingness to change.  But it is there that they part ways.  Self-help says “you can do this, all you need to do is approach the problem differently,” Christ says “pick up your Cross and follow me.”  If I take it from the wounded hands of Christ, it will make me whole.  Every virtue I am lacking is found in the crosses God sends me.  All I need to do is allow them to do their work on me.  It has a proven track record winning friends and influencing people—the Saints always make more Saints.

All that being said, this does not mean that self-help books and techniques do not have value in the spiritual life.  Grace perfects and elevates nature so that the books which acknowledge the good of virtue over selfishness can be the raw material for change in our lives.  But their proper place is always after the invasion of grace has occurred in our lives.  A recent book written by Jeff Goins called The Art of Work is one worth commending to you.

The subtitle of the book reveals just how compatible it is—A Proven Path for Discovering What You Were Meant to Do.  Although he does not specifically mention Christianity, it assumes that God’s Providence is an active force in our lives.  He offers practical advice on how we are to respond to our call (without reference to Who it is that is calling), how service fulfills us, suffering is a friend dressed like an enemy because all things work for good for those who have a calling and nothing we do is wasted.  He also recognizes God’s law of gradualism in which we do not so much leap from one cliff to another but build a bridge gradually across the chasm.  Throughout the book he gives tells stories to demonstrate his point (even at one point referring to St. Theresa of Calcutta.  All in all it reads like an instruction manual for fulfilling all aspects of your Christian vocation, especially when he talks about living what he calls a “portfolio life.”

Psychological or Demonic?

Devils, Spiritual Life, Spiritual Warfare, Suffering, Virtue, , ,

As followers of Christ, true God and true man, it is hard to avoid the truth that we inhabit two worlds—the seen and the unseen.  This is so basic a tenet of Christianity that we easily forget it and gravitate towards one or the other, the natural or the supernatural.  We have all met people who supernaturalize everything, referring all that happens in our world to the angelic and demonic.  On the other hand there are also those who tend to only accept natural explanations for what happens.  Our Lord however taught us to keep one foot in each of those worlds.  There were the sick whom He healed and those whom He exorcised.  There is perhaps no arena where this dichotomy is more obvious than mental illness.

On the one hand there are those who think that the remedy is simply to pray the problem away.   Prayer must always be part of anyone’s therapy (more on this in a moment) so this is a difficult point to contend.  But for most people prayer isn’t enough.  Or, more accurately, the answer to their prayer is found through the help of therapists.  God rarely acts in a vacuum.  He always uses secondary causes when they are available to carry out works of His Providence.  We may pray and pray for healing, but only receive it when we go to the doctor.  Does this mean that God did not deliver?  Of course not.  He simply wanted to share His power of healing with one of His creatures.

Removing the Stigma

Within Christian circles, mental illness is stigmatized.  Mental health problems are not just problems because someone’s faith or trust in God is not strong enough.  That can always be the case, but it need not be the direct cause.  There are people of incredible faith that nobly carry the cross of mental illness.  If anything, those who think this way are the ones who do not understand the Faith.

An authentic Catholic understanding of the human person, as both body and soul, leads to the recognition that because of our fallen nature, defects in our bodies can spill over into the way we see reality.  Think about the person who is drunk—their judgment is impaired.  Did the alcohol somehow drip into the seat of judgment, the intellect?  No, but when our senses are impaired we cannot judge correctly.  That which is in the intellect, was first in the senses as the Scholastics were fond of saying.

So too with the person with mental illness.  They may have a bodily defect which causes them to judge reality incorrectly.  Or, their early experience or exposure to a trauma may have hindered their ability to judge reality properly.  Perhaps they need a medication to restore the body back to its proper function so that it can send clean data to the intellect.  They may additionally need counseling on how to judge reality correctly.

As an aside, many Catholics fear receiving counseling because the counselor may not be Catholic.  This is a reasonable fear, but just because they are Catholic doesn’t make them good therapists.  What one should look for is someone who has a correct definition of mental health.  Mental health consists in the ability to judge reality correctly.  This means they have an understanding of man as a body/soul composite with a purpose outside of himself.  Only once this is established would you assess their clinical capabilities.  In this regard, it is no different than choosing any other kind of health care provider.  If a cardiologist thinks that a healthy heart is one in which only one ventricle is functioning, you would not choose him, even if he was the most clinically gifted doctor in the world.  Simply asking the therapist what his or her definition of mental health is, can often protect you from wasted time and doing more harm.

Psychology and Catholicism have been in conflict since the advent of modern methods, but this need not be the case.  Anyone who reads St. Thomas’ Summa on human nature and the virtues realizes he would have made an excellent psychologist.  This is because of his correct anthropology.  There has been a rediscovery of sorts of St. Thomas’ works and many schools are teaching them to those training in psychology.

It used to be that anyone who was mentally ill was thought to be possessed.  In this regard the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme where everyone assumes that the problem is clinical.  However, just because there were cases in the past where a supernatural explanation was sought when there was a natural one, doesn’t mean that they weren’t right some of the time.  Supernatural explanations still remain valid.  While not everyone who is mentally ill is demonically tormented, this does not mean nobody is.  In short, sometimes when someone claims to be hearing voices, they actually are.

A Third Way?

This opens up a third possibility—one in which we acknowledge that we are standing in two different worlds.  This is the one that most people overlook because they fall into an either/or mentality, when in many cases it is both/and.   The person can be suffering from some natural mental illness which is only exacerbated by the presence of the demonic.  The devil is a bully and loves to kick people when they are down, especially when he can hide within some natural illness.

One of my boys suffers from Autism and this has made him a target of the diabolical bully.  It was his condition that attracted the evil one and made it easy for him to hide while he tormented my son.  The demonic oppression got so severe that we had to seek the prayers of an Exorcist.  Through the prayers of Exorcism, he was freed from the oppression.  But, and this is a very important but, he was not healed of his Autism.  His symptoms were greatly reduced and his response to therapy since then has been overwhelmingly positive.  But the clinical condition remained—for that God is using natural means.  For the supernatural problem, He used the supernatural solution of the Rites and Authority of the Church (as a side not, for those of you interested in hearing about my son’s story, I did an interview with my friend Pete for his podcast in which this among other topics related to Spiritual Warfare).

The point is that there are many cases where the problem is really both natural and supernatural.  For the good of the person we need to recognize this as real and likely option.  In the majority of cases it will not be necessary to seek out an Exorcist, but still spiritual remedies will need to be applied.

This is where the “just pray and it will go away” folks have a point.  There is almost always a mixture of the natural and supernatural causes involved and it is always good advice to apply spiritual medicine to all mental health problems.  Prayer alone may not be sufficient, but it is always necessary.  Psychotherapy should always be accompanied by an intense prayer life and an active Sacramental life, including regular Confession and Communion, along with a healthy dose of Eucharistic Adoration.  When someone has been in therapy for a long time, making minimal progress adds these practices to their regular therapy they usually begin running towards mental health.

A New Asceticism

Virtue, , ,

Living in an age of unprecedented material prosperity and comfort, the practice of asceticism is a relic of ages past.  The word itself invokes images of emaciated monks wearing hair shirts and living in the desert.  Asceticism is still a foundational element in a healthy Christian life however and something that is foundational to the Christian life.  With this in mind, it is instructive to examine this practice with twenty-first century eyes.

What Is Asceticism?

Crippled in practice by misconceptions, a definition of asceticism is in order.  It is derived from the Greek word askētikós which means subject to rigorous exercise and hard work in the pursuit of virtue.  Simply put, asceticism is the strenuous effort one makes to overcome the deep division within his nature.  Asceticism is never done for its own sake, but always as a means to an end.  Forget this and it becomes more an exercise of ego than a Christian practice.  Christian asceticism is a means to greater freedom.  It is always done so as to live with the freedom of the children of God.  The more control we have over ourselves, the more grace is able to penetrate and transform us.  Grace perfects nature.

Never forgetting that we are earthen vessels, there is a vast difference between what we might call a heathen asceticism and Christian asceticism.  The heathen attempts to simply beautify the body the body while Christians attempt to bring it under control and train it for the glory of Heaven.  The heathen attempts to avoid death, the Christian lives looking forward to the Resurrection of the Body.

Asceticism is fitness training for the glory of heaven.  This training is approached from two angles.

The first is the classic approach in which we refuse to the body all that can weaken our soul’s union with Our Lord.  We know that, as fallen men and women, we are uncomfortable in our own skin.  Our bodies seem to have a mind of their own and so we must consciously forgo things that are good for us.  This training is not so much meant to bully the body but to prepare it to serve the higher goods of the soul.  In our resurrected state, the body will be under the command of the higher faculties of intellect and will—asceticism of this sort looks forward to that day.  We do what we can and wait for grace to do the rest.

The New Asceticism

On his death bed, St. Francis of Assisi had one regret—that he had been more gentle with Brother Ass, the moniker he gave to his body.  It is in this spirit that we view the second approach of actually taking care of our bodies.  A “new” asceticism might consist in doing all of those things and only those things that are necessary for our union with Our Lord.  In the old asceticism, the practice often overshadowed the purpose.  Subduing the body is not the end.  We subdue the body so that we may live fully in the freedom of the children of God.

Why this is “new” is because it reflects the times we live in.  Some of the poorest among us are surrounded by material comforts that only nobility would have enjoyed in the past.  With access to so many comforts, abstinence remains an option, but the harder path (i.e the path of virtue) is to practice moderation.  It allows us to use the material gifts God has provided with a greater freedom—the freedom that only comes when we use things according to the use that God intended.

In a vicious man, the body is a danger to his spiritual health, but in the hands of a virtuous man, a healthy body becomes a great spiritual weapon.  Rather than dragging themselves around by severe fasts, they abound with energy for winning souls to the Kingdom of God.  The beauty of their soul is matched with a certain beauty of body.  Holiness has a beauty all its own, a beauty that ought to radiate to the body even if it will never be matched in this world.

I have seen numerous articles floating about with regards to New Year’s Resolutions for Christians.  Almost all of them poo-poo “bodily” resolutions like getting back in shape because they suffer from a dualistic view of man that somehow puts the body and the soul at enmity with each other.  We may not be trousered apes, but we also are not angels.  A Christian knows that she is both and soul—she does not have a body and soul, but instead is a body and soul.  Those things that are truly good for the body redound to the soul and vice versa.  In other words, things that are good are good for the whole person.  As form of the body, the soul has a certain precedence, but nevertheless exercising the body is something that holy people do.

I would like to suggest that many Christians fail in their New Year’s resolutions precisely because they fail to see the need to train the whole person.  They may make resolutions to pray more, read Scripture more, etc, but then lack the bodily discipline to get out of bed to do these things.  They may be too tired because of poor health.  On the other hand they may promise to work out X number of days, but fail because they do not have the necessary virtue to persevere.  They fail to grasp that for the Christian, working out can be a spiritual practice (c.f.   ), or more accurately a practice done by a perfectly integrated Christian.

Asceticism in Practice

What would this new form of asceticism look like?  For starters we should have some regular form of moderate to intense exercise—always with its proper end in mind so as to keep us moderated.  From an ex-competitive bodybuilder I can tell you that physical exercise can become addictive especially as you begin to see positive body changes and so we must always remember why we are doing it.

There are other, more common sense things we can do as well—especially when it comes to food.  In God’s goodness, eating, because it is necessary for life, brings with it some pleasure.  But pleasure is not its purpose.  Its purpose is to produce health and strength.  It is in this spirit that we should always approach food and avoid snacking between meals and overeating.

This approach also helps us to rediscover the difference between merely eating and a meal.  A meal is meant to be a sign of a shared life together as they share something that cannot be lived without.  There may be a lot of eating, but very few meals.  In writing about gluttony, St. Gregory the Great describes the dangers of falling into the deadly sin of gluttony not only by eating too much, but also too expensively, too daintily prepared, too quickly and too often.  When our meals are more focused on who we are with and then the food, we are protected against this vice that acts as a gateway to the more serious sins of the spirit.

One other way the new asceticism is lived out is regarding getting enough sleep.  Often this simply means avoiding mind-numbing activities that typically keep us from falling asleep at a good time.  But it can also be an act of humility recognizing our own limitation and the number of things we can reasonably get done on a given day.  Most people find that when they set a hard and fast bed time, they not only feel better but waste less time during the day.  This is not to rule out vigils which are an important ascetical practice, but to say that these are an exception to what is otherwise an ordering of our lives that is patterned after God’s design.

Before closing, a point of clarification regarding the two approaches.  They are equally applicable to all stages of our Christian life.  It is not as if you graduate from the first approach and adopt the second.  We will never fully conquer the effects of original sin and so we will need to first approach.  Likewise, we are redeemed and ever-growing in our freedom and so the second approach will also be necessary.

St. Paul tells Timothy that “while bodily training is of some value, Godliness is of value in every way” (1Tim 4:8).  Christians, especially in our day, tend to ignore the first part and wonder why they are not as Godly as they could be.  Embracing asceticism once again, will go a long way in accomplishing this.

Then or Now?

Virtue,

It is always the questions with the obvious answers that cause the most problems.  Case in point, what if I were to ask whether you would rather live now or 200 years ago?  Allowing for the exception of a troglodyte or two, every one of them would, without hesitation, say “now.”  The reason seems obvious—the quality of life today is far beyond anything that could have been imagined two centuries ago.  Not only do we live longer today, but we are healthier and more people have access to more wealth.  Even the poor enjoy access to luxuries that only the very richest had in the past (if at all).  Think for example of our access to entertainment, entertainment filled with enough depravity that only the likes of Nero could enjoy in his day.  With that we realize that we may have answered the question too quickly and perhaps even looked at it the wrong way.  Sure we are enjoying an unprecedented material prosperity, but man does not live on bread alone.  Can we say that we are also enjoying an unprecedented spiritual prosperity?  Before throwing away the key to our time machines, we should reframe the question and ask “in which time period would being virtuous easier?”  Suddenly the answer does not seem so cut and dry.

The Question of Technology

We might be tempted to put the question down completely at this point.  We are when we are and there is no going back.  That is certainly true and the answer is only valuable insofar as it helps us in the here and now.  But rather than killing investigation, it ought to motivate it.  Volumes could be written on the differences in the time periods, but they could be summarized neatly in one word—technology.  At least that is the main difference according to CS Lewis who wrote:

“[F]or the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue.  For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both in the practice of this technique are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious—such as digging up and mutilating the dead.”

Summarizing Lewis’ point we can say that there are two kinds of men—those who subdue themselves to reality and those who will have reality subdued to themselves.  We call those in the first group virtuous and the second vicious.  This is a “problem” that is at the heart of man’s fallen existence.  Adam’s reality was that he had a single limitation—not eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Rather than subjecting himself to this reality, Adam chose to subject reality to himself.  In this regard he is no different than any one of us—sin is, at its core, an unwillingness for each of us to submit himself to reality.  We are like God in many ways, but not in the way that we can define for ourselves what is good and what is evil.

This is not a new problem for sure, but what is new is that in the past the average person lacked access to the power necessary to subdue reality to his wishes.  Now with so many technological solutions (techniques to use Lewis’ term) that give us power over reality, the temptation to subdue reality is much greater.

Technology and Power

Technology and power go hand in hand.  This may not be as obvious as it seems when more people have access to instruments of power, but it is true nonetheless.  Power in the hands of a few tends to corrupt only a few, power in the hands of many corrupts many.  With technological power comes the capacity to destroy ourselves.

We may have fallen victim to the belief that an increase of power mean “progress” but that is only true when the strength of character for using that power has kept pace.  We are now all like the superhero who wakes up one morning discovering he has superpowers and is confronted with whether we will use our powers for good or evil.  With greater command over the world, we need greater command over the self.

Progress in technology then is only truly progress when it makes us more human.  And this ought to be how we evaluate any advances in technology or our use of existing technologies.  Technology may be morally neutral, but how we use it is not.  Our guide as to its use is whether it leads to a more virtuous life or less, whether I am more human because of its help or less because of its substitution.

Efficiency

What often blinds us to seeing our use of technology more clearly is an obsession with efficiency.  Modern technology, the argument goes, increases efficiency making work easier and freeing us up for higher things.  But it seems that in the majority of cases the exact opposite has happened.   Labor saving devices may have replaced the slave labor of the past, but these devices often have enslaved otherwise free men.

The men of 200 years ago were freer than we are today.  Of that, there is no question.  The average man was more capable of taking care of himself and his family without significant outside help.  They could farm and hunt, they could build their homes and repair them, they knew how to navigate when lost in the woods, etc.  We, on the other hand, have specialists (farmers and homebuilders) or special machines (GPS) to do that for us now.  The average man 200 years ago would be far from average today.

The point is not that efficiency is bad, only that we should not treat it as an absolute value.  There is value in work done with our hands and simple tools.  It helps us to grow in the virtues of prudence, patience and perseverance.  In other words, we are better men for having done the work, no matter how menial it seems.  Labor saving technologies are only good and should only be used insofar as they help make us better men.

Another example might help to illustrate the point further.  Take a simple technology that is near and dear to my heart, the calculator.  Having a calculator has freed me up from doing the time consuming work of crunching numbers and enabled me to do the higher and more theoretical work in statistics.  However, when doing simple mathematical calculations, I will never use a calculator because it will reduce my distinctly human ability to do this.  I am somehow less human when I cannot do percentages in my head and have to rely on a calculator for a tip.  The point is that when the technology actually frees us up for higher things then it is a good, but this can never be at the expense of the loss of the ability to do the lower things.

Paradigm shifts always come abruptly.  We may pine for simpler times.  Frankenstein is already out of the cage and is not going back in.  While we may prefer to have lived in a previous age of morally better men, the reality is that we live in a technological age and we must find ways to use that power to make us better men.  Virtue itself may be harder, but this also means they will be stronger.

Awaiting the Prince of Peace

Advent, Virtue,

Each day during Advent, the readings focus on the coming of the Messiah, a coming that promised to usher in among other things, peace.  It is a peace that is anticipated by the prophets (c.f. Is 11:8), proclaimed by the angels who announce His birth (Lk 2:14), part of His endowment to the Apostles at the Last Supper (Jn 14:27) and the first gift given the Apostles celebrating His Resurrection (Jn 20:19).  It is also a peace that, despite being part of our Christian inheritance, remains elusive for many of us.  As we prepare to welcome the Prince of Peace, it is an opportune time to reflect on peace as the characteristic mark of Christians.

Definition of Peace

St. Augustine offers us the best definition of peace as “the tranquility of order.” It is an effect of having order in one’s life.  As an effect, it is end in itself. While we all desire peace, no one desires it as a means to something else.  It is simply part and parcel to a happy life.

Although we might struggle to come up with a definition as succinct as St. Augustine, we all intuitively know that peace has something to do with order.  One of the main ways that people cope with anxiety is by seeking to manufacture order.  For example, many people will clean when they are anxious in an attempt to create order in their environment.  The disorder that is actually causing the anxiety will not actually go away, but they will find some semblance of peace in creating order where there was previously disorder, even if it is short-lived like most coping mechanisms.

Where Peace is Found

This definition of peace also helps us to more deeply understand a famous quote from Thomas Merton in which he says that, “we arenot at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.”  Any attempt at socially engineering peace has the problem backwards, literally outside in.  Peace cannot come from the outside but must come from within because the well-ordered society only comes about through the work of well-ordered men.  It only comes about through the work of well-ordered Christian men, because only Christians have the capacity for true peace.

sassoferato-madonna-and-child

The narratives of the Old Testament orbit around man’s futile attempts to create peace for himself.  It becomes obvious that it was a practical impossibility and that only a miraculous intervention by God could bring peace.  As fallen creatures we find that there is a war within our members (Romans 7:23).  In other words, we lack the internal order that creates tranquility.  We find that the “flesh lusts against the spirit” (Gal 5:17)—our passions and our wills are constantly battling for control.

The path to order is paved by the moral virtues, those habitual dispositions that enable us to bridle our passions and ride them to the Good with intensity.  But even that road is marked by sinkholes until we put on Christ and take our rightful share in His virtues.  The Prince of Peace exercised all the virtues so that we might finally be empowered to be delivered from this handicap once and for all.  In other words, by making peace with God, the Word Made Flesh also empowers us to make peace within ourselves.

First Obstacle: Sin

No amount of coping mechanisms can help us avoid the truth that we do not have peace because we have sin in our lives.  When I say this, it is not so much the actual sins that cause the disorder, but the reason we commit them.  In other words, the disorder is caused by our predominant fault, with our actual sins just being manifestations of this fault.  It is not enough to recognize that I get irrationally angry at my family, but I must get to the root cause of my anger.  Perhaps I do it because I crave comfort and do not want to be disturbed.  Or, perhaps I do it because I am vain and do not want to suffer the embarrassment of being opposed.  Or, perhaps in my pride I am attempting to control other people’s actions.  It is the same sin, blowing up at my family, but its root cause can be vastly different—pride, vanity or sensuality.  I may learn to control my anger, but until I attack the predominant fault of pride, vanity or sensuality, the disorder will remain.  This is why we always use the principle of overcoming evil with good—we are habitual creatures.  You can only overcome one habit (or vice) by replacing it with a new habit (virtue).

The Second Obstacle: Lack of Trust

Sin is not the only obstacle to peace.  In order to see this, we must avoid the pitfall of assuming that the solution to a lack of peace is to be more “spiritual” by looking upon the world with indifference.  Peace may not come from the outside, but the things that threaten our peace do.  This is why peace is only found in those who have a radical trust in God.  Life is full of difficulties and contradictions—in other words disorder.  That is a reality that cannot be merely overlooked.  But what is also real is that God uses those difficulties and contradictions to bring about what is good for us. God’s Providence is not merely universal, but personal.

Advent and peace go hand in hand.  Advent is a time to “stay awake” so that we can hurry up and wait.  It is a time to cultivate patience as we reflect on those things that threaten our peace and begin to see that God is at work in them.  This is not something we will see all at once, but only grow in this conviction with repeated experience.  He brought order out of chaos in creation and will do so in our re-creation in Christ.  Peace is distinctly Christian because it is a fruit of the Holy Spirit.  Like all fruit, not only does it have a certain sweetness to it, but it also is a sign of a mature tree.  May this Advent be a time of maturity so that we may welcome the Prince of Peace into our hearts in a most profound way.

Thanksgiving and Gratitude

Virtue,

We might call it the “Black Friday creep”—for years the start time for Black Friday has crept closer and closer to Thanksgiving Day.  This year many retailers will be open for longer hours on Thanksgiving Day, threatening to make the holiday little more than a drive-thru meal.  The tug of war really is between two outlooks on life—one based on envy with the need to get the best deals on the latest things and gratitude at being satisfied with what you already have.   Thanksgiving Day is about gratitude and therefore is celebrated best when we have worked to cultivate this virtue.  Therefore it seems fitting to offer a reflection on this virtue.

black-friday-riot

 

To begin, a word about the celebrating of secular holidays like Thanksgiving.  As Christians who believe in a God who acts within human history (i.e. within the secular), we should not object to the celebration of these holidays.  What we should object to however is when they become infused with a secularized mentality.  Gratitude by its nature must have an object toward which one is grateful.  To say “I am thankful” is the same as going into a restaurant and simply saying “I order.”  Just as you need to identify the food you want to eat, you must also identify a person you are thankful to.  In the United States, the Person towards which we are thankful to is God.  Even Barack Obama, no friend of religion, echoes the sentiments of Washington and Lincoln in his own Thanksgiving Day proclamations calling for gratitude to “Almighty God.”  Without this acknowledgment, Thanksgiving becomes just another day to “eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you will die.”  As GK Chesterton may once said (quoting another author), “the worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful, and has nobody to thank.”  No one ultimately can be grateful to “the processes of history.”

Just knowing who we are grateful to however is not enough.  To keep Thanksgiving from becoming “Thanks-taking” we need to make sure we are exercising the virtue of gratitude properly.

Fr. Hardon’s Catholic Dictionary defines gratitude as the “virtue by which a person acknowledges, interiorly and exteriorly, gifts received and seeks to make at least some return for the gift conferred.”  Gratitude is both affective and effective.  The affective element consists in both “thanks-reflecting” and “thanks-saying.”  The effective element consists in “thanks-giving.”  Most of us only associate gratitude with “thanks-saying” and therefore miss the virtue in its fullness.

“Thanks-reflecting” consists in, as St. Thomas says, the “recollection of (divine) benefits.” It is this first part that in many ways is the most important.  It is the time when we count and name our blessings.  If you read the first Thanksgiving Day Proclamation of George Washington, he enumerates the things for which the country should be grateful— “the great degree of tranquillity, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed; for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted; for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and, in general, for all the great and various favors which He has been pleased to confer upon us.”  In other words, it is not enough to say who we are thankful to, but we must also say what we are thankful for.  There is great benefit to doing this because it only strengthens our gratitude.  As we begin to enumerate all the ways in which God has blessed us we will grow to thank Him for everything, including our sufferings, able to “give thanks in every circumstance” (1 Thes 5:18).

When St. Thomas discusses gratitude in the Summa (S.T. II-II, qq.106-107), he treats it as a sub-virtue of justice.  What St. Thomas is emphasizing is that when we speak of the “debt of gratitude,” it means that we owe something in return for the favors that are done for us.  We certainly owe the words of thanks, but we must also be prepared to repay our benefactor.  This is why we speak of “thanks-giving” and not just “thanks-saying.”  This notion of a “debt of gratitude” is often lost on us and we assume that merely saying thanks is enough.

There is a danger of seeing gratitude as being about quid pro quo—like sending Thank You notes for Thank You notes.  But it is something much more than that.  When given a gift, there are two things that should be considered—the affection of the heart of the giver and the gift.  It is the affection that should be returned immediately (that is we should express our thanks) and then the gift itself in a timely manner.  This applies not only to our human relationships but especially when we begin speaking of God’s gifts to us.

God gives out of sheer gratuity.  He does not benefit at all from the gifts He bestows and He bestows them simply because He is love.  And, most importantly He is a joyful giver.  While we may not be able to return the affection to God directly, it is with joy and sheer gratuity that we celebrate Thanksgiving with those God has placed in our lives.

What about the gifts?  How can we return to God anything that is proportional to the gifts He has given us?  The psalmist gives us a clue when he asks the same question:

“How can I repay the LORD for all the great good done for me? I will raise the cup of salvation and call on the name of the LORD.  I will pay my vows to the LORD in the presence of all his people.” (Ps 116:12-14)

 

Anyone reading this will immediately recognize the Eucharistic connotation of the “cup of salvation”   and recall to mind that the word Eucharist (or Eucharistia) is Greek for “thanksgiving.”  What the Spirit is telling us through the voice of the Psalmist is that the person who wants to repay his debt of gratitude to God will faithfully, actively and regularly participate in the Mass.  Thanksgiving Day will not be complete unless you start the day with Mass.  The Eucharist is man’s greatest gift back to God.

Gratitude is so important because it makes the hearts of the giver and the receiver the same.  This happens really and truly when we receive the Eucharist.  Our hearts become united to the Sacred Heart.  It is from the human heart of Jesus that God gives us the Eucharist and it is this heart that is meant to be formed in all of us.  The formation of the Heart of Jesus in us begins with gratitude.

As I have said any number of times, one of the ways that Catholics can recapture the culture is to celebrate holidays like only Catholics can.  We are not so other-worldly that we do not see the goods God has placed in this world for our enjoyment.  We do not merely thank God for His spiritual benefits, but also the freedom He has given us to use the material gifts in the way He intended when He bestowed them upon us.  This shatters the delusion about Christianity that many people operate under.  When we put the joy of being Catholic on display, holidays like Thanksgiving can be a powerful means of evangelization.  As Hillaire Belloc once said, “Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine, there’s always laughter and good red wine.  At least I’ve always found it so. Benedicamus Domino!

A Complaint Against Grumbling

Virtue

Pope St. John Paul II often avoided the use of the term “free will” when he was describing man’s moral life.  Instead he preferred to speak of “self-determination.”  What he hoped to emphasize in doing this was that our actions have an effect on us.  What we do does not simply remain outside of us, but make up who and what we are.  In other words, our actions turn us into something.  Even our speech reveals this to be true:  we call a person who lies repeatedly a liar, a person who steals a thief, a person that repeatedly shows courage a hero and a person who repeatedly gives of himself a saint.  This theme is central to his encyclical on Moral Theology, Veritatis Splendor.  Rather than commending what many consider JPII’s most difficult encyclical, I would like to point out the smuggled moral theology contained in CS Lewis’ The Great Divorce.  In this deep meditation on good and evil, Lewis’ pilgrim meets people somewhere between heaven and hell and finds that even if someone were given the option to choose between heaven or hell in the afterlife, they are already fixed as heavenly or hellish people.  Lewis himself cautions the reader not to read the book as a theological commentary on heaven, hell and purgatory.  Instead he calls it an “imaginative supposal” which offers insights into the moral life.

One of the more puzzling characters that the pilgrim meets along the way is a woman who seems to have a nearly endless list of complaints.  After listening to her “shrill monotonous whine,” the Pilgrim asks his guide how it is even possible that she is in danger of damnation.  She seems to have gotten into the habit of grumbling, but it is a mostly harmless thing that a little change in environment would remedy.  The Guide (George MacDonald) replies that:

“That is what she once was. That is maybe what she still is. If so, she certainly will be cured. But the whole question is whether she is now a grumbler…Aye, but ye misunderstand me. The question is whether she is a grumbler, or only a grumble. If there is a real woman-even the least trace of one-still there inside the grumbling, it can be brought to life again. If there’s one wee spark under all those ashes, we’ll blow it till the whole pile is red and clear. But if there’s nothing but ashes we’ll not go on blowing them in our own eyes forever. They must be swept up.”

Given the current level of discontent of most Christians with the direction the culture is taking, I think there is a grave danger than many of us may in fact become grumbles.  Grumbling and Christianity have become somewhat synonymous.  We may have grown so accustomed to it, that we fail to see its dangers.  What I would like to offer today then is a complaint against grumbling.

Sacred Scripture is consistent in its condemnation of grumbling (or murmuring).  In fact, it even goes so far as to say it is useless.  The Book of Wisdom tells us to “keep yourselves from grumbling, which profits nothing” (Wisdom 1:11).  St. Paul suggests that it is by doing things without grumbling that the Christian distinguishes himself when he tells the Philippians to “[D]o all things without grumbling or questioning, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation” (Phil 2:14-15).

If grumbling really profits nothing and we risk blame over it, how can we become grumble-free?  To answer that question, we must attempt to define it.  The Greek word for grumble is goggýzō which means “to express smoldering discontent.”  This is why Lewis expressed the lady’s situation in terms of ashes and flames.  Something that is smoldering, even if it never reaches a full blown flame, will eventually be consumed.  Grumble enough and we become grumbles.

At the heart of grumbling is a general discontent for life.  One who finds little joy in life grumbles.  This is why it is so antithetical to a truly Christian existence—Christians should be marked by their joy.  Left unchecked, this discontent becomes the seedbed of hell.  Lewis also says that, in the end, “the Blessed will say ‘We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,’‘: and the Lost, ‘We were always in Hell.’ And both will speak truly.”   We have all met people (we usually call them saints) who carry heaven with them.  We have also all been unfortunate enough to meet those who carry hell with them as well, and they are almost always if not other things, grumblers.  As Lewis says, “[H]ell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others… but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a day when you can no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood or even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself, going on forever like a machine. It is not a question of God “sending us” to hell. In each of us there is something growing, which will BE hell unless it is nipped in the bud.”

CS Lewis Writing

By saying that grumbling has no point, the author of the Book of Wisdom means that absolutely no good comes from it.  Christians are in the world because they are meant to redeem it.  With The Master as his model and his inspiration (in the truest sense of the word), the Christian transforms all things by drawing the goodness out of it and bringing into being good that otherwise would not have existed.  Evil is a parasite, it always feeds upon a good.  In the midst of personal suffering, social evils and secular culture, the Christian is called not simply to complain but to draw those goods that are present out.

Grumbling tends to make mountains out of molehills.  More accurately, we allow molehills to serve as stumbling blocks to True Mountain.  To overcome this tendency we must develop a radical trust in Divine Providence.  Note how Jesus responds to the grumbling of His disciples in the Bread of Life discourse.  He tells them to stop grumbling and then calls them to faith (Jn 6:41-43).

The faith that He invites us to is not one of resignation but one that is completely active.  When confronted with either a Mountain or a Molehill, we should ask how the situation can be redeemed.  Why is it that God allowed this to happen?  We are not attempting to write our own version of the story but to draw the good that God intends out.  Faith tells us there is good to be found, grumbling says there is none.

The reality is that we often do not have the power to eradicate a particular evil.  This is usually when grumbling sets in.  We must fight this temptation.  Instead we should seek to find the goods that are revealed and celebrate those.  When GK Chesterton suffered an ankle injury, he wrote an essay called The Advantages of Having One Leg.  It wasn’t that he was optimistic so much as the fact that losing the use of one of his legs became an occasion to praise God for the gift that up to that point he had taken for granted.  Evil has this strange quality in that it often allows us to see goods we would normally never have noticed.  If an evil persists, despite our best efforts to fight it, perhaps we need to look for those goods we were previously overlooking.  Summarizing, Chesterton wrote, “This world and all our powers in it are far more awful and beautiful than even we know until some accident reminds us. If you wish to perceive that limitless felicity, limit yourself if only for a moment. If you wish to realize how fearfully and wonderfully God’s image is made, stand on one leg. If you want to realize the splendid vision of all visible things–wink the other eye.”

Finally, grumbling blocks patience.  Of all the spiritual works of mercy, bearing wrongs patiently is the one that is most tied to the Cross.  We imitate Christ most perfectly when we silently bear wrongs.  This is not to suggest that Christians are doormats, only that there are times when confronted with evil that we must be silent.  Christ responded to the high priest servant’s blow by speaking, but there are also times when we must turn the other cheek.  Wisdom will help us know the difference.  But when by complaining I will bring about no good, no conversion of heart, perhaps the best approach is to bear it with patience.  The Cross always acts like a wrench in the gears of evil.

Anyone who has read The Great Divorce would immediately see the influence that Dante’s Divine Comedy had on Lewis.  As he climbs Mount Purgatory, Dante finds each of the remedies to the deadly sins has a Marian solution.  If he were to include the grumblers, then they would be purified by Our Lady’s habit of “keeping these things in her heart.”  She never grumbled because she always pondered.  May we too imitate her spirit.

 

Finding Joy

Virtue

Prior to becoming Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger addressed a group of Catechists in Rome on the topic of the New Evangelization.  He commented that one of the greatest obstacles to the Gospel is poverty.  The greatest poverty, the future Pope commented, is the inability of joy.  All of us seek joy and yet it remains elusive for many of us because we are unable to receive it.  Why might this be?

Joy remains elusive for the simple reason that we do not know what it is and therefore fail to identify it when it comes.  Joy, according to Blessed Paul VI, is the satisfaction that occurs when we possess a known and desired good [Gaudete in Domino (GD), 1].  Because joy is related to a “known and desired good,” and specifically man’s highest faculties of knowing and willing, we can say it originates within man’s spirit and not from within the body.  It may spill over into the body and be experienced as bodily pleasure, but that is not always the case.  To help us separate joy from pleasure St. Thomas says “we take delight both in those things which we desire naturally, when we get them, and in those things which we desire as a result of reason. But we do not speak of joy except when delight follows reason.”  Identification of the good as truly good and a love of it then are key components of joy.

An ever-present danger is to think that joy can only be found in the possession of God.  What this leads to is compartmentalization and an “over-spiritualizing” of our lives.  Joy finds its fullness in the possession of God as Goodness itself, but there is such thing as natural joy.  In fact supernatural joy assumes that we are capable of natural joy.

At each stage of Creation, God took delight (“it was good”) and upon its completion He rested delighting in the whole as “very good” (Gn 1:31).   In other words, God found joy in Creation.  Mankind, made in His image, is given a share in that joy.  Certainly if God finds joy then we should too.

We might find joy in a beautiful sunset or an incredible landscape, but in truth joy mostly comes in “smaller” ways.  Natural joy comes when we do those things that fulfill our nature— our work, our duties, and our relationships.  All of these things are true goods that fulfill us and thus sources of joy.

Why was it that God chose shepherds tending their flock as the first recipients of the message of great joy (Lk 2:11-12)?  Was it because they were particularly pious?  There is nothing to indicate that.  Was it because they were breathlessly awaiting the Messiah?  Again, nothing indicates this.  Instead the angels appear to them because they were open to supernatural joy.  They had found natural joy in watching their sheep by night.  They saw the good of their work and the fruits that it provided them and they delighted in them.  Supernatural joy, in the Person of God Himself, found them and He came to find us too so that our “joy might be complete” (John 15:11).

This is why supernatural joy is a fruit of the Holy Spirit.  Just as fruit only comes to a tree when it is mature, once a man has a certain spiritual maturity he finds the fruit of joy from his possession of the Holy Spirit.

joy-and-sadness

St. Thomas says that “no man can live without joy” so the Devil is always lurking trying to steal our joy.  We must also then be aware of the obstacles to joy.

Recall that joy comes in the recognition of a good thing as truly good.  If we are loaded down by our “responsibilities” and do not allow silence to speak to us about these goods, we may not recognize them as good.  We can only love what we know, so until we truly see them as good we cannot delight in them.  By cultivating silence in our lives as a time of reflection of the good things in our lives, we can develop the capacity for joy.  Rather than gratitude, the culture attempts to instill envy in us.  You will never find joy in keeping up with the Joneses.  As Paul VI said, “in a fast-moving world, too often men are prevented from enjoying daily joys. Nevertheless such joys do exist. The Holy Spirit wants to help these people rediscover these joys, to purify them, to share them” (GD, 5).  No prophet of gloom, the Blessed Pontiff left us with an antidote—developing a Marian spirit who “mediates on the least signs of God, pondering them in her heart” (GD, 5).

Paul VI also mentioned that “technological society has succeeded in the multiplying of opportunities for pleasure, but it has great difficulty generating joy” (GD, 1).  Technology (which literally means “the study of technique”) offers us efficiency, but there are no efficient ways to find joy.  In addition to silence, joy also takes work.  Technology is meant to reduce work.  This is a good as long as it doesn’t reduce man at the same time.  Even though it may create a temporary high, you can never derive joy from a thousand “likes” on Facebook.  But joy can come from a single smile from your child even after a trying day.  It might feel good to make one-handed catch in Madden ’17, but it will never bring the joy that comes from running a route until you have perfected it and then having the ball right on your hands when you turn around.

St. Paul in his letter to the Colossians says “I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake because I make up for what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ” (Col 1:24).  At first glance it seems that only a sadist would find joy in his sufferings, but there is something more at play here that is worth investigating.  This is especially true because suffering appears to be the one insurmountable obstacle to joy.  How is it possible to find joy in the midst of suffering?

Joy is not the same thing as giddiness.  Those who find joy in suffering still feel the pain of it.  They still suffer.  That is because it is not the suffering that causes them joy but the thing that they possess because of the suffering.  When suffering comes upon us, we know that we have God’s personal attention.  He has handpicked our suffering because it is the gentlest way for us to be made perfect like Jesus, the Suffering Servant.  We can rejoice because we are being perfected, like gold tested in fire.  We can rejoice because someone else through our participation in the Cross is being perfected.  The point is that we rejoice like St. Paul because we find the meaning of our suffering.  For those of us who have suffered we find joy in the goods that the Almighty Father attached to the suffering (for my own testimony read here).  The Cross really is the Tree of Life.

Modesty and the Freedom to Be Loved

Moralilty, Theology of the Body, Virtue

An assistant principal at a Texas High School recently came under fire for making comments that were “inappropriate and offensive to students.”  What did he say?  During an assembly he called out the young ladies in the school for wearing tight clothes and short shirts.  He went on to blame them for “the boys’ low grades” intimating that they are distracted by the clothes many of the girls wear.  While his comments may have been lacking in humor and mode of delivery, they were not lacking in truth.  He was challenging them to dress more modestly.  The problem is that many young people lack the necessary context to understand the value of modesty and therefore are “offended” when someone says something.

Before he was to become Bishop of Rome, Fr. Karol Wojtyla wrote what might ultimately become his most important work, Love and Responsibility.  In it, he examines the relationship between the sexes and lays out the foundations of what would become his Theology of the Body.  Perhaps if the Assistant Principal was familiar with the work, he would have been able to draw on Fr. Wojtyla’s lengthy discussion on the importance of modesty.

In the book he makes what many today would consider a radical assumption—that men and women are different.  This difference is not just skin deep but goes to the very depth of their being as man and woman.  In fact our bodies are simply expressions of these differences rather than the totality of these differences.  These differences even affect the ways in which men and women are attracted to each other.

When one speaks of being “attracted” to someone, it primarily means that there is a response to a perception of some value in that person.  But because the person is not just an object but also a subject, there is always the danger of treating the other as a “something” rather than a “somebody.”  To guard against this tendency, Fr. Wojtyla articulates what he calls the personalistic norm—“A person is a good towards which the only proper and adequate attitude is love.”

The sexual attraction (Wojtyla calls it the “sexual urge”) between men and women is a recognition of the sexual value of the other person.  It is experienced in two forms; sensuality and sentimentality.  Sensuality is the attraction to the body of the person of the opposite sex.  Sensuality is stirred when we encounter a person of the opposite sex and find value in their body as an object of personal enjoyment. Sentimentality is the emotional attraction to the sexual value residing in the whole person in the form of their masculinity and femininity.  Since sensuality is oriented towards the body as an object of enjoyment, it is generally stronger in men while sentimentality because it is more relational is strongest in women.

Because the sexual urge is so strong, there is always the danger that men and women will look upon the other person merely for their sexual value.  They then become an object of pleasure rather than a person to be loved.  In order for love to develop the entire “value” of the person must be seen and not just their sexual value.  What this means is that men and women must keep some of their sexual value hidden so that true love can blossom.

This, Fr. Wojtyla says, is the value in the experience of shame.  Shame arises any time that something which by its very nature ought to be private somehow becomes public.  Sexual shame arises when the sexual value of the person obscures their personal value.  Shame then acts like a protectant against use.  Most of us have experienced this.  A man instinctively will look away when he is caught staring at a woman he finds attractive.  A girl who is dressed immodestly will be forever adjusting her clothes.   Although they may not articulate it as shame, it is experienced by all but those who are shameless.  Modesty on the other hand is the “constant capacity and readiness to feel shame.”

pride-and-prejudice

As I mentioned sensuality is generally stronger in men.  This means that modesty and shame must be more pronounced in women.  The problem is that women are not primarily inclined to sensuality and so they do not intuit the need to conceal the body.  Modesty comes about when they gain an insight into male psychology

Even if it fell flat in its delivery, the Assistant Principal was trying to offer a much-needed insight into the male psychology.  Perhaps rather than being offended, what the students experienced was shame.  It isn’t just the boys’ problem for not focusing and it is not just the girls’ problem for dressing immodestly.  It is the self-perpetuating problem of use.  The girls dress immodestly, deliberately flaunting their sexual value, the boys respond by seeing only that.  The boys treat them as objects to be used and the girls accept this use.

The problem, I said, was one of context.  When we hear the word modesty we are immediately drawn to a Victorian encounter between men and women.  We must free modesty from this image.  Remember the goal is to keep sexual values from obscuring the true value of the person.  This does not mean that the person should hide all of their sexual value, only to the extent that they can be seen as a part of the value of the person.  The accentuation of sexual value by dress is inevitable and is not necessarily incompatible with modesty.  It is when the attire is chosen specifically to provoke a reaction that it becomes immodest.  As Fr. Wojtyla says, “What is truly immodest in dress is that which frankly contributes to the deliberate displacement of the true value of the person by sexual values, that which is bound to elicit a reaction to the person by sexual values, that which is bound to elicit a reaction to the person as to a ‘possible means of obtaining sexual enjoyment’ and not ‘a possible object love by reason of his or her personal value’.”

Most importantly, and this is what those young ladies needed to hear, modesty is more than keeping the boys from failing their classes and more than just protecting themselves from being gawked at.  “Sexual modesty is not a flight from love, but on the contrary the opening of a way towards it.”  Each of those young ladies desires to be loved and dressing immodestly, even if it garners attention, will never foster true love.  Only modesty frees love to blossom.

What Americans Hold

Church and State, Virtue

Anyone who has studied American history knows that keeping Americans united has been the greatest challenge.  The necessity of a “more perfect union” led to the abolishing of the Articles of Confederation and to the delaying of a remedy for slavery by the Constitutional Convention.  America is unique in the history of the world because it succeeded in bringing together men and women from different countries, cultures and even races.  Every other country is united insofar as they share a certain character.  Italy became a nation because all the smaller principalities were Italian, Greece because the city states were Greek, and France, French.  It is the reason why Scotland always fought becoming part of England and why, in modern times, the EU is ultimately doomed to fail.  But the United States is different because what actually unites its citizens is, as Chesterton observed, a creed.  It is the proposition that all men are “endowed by their Creator with the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” that unites us as Americans.  To use another Chestertonian image, America may be a melting pot, but the pot itself is what holds it altogether.

This “unity in diversity” is precarious and the danger of dissolution is always around the corner.  But the danger does not come not from any external enemy but from within.  Lincoln, the Great Restorer of the Union, said this, rather prophetically in an 1837 speech at the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield:

“Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!–All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.  At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

As Lincoln entered office, the country was divided precisely because one of the fundamental elements of the American Creed, namely the equality of all men, was rejected by a large portion of the population.  Those who were trying to reform the melting pot were in danger of breaking it.

Lincoln--Carpenter

Without any danger of hyperbole, we could easily say that we are facing a similar danger today.  We are a country that is clearly divided and no longer merely along political lines.  This is obvious to all but the most myopic of our citizens (namely politicians), but no solution can be found until we treat the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence as more than quaint historical facts.  It is the self-evident truths, and only these, that has kept our country united for 240 years.  If it is to survive the next 20, we will need to return to these with greater clarity.

I have written in other places about the elements of the American Creed, but I would like to take this essay to a more foundational level.  No amount of clarity will help us if we continue to deny the roots of the tree from which the fruits of freedom and equality flow.  One can argue all day long whether or not the Founders were Christian or Deist or just children of the Enlightenment, but that ignores the fact that what they built was built on a Christian understanding of reality.  They were breathing Christian air.

Equality of mankind? 

Entirely unknown in the world until Christ came to save all mankind without distinction—“ There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28).  Rich and poor, slave and free, Jew and Gentile all came together as one body to receive the one bread (1 Cor  ).  We are so used to this idea that we forget how revolutionary this idea was at the time.

Self-government?

Self-government rests upon the Christian understanding of the uniqueness of each individual person created by God and he is “the only creature that God has wanted for its own sake” (GS 24).  This power of self-government that is received from God can be transmitted to the governing party and taken away in dire situations.  As an aside, this was a foundational argument of Jefferson’s in the Declaration of Independence—“ But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

The point is that we cannot continue to take of the fruit of the tree while simultaneously digging up the roots.  This is why John Adams in reflecting on the Constitution said that it is “made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”  His point is that any attempt at self-government requires the ability for each person to govern himself.  It requires virtue (i.e. a moral people).  Only those who are virtuous can use their freedom well and in the manner it was intended, namely “the pursuit of happiness.”  But as history bears out (including the failed attempt of the French Revolution based on the similar founding principles), virtue is not enough.  Virtue requires religion.  While there may be individual exceptions in a given society, the beginning of virtue is the fear of the Lord.  Fear of judgment is not the end of virtue, but it is certainly the beginning.  One must believe that he will eventually have to answer for his deeds (i.e. a religious people).

While some of the Founders may have seen religion only from a utilitarian viewpoint, this will not do.  Our country needs not just “religion” but Christianity to survive.  It is instructive to reflect on Jefferson’s use of the term “Church” when he speaks about the “wall of separation between Church and State.”  Only Christianity has Churches.  Despite his own religious leanings he knew that America needed Christianity.  That means all of us need to be more Christian and not less.  The peace of our society and the salvation of souls depends upon it.

A society like ours that has become indifferent and even hostile in some ways to Christianity is cutting off its nose to spite its face.  The argument over which color lives matter presupposes the question as to why any lives matter at all—and only a Christian has an adequate response.  All lives matter because God has definitively said so in giving the life of His Son.  Why are we all dissatisfied with our choices for President?  Because we inherently know that character matters more than competence, another tenant Christianity has taught us.  In this great moment of division, who will lead?  It must be Christians willing to sacrifice themselves holding the pot together for a love a God and neighbor.

Watching without Seeing

Virtue

“Curiosity killed the cat,” the proverb goes, “but satisfaction brought him back.”  Throughout Christian history, from Augustine and Jerome to Aquinas, curiosity has been viewed as a serious vice.  In contrast, today, it represents little more than an annoying habit.  The problem is all the more acute in an age where we have access to endless hours of entertainment, social media, and the internet filled with information.  Far from being just a minor fault, curiosity represents a serious problem that, if left unchecked, can put our souls in just as must danger as the cat.  But rather than satisfaction, it is the virtue of studiousness that will bring us back.

It must first be admitted that because of our rational nature, we each have a great desire for knowledge of the truth.  As Aristotle said, “all men have a desire to know.”   Just as the body is fueled by food, so the intellect is fueled by truth.    Because knowledge of the truth leads to our fulfillment as rational creatures, it is a fundamental good.  This is why curiosity is such a temptation and ultimately harms us.

But like the natural desire for food, the desire for knowledge must be moderated by our reason.  This is where the virtue of studiousness comes in.  By fostering studiousness, or the habit of study, we will refuse to feed the intellect with the junk food of mere facts, but the nutrition of truth.  Just as a steady diet of junk food will leave us sluggish, a steady diet of facts leads to the sluggishness of curiosity.  If we recall that acedia or sloth is a spiritual laziness by which we see a spiritual good as not really worth the effort it takes to get it, we can see why St. Thomas thought that curiosity was a daughter vice of acedia.

Curiosity is the desire for knowledge simply for the pleasure that it brings as opposed to knowing for the sake of knowledge itself (which is the virtue of studiousness).   Gossip, which brings the pleasure of knowing something bad about someone else is a prime example of curiosity.  On the other hand, study is the keen application of the mind to something.  The studious person has no desire to gossip.

Gossiping women

But how can we know the difference, especially when the desire for knowledge is a good thing?  St. Thomas says the learning of the truth can be inordinate in four ways.  First, “when a man is withdrawn by a less profitable study from a study that is an obligation incumbent upon him.”   Although he did not live in an era of social media and the internet, St. Thomas is particularly prophetic here.  It is curiosity that drives the social media phenomenon.  A recent study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the average American spends almost an hour a day on Facebook.   To carry the food analogy further, this is about the same amount of time we spend eating each day.  While we are there, we are bombarded with facts—both news items and personal—but it is curiosity that drives us to scroll through the feeds.  That time could be better spent studying, especially given that the same study found that the average person spends less than 20 minutes a day reading.  Curiosity always leads to ignorance because we do not study those things we should be studying.  It is curiosity that has left us “educated” yet ignorant.

The second way in which curiosity manifests itself is through knowledge of things that are not licit.  St. Thomas gives the example of fortune telling.  Under the guise of harmless curiosity, many have been sucked unwittingly into the traps of the Evil One through fortune telling, Ouija boards and Tarot cards.  Many young men are sucked into pornography mainly out of curiosity—hearing about it from friends or wondering what the allure is for their dad and all the time he spends on it.

Aquinas also says that curiosity rears its head when we “study about creatures without reference to the due end namely God.”  By this he means that much of our modern scientific inquiry is rooted in curiosity.  All science has become mechanistic rather than teleological.  We collect facts through the scientific method, but do not study (or more accurately contemplate) the purpose.   Studiousness is needed for science because it requires the self-discipline to exclude frivolous pursuits and those that contradict the moral law.  Instead, we act without any reference to the moral law and equate the technically possible with the morally permissible.  Science when governed by studiousness allows us to see how all things are connected as part of a whole, a whole that is meant to reveal the Creator.

Finally Aquinas says curiosity seeks to know the truth above the capacity of our own intelligence.  All too often we fall into the Cliff Clavinesque habit of regurgitating facts merely to impress.  Curiosity is about replacing the desire for truth with empty shows.

What makes curiosity so soul-deadening is that it acts as a gateway vice, leading to worse things. Earlier we used the example of pornography, but it ultimately leads to an inability to love.  Recently, I witnessed a car accident when the driver hit the gas instead of the brake while pulling into a parking space and drove through a store front.  Rather than rushing to help the driver, nearly all of the bystanders stood there, phones in hand, taking pictures.  Deadened by curiosity, what else could they do but post photos of this poor woman’s misery to their social media accounts?  No compassion or even respect, just entertainment.

It is the stoking of curiosity too that drives the news media.  Each “major” event in the news cycle gets reported in painstaking details and then is quickly replaced with the next event.  Curiosity drives our consumption and it leads to a profound change in us.  It’s not just that we become desensitized to the suffering of others or that we waste time.  It is that we lose the ability to examine things deeply.  Life becomes episodic and we do not know how it all fits together because we watch rather than see.

“Curiosity killed the man and no amount of satisfaction can bring him back.”