Browsing tag: life

  • Bear Injuries Patiently

    Do not repay one bad turn with another 1 Thessalonians 5:15; 1 Peter 3:9.  Do not injure anyone, but bear injuries patiently.  (Rule of St. Benedict 4. 29-30)

    First of all, bearing injuries patiently is not a sign of weakness.  It’s a sign of goodness.  Only the strong bear up. Only the good restrain themselves when evil beckons, because evil is not their master.

    Secondly, this principle isn’t about defending yourself in the moment of attack.  You have the right to self-defense.  This is about the aftermath: now what? Why did God let a bad thing happen?

    Weak people fall apart and lash out at everyone around them as they disintegrate.  For a brief moment, they enjoy an experience of power: the power to destroy.  There’s something appealing about power, even when you know it’s fleeting, even when you know it’s hateful.  The Church calls this appeal the glamor of evil.  As Christians we reject it, along with Satan and all his works.

    On the other hand, strong people hold themselves together, hold on to what they know is good and hold out for what they know is right.  Sometimes they hang on by their fingernails.  As Christians this is the character we aspire to, and God knows it’s hard.  Sometimes the path leads straight up the face of a cliff.

    Why does God let bad things happen? You can be on the right path and still fall and get hurt.  Getting hurt doesn’t mean that God is against you.  It means that there’s an inherent risk to living at all.  You were thrust into existence without being consulted.  But now that you’re here, you’re free to venture your all for the good.  The promise of Christ is that ultimately your venture will pay off.  Death is not the end.

    People who have only this world to live for figure that nothing they do matters.  But the Christian message is that everything you do matters, even the tiny things.  For instance, even a small gesture of kindness counts in the sight of God.  He is always at work everywhere for good, and he invites you to participate in that work, wherever you are, whoever you are.

    But you are free to reject his offer.  You can rage against your Creator.  He allowed evil into this world, and now you can increase the sum of evil.

    However, know that if you choose for what is right and true and good, God is on your side, even if everything else in the universe is against you.  And he promises that the pain will last only as long as this life.  Moreover, you will emerge into peace for eternity.

    Meanwhile, there’s everything we have to face in this moment in time.  Sometimes we can’t understand why God does what he does.  Why does he hurt us?  Why make us stay in place in a corner with a cone around our necks?  We didn’t do anything wrong!  So heave a big sigh and wait: maybe something good will come along next.

    Don’t fret.  Don’t chew on your hurt and make it worse.  Instead, save your energy for the good you can do.  If the path before you is clear, and if you have the strength, get up every day and keep going.  Be patient.  Bear up.  There’s no quick fix to any killer problem, and you will encounter many problems along the way.

    Most importantly, when you’ve honestly done everything you can do, then stand firm and wait for God himself to act on your behalf. If you can’t stand up anymore, sit down.  If even sitting up is too much, lie still and be who you are where you are.  There’s a time to let people who love you take care of you. You’re not alone in this.  Fix sad eyes on your Maker.  Remain alert to his call.

    An injury can happen in an instant.  The healing takes a long, long time.  It saps all the strength you’ve got. Why does God let bad things happen?

    We don’t understand why yet. Healing is your job now.  We want you back.

     

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  • Fear Of The Lord

    The first step of humility, then, is that a man keeps the fear of God always before his eyes and never forgets it. Psalm 36:1  (Rule of St. Benedict 7.10)

    The practice of humility isn’t so daunting once you realize that it’s not about what other people think of you.  It’s about your existence.

    The first step in this practice is elemental.  Over and over in Scripture, the fear of God is recommended to us as beneficial to our well-being:

    Happy is everyone who fears the Lord, who walks in his ways.

    You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands; you shall be happy, and it shall go well with you.

    Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your children will be like olive shoots around your table.

    Thus shall the man be blessed who fears the Lord.  Psalm 128:1-4

    Immediately it becomes clear that if your idea of happiness is winning the jackpot in Vegas, you’ve got the wrong God here.  The God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the psalmists and prophets, St. Benedict and all the saints of the Church will bless you with a domestic life and a living wage.  God’s idea of happiness for his favorite creatures is not idleness, but satisfying work; not luxury, but abundance; not sexual adventures, but family.

    That’s the carrot.  But in case the carrot doesn’t motivate you, there’s also a stick.  When St. Benedict echoes the psalmist in proclaiming the fear of the Lord, he’s not talking about an intellectual assent to a coherent philosophical proposition.  He stands with all the other prophets in proclaiming that God is a Person.  And this Person holds each human being accountable for every free action.  God will punish those who willfully disobey his commands.  God will reward those who attempt to obey him.  Both the punishment and the reward will endure forever, once we’ve completed our journey through time.  So it is scary.  You’re supposed to feel a thrill of terror.

    But as always in this religion, there’s a paradox.  For those who don’t deserve much of anything, there is infinite mercy, if you’re humble enough to accept mercy.

    The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life Proverbs 14:27 

    The metaphor evokes fresh water in the desert.  On barren cliffs green things flourish.  How can this be?  A seed drifting on the wind lodged in a crack and sensed that it was time to send forth a tiny root.  Just so, the fear of the Lord is the mysterious spiritual sense that God endows his creatures with, enabling them to recognize his presence and to turn to him as the source of their vitality.

    Does it have to be fear?  Fear isn’t nice.  We’ve edited it out of religion.  But then again, we’ll pay money to feel it in a horror flick or on a roller coaster.  If it’s so bad, why do nice people seek it out and pay for it?

    Because we are alive.  Only living creatures can feel fear.  When we feel fear, we also feel alive, because we’re viscerally aware of a threat to our existence.

    The barren rock that never lived cannot fear losing the life it never had.  And people who’ve never felt alive can’t fear the loss of what they’ve never known.  They become indifferent to annihilation, their own and other people’s.  In interactions with others, these petrified souls exhibit a delusion of impunity.  Their moral indifference extends from their spiritual aridity. They’re untouchable, or so they imagine.  This is not a sign of progress or of superiority.  It’s a sign of something missing.

    The fear of God is the first step of humility, because humility is the root that aligns us in the proper posture with respect to our creator, so that we’re able to draw life from him.  We recognize our dependence on the one who called us into being.  We acknowledge the presence of the one who sustains everything at every moment.  And we send out at first just a tiny filament towards him, but as we grow and thrive, this will become a tough root mass that attaches us firmly to the region of our life source.

    What about the trouble that comes to everyone?  The trouble you face in this world is not the punishment of God.  The trouble you face now is what you have to get through on the way to your reward.  Now is the struggle of life in the desert.  Later is the rest at the oasis.

    St. Paul tells us that even if everything in the universe conspires against us–death, life, angels, demons, the present, the future, nature, culture, hurricanes, floods–God is still on our side, through it all, as long as we’re trying to do the right thing (Romans 8: 1-39).  Our struggle toward goodness through harsh surroundings shows that we are vital after all.

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