A Burning Clarity

I sit in my office, brimming with excitement and anticipation for a future never contemplated, never entertained, never thought possible. It is amazing when one’s life goes beyond simply “making sense” to “being so very clear.” The difference between sensibility and clarity is a matter of degree—the former simply being a case of a logical, acceptable and progressive trajectory; the latter being an absolute understanding of where past, present and future are seamlessly coming together. This clarity is a witness to a life not accidentally constructed or whimsically contrived, but purposefully unified where all events rise and converge into the culmination and consummation of the very moment which embodies the future. I had one of these moments today. When I saw my life not as some random set of experiences, but a meaningful narrative with an intricate, elaborate plot leading to the current chapter where the story doesn’t just make sense, but perfect sense. It is an amazing high when these moments occur. Today was perfect because of it. I was able to dream and discover today that these dreams are actually in reach. What I discovered was not a particular epiphany, but it was an insight whose revelation will undoubtedly affect the course of my life—regardless of the response. I saw my life’s unity today. I will not forget it. It was clear. It was a blessing to come to know toward what one’s life can be directed and how all that one has done will be called upon for that task. We are in God’s hands, as it has been made clear to me today. And those hands are ever mindful of an ordered plan—“God draws straight with crooked lines.” My life has been a conglomeration of seeming miscues, spontaneous tangents, random extraordinary opportunities and blessings. It has plotted me in so many places. And today, despite its sporadic nature, its crooked path, I saw the straightness that God’s Hand has wrought for my life. The happiness that it brings is indescribable. At best, I can only say that I am on fire. Praise Him!

Joy is Selfish...

One of the most pivotal and formative writings for me, personally, comes from Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s work "Wind, Sand, and Stars." In this volume he writes, “to be a man is, precisely, to be responsible.” While this doesn’t seem harmful (in fact, laudable) to promote, it has the ability to be intemperately used. I know I have misused it. Duty and commitment are not whimsical and silly things, but they are also not the only things. This we must remember. To be a man does mean being responsible, but it also means being more.

And what more ought we seek to be? Well, quite frankly, simply more. We need to be more. Each of us. This begins as a personal task for the person for their own sake. Yet this Christian’s mind sometimes gets too caught up in the virtue of responsibility that it forgets that it is not the only virtue. This is what leads people to becoming Stoic. They neglect to go beyond rampant duty toward the ecstasy of joy. This Stoic formation is driven by duty’s tendency to demand an absolute selflessness which perceives any self-accommodation as vice. I am certainly guilty of this. When this practice becomes habit, the joys of life become moments of personal shame—for we view the joy as an indulgence which translates into selfishness.

This rabid selflessness, however, becomes more self-destructive than self-promoting. As Christians we are to be at peace, not constantly warring with ourselves (yet not constantly passive with ourselves, either). G.K. Chesterton reminds us that duty is not the exclusive mark of a man when he writes, “Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial.” We must be responsible, but we, too, mustn’t forget to foster joy within ourselves. Certainly this is a selfish indulgence, but this does not make it an evil. The evil is a question of the motives for the indulgence. Christians are not called to be selfless, but rather, self-giving. And this becomes a critical distinction, I believe.

The Lumen Gentium reads:

“While man extends his power in every direction, he does not always succeed in
subjecting it to his own welfare. Striving to penetrate farther into the deeper
recesses of his own mind, he frequently appears more unsure of himself…Man
painstakingly searches for a better world, without working with equal zeal for
the betterment of his own spirit.”

From this, we realize: a) our own welfare is not to be ignored; b) man’s power is meant to be directed toward his own welfare; and c) this personal welfare consists in bettering his own spirit. Selfish? Well, yes. Evil? Vice? Absolutely not. Why? Well, it seems to me that a person’s endeavoring for personal growth that brings moments of sheer joy can’t be wrong simply because it is personal and/or joyful. The question of evil and vice is not a question of self-promotion, but rather a question of absolute self-preservation. Why do we build ourselves up? What is the purpose? These answers will dictate the appropriateness of the selfish act.

The Christian life calls us to kenosis. If your body is a cesspool, kenosis (like loving a friend) is not all that difficult to do. Nor is it all that beneficial to the formation of God’s Kingdom. If your body is truly a well-kept temple, full of joy and love and vibrancy, then your gift of self suddenly becomes something awesome and grand. This is not meant to promote Rand’s premise of the virtue of selfishness, but precisely the opposite. It is a call to find joy in life—to take care to find joy and foster it in our lives even if it means focusing on ourselves sometimes. Our lives were meant to be enjoyed. The joy we experience could well be an indwelling of God within us. And through that joy God may be emanated into the world. We foster it to give it. We build up ourselves so that when we are called to surrender ourselves that we might truly be a useful gift for God’s Kingdom.

If joy is a fundamental nature of humanity, then it needs little justification. It might be well to ask “Why?” simply for its sake, but know that any answer will suffice. We needn’t articulate reasons for wanting to be happy, to love, to experience joy. We must simply resolve to do it, fully and unreservedly. It is selfish. But is it self-preserving? Will you reflect the happiness, love, and joy to another? To the world? Will you make of your well-formed self a gift to others? If, yes, then reasons be damned. Just feel. Acorns do not reason themselves into great oaks. They simply react and respond, being at the same time docile and determined. Acorns grow in a very self-promoting way. But they bear fruit which they share with the world and glorify God by becoming the more that they can be. Thus, their selfishness is not in vain; rather, for the world. We must love ourselves if we are to love the world. That’s what measures the very value of the gift-of-self we hope to make. Joy-filled lives brimming with potential are the stuff kenosis lives for—look at Christ (he was no slouch). Find joy to share joy. Find love to share love. Care about yourself that others might care to accept your personal sacrifice for them. Joy is selfish. Congratulations on being a human! Ain’t it great! Now, share yourself with God and neighbor.

“Praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live.” G.K.C.

Hope is Charity's Teacher

This weekend I had the privilege of speaking with Knoxville Catholic High School students about how to “Be More.” Inevitably I leaned on my old friends Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas to speak to these young people about what it means to be a “thing.” Equipped with an acorn and the image of an oak tree, I proceeded to demonstrate the dual nature of all things as having both act and potency. It is an amazing thing to look into a perplexed and captivated high school student’s eyes when you are traversing new territory with them. I love thinking. I love seeing other people think. For a moment it makes us aware of another’s soul. Perhaps the best combination is when we think together—for it is then we know our souls are not venturing into the great unknown alone. That is the benefit of the Church, the Communion of the Saints; indeed, it is as a beloved professor once told me, “Never do theology alone. It will only turn out bad for you and God.”

As I was speaking to these young people about sanctification I used the familiar process from St. Paul: faith, hope, and charity. We begin all conversion by faith. We must first believe. Then we must truly believe in the promise of that belief—trusting totally in God’s Providence to provide the elements our faith espouses. Only then can we engage in great acts of charity. Only then. You see, I think most of us, at least myself, want so badly to change the world that we get in too big a hurry. We want to go from acorn to oak, from faith to charity, and just skip all the intermediate steps. While the world may see this impatience as admirable, it actually demonstrates a certain spiritual decay. How are we to love the world until we trust in God’s love? Whose love are we loving the world with? It was at this point in my presentation that I felt my own words convicting and convincing myself.

Hope is not one of my strong suits. Hope is the virtue that asks us to relinquish ourselves to the strength of God exclusively; to commit ourselves to the total vulnerability of His Will. It is the theological virtue that demands the most patience—it asks us not for a simple ascent to a set of truths or to a certain set of actions. Instead, it asks us for a series of inactions—it asks us for our time to be put to God’s use, to prayer, to trust, to surrender. Recent events in my life have forced me to reconcile my lack of hope in life. It is easy to disguise holiness through strong faith and what seem to be acts of charity. But without hope no work can be charitable. The difference between a charitable work and a good work is the presence of God’s Love. Hope is the only way we come to personally know God’s Love; and without that knowledge we have nothing to offer a situation but manipulation, at best.

The journey toward hope is not easy. It is actually very unsettling. Hoping becomes what Chesterton describes in his story The Man Who Was Thursday as “ the sensation that the cosmos had turned exactly upside down, that all trees were growing downwards and that all stars were under [Syme’s] feet. Then came the opposite conviction. For the last twenty-four hours the cosmos had really been turned upside down.” You see, in our pride, we see the world as we wish—we want our feet on the ground because we believe that it is there that we possess the control. We are happy being in a world where upwards is the way to go, for it is then we can pick the degree and trajectory of the climb. Yet this is not reality. Reality is that all is under the Providence and control of God. We are not happily seated by gravity, but levitating by God’s Grace. Our footholds are the Heavens. “All men are hanging on the mercy of God,” as Chesterton writes in another work. Hope is accepting this view. It refuses the comforts of the prevailing worldly paradigm. All is not as it seems, yet all will be well. Because God is in control. This is hope. And this is, like many other things Christ demands of us, a “hard teaching” (John 6:60).

There is a great bumper-sticker that reads, “Jesus is my co-pilot.” I’ve heard it said that if Jesus is your co-pilot, you ought switch seats with Him. We must give ourselves up. We must decrease that He may increase. For it is Christ that will make all things good, right, and well. Not us. It is He who loves supremely. Thus, if it is charity we seek to do, why imagine ourselves capable? Let Christ do it! Hope is this process of shrinking our will, our egos, our pride. The promises of Christ that we pray to be made worthy of derive from a docility that only the selfless and Christ-centered exhibit. We are worthy when we are willing to say, “Yes!” or “Do it unto me according to thy Word.” We love only when we have stopped being ourselves and let Christ love us and love the world through us. Acorns only become oak trees by shedding themselves of the security of their shells. Only by letting the soil influence them, by letting the rain invade their interior, by bursting forth into an unknown, uncertain world and trusting they find the Light, the acorn shows us the glory and exaltation of the thing.

Learning to hope is capsizing and captivating. It will rock your world because your world must be rocked. God will shake all things away until only He the unshakable remains (Heb. 12:26-27). Hoping is Charity’s teacher. It teaches us what love is by showing us how to trust in God’s Love. When we come to know this we are certain and secure in the greatest Love. From there we know how to share and what to share and know not to count the costs; for Hope teaches us that despite it all, God’s Love is real and that it will remain evermore. As we learn to Hope we learn what it means to be loved. In Charity we learn to love. Faith merely teaches us to know that God is love without the experience of it. Hope is so vital because it takes us from the theoretical nature of faith to the personal testimony of Hope. As a heroine of mine, Flannery O’Connor once wrote, “Abstractions, formulas, laws will not do here. We have to have stories. It takes a story to make a story. It takes a story of mythic dimensions; one which belongs to everybody; one in which everybody is able to recognize the hand of God and imagine its descent upon himself. Our response to life is different if we have been taught only a definition of faith than it is if we have trembled with Abraham as he held the knife over Isaac.” The problem with stories is they take time; they involve intricate plots, character development, awkward settings and scenarios. But it is an essential stage toward the pathway to Charity.

Oak trees don’t just appear ex nihilo. They are the product of docility to the elements of God’s creative power. No acorn lasts—if it refuses to take root, it will inevitably rot or be gobbled up by a squirrel. The course of human life begins at faith, then demands the metamorphosis of hope, only to arrive at the life of charity. There are no short-cuts to charity, for like the oak, it doesn’t simply appear ex nihilo. Charity is the product of docility to the Will of God. We only come to know it as we faithfully and hopefully forget ourselves. Faithful-do-gooders try to foil the three-step process of St. Paul by jumping the gun. Without Hope their heart is not correctly aligned to the acts they perform—which is just as important, if not more important, as the act, itself. As opposed to being faithful-do-gooders let us be hopeful-God’s-Will-doers. This will produce charitable results. It will transform our hearts. It will change our entire perspective of reality so that, despite the gloom of the situation, two things will prove possible, both of which are intricately related. We can love. And we will never despair. Never.