Monastic of the Day!

(Not him, obviously. But weren't the 80s ghastly, though?
Leggings and miniskirts, oh my.
And a headband, no less!)

In what seems to be becoming a regular feature here, today's featured religious* is the Venerable Mère Marie de l'Incarnation, 1599-1672, who started out this life in Tours and departed it in an Ursuline convent in New France, which is alot like Québec only with a great deal fewer Frites-Alors, much less poutine, and not even close to as much or as many habitant and habitants.

Both sides of my family, the French ones and the English ones, came over to North America early. This could mean they were desperate, adventurous, bored, reckless, in danger of incarceration, excessively fond of lengthy boat travel, or all these in varying measures. I know a lot about the English side: they fought in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars and sent letters telling about this. I know less about the earliest French arrivals, and I suspect it is because they are the ones who gave the women in our family the facial hair, and the less known about them, the less rancour towards the dead will arise. Still, though, I love the history of Québec/New France/Nouvelle France as much as I love that of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, so while rummaging around online for stuff about the former, I was reminded of the story of the Filles du Roi, in which the above Mother Marie played a part.

(The Roi Whose Filles We're Talking About.
Somehow this style never caught on in Trois-Rivières.
They were still probably wearing headbands.)

Firstly, it should be said that Filles du Roi are not at all the same as filles de joie, who figured in earlier posts and had far better wardrobes, not to mention restaurant choices, even after Escoffier, than the habitants of the Canadian wilderness.

(As you can see from the rug and the furniture
in this painting by honorary Canadian Cornelius Krieghoff,
imported spouses were also forced to endure shopping at Ikea, which was
even more horrific when Karl XI

was in charge of Sweden
than it is now.)

Unlike filles de joie, Filles du Roi were not career women; their job - once they moved to the New World and found a husband (which tended to happen within a month or so after disembarkation) - was to be a wife and mother, which, alongside religious and camp-follower, was one of the three main career trajectories available to women at the time. Despite the arduous passage across the Atlantic, New Franceian Hausfrau could well have seemed the middle-ground option for marriageable girls with a moderate, though not overweening, sense of adventure and a similarly underwhelming set of marriage prospects.

The Filles du Roi were recruited and imported from 1663 to 1673, beginning in northern cities like Paris, Rouen, and New Rochelle. The purpose of the programme was to populate the colony, which would eventually provide new soldiers to defend France's holdings against Iroquois and English alike. Moreover, having a wife, family, house, land - not to mention livestock, two barrels of salted meat, and dowry from the King - would in theory serve to keep more of the colony's male population where they were instead of following the trend of leaving New France to return home after their three years of service. Though there were only 700, or 852, or 1000 women shipped in during those years, the French population of New France was itself only about 2500 in 1663 (as contrasted with English North America, which already had 100,000 inhabitants), with only 1 percent of New France territory being used by the settlers, so the resulting marriages and considerable progeny (you only got a 300-livre annual pension if you stalled at 10 children, but 400 if you made it past a clean dozen) could indeed eventually constitute a relatively significant bulwark against English encroachment once the children reached soldiering age. In 1671 alone, about 700 babies were born to the new families, and by the end of the ten-year importation of Filles du Roi, the sex ratio in Nouvelle France was more or less even. By 1754, at the start of the Seven Years' War, or the Fourth Intercolonial War, or the Guerre de la Conquête, or the 'French and Indian War,' the 'Indians' at least had some Frenchmen to fight alongside them.

All that notwithstanding.



Some of the girls were not as ready for the privations of Canadian homesteading as were others. They got a quick remedial education in whatever practical domestic arts they lacked while awaiting introduction to suitable suitors, plus a ration of pins, needles, thread, taffeta, and scissors among other things. They did not, however, receive a pair of Sorels or experience in wood-chopping or fence-building. Just as the Filles preferred garçons who already had une habitation set up and ready for move-in (look, I love the Canadiens as much as you do and, honestly, probably more so, but that really is the boring reason they're called The Habs: steady settlers with land and a cabin. Homesteaders. Pea soup. Stability and stoicism, not high-sticking), the male colonists were in need more of a sturdy helpmeet than a piano-playing bourgeoise.

Enter Marie Guyart the Ursuline.

(And also another entry, since this one got away from me.)


*And for the irreligious among you, 'religious' in the nominative way is different than the adjectival version. Flat-earthers, for example, or snake-charming charismatics, no matter how ardent their faith in their faith, would only be adjectivally religious, i.e., religious people, a religious population, rather than 'a religious' like Mother Marie, who took vows/joined an order/consecrated her life. It's not biased language, I assure you, and it certainly doesn't prove the earth isn't flat.

Hopeless Causes, Claretians, and Charisms

'La caridad me urge, me impele, me obliga a gritar.' -St. Antonio Maria Claret

'You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.' - St. Bernard of Clairvaux

'To reach something good it is very useful to have gone astray, and thus acquire experience.' - St. Teresa of Avila

'Arm yourself with prayer rather than a sword; wear humility rather than fine clothes.' - St. Dominic



With all that being said, in regards to my statement in the last post about there being no one-fits-all spirituality, I do not mean to say that some truths cannot be universal, nor either that admiring and utilizing elements of other traditions is inherently wrong or fatuous. But trading one inadequately-investigated tradition for superficial adherence to another, one set of misapprehended truths for another yet more confusing system, is every bit as goofy as Chesterton makes it sound. Familiarity is a no more sufficient basis for renouncing a spiritual tradition than it is for divorcing a spouse or vowing never again to read Dostoevsky or eat ice cream.

Augustine defended his use of Plotinus by likening it to the Jews taking the gold out of Egypt, and varied things from different sources may have especial resonance to individual seekers. What is necessary when confronted with all these sparkling jewels is a determined refusal either to make lead out of them or to appropriate what seems convenient or commonsensical while gravely mistaking its essence.

In that vein, there are as many different spiritualities available within Catholicism as there are Catholics. John Dunne, John Dear, John Main, and the fourteenth-century Dominican John Tauler have not only the same name but a shared focus on contemplation and meditation that would not be entirely unfamiliar to a real Buddhist. Martin de Porres, Vincent de Paul, Francis of Assisi, Oscar Romero, Dorothy Day, Antonio Claret, Cesar Chavez, Jean Vanier, and Simone Weil can give anyone a good start who wishes he could combine his love of the poor and the suffering with his love of God.

And this is where the saints come in. There are two primary ways to look at the saints. One is as Friends of God. They did so well in this lifetime that they have God's ear in the next, so while you are praying to God directly that the Red Sox please, please, please take the pennant this time, you can also suggest to St. Jude that this may be the sort of hopeless case worthy of his attention as an advocate. If you are struggling in school, you can ask a brilliant scholar like Aquinas to help you along, or you can petition someone who battled the same challenges to at least give you the courage to keep plugging away diligently.

The other way to see them is as Heroes for Grownups. Saints can indeed be intimidating: they were saints, after all, and we are probably not. But each is as memorable for what he or she overcame as for what s/he accomplished, and meditating on those struggles is often where we can gain the most. They were also individuals, with distinct tendencies and temperaments, walking very different paths toward union, and just as we feel greater sympathy toward particular people we meet in daily life, so, too, will different saints' stories seem more or less apropos of our own journeys, strivings, and weaknesses.

I don't know why people are scared of saints. I think particularly if we refuse to idolize them, to make them into something they were not (i.e., perfect), we can see in their examples how far a small, flawed, and eminently human being - possibly a human being who shared some of our own fears and failures - can get in this life by not letting those fears and weaknesses surmount him.

More from our Correspondent in Geneva

Well, very excitingly (to me, anyway) today is St. Jane Frances de Chantal's day. It is exciting to me not just because I love her and her story, but because also this not only brings us back to Savoy (yikes! who would have thought!) and Geneva and all its Calvinists, and gets back to that issue of historicity that I snarkily mentioned a few posts back. Which I'll get to a few lines down, or a few posts down the road, but first: St. Jane Frances, or Ste. Jeanne Françoise, if you like your French names to stay in French.


She is sort of another St. Francis' St. Clare: his student, his peer, his friend, his spiritual companion, and his travel partner on a long and profound journey. This time, it is a François-Francis instead of a Francesco one, the sixteenth century instead of the thirteenth, the Renaissance rather than the Middle Ages, and a Francis born of Savoyard nobility rather than of wealthy Umbrian merchants. This Francis, Francis de Sales, was a carefree and competent student, then lawyer, and then a bishop, rather than an apathetic student turned playboy-dandy turned mendicant, and before joining and guiding Jane Frances on her spiritual journey, he set out like Francis of Assisi on a way of life quite unlike that his family had intended for him, turning his back on his wealth like Francis, but going over to Geneva to convert Calvinists à la St. Dominic instead of founding an order à la the Franciscan Francis.


Both St. Francis de Sales' and St. Jane Frances' stories are stories of waiting. Francis felt a strong vocation before he went to law school, but he waited and waited, wanting to make sure it was truly a vocation rather than his ego leading him. St. Jane was a young devout widow with children when she felt overcome with a desire to serve God more fully. When Jane asked the now Bishop Francis to undertake her spiritual direction, he counseled her to patience: 'I had to know fully what God himself wanted. I had to be sure that everything in this should be done as though his hand had done it.' Just as he had waited for his calling and for his Calvinists, and as he would later for his new sister's convent, Francis counseled Jane again to wait when she told him of her overwhelming desire to take vows: 'Be patient until you get the wings of a dove, and then you can fly. I am very much afraid that you are a little too ardent and headlong, that you pursue too many desires rather too eagerly. Courage, my dear sister; if our will belongs to God, we ourselves are surely His.'

And this moderation was an essential element of the institute, and then order, the two founded in 1610, the Order of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin. So that religious aspirants of older age or less robust health, 'strong souls with weak bodies,' might be able to fulfill their calling, Francis and Jane dispensed with the sort of physical austerities Poor Clares and other orders endured. St. Francis advised the community's new members and superior, 'Let your humility be boundless; let it be the source of your virtues; let it be manifested in all your actions, till gentleness towards your neighbor become natural to you by force of your frequent use of it.' Later, St. Jane described the charism of the order as essentially 'a spirit of deep humility before God and of great gentleness toward our neighbor.'

This gentleness was modeled already by Jane the wife and widow as she fed the town's poor and sick, and in the very gentleness of the rule itself: St. Jane accepted into the order a woman in her eighties and those young and old women whose infirmities would have barred them from religious life were it not for the inclusiveness of Salesian spirituality and its insistence that all people, regardless of health, wealth, status, occupation, age, or education, are called to love and holiness, and that we can manifest our love in small but profound acts of mercy and compassion. As Thomas Dailey said in Praying with Francis de Sales, 'Enabled and ennobled by this love, human beings are capable of much more than might well be imagined. They are capable of living a true life of devotion in the midst of worldly pursuits. They are capable of giving birth, through faith, to a new culture of life and of love.'

Also, unlike Savonarola, Francis de Sales in The Devout Life reveals that he thought games and jokes and dancing were okay, if in moderation: 'I am inclined to say about balls what doctors say of certain articles of food, such as mushrooms and the like--the best are not good for much; but if eat them you must, at least mind that they are properly cooked,' and 'if you would dance or play rightly, it must be done as a recreation, not as a pursuit, for a brief space of time, not so as make you unfit for other things.' I like anyone who has bad things to say about mushrooms.

St. Clare round two

And, because when she had become too ill to attend Mass, St. Clare would see it on the walls of her cell, she is the patroness of television and television writers. And EWTN was founded by a Poor Clare, Mother Angelica.

St. Clare

It's St. Clare's feast day today; here is a picture of her from a manuscript of Bishop Ugolino, a reluctant but eventual full supporter of Francis' and Clare's cause for the Poor Ladies of San Damiano/Poor Clares to be a truly mendicant order. Once convinced, the then Pope Gregory IX issued a privilegium paupertatis two years after Francis' death for the fledgling order and wrote these beautiful words: 'Neither does the want of necessary things deter you from such a proposal, for the left arm of your Celestial Spouse is beneath your head to sustain the infirmity of your body, which, according to the order of charity, you have subjected to the law of the spirit. Finally, He who feeds the birds of the air and who gives the lilies of the field their raiment and their nourishment, will not leave you in want of clothing or of food until He shall come Himself to minister to you in eternity.'

Infelix Ego -

if they only hadn't stolen all those left shoes, I could have pawned them and the visor-light and made a bid!

Wow, in just the same manner of everything I think or do or feel being reduplicated in some way about 12 hours later, this time it was over on the Intentional Disciples blog, which is the blog for the Catherine of Siena Institute, which was started at Blessed Sacrament parish here in Seattle, which had a Dominican mass today, which was the Feast Day of St. Dominic - they had a quiz on whose signature is this?

It was Savonarola's, and you could buy it at auction at the moment if you were thusly disposed (and thusly endowed), and I know it was Savonarola's not just because I'm not one to forget a pretty face,



but because I have been reading about him and trying to figure out his place in early Protestantism, if there is such a place. I would say Protestantism, but excepting Lutherans I do often get the sense that many Protestant denominations take a - what? - segmented? discontinuous? disarticulated? view of Christian history, inasmuch as those inclined that way tend to see two punctuating epochs - the First/Second Covenants, and then the Reformation/now - with a large fuzzy bit in between populated by hazy robed figures undeserving of much scrutiny.

Yet even among this group there are some revered figures in medieval theology (and, admittedly, among other groups there are loads), and many of the ideas of this singular figure (who himself ended up in a bonfire, but not before being treated to the rack first by his Medici hosts) prefigured many of the Reformers' concerns. He criticized the excesses of Rome and of Orders in much the same language and to much the same level of vituperation as Reformers did - yet he also echoed the return-to-the-heart-of-Jesus'-Christianity sentiment that had resounded over and over throughout the Middle Ages. The Church eventually had all his works formally banned - but by that time they were best-sellers all over the place and being printed in areas and languages too far from Rome to control.

Anyway, if you like the asceticism of a Calvin but prefer a Florentine accent in denunciations of dancing and drink, you would love Savonarola. If you like the gist of Dante but would prefer to do away with all the needless poesy, he's your man. And if you are inclined to think that Boccaccio and Erasmus would be just fine were it not for the wit, you will find all the spleen you need but none of the humor you don't in the fiery Dominican from Florence.

Here is some of Isaias' bonfire of the vanities in Savonarola's honor. I think this is most poetic in the King James. And the Dominican New Testament translation by Francis Spencer, OP, doesn't have Isaias, for what may or may not be obvious reasons.

Moreover the LORD saith, Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet:

Therefore the LORD will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the LORD will discover their secret parts.

In that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments about their feet, and their cauls, and their round tires like the moon, The chains, and the bracelets, and the mufflers, The bonnets, and the ornaments of the legs, and the headbands, and the tablets, and the earrings, The rings, and nose jewels, The changeable suits of apparel, and the mantles, and the wimples, and the crisping pins, The glasses, and the fine linen, and the hoods, and the veils.

And it shall come to pass, that instead of sweet smell there shall be stink; and instead of a girdle a rent; and instead of well set hair baldness; and instead of a stomacher a girding of sackcloth; and burning instead of beauty.

'Humility Is Attentive Patience.'

-Simone Weil

I am entirely aware that sometimes on here when I go off on a tirade about compassion, my diction can get a bit too soaring or florid. Sometimes both, frankly, and when I get to the inestimable consequences of compassion my tone is apt to run from hortatory to incantatory through beatific and on to splenetic long before righting itself and sticking nicely to the pragmatic.

However.

My excuse is that what I am talking about is every bit as powerful as I make it seem. It is like a drug: its effects are that shocking, marked, and fast acting. And yet, most of us do not avail ourselves of it, except perhaps with those closest to us. And that stands to reason. Family members are on the one hand easier to understand than those we know less well; on the other, our hobby and pool of defendants would quickly evaporate were we to spend all our time divorcing and disinheriting our relatives. Given that fact, it makes sense at some point simply to accept that Aunt Jane always talks to much about Shih-tzus and Cousin David will probably never fully surmount his persecution complex.

Fine.

But leaving aside altruism (which we already were, anyway; admit it), it benefits every individual's own psyche to stop seeing others as failed versions of ourselves. Even if we share some similar goals - getting ahead in the company, working on our marriages, shopping less, not drinking anymore, being more involved in the community, cooking at home more often, working out again, whatever they might be - we are going at them with radically differing histories, distinct personalities, weaknesses, and strengths, and perhaps for vastly different reasons in the first place.

It was probably Thérèse of Lisieux who had this additional insight into handling difficult interactions with irritating interlocutors, particularly those whose failings seem most obvious to us, those whom we know enough about to wish instinctively to judge in their failure: Yes, maybe he did do it again -- but what about all the times he succeeded, and we weren't there, and he was too modest to gloat, or even tell us quietly of his unnoticed, private success?

I think looking at the evident weaknesses of others from that perspective is profound. We don't even need to do any uncomfortable self-inquiry to come up with something we ourselves recently struggled with, which is an equally useful but more obvious and labor-intensive strategy. We just have to acknowledge that we can't possibly know everything about another, and that that other might well be doing some rather good stuff while we're not around. And, that he might additionally have the virtue of humility, and thus even be worth emulating in that respect!

I say it is like a drug because whatever method we use to get there once we feel a sympathy with our brother and his situation, the anger dissolves just as surely as morphine kills pain. If you can imagine that someone is driving aggressively (I use driving so much because it does truly render people insane when they are trapped in their little boxes and feel so powerless about many factors and any little thing can seem a tremendous injustice) because his wife just had a baby or because he needs to throw up, you immediately lose the anger. If someone's stereo is playing crappy music too loud, it's not much of a stretch to recall that most of us were young at one time, too, and wanted to be cool and to display our coolness when possible so that it could be validated by others, as coolness, just like wit, style, or 'success,' is a cultural commodity which can only be conferred on an aspirant by the recognition of its presence by a consensus of the relevant audience. He's young, the music's bad, I'm not his target audience: so, so what? After the next light I can go back to listening to the riveting story about heirloom orchids in Florida.

I like the Thérèse suggestion because even if we were never young ourselves, and even if we can come up with absolutely no failings of our own to gain us conditional entry into some grandiose vision of the Mystical Brotherhood of Common Human Frailty, we can easily imagine that the individual tiresomely prattling on to us about the after-market package he bought for his Lexus could just have donated to the Red Cross, and is thus as short of sense as he is glucose and the blood to carry it to his brain.

'Stay me with flaggons,

Comfort me with apples: for I am sick with Love.' --Song of Songs

My good heavens. I'm reading parts of St. Bernard's commentary on the Song of Songs, and I just noticed that someone left the goofiest mean comment (anonymously) on the Barnes and Noble post. Fascinating timing, as with everything these days. Anyway, I approved it and let it in because I think it is interesting - not to mention troubling - when people are so angry that they will use any forum available to them just to get rid of one tiny piece of that venom. As though there were some literal, physical store of it, like a bank account into which and from which quantities could be put and taken. If I could spend it all, in other words, I could deplete the account and finally return to civil and friendly interactions. In emptying it I might be again made whole.

Of course it doesn't really work that way. We don't lose our anger by throwing it around as much as we can, by dishing it out to everyone who crosses our path. There isn't an actual, finite amount of it for us to shepherd or amass interest or over-limit charges on. Frankly, it builds within us the more we live in it and the more we give in to seeing the world as one filled with enemies. And unity, even in small doses, even among small groups, can seem overwhelmingly daunting when you really try to absorb the fact that even the genuine and good-willed still ineluctably see the world only through one pair of eyes. Still, telling strangers to go kill themselves does seem a bit extreme in the other direction. Even if the stranger does dislike 80s pop icons Billy Joel and Elton John.

And I think it is obvious that there is so much more loneliness and anomie in the world now than was ever even possible before. People are disconnected, often isolated much of the time -- and how can I see someone as my brother when I haven't even met him? Maybe it is a leap, but equally so is seeing the stranger as the enemy and reacting in that manner.

I was actually going to write something about this the other day, but I couldn't find a way to make it not sappy. With Mr./Ms. Anonymous as inspiration, however, I can give it a try. My point was going to be about the fairly amazing day-to-day consequences of vigorously trying to keep love and respect in the forefront when dealing with other people. Some of us believe a reward will come in the next stage of life if we treat others well in this one, but we can choose to have a very different sort of life right here by opening up our hearts now and trying to act out of love.

I'm not even referring to any grandiose schemes, or recognizable 'acts of mercy' per se. Just being nice, basically. Not taking your frustration with a bad sleep into your interaction with the bank teller. Stopping for every pedestrian. Letting the right-turn guy merge without resistance. Asking the waiter where he got his watch, the neighbor how his rebuilt Triumph is coming. Sending an email to a store manager because the clerk was extra helpful. Refusing to tailgate the slow old lady in the Lincoln. And then actually thinking about why it is old ladies drive slowly, and imagining what your own world will be like when you yourself are eighty.

This is where it gets sappy, and I don't have the skill to make it otherwise. The fact is, if you take just one day of assiduously being nice to everyone you encounter, it will be an amazing day for you. If when someone goes on about something in a way that seems stupid, or excessive, or so alien to your own understanding, you might genuinely try to read what is behind it, why that person needs to say it, and is saying it in that particular way - not only will your blood pressure drop and you stop rolling your eyes, but you will know more about yourself as well as the other person. You will also have the additional opportunity to think about why you were given that experience at that time, and thus the chance to take even more from it. And you will come home at the end of the day satisfied and full and happy, having had twenty or thirty truly human, truly pleasant and enriching encounters with other people. Sappy, perhaps, but completely true!

Anyway, here is one pretty gorgeous thing St. Bernard had to say about love, which is far better than anything I could hope to write and not sappy in the slightest:

'Love is sufficient of itself, it gives pleasure by itself and because of itself. It is its own merit, its own reward. Love looks for no cause outside itself, no effect beyond itself. Its profit lies in its practice. I love because I love, I love that I may love. Love is a great thing so long as it continually returns to its fountainhead, flows back to its source, always drawing from there the water which constantly replenishes it.'

'There is something in humility

which strangely exalts the heart.' -St. Augustine

Just to bring humility, tolerance, and the common limits of our human understanding more fully into this rant about arrogance, bigotry, and factionalism, here is a quote about science and religion from turn-of-the(other)-century Muslim scholar Mustafa al-Maraghi. I want to use a Muslim because about as many Christians as atheists consider them unschooled and indelicate of thought, and also because the Muslim's relationship to the Qur'an as revealed rather than written, unchanging, untranslatable, and truly as the Word Inlibrate, is of a quite different order from other traditions' belief in and veneration for their own holy books. (In other words, I guess I conceive of this as the strong form of the argument to which other traditions could likewise accede in moderated form ?)

'True religion cannot conflict with truth, and when we are positively convinced of the truth of any scientific remark which seems to be incompatible with Islam, this is only because we do not understand correctly the Qur'an and the traditions. In our religion, we possess a universal teaching which declares that, when an apodeictic truth contradicts a revealed text, we have to interpret the text allegorically.'

Such a stance wisely refuses to conflate a holy book with a science text, to demand from one what it can never give and what, moreover, the other was explicitly designed to provide. It also places what might be an unsettling responsibility on the reader to read his book as well as the natural world carefully -- but this should be unsettling only if you find using rationality in your pursuit of wisdom and truth ignoble. For me, it points again to the need to recognize our limitations: there is much that each of us will never understand in this lifetime. Even if you don't believe there is one who is omniscient, it is pretty clear that humans are not. And a stinky-type atheist might do well to recognize that he is as limited in his understand as both the stinky and the thinky believers.

'Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past

Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus' --T.S. Eliot

So, on the day after the prudential judgment talk, while Fr. Fones was still at Blessed Sacrament (where you can attend a real live Dominican Rite Mass on 8.8.8), when I cornered him (which is what I do - when I can muster the courage, which is most of the time these days - with anyone religious or otherwise who is living out his or her vocation), he brought up Mother Teresa's view of those she served: that what she saw was the suffering and wounded Christ in each and every one of them.

She said it numerous times to different people, as that was precisely what compelled her to do what she did. But the version it brought to my mind was when a journalist asked her if she didn't have an ethical problem, or wasn't in some way in conflict with her faith, serving those who were dying of AIDS. Mother Teresa said something about not even understanding what he meant, and repeated that all she saw was the suffering Christ.

And a couple different aspects of that interaction really strike me as relevant to issues we face when addressing the problems of poverty and homelessness. One thing that is just terribly sad is that the reporter (I don't recall at all if it was a secular or religious reporter, big-time, small-town, male, female, or anything else) appears to be trying to create two classes, to separate himself and Teresa in their righteousness on the one hand from the dying sinner on the other. (Again, no idea whether he was really feeling that, or just playing devil's advocate to get a good quote, or perhaps even a gay man himself really hoping she was indeed as loving as he wanted to believe.)

The other issue it brought to my mind was how we look at 'those sorts of people' in general. I think very, very few, even among believers in Christ, manage to see glimpses of Him in the wretched of the earth. Fine: very few of us are saints, so that stands to reason. But we tend not even to see ourselves in them! That should be a much easier leap - and yet we so frequently see their suffering as proof not of our unity, shared longings, and common fears, but as clear signs of the gulf between us. To their fallenness we contrast our responsible jobs; to their lack of restraint we contrast our calm demeanor and good relations with coworkers; against their battles with addiction and petty crime we recall our sober investment practices and our determined, successful New Year's Weight-Loss Resolutions.

But I will repeat that any one of us is a finite number of tragedies away from our own version of just that level of despair. Some of us are broken more easily, some require decades of horror and abuse in order finally to abandon hope. And we can never know what it would take until we, too, are there ourselves. Just as the invisibles on the street didn't know. Just as they never hoped for the day when their suffering would be so inconsequential that most people wouldn't even see it as suffering, but justice, judgment - or simply an inconvenience.

I am not a pessimistic person, but I see a few bad winters ahead. With gas, electricity, and heating prices rising, the elderly in many places are not going to be able to heat their homes. With the mortgage crisis continuing, more families will be displaced. With food prices rising along with all other bills, contributions to already overtaxed food banks are diminishing - and thus, so, too, will access. My 'positive' spin on my fears is that, with more 'normal' people finding themselves on the margins, it may become easier for the other normal people to begin to see poverty not as a moral failing or a vice but a complex state of affairs brought on by many factors. Perhaps the struggling banks and airlines and weak dollar could be held up to the sceptical as examples that bad things can indeed happen to good people (well, corporate 'persons,' at any rate). Perhaps a negative $200,000 downturn in the value of one citizen's home could serve as testimony that if external conditions could affect one life so dramatically, they or a different set of circumstances might well be able to operate in a similarly striking fashion elsewhere.

In other words, I am hoping that all the nastiness that is still to come will help people to realize it could happen here, and it could happen now, and it could happen to me. Maybe for one person it will take a job loss, for someone else that and the loss of home, too, and for the very strong maybe no job, no house, a DUI conviction and a departing spouse. But if Mother Teresa could pray for years with loneliness and despair in her heart, I think many, many people in the coming years will receive the gift of brokenness. I hope it helps them see the humanity, and the divine, in the rest of the wounded.

Avalokitesvara Meets Aristotle, or Metta in the Modern World

The other night we were talking about the Fifth Commandment. As with everything else, Catholics have a rich understanding of the larger meaning of this rule. One direction it got me thinking, since it has always been the focus of my own spiritual path, is about compassion, or gentleness, or love, as one's abiding principle. Though this is not a specifically Catholic position, there is room for it within orthodoxy. I can believe the Church's position on just war, for example, but in searching my own conscience find no examples in history or current events in which this doctrine has been put into action.

But sticking (at least for the moment) to absolute orthodoxy, within the Catechism itself the Commandment's proscription against murder is understood to extend to anger. Anger construed in its active sense as wishing another ill is, I think, fairly obviously the opposite of charity/caritas, which is itself the active version of love or, viewed differently, the inevitable fruit of compassion. In this view, there is some transactional quality behind even the impulse to charity, inasmuch as it would seem to me that, lacking the ability to feel the other's position, being therefore unable genuinely to embrace empathy or compassion, there is no soil for mercy or charity to grow in. It is not simply a matter of 'If A then B,' which is, if you believe it, rather a lot by itself, making charity not merely a result but an inextricable concomitant of compassion and love. It is as well the understanding that 'If not A then not B,' -- and 'If not B then clearly not A.'

In this framework, my good works evidence my love, and lack of love, by contrast, confers a quite different meaning on ostensible works of charity. I argued tonight that once someone internalizes this comprehensive compassion there are certain acts that the person will never be able to do, there are certain choices that will never again have to be made. It is a different way of being, a different way of interacting with the world. If one has reached the point of being able to see the Divine, the Buddha-nature - or in Quaker terms, the Inner Light - within others, the point of being able readily to relate to another's suffering, it is not a matter of choosing not to strike. Certain reactions do not arise, and therefore certain responses are precluded a priori. They are precluded unconsciously, actually, since the mind does not have to go yet again to the point of laboring intellectually over a matter which was in fact long ago decided.



And this is all very pressing to me, given my own particular road of spiritual development. On my path, compassion, tolerance, and gentleness have always seemed the most necessary bedrock, the attributes without which other virtues are either meaningless or impossible. Moreover, in order to attain those three, one must start with the very first stone, which is humility. One cannot understand the struggles of another, let alone wish to ease the other's suffering, if he cannot first comprehend - viscerally, completely, in the profoundest depths of his soul - the truth of 'there but for the grace of God go I.'

My view is simple: there is no species of human suffering that is the province only of one type of human. The paths that lead to suffering are as diverse as the people who choose them and who are thrust into them, but in the end, sadness, loneliness, and fear are experienced as the same thing by us all, at whatever age, in whatever country, with whatever level of education or wealth. Whatever someone else is feeling, the specifics of his or her situation notwithstanding, is something each of us has, will, or can feel ourselves.

It is easier to feel compassion and thus be giving when the stakes are low, when the issue is something like rude and aggressive driving, or getting overcharged by a mechanic, than when it involves actual hatred or violence -- but that is where the principle is proven. That is where a person either lives his truth or renounces the core of his beliefs. Responding calmly to mild stress is one thing; very, very, very few of us even consider running over pedestrians on a crosswalk because they are making us late for a business meeting. In situations of real violence or deliberate victimization, literally turning the other cheek is a significantly deeper commitment.

One of the things I take greatest comfort in within Catholic spirituality is the huge emphasis laid on individual discernment, on prudent use of one's own conscience to determine the correct path in novel circumstances. This is likewise one of the things I most respect about the Friends; both share a belief that with prayer and devout listening we have it within ourselves to hear God's will, an amazing God-given power of judgment. In Catholicism, obviously there is more dogma and doctrine than with the Friends, but if after the best use I can make of my conscience I find in that something I cannot fully accept, or one element, such as mercy, the necessity of which outshines all other imperatives, that is between God and me, so long as I don't portray my actions as being representative of all official Church teaching.

And that is a tremendous gift of spiritual liberty, borne of a deep respect for the many ways we in our wondrous diversity can inhabit God's Word. If this catholicity of gifts and spiritualities were not recognized, then in a manner of speaking either the Carthusians or the Franciscans would have to be 'wrong.' Either the noble soldier serving his country or the grandmother in the Peace and Justice Ministry would be a heretic, and somebody or other would have to chuck either the thinky Chesterton, the silent John Main, or the loving Jean Vanier off the proverbial Train to Glory. I'm glad we get to keep them all!