Our Life in the Lord Part Ten: Our Own Stretch of the Road
Salvation history ran through Eden, Sinai, and Calvary, and it now runs through ordinary kitchens, parishes, and commutes. Every one of us on this stretch faces the same question: whether we will trust the God who made us and let him lead us home. For the purpose of every human life is the purpose of the whole story: eternal rest and friendship with God, begun already in this life.
Grace First
Everything begins with a courtesy God pays us that he paid no other earthly creature. God wants us, but he won’t save us without us, for a beatitude imposed on the unwilling would be a torment. Augustine said it once for all: “God created us without us: but he did not will to save us without us” (CCC 1847). Yet, all of the willing starts with God. Grace goes before us, and the desire to turn is itself God’s gift, for the preparation of the soul for grace is already grace. The God of the lost sheep goes out ahead of us and behind us. He will not haul us up the mountain against our will: the climb is real and it is ours, the strength for every step of it is his, and both are real factors all the way up.
Grace feeds our nature, the way sap feeds a branch, and never replaces it. God builds grace on top of what he has already made; grace works with what is there. The conversions of a lifetime, the small turnings and the large ones, are God’s pruning of a vine he intends to bear fruit. One conversion finishes nobody, for the journals of the saints record a long series of decisive moments, conversion upon conversion, and comparing our own pace against somebody else’s devotion wastes the energy the climb requires.
Faith
The first response to grace is faith, the first of the three theological virtues God pours into us: faith, hope, and charity. A precise description matters here, since much despair grows from vague ones. By his Revelation, “the invisible God, from the fullness of his love, addresses men as his friends, and moves among them, in order to invite and receive them into his own company” (CCC 142), and faith is the adequate response to that invitation. “Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen” (Heb 11:1). Faith is the whole person’s assent, intellect and will together, to God who reveals himself and can neither deceive nor be deceived. Its object is a person, so it is more than a passing feeling and more than a conclusion forced by proof, and it grows the way friendships grow, by time, fidelity, and shared suffering. Faith is our response to God who calls us first.
Faith is also a way of seeing, in which the seeing comes first; faith is never blind, for it begins in reason and goes past reason, seeing through created things to the uncreated God. It allows a person to see what the Lord invites an open heart to see: bread that becomes truly his flesh, wine that becomes truly his blood, a plain building that mirrors the heavenly temple for an hour, an assembly of ordinary neighbors who become mysteriously his Body. Because its object is a person, faith shows itself in action; indifference is content with thought and feeling. Faith believed with the whole person shows in a calendar, a budget, and a habit, whatever we say of it.
Hope
We have worn the word “hope” down to a wish. The theological virtue of hope is confident expectation founded on a promise, and the difference from optimism shows exactly where optimism fails. Optimism is a forecast, and forecasts collapse at deathbeds, in diagnoses, in the ruins of plans. Hope is a grip on someone, as sure as he is. A Christian who hopes trusts that God has sworn what he will do with those who love him, that he cannot lie, and that his oath endures through every present darkness. A hoping Christian sees the night for what it is, and walks in it with his hand in a grip that does not loosen.
Charity
Charity is the greatest of the three theological virtues. Charity is the willing of the good of the other, the love God is, poured into us to be spent. God gives faith, hope, and charity alike. They arrive in baptism as seeds, and God intends a harvest from them.
The Four Hinge Virtues
Beneath the virtues God gives, we build four more, hinge-virtues the tradition calls “cardinal.” We form them the way a hand forms calluses, by repetition:
Prudence: right reason applied to action. The prudent man sees a situation whole, as it is, undistorted by his fear or his appetite, and he chooses well within it. The tradition calls prudence the charioteer of the virtues, for courage without prudence turns reckless and justice without prudence turns rigid.
Justice: the constant will to render what is due. At its root justice recognizes God as the origin, cause, and sustenance of all things, and orders every creature to him as its purpose. The tradition calls the Godward part of justice the virtue of “religion,” giving God what he is due. A man who shortchanges no neighbor and gives God two distracted hours a week has yet to meet justice’s first claim.
Fortitude: firmness in difficulty, walking by faith and not by sight when sight is grim. It is the virtue of the long middle of a vocation, where the first gladness has worn off and a man does the next right thing anyway.
Temperance: the ordering of our appetites to their purpose. God made every appetite in us good, and every appetite aims at some good. The disorder enters by the dose and the direction. The temperate man is the man whose enjoyments obey him; he is not the man who enjoys less.
None of the four is glamorous, yet everything else in the moral life swings on them.
Freedom for Excellence
Freedom is the workshop where we make the virtues. Freedom for excellence is the capacity to choose the good we were made for, growing every time a man spends it well and shrinking every time he spends it badly. The world’s counterfeit, freedom as the absence of restraint, enslaves faster than any tyrant. The commandments fence the cliff edges of freedom for excellence.
Two opposite errors flank the road here, each easily mistaken for a virtue. Over-planning is one: the over-planner scripts his life so thoroughly that he leaves providence nothing to do, playing God without the necessary scope. Drifting is the other: the drifter calls his passivity trust and lets the current decide. The tradition calls the middle way between them simply “virtue”: docile listening to God who reveals, joined to action at the inconvenient moment with the least personal gain. That formula, listening plus costly action, is a working definition of holiness.
The Anatomy of a Choice
Every choice has an anatomy, and the Church distinguishes its parts so that consciences have something to work with. Every moral act has an object, the thing chosen; an intention, the purpose the chooser aims at; and circumstances, which frame it. All three must be good for the act to be good. A good intention cannot redeem an evil object, for the end does not justify the means, and some objects, by their nature, cannot be ordered to God at all. Circumstances and pressures can lessen a person’s guilt, sometimes to nothing, but they cannot turn a wrong act right. God judges the act by what it is, and the soul by what it knew and willed.
Conscience
Conscience is the judge nearest at hand: the voice of truth in the inmost sanctuary of a person, applying the law written on the heart to the choice on the table, and its certain judgment binds. A man must therefore form his conscience, for an unformed conscience obeys noise. A man can bargain with a preference; his certain conscience binds him. Formation is slow, as a man studies scripture, learns the Church’s teaching, and examines himself honestly, year after year. Where ignorance is invincible, where a person could not have known better, guilt is not imputed, though the wrong done remains wrong and still wounds. Adam and Eve made their excuses in the garden out of consciences unused, and forming a conscience is a duty.
The Ten Words and the Church’s Floor
The Decalogue remains the floor plan. Its first three words order love of God: no other gods, no wielding of his name as a weapon or a trifle, and his day kept holy. The remaining seven order love of neighbor: honor to father and mother; no murder, and no nursing of the anger that is murder’s seed; no adultery, and no treating of persons as instruments; no theft; no false witness; no coveting of another’s wife; no coveting of another’s goods. The two tables are one law, for no one loves the God he cannot see while wronging the neighbor he can.
The Church adds her handful of precepts as a floor set deliberately low:
Mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation, with rest from unnecessary work.
Confession of grave sins at least once a year.
Communion at least during the Easter season.
Fasting and abstinence on the appointed days.
Provision for the material needs of the Church, each according to ability.
These precepts measure the minimum, and holiness has always run further; they are a floor to stand on, never a ceiling to reach.
Prayer as Listening
Prayer is where our friendship with God happens, and prayer begins in the ear, because hearing God’s voice is the most critical activity in a human life. God speaks as he spoke to Elijah at the mouth of the cave, in a tiny whispering sound, in scripture, in conscience, in the quiet after we refuse the noise. That is, a man listens in prayer before he speaks, and listening requires silence. A man must build his silence, for silence no longer occurs on its own, in a room, in a house, or in a whole day. Rote prayers, prayed slowly, are rails for the attention.
God receives the weakest prayer, for “the Spirit too comes to the aid of our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit itself intercedes with inexpressible groanings” (Rom 8:26). God takes the least of our prayers and carries them along, as a strong hand clutches and carries a pebble. The honest beginner has an enormous advantage, because he has already grasped the essential thing: he is a supplicant and not a negotiator. A man who prays in solitude has company, for God is nearer to him than his own breath, holding him in existence for the length of the conversation and after it.
The Contest of Voices
The enemy is the din. The world speaks a competing catechism, repeated until it sounds like common sense, whose commandments are easy to transcribe from any ordinary day. Create value, and be valued for what is created. Be comfortable and content, whatever the comfort costs those nearby. Feed the appetites, for denied appetites are dangerous. Control the outcome, and forgive nothing that interferes. Compare constantly. Be afraid. Or, failing all of that, be a permanent victim, which at least assigns the blame. The serpent first spoke these inversions in the garden: evil presented as good, conviction as hate, indifference as sophistication, and sentiment as love. The world teaches its catechism by habituation, for what we expose ourselves to molds us, at ten years old or at a hundred. And so, the remedy is pruning: a man cuts his intake, guards his eyes and his hours, and chooses what he takes in the way a gardener chooses what is allowed to seed. We can observe the world, see it for what it is, and refuse to buy in.
Two pressures of this age are new in degree if not in kind. The first is speed: since the telegraph, the volume of words arriving daily has multiplied past what any soul can digest, and the noise crowds out the faculties flourishing requires, which is why slowing down has become a spiritual discipline. The second is the collapse of shared truth: neighbors have grown nervous and unable to agree on what is in front of them, amidst convincing counterfeit images, machine-made voices, and channels where people hear only their own opinions repeated back. But, the truth still exists; it is finally a person, who remains where he has always been.
The next word belongs inside the Church. Those charged with teaching the faith have too often taught it badly: haphazard catechesis, thin formation, slogans in place of the Gospel, and whole generations who never learned what they were given at their baptism. Many of the baptized remain strangers to their own identity, partly for this reason, and the Church owes them an apology. Every substitute for the true Word of God, however well-intentioned, and the prosperity gospel above all, is a road to hell paved with good intentions, thoughts, and feelings. The remedy is the whole faith, taught whole, in language a person can repeat.
Possessions in Trust
God owns everything we call ours, and a person who recognizes it has much of the moral life in order. A plain inventory of any ordinary morning finds a bed we did not build, water we did not carry, words we did not invent, a heartbeat we do not command. We are stewards in a house we did not raise, tenant farmers under a Lord who is perfectly benevolent, and everything in the barns is entrusted. Private property is good, and the Church defends it against every scheme that would abolish it; private property is also subordinate to the universal destination of goods, held in trust for the good of all, with an account to be rendered. Wealth gathered, hoarded, and aimed solely inward is dishonest wealth, diverted against its own purpose. Poverty of spirit is accuracy: the settled recognition of our creatureliness, the posture of the perpetual supplicant, and the door of the first Beatitude.
The arithmetic of giving is a reliable diagnostic. A poor widow once put two small coins into the Temple treasury, and the Lord watched her and said, “I tell you truly, this poor widow put in more than all the rest; for those others have all made offerings from their surplus wealth, but she, from her poverty, has offered her whole livelihood” (Lk 21:3-4). A surplus giver asks what he can spare. A sacrificial giver asks what he needs and gives from underneath it, and only the second resembles what God did. The same arithmetic applies to hours as to coins, for time is the primary sacrifice: every other gift takes time to give, and of the hundred and sixty-eight hours a week contains, the portion we return to the giver of all of them, in worship, prayer, and service, tells a soul more about what it loves than any self-description does. There will be an accounting, a day when stewardship ends and every soul renders what it did with every entrusted good. Everything that seemed to be ours was entrusted to us to bear fruit for others as well as for ourselves.
Suffering Put to Work
Suffering comes to every life on the road, and the faith refuses both easy answers about it. Suffering is neither a punishment dealt out from heaven measure for measure nor a meaningless accident. Ours is the God who fashions a remedy out of mortality itself, who took the worst thing creatures ever did and made it the hinge of their rescue. God puts suffering to work in the same way: he purifies through it what comfort never purifies, he teaches through it what ease never teaches, and, joined to the Cross, our suffering becomes an offering, spendable for others, for the Body, for the dead. An old counsel handed from priest to priest says that God permits every suffering that would spare us purgatory, unless we throw that suffering away by sinning under it. It is a pastoral maxim; the doctrine beneath it is enough: nothing suffered in Christ is wasted. The world flees pain at any cost and numbs itself by every available means. Sooner or later that flight costs some form of sin, and the sin costs more than the pain did.
The Church trains us for this by three practices, and she rehearses them every Lent: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. The tradition calls them the three “mortifications,” that is, the three small deaths. In prayer a man turns his time over. In fasting he turns his appetite over. In almsgiving he turns his treasure over. Each is a small voluntary dying to self, practiced at low stakes so that the greater renunciations, when they come unchosen, find a soul already in condition. We make our small deaths every day so that we are happily prepared for the end of our mortal life. A Christian who has never fasted from anything will meet loss as a stranger; a Christian who has practiced the small deaths has already learned the road’s grade.
Vocation and Mission
Every baptized life is also an assignment, for God gave the offices at the font to be exercised. Priest: the daily offering up, of work, of prayer, of trouble, joined to the altar. Prophet: truth told in a world allergic to it, mostly by a life that makes no sense unless God exists. King: stewardship of whatever small kingdom God has entrusted, a household, a classroom, a shift, governed for its good and aimed at its Maker. Vocations differ: marriage, priesthood, religious life, the committed single life. Every one of them is a vocation of service, for God made a life to be directed outward. No one is saved alone, for we are saved together as a Body. The test of our own climbing is therefore whether we are helping others up the mountain, and a man scrambling over his neighbors to safety has misunderstood where safety is.
Two particular missions belong inside every generation of the Body. The first is children. A household’s calendar and its anxieties show what it is preparing its children for. When we prepare our children for the world first, for scores and scholarships and careers, with eternal life somewhere after, our children learn the ranking. Parents and godparents chiefly promise at a font to prepare a soul for eternal life first, and the world’s preparations fit easily inside that one, never the reverse. The second is the neighbor not yet met. Evangelization in the ordinary case is presence, patience, and an unexplainable hope that eventually prompts a question. It is a marathon run at the speed of trust, since conversion comes as a sequence of small turnings, in us as in everyone we ever help. The evangelizer is a seeker of God, never an obtainer of God.
Joy as Evidence
Joy is the distinguishing mark of all this labor. It is transcendent blessedness expressed outwardly, more than pleasure and more than mood. Joy is relational by its structure, requiring an other, though the other may be God himself; no one has ever managed joy alone, and no one with God is alone. Lasting joy is a foretaste and echo of eternity, and it behaves like an invasion, breaking into the gloom of a world in sin and driving sadness before it. The familiar joys, a baby’s smile, a reunion at an airport, warmth against the cold, a stranger’s unasked kindness, are glimpses of the Kingdom, small windows the world cannot quite paint over. Joy shared in public, by people with every earthly reason to be anxious, persuades where arguments cannot.
The Unchosen Neighbor
The neighbor comes unchosen and unfiltered. A scholar of the law asked the Lord, “And who is my neighbor?” (Lk 10:29). The Lord answered with a parable, and he cast as its hero the one figure his audience despised. The parable works only while the Samaritan stays despised: the person from the other party, the other side of whatever divides the town, the one we write off. Beneath the parable is metaphysics: Christ holds that person in existence and brought him to be, that person wears the image and likeness of God, and God has called him to be his friend for eternity, so that judging the worth of another person belongs to God alone. The works of mercy, corporal and spiritual, are the apprenticeship of this love, and they school us most surely where there is nothing to be gained by them.
Stuck, and Unbound
Many a devout soul runs aground on a subtler reef, which is being stuck: the gap between what we believe we ought to be and what we do, felt as a low-grade ache and medicated with more activity or less. A man multiplies his devotions while his heart idles, and like Israel at Meribah he names his campsite with the question of that place (Ex 17:7). The way out is response, for the life of faith consists in continually striving to respond to God, who calls first, and no one treads water in it: standing still is sliding down the mountain. The Lord’s command at Bethany (Jn 11:44) is spoken over every bound and stalled soul on the road.
Accounting Questions
The Gospels posed the questions our ultimate accounting long ago:
whether we forgive our enemies, or only avoid them
whether the widow, the orphan, the outcast, and the resident alien can tell from our conduct that God remembered them
whether what belongs to Caesar goes to Caesar and what belongs to God goes to God, beginning with the Sabbath
whether we tell the truth when a comfortable falsehood is available
whether we helped or lectured the Samaritan on our own road
whether anyone within reach has heard the Gospel from us by word, or at least seen it by conduct
whether we came, on the whole, to serve or to be served
Nothing here is exotic, for every question came from the mouth of the one who will conduct our judgement.
Comments