Peace and Mercy as a way of life

"First things first" has some surprising implications

This morning I reposted on LinkedIn a Litany of Rest posted by a Catholic evangelist. I don’t recall knowing the evangelist or having seen that Litany, but it was powerful. It brings back to mind a hymn I sang in my evangelical, fundamentalist days, “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.”

The problem in that old Protestant piety was a quietism: if I just trust, God will take care of everything. It wasn’t just a Protestant phenomenon: Quietism was found in Catholicism, too, it is still found throughout Christianity, and it is dangerous. It lulls us first into complacency, and then into despair, and then into unbelief and rejection of the Gospel. Already in the patristic era, St. Augustine gave us the principle that God, who created us without us, will not save us without us: our participation in his plan is required. In starkest terms, He provides the Word, but we have to meditate on it; He provides the sacraments, but we have to frequent them. He provides the guidance, but we have to act upon it.

That last sentence is a bit of a hum-dinger, because we like to pretend we don’t know what He is saying, asking, directing, commanding, when in fact we do and just don’t want to do it. We’re afraid, or lazy, or just self-seeking. We hide in excuses — which is like plunging ourselves into darkness when in the light of day we would receive the insight and the strength to perform. Then we complain that we cannot see, that God is not answering my prayer and off to the races we go. You know the drill.

The other problem with Quetism is that it is “me and God.” There is even an old country-western song about that: “Me and Jesus got our own thing goin’.” It’s a pretty good song worth listening to: Jesus saves us, one by one. But the thing is, that personal relationship occurs within the set of relationships called The Church. The song gets it wrong, real wrong, with the lines, “we don’t need anybody to tell us what it’s all about.” I hate to say it, but that’s actually the spirit of pride and disobedience. Our parents, who are members of the Church, are the first to bring us to Christ, and to teach us how to know, love, and serve them. If it wasn’t your parents, it was someone else — someone who is in the Church. As we advance in the life of faith, we always — always — advance in the company of others, some of whom are far ahead of us, some of whom are peers, and some of whom are behind us. We are meant to help and to be helped by all of them. None of us sits under a tree and just “figures” the Gospel out by himself. The Gospel is always handed down, and it is handed down by those who worship.

The monks of old knew this well. They were, and are, the ones who separate themselves from all the pomps, vanities, and deceits of the world to pursue God and to remove all the obstacles we place between us and God so that God can fully possess us, filling us with his light, joy, and peace. They pay prices the rest of us don’t. While it’s fine to argue well, that’s their vocation, they’re meant to live that way and I am not, I’d say, not so fast: yes and no. Yes, it’s vocational, and most of us are called to marriage and to life in the world. But no, the principles they are living are only the principles of Christian life — there is only one Christian life — and so those principles are meant for us, too, to be lived in accord with the circumstances of our own lives.

Here are a few of them:

First things first. What is first, is prayer, prayer to begin the day and then prayer throughout the day. St. Benedict, whose Rule has been guiding Benedictines and others for closing in on two millennia, wrote, “Let nothing be preferred to the Work of God,” and what he meant by Work of God is the Divine Liturgy. Whatever else they were doing, monks were expected to drop it and show up at the appointed hours for Mass and Office, that set of prayer services interspersed throughout the day.

Wo, you might say, that’s a lot of prayer. Well, yes, I suppose it is. But isn’t the point of Christian life now to spend as much time as possible with God now, so that He heals us and fills us with Himself in order that we are ready for life forever with him in heaven at the highest level of joy of which we are capable? Another way of making the point is to say that heaven, or hell, begin now: we can accept Christ’s invitation, his plea, to let Him enter our lives deeper and deeper, or we can stall: but to stall is to turn away, and it’s when we are turned away that all hell breaks loose. So the question is how do you want to live? Anchored, or tossed about in the seas and storms of life? Rooted in the mercy of God, or thrown to the fates? We get to choose.

First things first also includes two other practices we don’t discuss much, and those are fasting and almsgiving. These are not optional if we are serious about conversion of life. Fasting disciplines the body and the lower passions to pipe down. They’re like spoiled children who constantly whine for more, and we give in to them either because we think they’re cute or else just to shut them up. Thing is, when we do that, the passions, like the kids, rule the house, and then nothing runs right. “Man shall not live by bread alone…” is at the outset of the Gospel, and Jesus says throughout the Gospel, “when you fast…”. He didn’t say after the Resurrection, ok, stop that now. Indeed, he had said while feasting with his disciples, when rebuked for doing so, that the day would come when the disciples would fast. Fasting is part of the deal. Don’t fast, and you’re not really in the game.

Almsgiving is also part of the deal. We are directed to give from our excess when we have excess, and from our own need when we don’t. If fasting orders our relationships to our bodies and our feelings, almsgiving orders our relationships to the world around us, filled as it is with people who need more than we do, service to whom is required by precept but which becomes a joy when we practice it sacrificially and with love. A friend of ours says, “charity isn’t charity until it hurts,” and she has it exactly right. Other people’s needs are at least as important as our own, and when we give alms, we swing the axe against the tree of self-centeredness that grows in the middle of every soul. But be careful here: if we are giving in order to procure benefits for ourselves, we are not really giving: we are buying. Then it doesn’t work. When we truly give, it is for the benefit of the other in the greater need and without the expectation of benefit or joy accruing to us. That it does is grace, but procurement of benefit for oneself can’t really be the motive. Otherwise we are using the needy to our advantage and that is what the “rich” do, those people the Bible labels as such because they exploit everyone and everything for their own ends. The poor, of spirit or of means, are not here for us: we are here for them.

How does all of this translate into our lives? Can you find time to pray throughout the day? Let me say it: You can and you should. Those daytime offices, or prayer services, that the monks offer, are short: the work of the day is at hand and it must be done. But it must be done with and for God and stopping to bring God into the midst of the work is exactly the way the work because transformative and you become transformed. The key word is “short.” Pray a short Office, if you are so inclined — and we can start a conversation about that. Read a few verses of Scripture, or a spiritual book. Say a short prayer, or two. The thing is to develop the habit and then live it.

Can you eliminate the superfluous in your life? Can you distinguish, even in your business and professional lives, between the “gotta haves” and the “want to haves?” Do you have to have the latest version of everything? Can you recognize that the want-to-haves turning into gotta-haves are your passions using coping mechanisms to keep you distracted from the real business at hand — and that “busyness” plays the same role? Eliminate the superfluous. That’s the essence of elegance — but I also think it’s part of the essence of charity.

To what causes does your business donate? Do you donate for recognition, or are you donating so as really to help those who cannot help themselves in that particular way? Are you donating at the expense of your employees? Yes, that’s right: paying a just wage is a requirement of Catholic Social Doctrine, and the prevalent idea of extracting the most out of a “human resource” — an object, like a non-human resource” — for the least amount of cost and effort is, sorry to say it, right out of the pits of hell. You cannot deprive your employees of that to which they are entitled, by way of having earned it or of needing it, then buy your way to the clear zone by “giving,” in a tax-favored manner, to someone else.

I remember a student once remonstrating with me when I taught that according to the Church’s social doctrine, an employee with a larger family was entitled, by need, to more compensation that an employee with a smaller family doing the exact same job. “Why should my father pay for someone’s irresponsibility?,” he angrily asked. The question was a perfect demonstration of everything wrong with modern compensation theory. There, the goal is to find the sweet spot, the balance of pay that that is the highest the company will pay and the lowest the employee will accept. Generosity in engendering human life is seen as a problem and even a disgrace, instead of participation in God’s miraculous gift of life. The notion that an employer has some responsibility for the welfare of an employee’s family is also rejected: an employee is a commodity that produces a profit, at the highest-possible rate of return, or is kicked to the street. Profit before people, always.

The argument that if there isn’t profit, there won’t be people to pay is a bit of a canard, isn’t it? Where is profit being concentrated these days? And who is paying for it, in more ways than can be counted? A proper application of Catholic social doctrine does indeed put a cap on executive compensation if without the cap, the ordinary workers suffer as a result. Defrauding the worker is a sin that cries unto heaven for vengeance.

Let us come back to the monks and conclude for now. In medieval times if you were a serf and you had a choice, you wanted to be a serf at a monastery. Monasteries always had stores for times of famine. Monasteries knew crops would fail, or bad weather, or Vikings, or greedy secular lords would come in and ruin everything; when that happened, they relaxed production requirements they knew could not be humanly met. Monasteries rejoiced in large families and helped them make provision for themselves. They did all this because they knew that circumstances vary, needs changes, possibilities open up and close down, and they will one day answer to God for everything. Their action was not, however, motivated by fear. It was moved by confidence in God’s mercy, for they knew and lived, as we should, “blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.”