The path from war to peace

We all want peace, or more of it, and in the press of life we forget how to win it. Today's Gospel offers us important clues.

Frustration is part of life. We would like to think otherwise; we would like to think that we can organize our time and our efforts in such ways that we can obtain everything we aim for. This is a recipe for disaster.

For the fact is that we are limited creatures with unlimited appetites. No matter what we have attained or obtained, we want more. We want to keep growing. We want to keep expanding. This is natural, because while our bodies are bound in time and space, our spirits are immaterial and they tend to infinity; and our bodily forces need replenishment. A great part of wisdom lies in knowing how to balance the desire for more with the limits imposed upon us, and in knowing which limits we can push and which we must accept. God created the universe out of nothing, because he wanted to, not because he needed to. It is impossible for us fully to comprehend that sentence. We cannot really imagine “nothing,” let alone creating out of it. Neither can we imagine creating in total freedom, because when you and I create, it is to fulfill an impulse or a need. God is perfectly fulfilled in himself and needs nothing. Everything God can be, God already is, and always was and will always be. He creates because he wants to, without fulfilling a want or adding to his plenitude. When he creates, when he acts, he does so effortlessly.

We can barely begin to fathom these truths, because we cannot sustain ourselves without effort, and so we cannot really imagine pure effortlessness. I suppose the closest we can come to effortlessness is the exercise of mastery that takes many laborious iterations of repeated practice until the movements, of the mind, the body, or both, become so routine that we can do them without thought. This is called virtue when the product of our effort is moral, and skill when it is physical. When we see that suspension of effort to do something really difficult, we admire the athlete, or the speaker, or the artist. All that previous effort has allowed the athlete, speaker, or artist to be completely, unselfconsciously present to the moment, when a certain timelessness seems to be reached, and within that timelessness, a freedom that results in both economy of effort and great beauty. Those we know who are not really godly will look at such performances and call them “god-like.” Although we wouldn’t put it that way, I think they are on to something.

We have the deep memory of a primordial effortless existence. We want desperately to return to that happy state and find that we cannot. We must either settle for the closest approximations to it we can reach, or receive the fulfillment we long for as a gift, just as our first parents received paradise and perfection as a gift, not the fruit of their own efforts. It is hard for us to grasp this, because we know we must work — indeed, the command to work was given before the Fall: the Fall makes work hard. But it is in working — in activating and developing our talents, abilities, and gifts, that we imitate the Giver whose image we bear, the Giver who gives simply because he wants to. Work — the giving of oneself for the benefit of others — is therefore necessary. But it must be the right sort of work, and it must be freely offered.

“Do not labor for the food that perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you; for on him has God the Father set his seal.” These are the words of Jesus recorded in the sixth chapter of John. We labor, so that we might receive something we could never create for ourselves. Here, too, we find the paradox and mystery of the Gospel. St. Augustine put it nicely: God, who created us without us, will not save us without us. There is something we must do in order to to receive as gift the food that endures to eternal life.

Today’s Gospel gives us an important hint. In Matthew 15, Jesus heals those who were brought to him by others. We have already seen that bringing others to be healed by Christ is an essential, indispensable element for receiving the healing and fulfillment we seek for ourselves. Today we see it again. He will not save us unless we work somehow to save others. And how does he save us? He gives us the food we need for our journey home, heaven, of which the earthly paradise in our deepest memory is but a shadow and a copy. We cannot go back to that earthly paradise, nor can we create it anew. Most importantly, we need not. It is the attempt to create our own paradises on earth that give rise to so much frustration. We find relief from frustration when we receive, and we receive really only when we have brought others to the Great Physician, who longs to heal, “to seek and to save that which is lost.”

Notice the pattern here. First Jesus heals, by touch, perhaps, by speaking, and then he feeds. The liturgy of the Word precedes the liturgy of the altar. God speaks His Word, and in that speech the entire universe is created. When we had fallen and brought the world down with us, God speaks His Word promising a Savior. When the Savior speaks, when he acts, when he touches bodies and touches lives, he re-creates them, reconstituting them into what we were always meant to be, and then he feeds us with himself.

We are still not entirely complete: we have sins to give up, habits to amend, and a new way of living to learn. A mistake we often make is to see the infusion of faith, hope, and love at baptism and then the strengthening of those virtues through repeated reception of the sacraments, prayer, and good works, as but the completion of the natural virtues we had already begun to develop. Jesus did not come to make good people better. He came to make dead people live. The virtues he infuses into us up-end our lives, causing us to see the world in entirely new ways. Until we have grown into the higher stages of spiritual life, the new creation and the old within us are at war, and we often find that we are at war with ourselves. Non-Christians see it, too, then wonder why we believe what we believe when what they see in us is not peace but strife.

It is in the waging of war against our lower impulses, the demands of our bodies, the demands for tangible comforts and signs of success, that we find peace and our frustrations begin to cease. As we get better at this war, we achieve an almost effortless mastery of life. Non-Christians see it, too, and they admire and respect those who have achieved the mastery of life our holy Faith offers, even if they do not come to profess it with us. Or else they hate us, because they find the price of our Faith too high: Christ freely gives, but he asks for everything, and we battle with him until we yield to him. Only then peace comes.

There are no hacks: there is only the doing of it, one deed after the other. The evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience vowed by our celibate religious become for us patterns to live detachment from materialism, purity in marriage and continence in the single life, and obedience to our lawful superiors, whether in the religious or secular realms. Our limitedness ceases to be a burden, becoming instead motive for thanksgiving, for our loving God and Savior, seeing our limitedness and our struggles, fills us with Himself when we let him. In the great Divine Reversal, the curse becomes the blessing, and the fault that caused our downfall comes to be proclaimed as happy, because it merited for us so great a Savior.

If Advent is to be the preparation for the coming of the King, in his coming at Bethlehem and his coming at the end of time, it is meant for us as a time of war, against our lower impulses and all that drags us down. Victory is promised to those who contend. We contend well, we prepare the way of the Lord, when we put the needs of others before our own, when we forego those things to which we have a natural right in favor of those who need without having. This is especially true of spiritual goods, and hence the spiritual works of mercy. But it is also true of the corporal goods. Christ means to fill both body and soul, and he means to depend on us to bring to Him those who need what He alone can give. He is willing to depend on us, to show us that we can depend upon him. In that mutual dependence, His freely willed and ours freely accepted, salvation is found, frustration subsides, and the way of the Lord is prepared. Once we have accepted all this, the battle does become easier and we arrive at the Twelve Days of Christmas, when we rejoice and feast in anticipation of the banquet already prepared for us and which will be ours forever, if only we contend for it by contending against our selfish, grasping selves.