The More You Try to Avoid Suffering, the More You Suffer

As is well known to regular visitors here, I have never been able to get through The Seven Story Mountain, Thomas Merton's autobiography. However, I owe a debt of thanks to Jim Campanella at Uvula Audio. He is departing from his regular science fiction, P.G. Wodehouse, and other old classics to read for us this book on his podcast (podcast RSS here). It has made a world of difference and I find myself enjoying it very much, as well as getting good points to ponder about spiritual living.

A few of these lines he wrote about suffering are fairly well represented on the internet as I look about, but not in sufficient length, or so it seems to me. His point is exactly what I saw my father and mother suffer over the last year or two as they struggled with various ailments and problems, but without any faith. Merton wrote this in response to remembering his father's death from cancer in the 1920s.

What could I make of so much suffering? There was no way for me, or for anyone in the family, to get anything out of it. It was a raw wound for which there was no adequate relief. You had to take it, like an animal. We were in the condition of most of the world, the condition of men without faith in the presence of war, disease, pain, starvation, suffering, plague, bombardment, death. You just had to take it, like a dumb animal. Try to avoid it if you could. But you must eventually reach the point where you can’t avoid it any more. Take it. Try to stupefy yourself, if you like, so that it won’t hurt so much. But you will always have to take some of it. And it will all devour you in the end.

Indeed the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being that is at once the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture. This is another of the great perversions by which the devil uses our philosophies to turn our whole nature inside out, and eviscerate all our capacities for good, turning them against ourselves.

As many Catholics will tell you, one of the things they love and appreciate about our great faith is that capacity to use suffering, to not let it go to waste by offering it up. The best explanation I have seen for this lately comes from Praying the Mass: A Guide to the New English Translation of the Mass by Jeffrey Pinyan (which I can recommend, by the way, though I am not quite done with it).

This is part of Pinyan's commentary upon the part of the Mass where the priest prays that the sacrifice being offered will be accepted by God.

The bread and wine (and afterwards, the Eucharist) and ourselves are united as one at the hands of the priest. The bread and wine which the priest holds during the words of consecration represent us, since they represent the fruits of our labor. Then, as the priest offers the Eucharist to God, we join our very lives -- all of our worries, cares, sufferings, and prayers -- to Christ in the Eucharist. It is only by joining ourselves to Christ, the perfect sacrifice, that the contribution of our living, spiritual sacrifice can be truly acceptable to the Father. (cf. Rom. 12:1, 1 Pet. 2:5)

Because Christ is both priest and victim, our share in His priesthood (exercised in intercessory prayer, as well as in this offering of ourselves as living sacrifices of praise) must also include a share in His victimhood. This does not mean that we should expect to undergo a persecution and death as grievous as His, but we should unite the suffering we encounter in our lives to the suffering that Christ endured for our sake. The words of St. Paul to the Colossians are particularly meaningful in this regard: "Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church." (Col. 1:24) St. Paul is not saying that Christ's sufferings were imperfect or incomplete, but that our participation in Christ's sufferings has yet to be fulfilled; in St. Paul's suffering for the sake of the Church, he is completing his participation in Christ's life, which he began in his baptism.

We do not seek suffering, of course, but when it comes and we offer it up at least it does not go to waste. For me, that is a thought that helps a great deal when suffering comes my way, as it inevitably does in life.

Of course, there is another great benefit which Merton goes on to mention. He says that his father was refined and purified by the suffering he experienced until he became saintly. Which brings me to Peter Cameron's commentary in this month's Magnificat. This hit me and then hits me again as I contemplate all the above:

The difficult circumstances of our lives are not just things to put up with. We are deluded if we think that peace and contentment will come if we can just figure out how to "improve" our circumstances once and for all. God deploys the problematic circumstances of our life to awaken us, challenge us, educate us. For the way that we deal with our circumstances reveals to us and to the world just who Jesus Christ is for us. We think that, when something goes wrong in our life, our predicament is outside the all-embracing purpose and meaning of life. But God intends such circumstances to move us to discover this meaning.

This is why I also ask God to show me the good that will come out of the bad I am experiencing. And you know what? It's a prayer He answers more than you'd think.

Oramus: For You We Pray

The essence of the Christian life is passing along God's love and blessings to those we find in our path. We love those with whom we live and work and play by sharing their daily lives, their joys and their trials. We love the needy in far off places through general prayer, and through contributions to those charities that aid them.

But how do we love and bless those in our own community that we do not know personally: those we see on the street, in the market, at the mall? Those who are well-dressed and well-fed, and in no obvious need? They, too, need the love and blessing of God. Some already have it; but what of those who do not know God? How, as Christians, can we love and bless them?

We Pray.

If asked, they would not accept our help; but through us they may receive the Lord's blessing. And some few might choose to ask what we are doing, and why; and perhaps they will learn to know God themselves.

This site really resonates with me. Perhaps because lately I have found myself looking at the faithful taking Communion while Thomas Merton's words echo through my head:

There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

I do not take credit to myself for the sometimes overwhelming waves of love I feel for all the wide variety of people filing before my eyes. I feel this is the Holy Spirit giving me just a little taste of Jesus' overwhelming love for all of us. It is a glorious thing.

Oramus also put me in mind of The Anchoress's reflection upon praying for strangers which also wound around Merton's statement.

Oramus also has a blog which says there will be occasional posting. I am inclined to think that if all they ever posted was the excellent reminder to anonymously pray for our neighbors then that would be enough. Perhaps, again, because that is what I often find myself doing, all based on that really good prayer which I wrote about some time ago: Lord have mercy on me and bless (name/that person). Praying for our neighbors is an extension of that idea but without the impetus of an annoyance to kick start the process.

I like it.

I like it a lot.

Tradition and Revolution V

In the final part of this thought provoking essay, Merton discusses true contemplation, God's grace, and theology. Just when we think we can see where he is headed, he throws in a twist at the end which takes us right back to the Church. (Part I is here.)

Tradition and Revolution (cont'd.)

Yet true contemplation is not arrived at by an effort of the mind. On the contrary, a man could easily lose his way in the forest of technical details which concern a professional theologian. But God gives true theologians a hunger born of humility, which cannot be satisfied with formulas and arguments, and which looks for something closer to God than analogy can bring you.

This serene hunger of the spirit penetrates the surface of words and goes beyond the human formulation of mysteries and seeks, in the humiliation of silence, intellectual solitude and interior poverty, the gift of a supernatural apprehension which words cannot truly signify.

Beyond the labor of argument it finds rest in faith and beneath the noise of discourse it apprehends the Truth, not in distinct and clear-cut definitions but in the limpid obscurity of a single intuition that unites all dogmas in one simple Light, shining into the soul directly from God's eternity, without the medium of created concept, without the intervention of symbols or of language or the likenesses of material things.

Here the Truth is One Whom we not only know and possess but by Whom we are known and possessed. Here theology ceases to be a body of abstractions and becomes a Living Reality Who is God Himself. And He reveals Himself to us in our total gift of our lives to Him. Here the light of truth is not something that exists for our intellect but One in Whom and for Whom all minds and spirits exist, and theology does not truly begin to be theology until we have transcended the language and separate concepts of theologians.

That is why St. Thomas put the Summa Theologica aside in weariness before it was finished, saying that it was "all straw."

And yet when the contemplative returns from the depths of his simple experience of God and attempts to communicate it to men, he necessarily comes once again under the control of the theologian and his language is bound to strive after the clarity and distinctness and accuracy that canalize Catholic tradition.

Therefore beware of the contemplative who says that theology is all straw before he has ever bothered to read any.

New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton

Tradition and Revolution IV

Continuing his discussion of Catholic dogma, Merton now looks at it's true benefit to those who have the grace to explore it to the fullest. (Part I is here.)

Tradition and Revolution (cont'd.)

The first step to contemplation is faith; and faith begins with an assent to Christ teaching through His Church; fides ex auditu, qui vos ausit, me audit. "He that heareth you, heareth Me." And "faith cometh by hearing."

It is not the dry formula of a dogmatic definition by itself that pours light into the mind of a Catholic contemplative, but the assent to the content of that definition deepens and broadens into a vital, personal and incommunicable penetration of the supernatural truth which it expresses -- an understanding that is a gift of the Holy Ghost and which merges into the Wisdom of love, to possess Truth in its infinite Substance, God Himself.

The dogmas of the Catholic faith are not merely symbols or vague rationalizations which we accept as arbitrary points of stimulation around which good moral actions many form or develop -- still less is it true that any idea would serve just as well as those that have been defined, any old pious thought would foment this vague moral life in our souls. The dogmas defined and taught by the Church have a very precise, positive and definite meaning which those who have the grace to do so must explore and penetrate if they would live an integral spiritual life. For the understanding of dogma is the proximate and ordinary way to contemplation.

Everybody who can do so ought to acquire something of a theologians' accuracy and sharpness in appreciating a true sense of dogma. Every Christian ought to have as deep a comprehension of his belief as his state will allow him. And this means that every one ought to breathe the clean atmosphere of orthodox tradition and be able to explain his belief in correct terminology -- and terminology with a content of genuine ideas.

New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton

So I'm thinkin' we're looking at more catechesis, whether done through our reading, scripture studies as a group, seeking guidance of spiritual directors, or more along those lines. There are many ways to learn to appreciate and understand the Church's teachings. It is incumbent upon us to pursue them.

We will hear more about where faithful adherence to the Church's dogma takes us in contemplation in Part IV.

Tradition and Revolution III

Continuing the essay, Merton takes on the issue of dogma, both in what men think it to be and what it actually is. What he says was doubtless true when the book was written in 1961 but we see his insight even more from the distance of where relativism has moved us almost 50 years hence. (Part I is here.)

Tradition and Revolution (cont'd.)

The notion of dogma terrifies men who do not understand the Church. They cannot conceive that a religious doctrine may be clothed in a clear, definite and authoritative statement without at once becoming static, rigid and inert and losing all its vitality. In their frantic anxiety to escape from any such conception they take refuge in a system of beliefs that is vague and fluid, a system in which truths pass like mists and waver and vary like shadows. They make their own personal selection of ghosts, in this pale, indefinite twilight of the mind. They take good care never to bring these abstractions out into the full brightness of the sun for fear of a full view of their unsubstantiality.

They favor the Catholic mystics with a sort of sympathetic regard, for they believe that these rare men somehow reached the summit of contemplation in defiance of Catholic dogma. Their deep union with God is supposed to have been an escape from the teaching authority of the Church, and an implicit protest against it.

But the truth is that the saints arrived at the deepest and most vital and also the most individual and personal knowledge of God precisely because of the church's teaching authority, precisely through the tradition that it is guarded and fostered by that authority.

New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton

We will hear more about where faithful adherence to the Church's dogma takes us in contemplation in Part IV.

Tradition and Revolution II

Continuing from yesterday, Merton goes on examining the popular concept of revolution as opposed to the revolutionary concept of Christian truth.

Tradition and Revolution (cont'd.)

A revolution is supposed to be a change that turns everything completely around. But the ideology of political revolution will never change anything except appearances. There will be violence, and power will pass from one party to another, but when the smoke clears and the bodies of all the dead men are underground, the situation will be essentially the same as it was before: there will be a minority of strong men in power exploiting all the others for their own ends. There will be the same greed and cruelty and lust and ambition and avarice and hypocrisy as before.

For the revolutions of men change nothing. The only influence that can really upset the injustice and iniquity of men is the power that breathes in Christian tradition, renewing our participation in the Life that is the Light of men.

To those who have no personal experience of this revolutionary aspect of Christian truth, but who see only the outer crust of dead, human conservatism that tends to form around the Church the way barnacles gather on the hull of a ship, all this talk of dynamism sounds foolish.

Each individual Christian and each new age of the Church has to make this rediscovery, this return to the source of Christian life.

It demands a fundamental act of renunciation that accepts the necessity of starting out on the way to God under the guidance of other men. This acceptance can be paid for only by sacrifice, and ultimately only a gift of God can teach us the difference between the dry outer crust of formality which the Church sometimes acquires from the human natures that compose it, and the living inner current of Divine Life which is the only real Catholic tradition.

New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton

In Part III Merton will move on to discussing Catholic dogma.

Tradition and Revolution I

Our Catholic women's book club read New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton over Lent. Obviously I am very late in sharing some of it with you. Overall, the book was interesting because I'd never been able to get through one of Merton's books before. This one, a series of essays, which Merton wrote for himself as much as anything, contemplates what holiness means for each of us. Oh, as well as contemplation. That too.

I did not always agree with everything Merton said. Although many tend to view him as a saint, I remind us all that he was not. An interesting writer, yes. Striving for holiness, yes. A saint, no. Infallible, no.

That said, I really enjoyed the way that he was able to set examples forth in defense of Catholicism much of the time. This is something that I believe some who enjoy reading Merton may not realize, considering that when I see him quoted it is often to make an edgy point about orthodoxy in the Church.

I have wanted to share this with y'all for some time and perhaps now is the right time since I am finally getting around to it. I think it is definitely an essay that needs to be read in the times in which we are living.

Tradition and Revolution

The biggest paradox about the Church is that she is at the same time essentially traditional and essentially revolutionary. But that is not as much of a paradox as it seems, because Christian tradition, unlike all others, is a living and perpetual revolution.

Human traditions all tend toward stagnation and decay. They try to perpetuate things that cannot be perpetuated. They cling to objects and values which time destroys without mercy. They are bound up with a contingent and material order of things -- customs, fashions, styles and attitudes -- which inevitably change and give way to something else.

The presence of a strong element of human conservatism in the church should not obscure the fact that Christian tradition, supernatural in its source, is something absolutely opposed to human traditionalism.

The living tradition of Catholicism is like the breath of a physical body. It renews life by repelling stagnation. It is a constant, quiet, peaceful revolution against death.

As the physical act of breathing keeps the spiritual soul united to a material body whose very matter ends always to corrupt and decay, so Catholic tradition keeps the Church alive under the material and social and human elements which will be encrusted upon as long as it is in the world.

The reason why Catholic tradition is a tradition is because there is only one living doctrine in Christianity. The whole truth of Christianity has been fully revealed. It has not yet been fully understood or fully lived. The life of the Church is the Truth of God Himself, breathed out into the Church by His Spirit, and there cannot be any other truth to supersede and replace it.

The only thing that can replace such intense life is a lesser life, a kind of death. The constant human tendency away from God and away from this living tradition can only be counteracted by a return to tradition, a renewal and a deepening of the one unchanging life that was infused into the Church at the beginning.

And yet this tradition must always be a revolution because by its very nature it denies the values and standards to which human passion is so powerfully attached. To those who love money and pleasure and reputation and power this tradition says: "Be poor, go down into the far end of society, take the last place among men, live with those who are despised, love other men and serve them instead of making them serve you. Do not fight them when they push you around, but pray for those that hurt you. Do not look for pleasure, but turn away from things that satisfy your senses and your mind and look for God in hunger and thirst and darkness, through deserts of the spirit in which it seems to be madness to travel. Take upon yourself the burden of Christ's Cross, that is, Christ's humility and poverty and obedience and renunciation, and you will find peace for your souls.

This is the most complete revolution that has ever been preached; in fact, it is the only true revolution, because all the others demand the extermination of somebody else, but this one means the death of the man who, for all practical purposes, you have come to think of as your own self.

New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton

Part II is here.

God's Love Shown Us Through Others

If left to myself I'd probably become a hermit. However, since I met Him, God has been dragging me not only out of my shell but out of the house into many communities. Lately I have been very aware of how blessed I am to have so many brothers and sisters in the Body of Christ to share joys and sorrows with. It is a special bond.

It doesn't hurt that our Catholic women's book club is reading The New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton. It is a series of essays, several of which dwell in particular upon different aspects of community. This bit in particular is a good "sound byte" of what has really hit me lately.

When the Love of God is in me, God is able to love you through me and you are able to love God through me. If my soul were closed to that love, God's love for you and your love for God and God's love for himself in you and in me, would be denied the particular expression which it finds through me and through no other.

Because God's love is in me, it can come to you from a different and special direction that would be closed if He did not live in me, and because His love is in you, it can come to me from a quarter from which it would not otherwise come. And because it is in both of us, God has greater glory. His love is expressed in two more ways in which it would not otherwise be expressed; that is, in two more joys that could not exist without Him.