Part II, The desert and the pursuit of holiness
We hear terms like "sanctification" and "holiness" a lot, but are we ever told what they actually mean? How do you get there from here?
Site update: the annual summer slow-down
I’m going to apologise ahead of time for the low level of output we’re going to have here for the next few weeks. We’re entering the hottest period of our year right now - as I’m sure so is everyone in the northern hemisphere. For me, the Big Hot is the time of year where I can’t really function. Since chemo wrecked my endocrine system 13 years ago, I’ve had considerable difficulty with the summer heat.
This is the weather that gives me the strange waves of nausea, racing heart and dizziness, a hormonal reaction I’m told, that makes it impossible to work. Nothing to be done about it but rest. I’ve got some herbal remedies that help, but it’s simply not going to be possible to keep up with the full writing schedule.
So, I missed our Wednesday paid post yesterday, and today we’re going to have a repost of a set of articles I wrote some time ago for One Peter Five on mysticism, asceticism, and the spiritual life in the ancient Christian tradition. I’m afraid this week has been a bit of a dud for writing. Or being able to concentrate on much of anything.
We have a portable AC unit, which runs in the workroom, but even with it chugging away at full blast, it isn’t much of a match for the great ravening yellow monster in the sky, especially with our three big south-west exposure windows. The view down the valley is always wonderful, but this time of year I’d gladly trade it for a cave in the mountains.
The house is so hot this time of year that we keep the front sitting room closed entirely, with the blinds down and the connecting doors shut, as well as the kitchen door, in hopes of keeping the beast at bay. But even so, all the denizens of the house are camping in the workroom at night with the AC running, and to heck with electric bills. Any cooking that gets done is in the electric slow-cooker, which sits out on the terrace with the long extension cord to keep it from heating the kitchen up any further and taxing the fridge and freezer chest compressors.
For some reason, I managed to choose nearly the hottest place in the country to live in. In Siena last week we met a young chap from Egypt working the counter in a gelato shop who said it is so hot in central Italy he would prefer to go home to Alexandria. I don’t blame him; it’s only 83F there today.
Narni is in every other way, and for the whole rest of the year, perfectly congenial. But for about 3 weeks every summer, I am obliged to simply hide indoors, and resign myself to being more or less non-functional except for about three hours early in the morning.
I’ll do my best to keep up with our regular schedule, and there’s loads of things on the calendar, and we’ll get to them one at a time. I’ve got a post half finished on the great Carolingian “Renaissance” - that time the pope crowned an emperor, and changed western European history forever. Tomorrow we’ll take a look at our quiz answers from two Friday Goodie-bag posts ago, and a little sneak peek for paid members of our glorious trip to Siena.
Benedictine book club
But I’m getting excited about our exploration of Benedictine monastic spirituality and prayer I mentioned in the paid section of Monday’s post. Quite a few of our members messaged that they’re interested in joining the book group. We’re going to be starting with the book, “The Spiritual Life and Prayer According to Holy Scripture and Monastic Tradition.” Quite a few said they already own it, (which speaks volumes about the quality of our members here, I have to say). If you’re interested and don’t have it yet, you can order a copy here and here.
I was able to spend about 1/2 an hour with her this morning, and even in the preface there are deeper insights than one usually gets from the average Sunday homily.
We’ll be starting the book group on Monday, and I hope it will just be a fun group talking about what we learn and think about from the readings. I suppose as the instigator I should set the assignment; I’m just reading the Preface at the moment, so that seems like enough to be getting on with.
Meanwhile, I thought if we were going to be starting a serious exploration of classical Christian mystical theology - which is what all the Benedictine stuff is - we might like to review some background…
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The Desert And The Pursuit of Holiness
First published by One Peter Five, September 3 and 4, 2020.
What does the common expression mean, “pursuit of holiness”? We hear it a good deal from churchmen, but the details, the concrete “how-to” is often left vague. Most of us have never heard anything about the Church’s great traditions of contemplative prayer – mostly assuming they are intended for monks and nuns. We know “go to Mass” and “pray the Rosary,” but little more. In the US and Canada, Eucharistic adoration is popular, but I don’t remember ever being taught how to pray before the Blessed Sacrament. And about “mental prayer” I never heard a single word.
If you only get your information on the spiritual life and how to conduct it from sermons at Mass it’s easy to come away with the idea that it is a rather nebulous, undefined (perhaps undefinable) and has something to do with “being nice,” an answer that can’t help but fail to satisfy.
It’s especially unsatisfactory to people who develop a healthy sense of their own sins and shortcomings. If that’s all there is to it, how is “being nice” going to change me? How do I get transformed from being a sinner into a saint? Or even just less bad? And crucially, what has it got to do with Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, His death and Resurrection? Anyone can “be nice”; it doesn’t take God Incarnate to be a Saviour for that.
And this gap is filled very often with a lot of nonsense. New Age and warmed-over Eastern mysticism (often much to the annoyance of actual Hindus and Buddhists) is offered by popular “spiritual writers,” available in parish and monastic bookshops across the globe. And it need hardly be said that a good deal of this – pertaining as it does to one’s eternal destiny – can be very dangerous indeed.
And what of the saints? If “being nice” is all that’s expected of the general run of humanity, what does that mean for the Church’s great history of saints? Doesn’t it hint that in fact, sanctification – the real thing, that produces the miracle workers, the walkers-on-water, the raisers-of-the-dead, the healers, the levitators? How do you go from “being nice” to laughing off being grilled to death for Christ? To failing even to notice being rent by wild beasts or strapped to a post and set on fire in the arenas of 3rd century Rome and Carthage?
What does “being nice” even have to do with someone like St. Denis, who was martyred by beheading? He who famously shrugged it off, got up (or at least, most of him did), picked up his head, stoically tucked it under his arm, and marched off to carry on preaching and calling sinners to repentance. (This is actually a thing. So much so that there’s a name for it in Christian hagiography: “Cephalophore” – Greek for “someone who carries his own head around, and not on his neck.”)
Such stories, we might be tempted to think, are in the realm of heroic fiction. They read like Homeric myths of monsters and demigods. What could they possibly have to do with us? Or with “being nice”?
Very little examination is required to conclude that there has to be more to it.
But then the question arises; if that’s so, then how do I get there? It seems like there is an impassable gulf not only between me and God, but even between me – regular old me down here on unremarkable planet earth living my lumpy quotidian life – and my fellow man who has somehow mysteriously achieved these exalted heights. If the “be nice” doctrine is true, the only sensible response to the saints is a shrug and a hearty “Well done you!”
All saints enter the desert
This puzzle started occupying my mind when it occurred to me that not only must there be more to it, but that no one was telling. (This is because most of the people in charge of the Church in our time don’t know either.) And this brings me to this video about the life of St. David of Wales:
This is one of a series of biographical videos made by a group of Orthodox Christians in the US, called “The Chronicles of the Desert”. It’s a series that mostly focuses on the saints of the first millennia, the ones that the Catholics and Orthodox have in common. These are the guys, like St. Anthony the Great, who marched off to the Egyptian wilderness to emulate Moses and Elijah, to have face to face encounters with the living God. So, how then does David of Wales fit in to this “desert” business? Anyone who has taken a summer holiday in Wales will tell you that the place is hardly a desert. And yet, St. David was firmly of that ancient Christian mystical tradition that we sometimes abbreviate to “the desert”.
So what does “the desert” mean in the context of the pursuit of sanctification? I’ll let you watch the video, and think about this: all saints enter the desert.
St. Philp Neri, the wonderworking “second apostle of Rome,” who never left Italy in his life. St. Columbanus, the mariner and founder of Celtic monasteries. St. Cuthbert, the abbot of Lindisfarne who spent his life in Northumberland. Bl. Anna Maria Taigi, the married mother and housewife who lived a suburban life in Rome and was a mystic of the highest order.
All the same. All saints of the desert.
Mental prayer is the door to another world - “What is holiness, anyway?
Last time we talked about the question, “How, exactly, do I ‘pursue holiness’? What does it mean?” Today we’re going to look at the second half of the question. What does holiness mean anyway? We could look it up on Wikipedia or even in a catechism, but it might not help.
You can’t know you want something – still less devote your life to getting it – until you know what it is.
We can point to the saints, and say we know them when we see them – particularly the kind with the spectacular gifts – but that doesn’t mean we know what precisely constitutes their sanctity. Or, most importantly, how to get there ourselves. Exactly, concretely, precisely and practically, how do you get from here to there?
In fact, spectacular sanctity – the floating, bilocating, wonderworking kind – can often be for modern people a way of dismissing sanctification altogether, at least as a possibility for themselves. We assume not that we can emulate such people and follow their path to become saints ourselves, but that God has simply chosen some people, or made some people, as specially gifted and we’re not one of them. We excuse ourselves on about the same grounds as people do who dismiss the ability to draw as mere “talent”. They have the “gene” for sanctification and we do not.
So not only do we not aspire to it ourselves, we might even feel as though it is presumptuous to try. “That’s fine for St. Gerard Majella and Bl. Margaret of Castello to do all that healing and floating and whatnot, but I’m just a regular schmoe.” We turn back to the TV or the internet, rather relieved that it’s not really a matter of work and we’re off the hook for such grandiose expectations.
Such thinking was, by all accounts, common in religious life before the Asteroid1, in which novices were positively discouraged from reading the spiritual works of their founders, like St. Teresa of Avila, for fear of them acquiring wild ideas for themselves.
It is something akin to the British working class fear that a child will “get above himself” if he is encouraged to read books too much – he will give himself unfulfillable dreams about his future prospects, when the only work available in town is in the factory or the mine. Encouraging such flights of fancy will sabotage his happiness. Best he gets no hint of higher things and keeps his feet firmly on the ground of this life.
But this attitude makes a fatal mistake: we are not, in fact, meant for this life at all, which is why the suggestion that we are is so depressing, so disappointing.
C.S. Lewis became famous for preaching the better, higher things to the grey and perpetually depressed English; “You have never met an ordinary human being,” he said in one of his radio theology sessions. We are all meant for the golden splendours of eternal bliss, so glorious that even the wonders of a gilded Baroque ceiling look poor and tawdry in comparison.
We must throw off the idea that the dull, grubby drudgery of this earthly life is what we are meant for. Think bigger. I will go so far as to say that it is one of the things for which we may thank the Second Vatican Council that it made the idea of the “universal call to holiness” respectable again – though it seems to have discouraged all possibility of actually fulfilling it in any practical sense.
Sanctification is simply living in heaven in this life.
There certainly seems to be an unbridgeable gulf between regular, lumpy old me, sitting down here on hum-drum, non-magical planet earth, and the dazzling wonders of the heavenly hosts.
But is this model really correct? It’s easy to assume so, if we spend our lives carefully avoiding the wonderful, tantalising – intimidating – alternative view: that this life is infused with heavenly wonders and glories. We see it in the saints most clearly and in their fantastic works, their transformed lives and their miracles, their unearthly wisdom, their utter fearlessness.
These traits – the thing we call “holiness” – are a result of the dual citizenship of the saints who travelled frequently, daily, hourly, all throughout their earthly lives between heaven and earth, bringing a little of the former into the latter every day. For the saints, the earthly life is already heavenly, and not merely “despite” the suffering that always comes, but because of it, or more properly, because of their grace-filled response to that suffering.
It is something I suspected from childhood – that wonderful, magical realities were hiding just barely out of sight, behind every leaf and blade of grass. We might not ever admit it to any of our sensible, down-to-earth, business-as-usual friends or family, but don’t we suspect that there is something more to the world than we’re told? It’s like a belief that many people secretly hold in the existence of fairies – an entirely wonderful, otherworldly reality lives right here with us, if only we could learn the knack of seeing it.
Is this perhaps the underlying origin of our love of nature, our fascination with birds and plants and animals? Of awe-inspiring weather, or extraordinary intricacies we can see in tiny life forms under an electron microscope? Why do we climb mountains just to look at the view? Why do we not dismiss as merely earthly events – all perfectly explainable and natural – phenomena like the Aurora Borealis, or the recently discovered lightning “sprites”. Why do we stand thrilled in awe and joy and wonder at something so common as a thunderstorm?
There is something inherent in the human makeup that thrills at these things; we are built with a capacity for awe. We have a built-in numinous2 sense. And we have to work very hard at deforming that nature to suppress it – which is what the World has accomplished so well in the last 250 years. All children know the thrill of joy at seeing a wild animal, hearing thunder far off or gazing deep into the heart of a tiny wildflower, looking for its great, cosmic meaning.
Icons, the lenses of the numinous - a short story
One day you wake up very early, as the sky is only beginning to lighten. You’re sure you heard a knock on the door of your little city flat. You get up and wrap your bleary self in your housecoat and peek through the spy hole and see a man standing in the hall, dressed like a postman, with a bag over one shoulder bulging with brown paper wrapped packages. He smiles and waves at you through the peek hole.
He looks harmless enough so you open the door, and he holds out a small package. You are still sleepy enough to fail to be cautious and you reach out to take it. The man gives a small wink and disappears, leaving you holding the little paper-wrapped box, wondering if you’d really seen what you just saw.
The package is completely plain, only wrapped in a bit of white string, except for a single symbol, stamped in what looks like gold:
After a coffee to settle your brain, with the package sitting on the kitchen counter, you dare to shake it. Just a dull little thump indicates there is something inside. No scrabbling or squeaking; at least it’s not alive.
You decide to take the risk and it’s just a pair of glasses.
There’s a note, written in beautiful cursive with a fountain pen: “What you’re looking for is right here.”
There’s only one thing to do.
~
There’s a good reason modern people are wild about fantastic tales of wizards and superheroes. We all know, don’t we, that there’s more to life than this dull, pallid, mechanical existence we’ve made for ourselves. That we’ve trapped ourselves in.
It’s what I’ve discovered in the world of iconography and sacred art – all of which is (or is supposed to be) an expression of the existence of this higher reality as it lives right down here with us. Heaven comes to us through the “door” of the icon, and the paintings (and the architecture) provide a door for that higher reality to enter our world.
I’ve looked for the Door to Narnia all my life, and here it is; it might be a while before I can go through it, but it can allow heaven to visit me, I can befriend the heavenly hosts. I can become a Narnian citizen, though for now an expat, and look through it to my home every day.
Aidan Hart, the English iconographer, wrote about it in a small instruction manual for gilding icons. What is the symbolism of gold on an icon? It is not mere decoration. It represents the Divine Order of the universe, that which created it and sustains it from moment to moment. The halo and gold accents in an icon of a saint or angel represents the glory of God shining out from within.
Gold has been used in religious and votive objects since ancient times for essentially this purpose not only because of its colour, but because it is imperishable – it never tarnishes or fades and is impervious to sunlight or age, all divine attributes recognised as such by ancient peoples.
Aidan writes:
In Orthodox icons, as in sacred arts of many other religions, gold symbolizes divine presence, glory, spiritual light. Gold is not a colour as such, as are the other elements of the icon; it is of a different order of existence. That is, it represents the divine order, which creates and sustains the created order.
As background the gold shows that it is in God that we “live and move and have our being”, as Saint Paul said. God is like the water within which all creation swims like fish in the ocean.
The gold halo represents the Holy Spirit’s indwelling of the saint, the ‘shekinah’ [Hebrew for the manifestation of the presence of God] glory of God shining from within.
The gold in the background represents the “water” of the ultimate reality of God in which we are all swimming, and the halos represent that same Divine glory coming forth from the saint. On the clothing in lines and accents, it “represents the material world being transfigured by God.”
The lines thus do not denote superficial decoration, but rather an inner, transforming presence of the Divine within the inanimate world. These lines follow the basic form of the object on which they are drawn – the drapery, tree trunk or whatever – but are abstracted enough to show that they represent a spiritual reality and do not just suggest form.
And it is this higher reality, living right here with us in the world, that Christian mysticism seeks to gain access to. This is the transforming power of the sacramental life, but we must learn to enter it.
Why aren’t the Sacraments fixing me?
It is a mistake to think that the theological expression “ex opere operato” works on us as well as it does on the bread and wine. Transubstantiation happens but the Most Holy and August Sacrament of the Altar isn’t a magic pill. Catholics have acquired a distorted understanding in our time of how sacramental grace works. We imagine that it’s an automatic thing – we receive Communion and are made saints… some day. But ask yourself; has that day come? Are you being changed? If you are not being transformed as you hoped, what more can you do? What’s missing?
And this is the catch to the whole business, the thing we’re missing since the 1960s and the Church went silent on her mystical tradition. You have to be prepared. You have to do the work. God won’t meet you “half way” because half way through an infinite distance is still infinite. He’s going to be right in front of you, right behind you. But He does want you to do at least a little work, take a few steps forward. You need to struggle against the inertia and spiritual obstacles, at least a bit.
In short, while the Eucharist is Christ, even He cannot change you until you are ready to be changed. This is the old fashioned notion of “dispositions”. We modern Catholics are still (mostly) aware that we must be in a state of grace – that is, not have unconfessed mortal sin – to receive Communion lawfully, but this is the very rock bottom minimum requirement. This is what it takes only to live your life teetering one inch from the edge of the cliff of calamity.
To get from this life lived constantly on the edge of barely doing enough to actual holiness there is stuff you need to do.
And that’s where prayer comes in.
The third instalment of this series never got published. And I think I need to wait to write it after diving into Abbess Cecile’s book. But I know the question I’m going to be looking for answers to: what is prayer, really?
The Second Vatican Council and that which followeth.
The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis:
Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told "There is a ghost in the next room," and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is "uncanny" rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread. With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous. Now suppose that you were told simply "There is a mighty spirit in the room," and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking—a sense of inadequacy to cope with such a visitant and of prostration before it—an emotion which might be expressed in Shakespeare's words "Under it my genius is rebuked." This feeling may be described as awe, and the object which excites it as the Numinous.
I recall reading this article back on 1P5, but it was refreshing to see this here. Especially because the line about ex opere operato not working on us like it does on the sacraments (paraphrased) was particularly pertinent. Thanks Hilary.
Looking forward to an answer on "what is prayer really" as I am still bemused after all these years!