Lent is not always about the negative, about the sacrifice of this or that. It’s also taking on the positive, doing something more for someone, enriching someone’s life.
Or maybe I’m just trying to justify this entry…
Results For "Month: February 2013"
#13 — Humility and Humiliation
humiliate ourselves before false gods
It’s sometimes easy for me to grow depressed about the world we have brought our children into. There are so many different calls for attention, so many things that people place in the center of their lives, things that at their heart are not only meaningless but actually harmful yet somehow seen as the ultimate good. It all falls under the banner of materialism and instant gratification, and the technology of today only heightens it. Indeed, the technology is often part and parcel of the whole game: smart phones to take pictures of unhealthy food to share with friends who have just posted pictures of the new car they bought that they really can’t afford; tablet computers that allow people to feed their obsession with sex, shopping, or whatever their fetish anywhere and everywhere; televisions large enough to cover most of a wall so we can see in painful clarity the details of our visual obsessions. Add to it the realization that children growing up today face new peer pressure to fit in by owning all these gadgets, using all these gadgets obsessively, virtually praying to these gadgets — and anyone who doesn’t fit in will faces a barrage of bullying, taunting, and rejection.
It’s not a world I would personally like to have to grow up in.
Weil speaks of these obsessions in terms of false gods:
We do not have to acquire humility. There is humility is us. Only we humiliate ourselves before false gods.
The fact that humiliate and humility have the same root is ironic today, considering how so many people humiliate themselves, all the while thinking they’re elevating themselves.
#12 — Natural Movements and Grace
Some Christians explain it with the doctrine of Original Sin. Muslims reject the notion of an inherently sinful nature in humanity but believe that pride (an unwillingness to submit) is humanity’s chief sin (ReligionFacts.com). Judaism seems to have no established doctrine on the matter, but the Jewish experience of the twentieth century — indeed, in most centuries — probably led many to believe in the tendency of humanity toward evil. Through countless rebirths, Buddhism  teaches, humans are to overcome a seemingly natural tendency toward attachment. Hinduism teaches that there is a reality beyond the everyday — the Brahman — that humans can achieve by changing not only their view but also their behavior, suggesting that the original state is an inferior state. Secularists use the term “human nature” to explain the simple fact that all religions recognize: the natural movement of the will tends to be downward.
All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analagous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception (Gravity and Grace, 45).
Yet life is generally about improvement. We want to become better people We want the “I” of today to be somehow more elevated than the “I” of yesterday and not quite so much as the “I” of tomorrow will be. Yet all this movement is relative to a standard. If we’re saying “better” and “worse,” it’s in relation to something. And even though we could say, “Well, yes: that ‘something’ is our former self,” that’s still not quite satisfying. We seem to have the desire to move toward an ultimate goal. It’s always about rising above the natural state we find ourselves in, and more often than not, it’s about detachment. The things that drag us down are things that we can leave behind, religions teach us, and the first step to rising is to make ourselves lighter. Gravity can pulls down harder on more mass; grace works to remove those weights and pull us upward.
While it sounds somewhat more Eastern — more Buddhist or Hindu than Christian — than Fr. Robert Barron, in Catholicism, points out that there is an element of detachment in Jesus’s most famous teachings, the Beatitudes, specifically the four, seemingly negatively framed Beatitudes. Barron begins by reminding us that Thomas Aquinas said there were four substitutes for God: “wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. Sensing the void within, we attempt to fill it up with some combination of these four things, but only by emptying out the self in love can we make the space for God to fill us” (43). The negative Beatitudes, then, are formulas for this emptying, and they form a perfect parallel with Aquinas’s four substitutes.
- Wealth: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Barron suggests a slight reformulation: “how blessed are you if you are not attached to material things, if you have not placed the goods that wealth can buy at the center of your concern.”
- Pleasure: Another negatively framed Beatitude becomes surprisingly apt for our culture when we reformulate it as Barron does: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted” becomes “how blessed […] you are if you are not addicted to good feelings.” It’s easy, Barron says, to see this addition to good feeling in today’s society with its “prevalence of psychotropic drugs, gluttonous habits of consumption, and pronography” (44).
- Power: “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land.” Barron reforms this into, “How lucky you are if you are not attached to the finite good of worldly power” (44). We might be tempted to think this applies only to those with political power, but we all — even children — Â have some degree of power and control over someone in the world.
- Honor: “Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” The polar opposite of honor is persecution, and while honor is good, “when love of honor becomes the center of one’s concern, it, like any other finite good, becomes a source of suffering” (45).
This is what Lent is all about: giving up some of the distractions and attachments that tend to pull us downward (often material objects) while paying special attention to the things that lift us up (often some form of giving). It’s a sacrifice of the things for which we often sacrifice everything, our little mini-idols that occupy unhealthy proportions of our thoughts — forty days of detachment.
#11 — Advanced Opinion
opinion has an effect
Humility is the great sin of the modern age. Whether it’s “I’m okay; you’re okay” or “I’m the king of the world,” humility is on the other end of that spectrum. Many in the secular world find the notions of Christianity — Catholicism in particular — about the true, fallen nature of humanity to be distasteful because it offends the relatively modern sense of the inherent goodness in humanity. I think it probably has more to do with the humiliation of humility than it does with supposed dignity and inherent moral goodness. This is, of course, not to say that all individuals in today’s culture lack humility — just the prominent ones, the ones we as a society generally look up to.
Humility has as its object to eliminate that which is imaginary in spiritual progress. There is no harm in thinking ourselves far less advanced than we are: the effect of the light is in no way decreased thereby, for its source is not in opinion. There is great harm in thinking ourselves more advanced, because then opinion has an effect.
Having too positive an opinion of ourselves distracts us from the goal almost all religions set before us: the purification of our will. It not only distracts us; it deceives us.
Second Sunday of Lent 2013
Sun. It’s always there, they say. While living in Poland, I could go weeks, it seemed, without actually seeing it. Hidden behind layers upon layers of clouds, the sun’s light was defused throughout the whole sky, a dully gray that made it impossible to tell the time of day. There were two modes: darkness and less darkness.
Lately, it’s seemed like that around here. Gray skies. Rainy days. Cold and damp. Damp and cold.
And then, this morning.
Cloudless. Bright sky. Rich blue. And the temperature soars into the fifties, touches the sixties.
Everyone it seems is out. The neighbors’ dog, an ever-thrilled, always-excited Spaniel, is out making its rounds. I would say “Everyone loves him,” but I can speak only for my family: everyone loves him.
Everyone is out and about, including our dear little friend from up the street. The bare Crape Myrtles in the front beckon, and soon the kids are climbing, laughing, playing.
The promise of spring, the promise of afternoons outside, the promise of long evenings with golden skies.
It’s all coming.
In the Crib
Singalong
New Year’s Eve Performance
I’ve been catching up on old videos I never compiled…
#10 — Existence and Value
Illusions about the things of this world do not concern their existence, but their value.
Keeping a proper perspective about the value of the things around us — the everyday things in our lives, the this and that which are so much more than merely this and that — is probably made both easier and more difficult by the simple fact of having a family. Children and a spouse create routine, and routine risks monotony.
Therein lies the danger.
Saturday morning — breakfast, Skyping with Dziadek and Babcia, taking L to ballet, cleaning the house, doing the laundry, planning for the next week of school, correcting this or that assignment. This mix of truly the meaningful with the truly mundane risks making it all seem mundane.
Therein lines the illusion.
Weil is speaking the illusion that makes actions of inherent evil seem good in some circumstances, but the reverse is equally likely, and probably equally dangerous.