Matching Tracksuits

The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass (62).

Augustine famously said of God in his Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are rest-less till they find their rest in you.” Others have simply reformulated this as the “God-shaped hole,” the “terrifying bottomless abyss opening up inside us which we would do anything to fill” (Source). Yet perhaps Weil’s vision is a little more apt: it’s not a single hole, but a series of fissures that permeate our whole existence. That goes a long way in explaining why we’re so apt at blocking the various graces that we experience on a daily basis. We’re like kids with buckets of mud after an earthquake, trying to seal this crack, that fissure with something completely inadequate.

As alluded to earlier, Father Robert Barron rightly compares the substitutes with which we fill these holes to addictions. The analogy couldn’t be more apt. Addictions control us; we react without thinking through our conditioned addictions, and that false consistency — always “knowing” how to respond — gives us some sort of emotional comfort that accompanies the physical or psychological “comfort” that most addictions provide. And yet it is our addictions that close us off from so many positives in the world. Indeed, addiction in its severest form can become our world, at which point I suppose we’re living our whole life in a small little crack through which grace could enter.

The world must be regarded as containing something of a void in order that it may have need of God. That presupposes evil (56).

The problem of evil for many is the single most convincing argument for an atheistic stance. Dr. Peter Kreeft, of Boston College, writes, “The problem of evil is the most serious problem in the world. It is also the one serious objection to the existence of God.” He continues,

More people have abandoned their faith because of the problem of evil than for any other reason. It is certainly the greatest test of faith, the greatest temptation to unbelief. And it’s not just an intellectual objection. We feel it. We live it.

Standford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes it thus:

1. If God exists, then God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect.
2. If God is omnipotent, then God has the power to eliminate all evil.
3. If God is omniscient, then God knows when evil exists.
4. If God is morally perfect, then God has the desire to eliminate all evil.
5. Evil exists.
6. If evil exists and God exists, then either God doesn’t have the power to eliminate all evil, or doesn’t know when evil exists, or doesn’t have the desire to eliminate all evil.
7. Therefore, God doesn’t exist.

The problem of evil has a mirror image, though I didn’t see it for many years. For many years, I encountered only the standard responses about the limits of human knowledge and “the best of all possible worlds” argument. Then there are the theodicies, which all reduce down to the proposition that freedom of will necessitates the option to do evil. But the flip side of the problem of evil is the problem of good: if things are the result of atheistic chance, why is there beauty, and relatively speaking, so much of it? Indeed, humans seem obsessed with the creation of beauty, though we don’t always agree with the definition of “beauty” — especially in the case of modern art.

Thus, in a sense, Weil’s words constitute a kind of theodicy in miniature. Evil has often been described as a void, as a privation of good — and thus, having no real existence. It’s the absence of good. That does little to explain why a loving God wouldn’t do something about the evil that seems to suffuse the world, but it does reframe the issue in a way that puts evil in the proper relation to good: a void.

If God is, then everything else is not, writes Weil:

If we find fullness of joy in the thought that God is, we must find the same fullness in the knowledge that we ourselves are not, for it is the same thought. And this knowledge is extended to your sensibility only through suffering and death (84).

If God is, then everything else — including our suffering and death — is not. It’s a paradox of monotheism in general and Christianity in particular: when we speak of “God being,” we’re not using the verb “to be” in the same sense we do when speaking of our everyday reality. God’s “is” is not the “is” of the book that “is on my table.” God’s “is” is the “is” — the ground of every other “is,” and perhaps more appropriate written “Is.” Thomas Halik, explaining Meister Eckhart’s thought, expresses it thus:

He is “nothing” in a world of beings, because God is not a being among beings. And Eckhart goes on to declare that you must become “nothing” if you wish to encounter him. If you want to be “something” (that is, mean something, have something, know something, in short, be fixated on individual beings and the world of things), then you are not free to encounter Him (Night of the Confessor, 22).

God’s “is” can only be thought to be “nothing” in terms of our “is” because His is outside ours, the grounding of ours, the “Is.” Thus God gives Moses the name, “I Am.”

Weil on transposition:

We believe we are rising because, while keeping the same base inclinations (for instance: the desire to triumph over others), we have given them a noble object. We should, on the contrary, rise by attaching noble inclinations to lowly objects.

My thoughts — bed…

(Yet another cheat…)

Weil writes,

God gave me being in order that I should give it back to him. It is like one of those traps whereby the characters are tested in fairy stories and tales of initiation. If I accept this gift, it is bad and fatal; its virtue becomes apparent through my refusal of it. God allows me to exist outside himself. It is for me to refuse this authorization.

It’s not something I pretend to understand. Even with a conversion to Catholicism and resulting reading and studying, the whole reason for a deity to create anything confuses me. If God is perfect, why create anything? What does that provide a perfect being that said being doesn’t already possess?

The use of temptations. It depends on the relative strength of the soul and of time. To go on for a long time contemplating the possibility of doing evil without doing it effects a kind of transubstantiation. If we resist with merely finite energy, this energy is exhausted after a certain time, and when it is exhausted, we give in. If we remain motionless and attentive, it is the temptation which is exhausted — and we acquire the energy raised to a higher degree.

For a little boy, temptation is a simple thing; for a little boy who can move about under his own volition, it’s a simple thing that’s simply everywhere. Closets hold treasures. Desks sit over snaking cables and wires.

Cabinets hold bags of flour, sugar, and other mysteries. Desk cabinets conceal pencils, markers, and other goodies. 

The Boy doesn’t resist temptation, reaching his pudgy fingers toward dangers and toys alike.

But he’s at that lucky point in life when temptation is all about learning, and vice versa.

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.

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.

1. 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.”
2. 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).
3. 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 —  have some degree of power and control over someone in the world.
4. 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.

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.

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.

As a teacher, I think often about authority and legitimacy, and the simple fact that if I lack one, I lack the other. The problem with legitimacy, though, is that many of my students come with different definitions of what legitimacy looks like. I might just have two strikes against me from the beginning — two, or more. When our differing definitions collide, someone often ends up losing. Win-win is a lovely idea, but sometimes, it’s just not practical. Sometimes, the option seems taken before the situation even reaches a full head.

When I read Weil’s suggestion that authority without legitimacy is a nightmare, I realize that, from time to time, my classroom must be a nightmare for these students. It’s a difficult thought to accept.

Technically speaking, the Sundays within the Lenten season are not fast days; Sundays, the Church teaches, are always feast days. Which means that theoretically, all the things one gives up for Lent are fair game. “Isn’t that cheating?” I’m tempted to ask.

After all, I really didn’t sacrifice anything of real value — that’s sort of the purpose of Lent, that realization. What’s in my life that has any value remains: family. Cigars? Alcohol? Coffee? Sweets? These things are all relatively meaningless in the larger picture — again, what Lent helps us focus on.

It’s not like I’m only just barely refraining from desperately grabbing at this or that. Sure, the things I give up for Lent give me a certain amount of pleasure, but they come with a price. Cigars, no matter how infrequently enjoyed, are in no way healthy. Alcohol is easily enough abused and doesn’t add much to life other than some relaxation and pleasure. Sweets? No problem: it’s not really surrender if you hardly ever do it. Coffee? Well, I thought in giving up coffee for the first time this year I might actually be sacrificing something I would really notice, and believe me, that first day without caffeine, I noticed it.

But after that first day, it was no problem at all. (A small admission: I did drink coffee today. Couldn’t resist.)

Still, when taking into account all the things I could lose, voluntarily or not, I think most all Lenten sacrifices are fairly insignificant — again, a realization that gets at the heart of the whole point of Lent.