Finding a Spiritual Director

I also wanted to share some good news. After some adventures and awkward moments--including asking a Cardinal of the Roman Church, true story--I think I have found a spiritual director here in Rome. When the time was right I had the inspiration to send an email in a certain direction, and right away I was led to someone who seems good.

We had a first meeting, which seemed to go well. He recommended that I no longer use the meditation period between Morning Prayer and Mass to pray the Office of Readings, but that I use it for meditation in the strict sense, what in the Capuchin tradition we call mental prayer.

He also recommended that I reread Thoughts Matter by Sr. Mary Margaret Funk. Also a very good idea. She writes:

This book is intended for a person who is looking seriously for the right path on the spiritual journey. According to John Cassian, a fourth-century monk, renunciations are required of us if we are on that journey. First, we must renounce our former way of life and move closer to our heart's desire, toward the interior life. Second, we must do the inner work (of asceticism) by renouncing our mindless thoughts. This renunciation is particularly difficult because we have little control over our thoughts. Third, we must renounce our own images of God so that we enter into contemplation of God as God.

Back From Retreat Ramble

I'm back in Rome after the week in Assisi. The 'spiritual exercises' were good, just not what I would call a retreat. It's a nice time to be with the brothers, to hang out, to have some time away from work and the usual routine. And of course it's always a privilege to be able to visit Assisi, to pray at the tomb of Francis and before the relics of St. Clare.

Devotion to the Saints

Each year on the feast of St. John Vianney I think of the permanent deacon who instructed me as a catechumen and then baptized me nineteen years ago this month.

The deacon thought of himself a simple man, and had found in John Vianney another cleric who had persevered through difficulty in his theological studies. Over the years I've realized that this was an important thing for me to see; it was my first real-life experience of personal devotion of a saint.

There are all sorts of devotions to saints, all of them blessed.

Sometimes we find in a saint or spiritual writer a resonance with our own experience of Christianity; we see some similarity in the graces and struggles and find someone in whom we can see ourselves. For me I think of Augustine, Benedict Joseph Labré, Thomas Merton, and Edith Stein.

Sometimes the saint seems to have something that we desire, or who seems like an intercessor consonant with what we seek. For me I think of Joseph, Monica, Thomas, and Bonaventure.

Sometimes a devotion arises from something like a combination of these two sorts of dynamics; the life and holiness of the saint not only speaks to something in our own experience, but of taking it to a depth or a place that we still want to go. For me I think of Francis.

Sometimes we can become devoted to a saint because his or her doctrine helps us understand the operation of grace in our own prayer and desire for Christianity. For me I think of Cassian and John of the Cross.

I suppose there are many more ways that we come to receive the gift of devotion to different saints. In all of it we give thanks to Christ, because it is his death and resurrection that has established us in a communion that transcends time and death.

Read

I was touched by this anonymous comment: I had gone to Reconciliation and had been feeling somewhat disconsolate afterwards. I wished I had a spiritual director.

The spiritual life isn't easy. Prayer, as is said, is an 'uninteresting wilderness.'

A spiritual director is a good thing, but only a help. Not everyone who thinks he needs a spiritual director really does, and not every who tries to engage in directing souls is competent to do so.

In the early years of my baptism I was often preoccupied with a certain interior struggle that was made much worse by my inability to really understand it or articulate it well. A significant part of my journals from those years is taken up with my struggle to find an understanding of this trouble. I remember trying to explain it in confession without much success. One time a priest just admitted that he didn't know what I was trying to explain. It was very frustrating because I felt like my spiritual progress was being impeded by something, but I couldn't quite describe what it was; I couldn't name the demon, as it were. I was also scandalized to find that priests were little help; I had presumed (in my innocence) that one of the ordinary works of priests was the diagnosis of spiritual maladies and prescription of appropriate remedies.

I began to arrive at some resolution in this issue when I read John Cassian. I realized that I was struggling with a subtle form of kenodoxia or vainglory. Cassian taught me how to recognize and name the particular thoughts and interior movements that were at the root of the affliction.

This is why I say that in the pursuit of a spiritual life, the best thing that someone can do is read. Through the ages, the life of prayer and the call to holiness have been lived by all kinds of different people with all sort of personalities, gifts, and faults. The Holy Spirit arranged for many of them to write about their experiences and what they had learned, so that their wisdom might be available to us.

For any individual soul, personality, and temperament, there is some spiritual writer out there who will speak to you from the communion of saints. Pay attention to cues you receive in prayer or through spiritual friends, and God will lead you to someone with whom you resonate. Find the spiritual writers who speak to your particular condition, and you will find that your own spiritual life begins to enter into the communion of saints. The saints will give you language and conceptual frameworks to understand your own experience, and you will also find your own sense of your journey comes to be informed by those who have gone before you. This is what I mean by the communion of saints in this regard. For example, my sense of my own prayer has ben strongly patterned by John of the Cross and John Cassian. My understanding of the narrative of my own conversion has received much from Augustine, Francis, and Thomas Merton.

To anyone who would live a spiritual life, make such friends. It is for you that God made them write.

Pride

In my experience of trying, or at least desiring to live a spiritual life, it has been my experience that pride is among the sneakiest and most insidious of the passions. Not that this is anything new; as John Cassian--my great teacher--writes, "There is no other vice, then, which so reduces to naught every virtue and so despoils and impoverishes a human being of all righteousness and holiness as does the evil of pride."

Today I was reflecting on an example from my own experience. It was a Sunday after Mass. I thought I had said an attentive and devout Mass, sung well, and preached a homily both entertaining and illuminating. I had a wonderful feeling of having found my niche in the world and gratitude to God for having got me where I was meant to be. People told me it was one of the best homilies that they had ever heard.

Then one man came up to me and pointed out how I had missed an obvious and homiletically useful point. He made me realize that my homily had been clever, but had not really engaged the Scripture. Through this man's little bit of advice, God had accomplished in me a twofold humiliation of my intellectual pride; not only did it cut through my self-congratulation at my preaching, but pointed out that my own cleverness had interfered with my preparation and made shallow my own prayer through the Sunday readings.

As I made my prayer of thanksgiving after greeting the people, I thanked God for the grace of the humiliation and correction, and prayed for the willingness to surrender to true humility.

Then came the next and even more insidious temptation, a thought rising as one of the logismoi if there ever was one: "Wow, I have accepted this humiliation of intellectual pride pretty easily. It feels good to be able to let go of myself so easily. I must be more spiritually advanced than I thought!"

Pride does not give up so easily. Such is the insidiousness of the worst of the passions.

Acedia and Distraction

After yesterday's post and some clarifying comments, it seemed like a good idea to me to continue on the topic of acedia, especially in its distinction from ordinary distraction and other troubles and challenges in the spiritual life.

Acedia is a slippery term, for sure. In the monastic tradition it refers to a kind of spiritual sickness by which we lose our taste for spiritual things and thus become spiritually lazy or find ourselves in a spiritual torpor--here we can see the relationship by which acedia gets transformed into sloth in standard lists of "deadly" sins. Acedia leaves us joyless in--or even disgusted with--the things of God and our spiritual practice, even though we might be dutifully fulfilling them all the same. This is very dangerous for anyone, but especially for those who preach the Word of God and minister the Church's sacraments, for they may be 'going through the motions' or simply acting as a technician who lacks any genuine savor or spiritual unction.

It is critical, in our own discernment or in spiritual direction, that ordinary sadness or even depression not be confounded with spiritual acedia. Acedia must also be distinguished from certain positive movements in the spiritual life that may bear some resemblance to it, like an invitation into John of the Cross's "Night of Sense."

Acedia must also be distinguished from the ordinary experience of distraction, both in prayer itself but also in our desire to be recollected in God during the rest of our day. While acedia is a dangerous passion, a 'bad thought' or a 'demon' as our monastic fathers and mothers call it, distraction is a normal part of human experience flowing from the mutability of our wills and bodies. In fact, distraction--when used properly--is no danger to the spiritual life at all, but is actually one of its most important helps. By using our distractions well, we refine and purify our intention toward God and become more durable in our recollection. In other words, distractions are the daily workout and exercise of our souls; they are always an opportunity to strengthen our intention and attention to the God Who is the true Desire of our hearts and Delight of our minds.

Nevertheless, there are dynamics that occur between acedia and distraction, and we should be aware of them in our daily practice. On the one hand, if we are not vigilant in our guard of our hearts and do not use our distractions well, instead allowing our hearts and minds to rest in whatever random thing arouses their interest, we will eventually discover ourselves to be slaves of concupiscence and sensual appetite. This is one way that the poor use of the opportunity of distractions can help us 'catch' the spiritual disease of acedia. If we follow every distraction and take worldly delight in every curiosity that invites our attention, we will find that when we do try to return to our piety we have lost some of the savor and joy we used to have in spiritual things. We will discover to our horror that even our desire for spirituality is selfish and sensual and that God no longer delights us in the way we had previously imagined.

On the other hand, for one who is already sick with acedia, distractions from prayer or from our recollection in general become that much more dangerous. This is because, according to Evagrius and Cassian at least, the remedy for acedia is to get to our spiritual work as diligently as we can, especially if we don't feel like it. Once I told one of my first spiritual directors that I had not prayed one day because I didn't feel like it. He told me that such a time was the most important time to pray. To pray when we want to and when we are full of the taste for the things of God is always to risk praying in order to have these delights. To pray when we don't feel like it, and when--as the world says--we don't 'get anything out of it' is the real ascesis of the spiritual life. So, distractions and temptations that would be the plain, ordinary tools of spiritual growth become that much more dangerous to the one afflicted with acedia, because of the risk of failing to do the one thing that needs to be done: getting back to work.

Hypotheticals

The next youngest brother (in religion) who is here with me in community likes to play a game called "hypotheticals." It makes for some silly and light conversation to take the edge off after stressful ministry in this world of suffering. For example, we ask each other to choose between two hypothetical assignments, neither of which is attractive of the natural level. Or we choose two of the friars and try to make educated guesses about which one would win in a hypothetical fistfight.

The other night, though, my confrere got me with one which stuck with me on a more serious level:

"If there were some kind of illegal steroid that would make you a better preacher, would you take it?"

Of course I said no. But I have to admit, it would be a temptation. Probably not a temptation that would get very far, but one that would at least arise in my thoughts. The very fact that I could be tempted in this way reveals the admixture of selfishness present in my ministry. That I might even consider risking health and committing civil crime in order to be a better preacher, reveals that there is part of my ministry that is about me and not yet exclusively about God.

It's what the ancient fathers called kenodoxia, or vainglory. In John Cassian's treatment of this vice, he tells a hilarious story about a solitary monk who was spied in his cell pretending to be a grand deacon, dismissing the people, and singing the double alleluia to himself.

Nevertheless, such realizations as this are salutary in the spiritual life. When we have those moments that display the admixture of selfishness in our religious motives. Our prayer and our ministry are never a pure adoration, submission, and service of God. In this life there will always be at least a little bit of bad motivation mixed in: fear, idolatry, vanity, etc.

Our good and bad motives are like the weeds and the wheat that grow so closely together that it can be hard to tell them apart sometimes. A good and quiet habit of discernment and examination of conscience are the best tools in trying to know the difference, and this is the hardest ascesis there is. The Lord promises that he will harvest the wheat. Despite our mixed motivations, we know that the good that the Spirit has nurtured within us will be harvested unto eternal life. (Matthew 13:24 ff.)

Learning to Pray

Here's part of a comment left by Jake on one of yesterday's posts:

one of the things that I remember really puzzling me was "how do you pray". How do you get/ try to get connection to the divine. this was never really explained.

This goes to the heart of what I worry about with "religious education" for both children and adults. It can be very hard to know how to learn spiritual practice in a way that can be owned and portable. It's easy to find a way to learn the data of the faith; it can be learned through a trustworthy director or it can be studied on one's own. It's easy to learn the words of the Our Father or Hail Mary, but to learn how to pray, that's another story. There are lots of books on prayer, many of which are nonsense, but they will seldom tell you exactly what to do in order to pray.

I think this is partly because the concrete details and methods of prayer and spiritual practice depend a lot on personal temperament and state of life. In the course of my baptismal vocation I have lived as a lay secular, a lay religious, a lay secular again, a lay religious again, and finally as a religious cleric. My prayer life has shifted along with that. The course of this active religious life and ministry has made me a little more extroverted than when I was younger, and that has been reflected in my prayer as well.

I began to learn to pray through a mentor, and I think this is a good method with a lot of support in the tradition. Early on in my religious life I made friends with a brother who was really into the Centering Prayer method, and he taught it to me. From there I was led to read The Cloud of Unknowing, St. John of the Cross (especially, early on, The Ascent of Mount Carmel) and finally the prayer conferences of John Cassian. These have remained my principal teachers from the tradition.

Teachers of prayer are few and far between though, so someone who desires prayer has to be a "self starter" for sure. In this case I would recommend the use of a simple method to encourage the prayer of the heart and mind, beyond, beneath and above verbal prayer. Lectio Divina, Ignatian style discursive meditation on passages from the Gospels, or Centering Prayer are all fine choices. Run with the one that seems to grab the heart at first glance. There is enough written about all of them, so it should be easy for anyone to find something to read. Commit to a certain time and place for prayer each day, and do whatever rearranging has to be done to be faithful to it.

The best contemporary introductions to the basics of the spiritual life I have ever come across are Beginning to Pray by Archbishop Anthony Bloom, Celebration of Discipline, by Richard J. Foster and Thoughts Matter and Tools Matter by Sr. Mary Margaret Funk.

Christmas Sins

For a Christmas present, my father gave me the New York Public Library/Oxford University Press series on the Seven Deadly Sins. All of them.

So the question arises: in what order do I read them? One of the brothers suggested that they should be read in order of publication, but that doesn't seem right to me. They're ought to be a an order of internal logic, you know?

Now the classic list of the sins, pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, anger, and sloth, it seems to come from Pope St. Gregory the Great. But I don't know what order he put them in, and, luckily, the library at school is closed this week, so I don't have to deal with the temptation to go read his Moralia in Job to try to find out.

The list that has always made the most sense to me, although it's a little different, comes from John Cassian. He puts the sins in a definite, logical progression: gluttony, fornication, envy, anger, sadness, acedia, vainglory, and pride.

Cassian lists the sins in ascending order of insidiousness and complexity of cure. The first three, gluttony, fornication, and envy, are afflictions of the body and our relation to the world around us. The middle two, anger and sadness, are afflictions of our emotions and internal life. The last three, acedia, vainglory and pride are diseases of the spirit and are the most dangerous because they can hobble our spiritual and religious life.

You can read John Cassian's treatise on the eight principle vices in a new and fresh translation.

So, if I adapted Cassian's list to the books I have, I suppose I would read them in this order: gluttony, lust, greed, envy, anger, sloth, and pride. So I suppose I'll look pretty funny reading them on the subway.