Docta Ignorantia

For a few days each year around this time we get, in the Office of Readings, St. Augustine's Letter 130, to Proba, on prayer. It touches me every time.

Today I landed on one of Augustine's somewhat famous expressions, docta ignorantia, 'learned ignorance.' In prayer there is an ignorance, an unknowledge that we learn, for our not knowing "how to pray as we ought" in which "the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words" (Romans 8:26) is not just something we lack because of our distraction and sin, or even because of our innate limitedness, but is something positive that we learn in prayer, one of its precious fruits.

Indeed there is much to unlearn in prayer; it is, as Evagrius says, "the shedding of thoughts." I must unlearn about the deity that the flesh weaves out of its lusts and even ideas of the divine that give more rarefied delights to the intellect. True prayer means unlearning the unvirtues of the those false religiosities the flesh concocts to serve its purposes under sacrilegious cover. I am even invited to unlearn cherished ideas and attributions about myself.

In the end, it is all aimed toward the searing unlearning that "there is 'no such thing' as God because God is neither a 'what' nor a 'thing' but a pure 'Who.'" (Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, chapter 2) And it is precisely this awakening that bears the most blessed fruit of prayer, the shedding of the 'whatness' and objectification of other people, learning to see them only as persons, as 'who.'

Retreat Notes: Quotes

A collection of quotes read and heard that I wrote down during the retreat.

"...it's when I am with people that I am lonely, and when I am alone I am no longer lonely."

--Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas


"The Word of God is a light to the mind and a fire to the will."

--St. Lawrence of Brindisi, from his sermons for Lent


"I cannot think what harsher curse I could call down upon a man than that he should always get what he asks for when he tears away from sweet repose out of a curiosity which revels in restlessness."

--St. Bernard of Clairvaux, On Conversion, a Sermon to Clerics (trans. Bernard Saïd, OSB) (In my margin it says, "like when you realize you've been surfing Wikipedia articles for 20 minutes".)


"Grammar is not for me. I am a free dancer. Life begins beyond the rules. I am a free dancer."

--Foreign born, not so young Trappist opening an Amazon box containing a book of English grammar, after explaining, in perfect English, that he now has to learn English.


"I think it is likely that much of the restless boredom, frantic escapism, commitment phobia, and enervating despair that plagues us today is the ancient demon of acedia in modern dress."

--Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me


"Luminous beings are we; not this crude matter!"

--retreatant waiting for the dishwasher, quoting Yoda in half-mockery of the taped lecture we heard during the meal.


The tools of retreat: The Sacred Scriptures, breviary, rosary, and journal.

Baby Names

One thing about being a parish priest is that you get a sense of what people are naming their babies. I have honestly been surprised by the lack of diversity:

A quarter of all the baby boys I have baptized have been named Matthew or Andrew.

Of all of the girls, an impressive 23% have been named Madison.

The Ascesis of Preaching

For me the greatest challenge in preaching is finding the right ascesis for preparation. To paraphrase Master Yoda, it requires a good deal of 'unlearning what you have learned.'

Ever since I have been able to read, I have been conditioned to read a text as fast I can (while still comprehending it, more or less) and to think of something clever to say or write about it right away. The quicker and the more clever the better. This is the relationship to a text that going to school has taught me, from the first grade all the way through theological studies.

The trouble is, you just can't go about preparing to preach on the Sacred Scriptures in this way. To skim the text and go with the first clever thing you think of is a serious error, and one that has caught me many times in the hundred or so weekends I've spent so far in the clerical state. Many times I have gone to an ambo to proclaim the Gospel and only at that moment realized how I ought to have reflected and prepared to preach on it. I realize that this is partly because this is when the printed word becomes the Word of God most eminently, i.e. when it is proclaimed in the assembly, but it's also because the Scripture simply has to be heard.

Through all of this I have learned that I need to employ all kinds of practical strategies to make myself slow down in the course of my weekly preparation. I need to read the Sunday Scriptures out loud, for one thing. I need to refuse to have an idea the first time. Ideas make you miss things, as you begin to conform the text to the thing you want to say. I need to play with several ideas and refuse to choose one right away. Finally, I need to keep reading the text as I prepare, to make sure it's not drifting off into my idea. For we are not meant to preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord. (2 Corinthians 4:5)

2084

The news frightened me yesterday. On and on with the killing in Iraq, and now you have to wonder if a conflict with Iran is coming. Not to speak of a new "spring offensive" in Afghanistan. I just wonder if we are heading to a world of permanent warfare, like the Oceania-Eastasia-Eurasia war in 1984.

Everyone says that they want peace, but their problem is they don't know what peace is. To the world, peace is just the absence of annoyance and conflict. It is the absence of anything which would interfere with their own selfish projects and plans for exploitation of others.

Real peace isn't just the absence of conflict. It is an active, provocative force. It "turns the other cheek," putting the power of peace and non-violence in the face of those whose misery and self-hate explodes into the all the violence of the world.

As long as we live in fear, there can be no peace. But the answer to fear is not war, is not the "Cheney doctrine" of destroying threats before they can arise. Perhaps Yoda put it best: "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering."