A Lent of Tiny Thorns

(Originally posted at The Personalist Project in February 2017)

All our life is sown with tiny thorns that produce in our hearts a thousand involuntary movements of hatred, envy, fear, impatience, a thousand little fleeting disappointments, a thousand slight worries, a thousand disturbances that momentarily alter our peace of soul. For example, a word escapes that should not have been spoken. Or someone utters another that offends us. A child inconveniences you. A bore stops you. You don’t like the weather. Your work is not going according to plan. A piece of furniture is broken. A dress is torn. I know that these are not occasions for practicing very heroic virtue. But they would definitely be enough to acquire it if we really wished to.
—Saint Claude la Colombiére

Lent is fast approaching, and with it comes discussion of the merits or lack thereof of undertaking Lenten sacrifices or extra devotions and other forms of discipline. I explained to my five year old daughter last night that we won't be having sweets or desserts during Lent because Lent is a time for being sorry for our sins and getting ready for Easter. Afterwards, I realised that my explanation still didn't make a very clear connection between giving up desserts and getting ready for Easter. Since many adults don't seem to quite understand the connection either, it seems worth further thought. 

There's really two things at play here: the question of the value of small actions--personal fasts and devotions--and the question of connecting these in a particular way to the season of Lent and preparation for Easter. In this post, I'd like to address the former. 

Why do small actions and choices matter? 

What is the use of giving up something like dessert? Dessert is not an immoral thing under most circumstances, and moderate enjoyment of physical pleasures can help us to be contented and pleasant to the people around us. Self-denial does not obviously or directly make us more loving or kind or generous to others, so what IS the point? 

But perhaps that is the point. Self-denial takes away some of the comfortable props we lean on to help us feel well-disposed towards the world. Not all of them--and I don't recommend looking for a Lenten discipline that will leave you thoroughly irritable and out of sorts with everyone around you!--but removing just one or two small buffers can test our charity and goodwill in a real, though small way. 

Perhaps that glass of wine at dinner gives the world just enough comfortable glow to make it easy to resist micro-managing how your children do their evening chores. Maybe you're in the habit of popping into the pantry for a square of chocolate whenever your spouse repeats some soundbite that makes you want to roll your eyes. Perhaps you shop online when your busy schedule leaves you feeling frayed, and looking forward to the resulting packages in the mail helps you face your workday cheerfully. 

None of these things are bad in themselves, and as you can see, they can all be used in ways that help us live full and good lives. 

However, there is more to virtue than arranging our lives so that they are full of comforting rewards and distractions from temptations to anger or sin. Our small challenges can, as St. Claude reminded us, be the means by which we acquire heroic virtue, even if there is nothing especially heroic in the moment about biting your tongue against a sarcastic reply to a coworker or quelling your impatience when returning a small child to bed for the umpteenth time. 

The choices we make when we encounter life's tiny thorns are important because they are the means by which we form our characters. To use psychological language, these choices help to mold our affective responses, to change our first, interior responses to temptation. 

It's an important lesson, a protection against scrupulosity, to know that we are not responsible in the moment for an involuntary affective response. The flash of anger at being interrupted that I experience when one of my children barges into my office while I'm writing isn't virtuous, but neither is it sinful. It simply is. What I choose to do with that feeling, whether I act on it or let it drain away, can be a moral choice, but the initial feeling wasn't chosen and I am not culpable for it. 

On the other hand, to say we are not culpable for our affective responses isn't to say that we have no part to play or responsibility for shaping and training our affective responses over the long term, and how we face the small temptations and aggravations of life has a lot to do with what kind of person we become. 

The practice of a Lenten discipline isn't about rejecting the good gifts of Creation. There's nothing innately bad about good food or entertainment or diversions. But choosing to set them aside for a time allows us to test our characters and see who we are becoming.

My middle child is taking a short water safety course that is designed to teach children how to survive if stranded in deep water by a boating accident or mistake in judgement. The program is called "Swim to Survive" and, although the intention is to get the children to where they would be able to swim to shore or stay alive for hours in the water under difficult conditions, obviously the instructors don't teach survival skills by dumping a bunch of 9-year-olds in the middle of a lake to sink or swim.

Instead, they teach them pieces of the skills they need, using repetition to grind survival skills into their heads. They practice heat-preserving flotation techniques in and out of life-jackets while in shallow water. They practice treading water near the dock. They have the children swim short distances at first, and then longer ones, zeroing in on reducing the kinds of bad habits that will prematurely tire a swimmer, like splashing feet and arms out of the water.

None of those children is doing anything extraordinary during any 30 minute session. But by setting aside their flotation devices and water toys for a time, they may acquire responses and skills to survive in an extraordinary circumstance sometime in the future. 

By setting aside some of the small material comforts that make life easier and more pleasant for a time and leaning instead on God's graces, may we also acquire heroic virtue against any extraordinary challenges the future might hold.

Image Credit Petr Kratochvil, via publicdomainpictures.net

Particular Hearts, Universal Bones

He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. 

[...]

...The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. 

- William Faulkner – Nobel Banquet speech, 1950. Emphasis mine.

It felt as though the entire West was holding its collective breath on Monday, watching the people of Paris as they watched the great Lady of Paris, the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris, be engulfed in smoke and flames. Pictures of the bystanders reflected our own expressions back at us--awe and a kind of futile incredulity. Notre Dame Cathedral has been part of the Parisian landscape since the 12th century, and part of the landscape of the Western imagination for almost as long.

The fire itself, the pathos of the hymn-singing Parisians, the bravery of the firefighters, the small consolations as one treasure after another was announced to have been recovered, all of it made a compelling story filled with vivid images and characters--the firefighter priest, the Crown of Thorns, the warped but intact rooster weathervane.

With every photo, I compulsively scanned for some sign of the fate of the famous rose windows. I'm not sure why. No, that's not true--I do know why. It's because in the back of my mind, I always assumed that some day I would make it to Paris to stand in the dappled light of those glorious windows.

Some day, I assumed, I would reach through the centuries to feel fellowship with men and women long-dead, all of us gaping at the grotesqueries and buttresses, all of us, lifted by the glory of her arches and the wonder of her windows, touching something transcendent.


Tuesday and Wednesday brought unexpected joy and relief at the news that Notre-Dame will rise again. President Macron vowed to rebuild. The rose windows were found to be intact; the arches still solid. The roof burned and melted away, but photos of the interior showed spots so untouched by the inferno that even the candles remained unmelted.

But this is an age when nothing beautiful or unifying--not grief and not joy--can be allowed to stand unchallenged. And so we have the following piece of misanthropy masquerading as virtue.

[Image: Meme showing the Great Mosque of Aleppo before and after bombing. Facebook text reads: "Ethnocentric bias pointed out. 'The world's selective outrage sickens me ...like trained brainless fucking monkeys crying on cue'"]   

Leaving aside the assumption that those of us upset at the burning of Notre Dame were untouched by the destruction in Aleppo--which is indicative of the poster's selective attention and focus more than anything, I suspect--is it "ethnocentrism" to grieve some things in a more personal and particular way than others?

A friend of mine responded by passionately pointing out that ethnocentrism is an inescapable feature of humanity, not a character flaw,

"Ethnocentric (or rather, spiritually-centric, you bigoted idiot, big fucking difference) bias is a neurological reality of being alive. The things that effect you and your group are going to elicit a greater emotional response. It’s not a mystery, and it doesn’t make you a failure as a person."

This is, of course, true. It's natural to feel more strongly about those things that affect you more closely, and it is normal to be more closely affected by things that happen to familiar places and people.

It's no more strange that a Westerner would be especially affected by the burning of Notre Dame than it is strange that a woman should grieve especially deeply for her own mother. 

A friend of mine has been driven to anxious distraction today by a health crisis in her husband's family. No reasonable person would think to scold her for being more heartsick over an in-law than she would be over a distant friend's cousin's neighbor's brother. That much grief and worry over every suffering person would be unsustainable. It would be paralyzing. The only way to equalize them would be to remain as faintly and distantly dismayed by the family member's illness as we are over the distant acquaintance's injuries.

This, you see, is where this impersonal universalism inevitably leads us: to the corrosion of our humanity. Because, of course, the truth is that my friend does not love the friend's cousin's neighbor's brother less for loving her own father-in-law in particular. The reverse is in fact observably true: her compassion for strangers is enriched by her love for those closest to her. She sees her lost brother in every addict; she sees herself in every motherless daughter.

By knowing and loving particular people, she has learned better how to love people in general. And there is no better way to begin to love Humanity than knowing that it is made up of individual humans, each of them a person as deeply real as we are ourselves.

A wise man said that the family is "a school of deeper humanity." Mother Teresa, the little Albanian nun who left her home and community behind for a life of service to the poor and suffering people of the streets of Calcutta, has been quoted as saying, “If you want to change the world, go home and love your family."

Meanwhile, our modern Mrs. Jellybys preach about Aleppo to neighbors grieving for Notre Dame, but they give their hearts to neither. 

How can our erstwhile critic enter into the communal grief of the people of Aleppo if she holds herself apart from the communal griefs of her own cultural community? Her griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars.

She writes as though she is standing apart, watching the end of man.

Nobody is obligated to feel deeply, emotionally moved by the immolation of Notre Dame--or any other loss or tragedy. But when you are struck more fiercely by some one particular grief or joy or fear or hope than another, you should know it for what it is--a tutorial on the passions and movements of your own heart, and an opportunity to grow in understanding and compassion for the hearts and lives of others.

Westerners treasure Notre Dame in part because her artistry, like Faulkner's, reminds us of "the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice" that made up our past.

It will rise to do so again.

Until then, let us strive to let the particular grief of this moment teach us to recognize the "universal bones" of human grief, love, and loss, wherever and in whomever they may be found.




***

A sidebar, because it was tickling at my brain and finally clicked. As I was writing this post, I had a vague sensation I had read some other quote that bore thematic similarities to the Faulkner passage I opened with, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Just now, I realized that it was from an interview with Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski that a friend and fellow fan sent me yesterday. In the interview, JMS compares the universe he envisioned with what he saw as the much more antiseptic utopia of Star Trek's Federation. "The Star Trek universe," he said, "seemed to say that for us to go into the stars, we have to leave behind important parts of ourselves, the good and the bad: our vices, our avarice, our commercialism, but also our faith and our beautiful fractures." 

The image of leaving behind "our beautiful fractures" had evoked Faulkner's "His griefs grieve no universal bones, leaving no scars"--which then burst to the forefront of my consciousness when I sat down to write about the particularity of love and grief. So there you are--a bit of insight into the web-like way my brain makes connections. Babylon 5, Faulkner, Mrs Jellyby, JPII and Mother Teresa. And Notre Dame. And you and I. All connected by the universality of our particularities. 




[*** I'm back to blogging for Lent! And I'm not the only one. Check out the list here. ]