Choir as a Model for Community Life: Technique

[Chapter talk of Friday, May 11, 2007]

I mentioned yesterday that Kevin also has stressed technique. Again, I thank each of you for your earnest efforts in this area. It may seem as if technique is extrinsic, perhaps not something to bother with in a monastic choir, where after all, we are not trained professional singers. Whether or not that is the case, I would like to look at the idea behind technique.

There are two aims of good technique in general: reducing extraneous movement and channeling the freed-up energy to good use. So we try to breathe without moving our shoulders because eliminating this extra motion frees the energy of the breath to make the voice louder and also suppler. Similarly, a wide-open mouth gives the widest range of mobility to the voice and makes it sound better.

I said yesterday that we need to listen and follow one another. Often times, an earnest desire to do this is frustrated by poor technique. We want to move, and then our bodies don’t respond. "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." The temptation is to blame the other brother for his inflexibility, but all of us surely have room to improve.

The analogy in the spiritual life is asceticism. Asceticism is no more about personal perfection than singing technique is about getting us to the stage of the Met. Rather, the goal of our life is the Kingdom of God, a life of blessed communion with God and with others. We are prevented from attaining this because our souls lack the flexibility and docility that purity of heart provides. To use the techncal language of the Fathers: our passions tend to be misdirected, ending toward dissolution instead of integration. Asceticism allows us to overcome anger, sadness, lust and so forth and use the freed-up energy for service. So, just as we work on singing technique to allow us to listen and sing in concert with our brothers more effectively, each of us also needs to be working at the ascetic life in order to be more and more free to live attentively and in fraternal charity.

St. Benedict on Lent, Part 13

Before I begin on St. Benedict, I post this follow-up thought related to my last post. Here you have a similar sentiment from a better authority than yours truly.

"Reading, vigils and prayer...hunger toil and solitude...the singing of Psalms...patience and almsgiving...: all these practices are to be engaged in according to due measure and at the appropriate times. What is untimely done, or done without measure, endures but a short time. And what is short-lived is more harmful than profitable."
Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos, ch. 15

Back to Evagrius' grandson in the monastic tradition, St. Benedict:
"Whatever is undertaken without the permission of the spiritual father will be reckoned as presumption and vainglory, not deserving a reward." RB 49: 9

St. Benedict here moves away from the Aramaic title 'Abbot' back to the root title, 'father' in relating the monk's ascetic practice to the discipline of obedience. The 'spiritual father' is a term with a very long monastic pedigree already by the time of St. Benedict, and as he himself frequently points out to the abbot, the very term 'abbot' is a short-hand familiar name for the spiritual father.

Sadly, today we tend to think of abbots as administrators, much as we think of bishops in the same way. Contributing to this is an individualized spirituality that many undertake today for 'self-betterment' or 'self-actualization'. Of course, all of us should strive to improve our lives and to become the person God means us to become. But the Church teaches that we do this as a Body, the Mystical Body of Christ. No one is in the monastic life for himself, anymore than the
Word of God became man simply to see for Himself what it would be like. No, the Son of God, obedient to His own Father became human by the Holy Spirit in order to bring together what had been lost. The relationship of the work of the monk to the will of his spiritual father should itself be modeled on the Holy Trinity: the monk is never simply a worker bee in the grand projects of the monastery. Rather, he is looking to serve the Church as a whole through the purification of his heart in submitting in faith to God through the instrument of the abbot. Wow! If we really saw that this is what is happening, how would our lives change? Yet this is exactly what St. Benedict, grounded in the spirituality of St. Basil the Great and the Desert Fathers, proposes.

If we do this right, our mystical lives in baptism should begin to interpenetrate one another as happens in the Trinity. We were created for this sort of intimacy. To guide us in this path of agape, St. Benedict proposes a relationship of spiritual father to son, rather than that of CEO to employee. Therefore, the abbot functions not primarily to 'enforce the law' with various sanctions. Rather, he instructs the disciple in the path of spiritual maturity; what matters is less 'the monastery' and more the fruit of charity in the life of the individual monks. The 'son' demonstrates his faith in Jesus Christ by his openness to do the will of someone further along the path.

As I mentioned yesterday, one frequently hears from young aspirants in the religious life, particularly from those who are truly good persons, that they are turned off by what they perceive to be a lack of zeal in the community. When the abbot tempers their ascetical efforts, this is seen as proof of laxity rather than as solicitude for the health of the family. Yes, the one who so criticizes may be full of zeal, but there is more than one kind of zeal. The bitter kind divides: from others, but just as much from God [RB 72: 1]. It points us down the road to spiritual burnout and cynicism. Much better for the love of God to walk the sure path of obedience. St. Teresa of Avila often lamented the poor spiritual direction she received. Yet she always obeyed and she became, after all, St. Teresa, even with bad advice taken for love of Christ! Surely we can learn humble obedience as well.

St. Benedict on Lent, Part 12

"Whatever he intends to offer, however, let him suggest to his abbot, and let it be done with his prayers and permission." RB 49: 8

Obedience is the primary asceticism for the monk. Yes, we look to fasting, prayer and almsgiving, as do all the baptized, but the perfect renunciation is not that of the body or of possessions, but of one's will (Jesus Christ was glorified by the Father because of his obedience unto death). This is why personal projects must never be undertaken in a monastery without the permission of the spiritual father. A young monk will not infrequently desire to undertake a serious ascetic labor, such as eating one meal a day or adding long periods of prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. The abbot will likely not consent to such schemes; the daily life of a monk usually has enough asceticism built in for younger monks. If the monk is disappointed or thinks the abbot lukewarm, this demonstrates all the more the need for conversion. I will return to this theme in the next few days, as we make our way through Holy Week.

I will conclude this entry by noting that St. Benedict's famed 'discretion' (attributed to him by St. Gregory the Great) consists in finding the Royal Road of moderation in all things. Benedict was not the first to entreat this: the amazing ascetical feats of St. Antony the Great were a marvelous grace to be sure, but he himself regularly counsels moderation in his letters and in his sayings.

When we embark on a serious spiritual life, we cannot anticipate the difficulties that will arise. Most of us have repressed all kinds of dark motives and dark memories, and the practices of quiet, prayer and fasting tend to free these up. When they begin to manifest themselves, asceticism becomes much more difficult because we are so sorely tempted to return to whatever compensatory behavior we had cultivated. For example, we may be naturally fearful persons and be unaware of it because we have made a habit of binge eating to stuff away our fear. When we make that effort to fast and pray, the fears come to the surface and threaten to overwhelm us; at these times, the temptation to give up and just go back to stuffing ourselves is very strong. The more difficult the ascetic labor we have undertaken, the easier it will be to abandon it. An abandoned ascetic project can often do more harm than good, like the person from whom one demon goes out only to be beseiged by seven more harmful spirits.

The monastic tradition is aware of these pitfalls and proposes an asceticism that is humane in measure and in scope. In other words, it is a spirituality 'for the long haul'; not something that promises holiness overnight, but practically ensures conversion for those who stick it out. When we try to fix ourselves, we are prone to apply 'remedies' drawn from our own store of wisdom and experience, but this very wisdom and experience is what needs purification. We need assistance. So we turn over our projects to someone authorized by God and with more training in the spiritual combat. To this we will return on Tuesday.

St. Benedict on Lent, Part 11

"With the joy of spiritual longing, look forward to Holy Easter." (RB 49: 7b)

There is a joy proper to the sphere of the world, a natural joy that in itself is not evil but is also not sustainable and without proper reasons for hope. We often put our hopes in material things, in human beings, in our own plans for a better future. We lay up treasure in the field of the flesh. The joy that can come of a life that 'works out', however, is unreliable. Riches fail, persons let us down, our plans get interrupted by sickness, bad weather, unforeseen glitches.

Where your treasure is, there your heart shall be. The "joy of spiritual longing" as St. Benedict calls it, is this reliable source of hope and joy. God is faithful, and the joy of knowing that His faithfulness culminates in nothing less than the Resurrection of the Dead that we celebrate at Easter is something that can never be taken from us once we seize it with our whole heart.

God is faithful, but He does allow us to be tested, though not beyond our strength. St. Benedict is aware of this, and it is worth noting the context of his previous quote about joy, the "joy of the Holy Spirit." This quote comes from 1 Thessalonians 1: 6, in which Paul is relating to the Thessalonians his ill treatment at the hands of unbelievers in Thessalonica and Phillipi (see Acts 16-17). The same treatment no doubt awaits the Christians newly converted in Thessalonica. However, because they had learned from St. Paul to find their joy in the Spirit, they were able to stand firm in the face of suffering in the flesh.

This testing that God allows pushes us to joy in the Holy Spirit and away from hope in temporal things. Let us this Holy Week take the suffering with which we have been tried and join it to the Passion of our loving Lord, that He can redeem it and pour forth into our hearts the spiritual joy of His own Sacred Heart.

St. Benedict on Lent, Part 10

"That is to say, let each monk withhold from his body some food, drink, sleep, talkativeness, and jesting."

In her marvelous little book Thoughts Matter, Sr. Margaret-Mary Funk (no relation!) recommends fasting as 'a good practice to adopt as we start serious work in the spritual life'. If we fast by simply eating only what is necessary and at proper times (not snacking, that is), then "we can get in touch with our thoughts, because when we feel the bodily need of food and drink, we begin to notice our thoughts about food and we know we must let them go without acting on them if we hope to progress in calming our mind." [p. 26]

John Cassian, as I have pointed out here on other occasions, teaches that the interval between thought and bodily action is medicinal for us because when we conceive of an action (eating), we must often seek out an opportunity to act on this conceived thought. In the interval, we have a chance to think better of it. Making a prior decision only to eat a certain amount at a certain time and perhaps keeping food in an out-of-the-way place allows us to examine the thought of eating and determine if we really want to act on it. Too often today, we keep bags of chips on our desks, or absent-mindedly grab a soda from the fridge on the way through without observing this interval and acting freely.

Abstention from food, drink and sleep also simply slows the body down. We have less excess energy that needs burning up, so we are less anxious, less apt to jabber thoughtlessly and to overdo our work (though for younger men--this may apply to women as well--the unaccustomed lack of energy may seek compensation in anger or lustful impulses which are sources of energy; these impulses will dry up if we are persistent in self-denial).

The advice against talkativeness and jesting sometimes strikes modern rootless man as inhumane: how do we build community if we can't talk and break the ice with a joke? While a good humored monk is always to be prized, we can often use a quick, nervous word as a means of keeping our relationships at the most superficial level. Having to sit next to someone or work with someone without talking or cracking a joke again forces us to deal with our thoughts, rather than allowing them to drive us to impulsive chatter. This discomfort, too, will dry up, if we force ourselves to observe a gentle silence and in doing so, take time to examine what is taking place in our heads. We are often projecting ideas onto others: "He doesn't like me;" "He thinks I'm unfriendly;" "He's unhappy today..." We seek to determine and control others' moods without the benefit of access to the others' interiors. At the same time, we are not paying any attention to our own interior, over which we should have some control. We will not enjoy interior freedom as long as we allow the impulse to talk and joke cloud the interior work of discernment.

St. Benedict on Lent, Part 9

"So that each of us will voluntarily offer to God something above our usual measure with joy in the Holy Spirit."
RB 49: 6

God loves a cheerful giver. Abbot Leo Ryska of Benet Lake pointed out in our recent retreat that this chapter on Lent is the only one in the Rule that mentions joy twice.

The exhortation to joy, especially amidst self-denial, gets at one of the cruxes of our modern interpretations of spiritual texts: is it inauthentic for someone to make an effort to be joyful when he is not? Is he being dishonest? Is St. Benedict throwing his weight behind the power structures of the Church and of the monastery when he insists that brothers be joyful in deprivation? What if things are rotten in the Church or in the cloister? Are we still to be joyful? Is this anesthesia or a willful playing along with injustice?

So on and so forth...

Let's begin with the 'what if' part of that rant, pieces of which I have heard both externally and internally. Living with 'what ifs' is a spiritual killer. Life in this world is uncertain and a million things might or might not go wrong, at least from our perspective. Living intent on exploring ifs, woulds, coulds and the like distracts us from being, from awareness to what is: the present. So let's agree that if nothing is wrong, we won't look for something that might be wrong (except for the sin that hides in our hearts and pretends that there is nothing wrong _there_).

Things do go wrong in the Church and in the cloister. We all suffer for it. In these cases, the questions we must ask ourselves are "Do I believe that the Holy Spirit operates through the structures of the Church?" "Do I believe in the Paschal Mystery--that I can rejoice even in the midst of suffering?"

My sense is that if we are faithful to the inner work of conversatio, to silence and stillness and the sifting of thoughts, we will be too aware of our own weakness to be raging against the injustices, real or perceived, in the Church or cloister, especially when they fall outside of our explicit authority. Awareness of our own frailty also should bring about a corresponding gratitude to God for the salvation offered us in Christ. Here is our joy: we practice the ascesis of Lent not in order to perfect ourselves, but to become more and more disposed to God's grace, and it is God's grace that brings joy: the joy of the Holy Spirit.

If we are called to a prophetic word and we speak it out of a center of joy, charity and faith, it has much more chance of effecting change than a word spoken out of fear, incrimination and anger. So joy is not incompatible with prophecy: witness Pope John Paul II and Mother Theresa, two recent examples of fearless, joyful persons.

I close with a quote from Sigrid Undset:
"Her father's wondrous gentleness came not therefrom that he saw not clear enough the faults and the vileness of mankind, but that he was ever searching his own heart before his God and bruising it with repentance for his own sins." (from Kristin Lavransdatter)

St. Benedict on Lent, Part 8

[Note: I was 'kitchener' last week, and 'computer technician this week--thence comes the reason for the infrequency of posts. God willing, we will be back on our regular schedule now!]

"Therefore, during these days, let us increase somewhat the usual burden of our service, by private prayers and abstention from food and drink."
RB 49: 5

Here St. Benedict refers again to the fact that the monk's life is already a kind of Lent, and a monk should be more of what he already is during this holy season. St. Benedict, knowing human nature, focuses on the efforts involved, ones that our frailty tend to avoid when we can do so without being altogether outside of the law. It is good, however, to look on the positive side of the privation associated with Lent and the monastic life.

Hans Urs von Balthasar's theories on the Pascal Mystery have recently occasioned some controversy, whether Jesus' abandonment by His heavenly Father was complete or not. In Balthasar's opinion (one that I judge supportable by Biblical witness as well as Tradition), the total kenosis or emptying of the Son of God to take the form of a human being is in fact an extension of the total emptying of the Persons of the Holy Trinity in the Love that is the very Truth of Trinitarian life, the fullness of life. To live a life of kenosis is to live in imitation of the Holy Trinity and so to enter fully into Divine Life. This is counter-intuitive, but it strikes at the root of the problem of sin, in which we humans retain, at all costs, some tiny portion of ourselves for ourselves. We cling to self-preservation out of fear of the Other. Jesus shares with us the high cost of shedding the last vestiges of self-will and self-interest, and by dying demonstrates that humanity 'cannot buy life without end' on any of our own powers or merits. We can only receive life. By our Lenten privations, we Christians peel away (slowly!) the protective layers of the false self, the ego, however you would like to label it. What is left is only what God made and what God intends to remake. Hunger and thirst and the fast from activity that is not prayer helps bring home to us our radical poverty and our radical need for God. God, of course, is infinitely greater, more loving, more life-filled and joyful than we are, and so this radical need for God is a surrendering to love and joy! It feels like suffering, and so we avoid it, but we should, with the Apostles and the Virgin Mary, be fearless in proclaiming the gospel in our radical self-surrender.

St. Benedict on Lent, Part 7

"We give ourselves to...compunction of heart and self-denial"

"Self-denial" here is more literally "the work of abstention." We will get to the particulars of abstention in the following verses. Here, let us focus briefly on the whole idea of abstention and self-denial in the first place.

"Athletes deny themselves all sorts of things, and this to win a crown that withers," writes my hero St. Paul.

The last couple of days, I have received emails from high school students doing a project on monasticism in which they have been assigned to ask questions of real, live monks. One frequent question runs something like this, "Do you wish that you could have a family?" Well, I have written, yes, I wish I could have a family some days. But I also wish that I had been able to play professional baseball and lead a rock band that was bigger than U2. I wish that I had a more patience, too, and that I had time to read more Shakespeare, whose work I adore but is hard to justify spending lots of cloister time with.

The notion that we should be able to do all the things that appeal to us is part and parcel of the mistaken notion of freedom as autonomy favored by the post-Enlightenment West. The classical idea of freedom was the freedom to do the good engendered by the virtues. Virtues are not a denial in the end, but a confirmation of the goodness of the human person rightly ordered to the mean.

In order to help a plant grow in its proper measure, we regularly need to prune it, sometimes even down to the stem. Is this a denial of the plant? No: it is loving care for the plant. Similarly, in order for us to find the proper measure of food, of talk and information, and sleep, it is often healthy to reduce these goods to their bare minimum or even if possible do without. There is a freedom that comes of being able to set Shakespeare down when the duties of worship or charity beckon. The fact that we bristle at being pruned demonstrates our need for "compunction of heart."

St. Benedict on Lent, Part 6

"To reading"
RB 49: 4

Dom Jean LeClerq begins his inspiring book The Love of Learning and the Desire for God with the observation that monastic culture is a culture of literacy. Drawn from all educational backgrounds, monks are expected to learn to read in the cloister. In all probability, this reading is almost entirely Holy Scripture. It is difficult for many to imagine simply sitting down and reading Scripture, but it is a practice I recommend.

In the past fifty years, there has been a conscience-salving movement in favor of so-called 'quality time'. The idea is that what matters is not how many hours you spend with those you love, but what you do during the (limited) time you have. In contrast, I've always been a fan of 'logging hours', be it in courtship, practicing a musical instrument or in prayer. There are always limitations on the hours we have with the persons and activities we love; however, we also demonstrate love by willingly and ungrudgingly 'wasting time' with the beloved. There is nothing that says "I love you" quite like the uncalculated and simple preference for being together: not trying to cram in good experiences or say meaningful things, simply being: "Like the eyes of a servant on the hand of her mistress, so our eyes are on the Lord our God."

Spending more time reading Scripture is a way of logging hours with God, making a priority of being present to Him, listening (obsculta!) to Him.

It is surely significant, too, that 'reading' falls between 'prayer with tears' and 'compunction' in RB 49. When we aim at 'quality time' it is easy to feel that we are bestowing some favor on the person receiving our shiniest selves. Quantity time forces us eventually to drop the pretense of being 'at our best (!)' and giving the rest, the less savory, the reality, the entirety. When, in the course of our sacred reading, we reach this realization of how stingy we've been with God, we are open to a deep conversion, deep because reaching the farthest corners of our selves, normally hidden. Our hearts are compunctae, punctured by God's love. God grant that this be so in the second half of this great season on conversion.

St. Benedict on Lent, Part 4

This will fittingly be done if we abstain from every vice.
RB 49: 4a (my translation)

Sr. Margaret Mary Funk, OSB notes that in Evagrius and in Cassian, the 'active life' refers not to charitable works outside the monastery, but to the two-fold ascetical program of uprooting vices and planting the virtues. Vices are destructive habits, conditioned responses to situations in which we act out of fear, or self-interest. The active life, in monastic terminology, seeks to deconstruct these largely unconscious and reflexive patterns of behavior. We should therefore understand that St. Benedict is not aiming at a program of repression of 'sinful actions', and interpret this injunction through the lens of a modern Freudian model (which Alasdaire MacIntyre calls 'hydraulic' because it assumes that pressure builds up in the psyche when emotions are repressed). The way to abstain from every vice begins, yes, with a determination not to act viciously or sinfully. However, we cannot stop there. The heart is the place from which sin proceeds. If we really wish to abstain fully from vice, we must go into our hearts with the light of the gospel and illuminate the unconverted parts. Then we must give them to God. Hence the renewed emphasis on silence and prayer during Lent.

One brief final note: the word here translated as "abstain" is temperamus. This Latin term can reasonably be translated as 'abstain', but has the fuller sense of 'tempering' or 'finding the just measure'. There can be no just measure of vice, of course, but the fuller meaning of the term can help us to recognize that what is being sought is not merely a negation of impulses but a restoration of the harmonious workings of all the faculties in the inner person.

St. Benedict on Lent, Part 3

"We therefore urge that during the actual days of Lent the brethren keep their lives most pure and at the same time wash away during these holy days all the negligences of other times."
(RB 49: 2-RB1980 translation)

Purity of heart is the proximate goal of the monk, according to St. John Cassian. We get a glimpse from St. Benedict of the purification that goes on in the life of the monk and during Lent in the above passage. I wrote a few days ago about Kierkegaard's formula that 'Purity of heart is to will one thing'. This expression of purity focuses on the will, and this is helpful. However, we are so often unaware of the obstacles to our willing what we ought. We are also weak of will and the flesh often opposes our good efforts.

"The negligences of other times" continue to exercise a power over us, even when we have repented and willed to act otherwise. This is a good thing to remember at times of temptation. We might think that we are able to dabble in this or that sin 'without hurting anybody'. But in truth, dabbling leaves its mark and makes it more difficult to act uprightly at a later time. The habituial white lie makes a life of full transparency inconvenient and even hazy: we can't even quite see our way to the fullness of truth because of this past negligence.

I had a basketball coach who once likened the body to a tape recorder: it might be fun to practice all kinds of fancy moves and goofy looking shots, but our bodies don't forget the actions required of the muscles to showboat. When it comes time to shoot a free throw, we have to unlearn all the motions that we preferred to use to do fancy reverses, fade-aways and spin shots. We have to wash away the negligences of other times. Practicing free throws is dull but the team is counting on me to be able to make them when the game is on the line. The fancy trick shot won't do me any good at that moment.

The spiritual life is an almost direct analogy. We don't often set out to sin or lead updisciplined lives: we are simply unaware of the consequences of small waverings: they are 'just having fun', products of unculpable ignorance or simply convenient. These are indeed unavoidable, and we shouldn't be hard on ourselves for not being omniscient and omnipotent. However, we should also recognize that we are engaged in a spiritual battle and mercy toward ourselves should not be confused with excusing ourselves for negligence. With the help of God's grace, we can actually wipe away the stain of even venial sin and become purified through and through, transparent to the light of the Divine Life, radiant with the joy of the Resurrected Christ. With that offered us, perhaps this Lent we can find the desire to work with grace at this purification.

Ash Wednesday

Somewhere St. Augustine speaks of Lent as being an analogy to the whole of our life and Easter being an analogy to the next life. Certainly Lent is a good time to pull away a bit from the allure of this world and to focus again on our interior life. In the year before I entered the monastery, I discovered that this can be quite painful if we aren't used to it. I was discerning a religious vocation and making efforts to fast and pray. In the meantime, my best friend and roommate was dating the woman whom he eventually married (and with whom he has three beautiful daughters). The two of them were out one evening and I was home by myself. I prayed the Divine Office and looked to sit and pray silently. One after another, voices began to come into focus in my head:

"Why don't you call Beth (an old friend living in D.C.)?"

I decided no, I would sit and read and pray and just be silent for awhile. Soon another voice came:

"Wouldn't it be great to go to the Medici (local hip restaurant/coffee shop), get a piece of cheesecake and sit and read poetry, see who's there...?"

I decided not to do that either. An astounding cascade continued in my head:

"Get out your guitar and play and sing some moody songs!"
"Go to Starbucks and get some coffee and a sweet roll, come back and do some composing!"
"There's probably something on TV..."
"Play something at the piano by Beethoven--that always cheers you up!"
"You haven't called home in awhile"
"Put on some Jethro Tull really loud and sing along!"
"Why don't you take a long walk and brood over something?"

At some point I remember simply laying down and waiting for all these activities simply to fade away, not unlike the apocryphal quote attributed to R.M. Hutchens: "When the urge to exercise strikes, I lie down until it goes away." As I lay there, I felt as if my skin was being lifted away from me, as if I was be divided from myself. It was an actual physical sensation and not a terribly pleasant one. However, I was willing to undergo it because I was tired of being at the mercy of my own impulses, good as some of them were or seemed to be.

This renunciation of thoughts (as Cassian or Sr. Meg Funk would call it) is something that I still need to do, and Lent is the perfect time. Fasting is one of the best exercises in this effort because food is so central to our survival and something we think about directly or indirectly more than we realize. What I mean by 'indirectly' is that we take for granted that we will be warm and energetic a lot of the time, and people probably expect it of us. But being hungry means being slow, a bit chilly and not a party animal. It is a good reminder of our creatureliness and our dependency on the earth, on those who till and harvest the earth and on the work by which we support ourselves. It is a good reminder of our privileges in 21st Century America when most of our fellow human beings are cold and hungry somewhere else. Most of all, it is a discipline that helps us to slow down and actually identify thoughts and impulses as they come. Most of us are not aware most of the time of the impulse to eat and to feel good eating and drinking (I also cut out coffee during Lent). If we rely on caffeine, on sugar or on alcohol to be happy, even at a small level, then we are not relying on God who is our happiness.

Let us joyfully return wholeheartedly to our Lord and God this holy season of Lent, and let us pray for one another that we as a Church may repent of our reluctance to be the Body of Christ and so be transformed again into the Presence of Christ in the world.

Bad News for Professional Victims

Gregory of Nyssa, the mystic, is generally paired with his brother, Basil the Great, the organizer and pragmatist. There is much to this generalization, though it possibly short-changes Basil's mysticism and Gregory's ascetical works. Here is Gregory with some good practical advice:

"Do not accept the honors of this life; run in such a way as to conceal your struggles in behalf of virtue lest the devil, finding an opportunity to tempt you with worldly honors and having distracted you from leisure for good, lead you to vanity or error."
(from "On the Christian Mode of Life")

Let me add only two observations on this passage to explain my choice of a title for this post: where in Gregory's day, honor and fame were thought to belong to especially virtuous persons who sacrificed greatly for civic ideals, today, 'struggles' are more often for emancipation from civic duty. Perhaps worldly acclaim accrues from successfully prosecuting one's case on 'Judge Judy'?

Second, how much 'leisure for good' do we lose to mulling over gripes that we have with others? How much leisure for good do we cultivate, period? Leisure has a bad name in religious circles: It sounds like the privilege of an upper class. In fact, I don't think it needs to mean anything other than regularly taking time to turn our minds toward heavenly things so as not to fall into distraction and error, as Gregory warns can happen. If we take the time for a regular 'searching and fearless moral inventory' (to borrow AA's excellent phrase), then the possibility of us making a big show of our virtue is certainly less. Corresponsingly, our progress in spiritual warfare will be greater.