Saved by Another

Les Mis is about the redeption and salvation of a soul, namely that of Jean Valjean.  And after seeing the film version, it struck me how fitting it was that Fantine should lead Jean Valjean into heaven.  And I realized that this is because we are saved by other people.  Yes, it was love that saved Jean Valjean. It was his love for Cosette, whom he raised.  It was his love for Marius, whom he saved from the barricade.  It was his love for Fantine and his mercy even to Javert.  It was the practical charity into which Jean Valjean grew that saved him, that allowed him to escape his past deeds.  And we should not forget that all this was made possible by the love which was shown him by the bishop and others along the way.  In a word, it was made possible by grace.

I think this is an interesting reflection for us.  When we make the final transitus, the final journey home, who will lead us?  You can't get to heaven on your own.  So who will be the people who will take your hand and guide you there?

Take my hand, and lead me to salvation
Take my love, for love is everlasting
And remember the truth that once was spoken
To love another person is to see the face of God.

Taming

Too many people, too little time.

I've been blessed to live in places where there have been an abundance of people to whom I can easily relate and get along with.  Actually, I have a theory that you could be friends with almost anyone, because people are generally awesome once you get them talking.  But regardless of that, I still think I've been put in places where I have an extraordinary amount in common with an extraordinary amount of people.  Which leads to a problem: we are finite creatures which means that we only have a finite amount of time to spend with other people.  There are lots of people, lots of personalities to which I am drawn.  There are many people about whom I've thought, "we could be really good friends."  But there are only so many people that you can know in any meaningful way, and even fewer that you can become really close with.  (Sociologists would agree.)  So how is one to choose? How is one supposed to figure out who, out of all the smart, funny, relatable people that one could know, are the smartest, funniest, and most relatable?  Is it even possible to find the "perfect" friend?

What I've come to realize, is that the people you end up knowing and knowing well are random.  You happen to do the same activities as a certain person, live near a person, belong to the same organizations as a person, have a number of the same classes as a person.  Chance circumstances have a lot to do with who you know.  I think this used to bother me.  Its especially troubling, I would imagine, when it comes to things like deciding whom to marry.  How can anyone be "the one," the perfect match when who you get to know seems random anyway.  I remember once making a list (I was like thirteen at the time) of all the pretty girls I knew and ranking them according to categories like 'looks,' 'personality,' 'intelligence,' etc. all so that I could come to some sort of rational basis for choosing to set my affections on one of them.  But what thirteen year old me didn't realize is that love has its own dynamic, its own internal 'logic,' which cannot be captured by mere rationality.

I thank Antoine de Saint-Exupéry for giving me the language to express what I have come to realize over time.  "Taming" is the secret to how one rose, that at first looks just like any other rose on the bush, can become the most beautiful flower in the world.  It is the secret to how one person, not much different from any other person, can become a special friend. In The Little Prince, this is expressed perfectly in the dialogue between the little prince and the fox.  The fox explains to the little prince that if he wants to have friends, he needs to 'tame' someone, which is 'to establish ties.'  He says:

To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys.  And I have no need of you.  And you, on your part, have no need of me.  To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes.  But if you tame me, then we shall need each other.  To me, you will be unique in all the world.  To you, I shall be unique in all the world.

This is what it means to be in relationship with someone.  It means to put yourself in a position of vulnerability, a position of needing someone.  It's this process of coming to know someone that makes them stand out, that makes them important to you.  And I think this is what makes the question of whether the people we know are the 'best' people we could know a silly one.  To tame someone is to know them, to let them enter your heart, to care about them and let them care about you.  They may not be the best or the brightest, but that's okay because they are the ones you know.  There is a freedom here to not question why you are friends with someone (and not someone else) but to accept the fact that they have become unique to you and to accept the 'logic' of love.

"'Go and look again at the roses,' [said the fox,] "You will understand now that yours [the one the little prince left on his home planet] is unique in all the world."
. . .

"The little prince went away, to look again at the roses."
. . . 

"[To the roses he said], 'You are beautiful, but you are empty...One could not die for you.  To be sure, and ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you--the rose that belongs to me.  But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing.  Because she is my rose.'"
. . .
"And he went back to meet the fox"
. . .
"' Goodbye,' said the fox. 'And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
. . .
"'It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.'"
. . .
"'Men have forgotten this truth, but you must not forget it.  You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.  You are responsible for your rose...'"

This, I think, is what it is to truly live.  It is to tame others, and to let ourselves be tamed.  It is to waste time with people, because that is kind of what other people are there for.  And when we do this, it enables us to see others in a way that no one else sees them.  And we when we do this, we allow others to have a claim on us...forever.

To everyone whom I have had the great pleasure of getting to know in little ways or in big ways: thank you.  Even if that fact that we are both finite means I haven't yet gotten to know you as well as I would like, you should know that you really have made a difference in my life.  All of you.  So thank you.

Monks' Hearts

One of the things of which I have been reminded time and again in the recent past, (and of which I am in need of constant reminding) is the simple fact that we are called to have hearts for God alone.  There is a hunger and a loneliness inside each of us that only God can fill.  Growth in the Christian life is one of stripping away all temporal things to which we are attached, so that we can be filled with God alone.  And while this may be easiest to do in the context of the religious vows, and most particularly in the context of a monastery, it is something that everyone is called to do.  Whether priest, religious brother, religious sister, single, married, we are all called fundamentally to have monks' hearts.  Just like the men who go through these gates at the Abby of Gesthemani.

Photo by Bryan Sherwood, used under Creative Commons license.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church has this gem about distractions in prayer and what they tell us:

To set about hunting down distractions would be to fall into their trap, when all that is necessary is to turn back to our heart: for a distraction reveals to us what we are attached to, and this humble awareness before the Lord should awaken our preferential love for him and lead us resolutely to offer him our heart to be purified.  Therein lies the battle, the choice of which master to serve.  -CCC #2729
 

It is through the stillness and silence of prayer that we can learn what is disquieting our hearts, what is weighing them down, and there learn to free ourselves from all worldly attachments and to love God above all else.

Edit: I should note that the phrase "monks' hearts" isn't mine originally, but came most immediately from a priest I know.  I don't know if he got it from anywhere.

The Sacrament of the Present Moment

Different paths led us here.  We each came here on our own journey.  And soon we will follow different paths away from here.  For our journeys are different.  But what matters is that now, in the present, they overlap.  We cover the same ground. We take in the same scenery, pass by the same waypoints, and even share the company of the same fellow travellers.

Sometimes I think the sadness that sometimes falls between us is not so much because the part of the journey we have together is so short, but because each of us can't understand the path the other must take in the end.  I can only really know what it is like to travel the journey I was given, and you yours.  In the end, my path is not to be your path, and your path is not to be my path.  This keeps us apart even now.  For how can I understand you, if your path and mine are not the same?

But come, let us walk together for as long as we can.

Transforming Desire

Travelling about the lake (this time running) has been a good source of thoughts lately.  On my run today it struck me how living a good life and living a Christian life are as much about transforming our desires as they are about transforming our behavior.  In paraphrasing William Law, Peter Kreeft once said "If you will look into your own heart in utter honesty, you must admit that there is one and only one reason why you are not even now a saint. You do not wholly want to be."  This, then, is the task.  We must want to be saints.  The most successful people really want to be successful.  This holds true in the spiritual life, as much as in the world of business or the world of athletics.

But how do we begin to transform our desires?  I suppose it starts by living as if we had them.

Humilitas

While I was walking back home today, it stuck me in a new way why humility is such an important virtue and why pride is such a deadly vice.  It's a simple as this: all the greatest things in life are gifts.  Without much qualification one could say that all things, including life itself, are gifts.  Not only does grace perfect nature, but nature itself is gratuitous.  Humility recognizes this and experiences everything as a gift.  Pride does not.  The prideful person sees himself primarily as a giver rather than as a receiver.  The guy who thinks he is God's greatest gift to women would do well to think rather on how women are God's gift to him.  The truest friendships have made me feel humbled and completely unworthy.

Here's the summary:

The world is pure gift.
Humility experiences world as pure gift.
Pride thinks it has more to give than to receive.

Thus, humility is the attitude which is properly oriented toward reality.

The Searcher

Bill smiled to himself.  The symbolism could not have been clearer.  (Or was it symbolism?  Bill had forgotten nearly everything from his college semiotics class.  In any case the meaning was obvious.) There was the answer staring him directly in the face.  His thoughts jumped back to last night.  Not that they had far to jump.  All day thoughts of last night had been rolling around in his head.  Last night had been one of those rare, wonderful moments in time that you can't really be sure will ever happen again.  If Bill had counted the moments like this that he could remember (moments that were by definition unforgettable), they would have fit on one hand for sure.  Close friendships are rare enough, he mused.  But then there are those moments, that you certainly cannot control or try to make happen, when those barriers that keep even kindred spirits apart are removed or let down.  Perhaps it was the calm of the night. (It was almost always at night, wasn't it?)  Perhaps it was the impermanence of their situation.  No, this was not their final parting of ways, but the impending, albeit temporary, spatial separation was in someways a microcosm of a much more permanent separation they knew would eventually be coming.  Whatever it was, the conversation ran deeper than usual.  "The meaning of life" would be an apt way to describe its content, although Bill meant that in the most inclusive sense possible.  Bill had decided long ago that the meaning of life had something to do with music, religion, and sex.  No other things have quite the power to captivate and are so central to the human experience.  (If you are a tone-deaf, impotent atheist, you probably don't have much to live for, Bill figured.  Bill also liked having an excuse to introduce people to the term "hemidemisemiquaver.") But it was obviously more than just the content of the conversation that made last night so special, Bill thought.  It had to be the people he was with.  Maybe he should add friendship to his "meaning of life" list.  He had never wanted so much just to pause time.  He didn't care that he was now doing manual labor on barely two hours of sleep.   Bill would have gladly done it all over again.  It just added to the a strange, wonderful, indescribable, and oddly dissatisfied feeling had pervaded him all day.  Yes, dissatisfied.  That was the part that Bill hadn't quite understood until now.  Strange, because they had even talked about this very thing, about Augustinian restlessness, about how humans can't quite ever be satisfied, and about how the best sources attest that the most ecstatic human experiences only make the ache, the longing, the dissatisfaction even worse.  Hadn't C.S. Lewis called this Sehnsucht?  Hadn't Tolkien mentioned "regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness"?  Of course, Bill had felt this restlessness before, and accepted the received wisdom that it only gets stronger the more ecstatic your experience.  But he had never felt it to quite this extent before.  Usually, it was the chance sighting of a pretty face that would drive him crazy.  But the happiest things he could remember?  Not so much.  This was probably why he didn't know what to make of his dissatisfaction, until now.  But there it was, the answer staring him directly in the face.  (It's all in Lewis, all in Lewis! He was right after all!)  Or perhaps more correctly, pounding his eardrums. Someone nearby was playing music.  Overall, not a bad selection, Bill had thought.  It sort of makes the day less monotonous.  But then a song by U2 came on.  Bill had always enjoyed U2, and this song in particular, but hadn't really paid close attention to the lyrics until now. 


I have climbed the highest mountains
I have run through the fields
Only to be with you
Only to be with you...


...I have kissed honey lips
Felt the healing in her finger tips
It burned like fire
I was burning inside her...


...But I still haven't found
What I'm looking for
But I still haven't found
What I'm looking for


Bill couldn't help but smile.  It all made sense now.  Last night was but another reminder that no matter how much we seek, even though we reach the very heights of human experience, we won't ever find quite what we are looking for.  Not in this lifetime, anyway.