Sunday, August 12, 2012

Thwarted



What happens when we are thwarted?  Most of our problems come because of a wrong view of ourselves. Life is simpler when we acknowledge our place in the universe: The Lord is God and I am not!  Along with that simple fact there is a corollary: He has many children and I am only one of them.

Peter Kreeft writing on Pascal tells us,
The essence of sin is selfishness, “me first”, self-love or pride.
            Pride is essentially competitive. “Me first” necessarily means “you second”.  Pascal would like Rodney Dangerfield’s line, “When you’re looking out for Number One, you’re going to step on some Number Two.”
            Self-love, or pride, is not the same as self-respect.  Self-respect means treating yourself, like all selves, as valuable. . .
            Self-love on the other hand, means making yourself your own God: that is your own end, good and goal; seeking your happiness and purpose and destiny and meaning in yourself rather than in God.[i]

There is a twist in human behaviour that needs to be noted.  Another more subtle form of self-love is seeking others as “your own end, good and goal.” Make no mistake; that is also another form of self-love, because in doing so you are not seeking others for their own sakes.  May God deliver us from people who want to put us in first place, for the first place belongs to God alone, and people who make a habit of doing that can be a tremendous nuisance to the people they love in this manner.

The only antidote is truth, and truth is not loved by those enmeshed in self-love.  Pascal says that the nature “of self-love is to love only self and consider only self, . . . The predicament in which it thus finds itself arouses in it the most unjust and criminal passion that could possibly be imagined, for it conceives a deadly hatred for the truth which rebukes it and convinces it of its faults.”[ii]

In Gaudy Night, Dorothy Sayers gets to the heart of her plot by uncovering a motive for an attempted murder.  Lord Peter Wimsey, in conversation with the teachers of a women’s college, holds forth,

My first task was obviously to find out whether Miss de Vine had actually ever murdered or injured anybody. In the course of a very interesting after-dinner conversation in this room, she informed me that, six years ago, she had been instrumental in depriving a man of his reputation and livelihood—and we decided, if you remember, that this was an action which any manly man or womanly woman might be disposed to resent . . .

Incidentally, I established for a certainty, what I was sure of in my own mind for a start, that there was not a woman in this Common Room, married or single, who would be ready to place personal loyalties above professional honor.  That was a point which it seemed necessary to make clear—not so much to me, as to yourselves.[iii]

            The point being that part of our acknowledgment of the Lord being God is an acknowledgment that it is the Lord who sets the rules and not we ourselves.  His rules are that Truth and Integrity must prevail, and that in so doing justice must be carried out.  Justice includes truth and integrity, and making your word your bond.
            Is Kreeft too glum when he says?

“We are all born into the world as selfish little pigs . . . our working philosophy is always “I want what I want when I want it”; and that even when we later learn to cover up and compromise this demand, it remains down at the bottom of our heart.”

This truth is easily uncovered by the experience of feeling thwarted, and being thwarted is a common every day experience when we human beings interact with each other.

            How easily we are annoyed, perhaps even angered, when some other equally self-centered person encroaches on what we consider to be our rightful territory, be that territory our time or our personal space.  When that happens what we really are saying is that “I am my own,” and “What’s mine is mine.”

            A good deal of the salvation history of the children of Israel was involved with the issue of territorial claims, one encroaching upon the other, and that conflict persists to the present day.  What was largely missing was the fundamental underlying question: Just whose land was it anyway?  Even Job, at the outset had a clear understanding, “The Lord has given, and the Lord has taken away,”[iv]  And King David is his dedicatory prayer of the offerings for the temple confesses,

"But who am I, and what is my people, that we should be able thus to offer willingly? For all things come from you, and of your own have we given you.  For we are strangers before you and sojourners, as all our fathers were. Our days on the earth are like a shadow, and there is no abiding.[v]

There is an ancient Navajo understanding that we don’t “own” the land, we just inhabit it.  We are stewards not lords.  From a Benedictine viewpoint this governs St. Benedict’s general attitude towards material possessions.  St. Benedict in his rule tells his monks,

Let it not be allowed at all for a monk to give or to receive letters, tokens, or gifts of any kind, either from parents or any other person, nor from each other, without the permission of the Abbot. But even if anything is sent him by his parents, let him not presume to accept it before it hath been make known to the Abbot. And if he order it to be accepted, let it be in the Abbot's power to give it to whom he pleaseth. And let not the brother to whom perchance it was sent, become sad, that "no chance be given to the devil" (Eph 4:27; 1 Tm 5:14). But whosoever shall presume to act otherwise, let him fall under the discipline of the Rule.[vi]


This is not socialism in action but something quite different.  It has to do with the nature of original sin.  Benedict does not want his monks grasping at material possessions and shrieking, “Mine! Mine! Mine!”  Nor does he want his monks to consider time their own.  When the bell rings it’s time to worship and if you are so inconsiderate, not of others but of the Lord, that you are late there will be an act of discipline.  In this context discipline is a better word than punishment.  The monk has to learn that even time is not his own.  The Psalmist prays, “But I trust in you, O LORD; I say, "You are my God." My times are in your hand.”[vii]

The experience of being thwarted may actually be a gift from God because it helps us understand that the real issue of spiritual life is a call to a deeper acceptance of our place in the universe and our place in the family of God.  Surrender is not an abstract quality so much as an action verb.  In all of this, with time, space, and material things, we are to live with open hands not with wicked closed fists.


[i] Peter Kreeft, Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensées, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), p. 147
[ii] Ibid. p. 149
[iii] Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night, (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 478
[iv] Job 1:21
[v] 1 Chronicles 29:14-15  
[vi] The Rule of St. Benedict by chapters (Boniface Verheyen OSB, Atchison, 1949) OSB Website
[vii] Psalm 31:14-15   

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