Keypad as needle, wireless as drug

You'll never truly be free until you face your compulsions. Unless you can say "no" to your bodily appetites not only will you not be able to pray, but you'll not be able to resist the maddening choices that assault you every day. Your sanity and your spiritual vitality depend on being able to resist impulsive action. So long as you eat or drink or smoke whatever you want, so long as you indulge in whatever sensual stimulant arouses you, so long as you cannot turn off your cell phone or close down your Facebook page for awhile you're a slave to external impulses that overshadow, abuse, and diminish your interior identity.

There are some who are hooked to texting and tweeting as disastrously as a junkies were hooked to heroine when I was young.

The keypad is their needle and wireless is their drug.

Is it yours?

The power of solitude in the midst of a busy life

To discern the emptiness, and the vain pursuits of those who are strangers to Love, you need space, real freedom . . . solitude, silence. Not solitude that is a flight from all this in order to escape into some peaceful realm.  Rather, a cleft in the rock, a place to take your stand for the sake of others---for Love---rather than against them in judgment of them and their empty pursuits (which frankly, are often your own).

This is the path of the "peacemaker" Jesus wills you to be (Matthew 5.9)---who you really are when you are free from such spiritually alien compulsions.

This solitude is most of all a condition of the heart, and inner disposition and can be embraced anywhere with practice---though it needs the support of real solitude; a lonely place you habitually go where no one and nothing can disturb or call on you for awhile; a place where you can let go, unplug . . . be.

Says Thomas Merton: "it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin.  It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity" (New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 81).

On prayer to the saints: why neglect so great a band of intercessors?

Regarding prayer to the saints---we Protestants aver. Why?

If  we "believe in the holy catholic church, the communion of saints," (which we do), and if we can appeal to another human being for prayer on our behalf (which we also do), then why neglect so great a community of hallowed disciples as intercessors?

Unless we really don't believe or understand what we confess.

These to whom we appeal are not run-of-the-mill humans---they are saints, whose form of life is simple, humble, kind, holy--with whom God is in greater communion by virtue of their proven sanctity, their abandonment to God.

It's not sufficient to deny prayer to saints because it's "too Roman." We must think better than that. More biblically. More theologically. More mystically. We must not be taken captive by our "Protest" and our uncritical immersion in Enlightenment rationality.

And if we can appeal to the saints gone before us and bridge the thin barrier between worlds, what then of Mary, mother of our Lord? She is not divine, not confused with Christ, or a rival of the Trinity.  But she is one whose virtue makes her particularly efficacious in her prayers and intercession and guidance.  Further, is she one who, by the grace she begs from our Lord on our behalf, can give birth to a broader transformation of our lives, the formation of Christ in us?

Of course!  Pray to the Holy Trinity with fervor.  But don't neglect the grace that may come to you through the intercession of one of God's special ones, especially if they're special to you and you to them.

The infinite variety of paths holiness must take

All Christians are to live as saints---all are to live their lives in continuity with that long line of women and men whose witness shows us the infinite variety of paths holiness must take if we together are to enlarge the harvest of love. It is the "communion of saints," so neglected among Protestants, who not only bid us to follow, but also show us the way until we make that way our own.

The spiritual intelligence we need

Some readers have expressed interest in the line of thought in my previous post, and especially my reference to Aristotle.

I’d suggest a longer treatment of the argument in Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Slim book by a strong Catholic philosopher. About it the New York Times Book Review says, “Pieper’s message for us is plain…. The idolatry of the machine, the worship of mindless know-how, the infantile cult of youth and the common mind-all this points to our peculiar leadership in the drift toward the slave society…. Pieper’s profound insights are impressive and even formidable.”

On the first page Pieper writes: “It is essential to begin by reckoning with the fact that one of the foundations of Western culture is leisure. That much, at least, can be learnt from the first chapter of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. And even the history of the word attests the fact: for leisure in Greek is skole, and in Latin scola, the English ’school.’ The word used to designate the palce where we educate and teach is derived from a word which means ‘leisure’. ‘School’ does not, properly speaking, mean school, but leisure.”

This is an important philosophical critique of Modern culture and our captivity to endless doing.  It plumbs the classic tradition inviting us into the spiritual intelligence necessary not just to survive but to thrive.