Undone

A few years ago, I was fairly satisfied with my spiritual life. That may sound good or bad, depending on your theological slant, but generally I was happy with it. Then sometime, maybe five or more years back, it started to unravel.

I'm not having a crisis of faith or anything. I think I'm as close to God as I've ever been. What I've lost is religious practices. I don't go to church often. I don't read the Bible often. I don't pray often. And when I try to re-establish these practices, it doesn't stick.

Blogging isn't a very traditional spiritual discipline, but it's been very helpful to me in the past as a way to organize my thoughts about religion and about God. It's another indicator of how my religious discipline has been. I've tried to re-establish the habit a few times, but without much success.

I'm trying again -- not just with blogging, but the other spiritual disciplines as well, beginning with prayer.

Let us arise, then, at last,
for the Scripture stirs us up, saying,
"Now is the hour for us to rise from sleep" (Rom. 13:11).
Let us open our eyes to the deifying light,
let us hear with attentive ears
the warning which the divine voice cries daily to us,
"Today if you hear His voice,
harden not your hearts" (Ps. 95:8).
-Rule of Benedict, from the Prologue

Truth and Openness

Let your word be "Yes, Yes" or "No, No"; anything more than this comes from the evil one.
-Matthew 5:37

Continuing my slow, deliberate pace through Matthew, I came to the passage on oaths today.

I had reflected in previous days that Jesus' teachings on anger and adultery were both double-sided. That is, he first warns against being angry with a brother and then gives instruction on whaat to do if your brother is angry with you. Then he warns against "adultery of the heart" and then immediately follows it with prohibitions of actions that would force others into adultery (the sayings about divorce).

The double-sided nature of these teachings makes perfect sense if, as I previously concluded, Jesus is teaching a community to be a righteous community. None of us are in this alone, and so in everything we do, we must uphold one another.

With that as my personal context of understanding, I was looking for something similar in the teachings on oaths, but it isn't there. I thought about it, I considered that perhaps there is an implicit reciprocity in this. If everyone in the community is to "let their 'yes' be 'yes' and their 'no' be 'no,' it is encumbant upon the others to accept this as such. It requires trust.

But then I wondered, what if another person abuses this trust? Is this not poison to the community? How can it be remedied? That was as far as I got most of the day.

Then this evening, I picked up Joan Chittister's book on The Rule of Benedict, and the section I read tonight included Benedict's admonition, "Bind yourself to no oath, lest it prove false, but speak the truth with heart and tongue."

Sister Joan comments, "Holiness, this ancient rule says to a culture that has made crafty packaging high art, has something to do with being who we say we are, claiming our truths, opening our hearts, giving ourselves to the other pure and unglossed." Good stuff. She may as well have been commenting on this section from the Sermon on the Mount, and I suppose indirectly she was, given that Benedict is so obviously referencing it.

So this reinforces my understanding of the main point, but it doesn't solve my problem of broken trust. When a coincidence like this comes along, I expect it to resolve my difficulties. :-)

Then I read on and saw that the very next thing Benedict talked about in his rule was bearing injuries patiently, loving your enemies and blessing those who curse you. And what do you know, that's going to be the next thing Jesus talks about too. Again, it may be that Benedict is simply following the order of the Sermon on the Mount, but either way it gave me my answer.

What do you do when someone you've trusted has lied to you? You bear it.

I don't think Jesus is telling me to be a dupe. I can recognize that I've been lied to. I suppose I can even tell the other person I know they've lied. (Would anything less be honest?) What I can't do is repay evil with evil. What I must do is react with love.

Weakness

I was reading Joan Chittister's The Rule of Benedict this evening. She was talking about the role of the superior in Benedictine monsteries. She said the superior is meant to be like Christ, "simple, unassuming, immersed in God, loving of the marginal, doer of the Gospel, beacon to the strong."

This last phrase, "beacon to the strong" grabbed my attention. For me, it conjures up the image of a popular leader, surrounded by equally popular heroes -- sort oof like David and his mighty men. It's not an image I like, mostly because I can't picture myself as one of "the strong."

As I reflected on this, I saw how this connects to one of the problems I have in living the Christian life. I want to be strong. I want to be a great person. I want to be heroic. But I'm not. If there's one thing that life has taught me about myself, it's that I'm ordinary.

That's OK. I know it is. Even so, I can't shake wanting to be more than I am. I want to be like Martin Luther or Francis of Assisi or Augustine. Paradoxically, I know that it is a weakness for me to strive for that. It's not who I am, and that is my calling -- to be who I am.

So I go back to Sister Joan's list of Christ-like attributes, and I take hold of "loving of the marginal." This is one of my favorite things about Christ. He loves the marginal, the weak, the little, the lost. He loves me.