The Community Builders

I think (maybe I'm wrong) that the mom in a family is the community builder. I remember listening to a Mars Hill tape on hospitality, and how this is a dying concept in our fragmented (or spatialized, in Catherine Pickstock's view) societies. The mother, that ideal of hospitality, comfort and the warmth of community, is now often replaced by a slick office version, who is an expert at microwave meals and would be interested in an ad such as the one I found in a California paper: "Do you need a housewife? Well, we've got 'em".

The reality is, it seems to me, that among working mothers there are two types: the educated, wealthy types, who manage things with smooth hair because they have a lot of help, and the frazzled one, who must work to help maintain a mortgage or just survival. This second type is often covering over a train wreck with saran wrap and hoping that the kids will make it somehow- thanks to the schools. The wealthy type enjoys dinner parties and guests from time to time, but really has no time for true community building and hospitality.

There is another, growing group of women: the neo-community builders, who are the true heirs to that generation (two or three ago) who knew the art and importance of hospitality and community. These are the homeschoolers, the stay-at-home moms, or the 'very part-time working' moms who somehow understand that their place is at home- but not staring out the kitchen window like some fifties manikin. They have sensed that no one, not even the TV, can replace them in the lives of their children. They understand that they have to build a culture for their children, because the culture outside is failing children, and corrupting them. They know that they have to provide safe and healthy spaces of play and work, places where their children can retain their innocence and yet learn to deal with 'the world' from a place of strength.

In this endeavor, hospitality is primary, because in order to build a healthy culture-within-a-culture, community is essential. People have to open themselves, their gifts and their homes in a more radical way, so that a community can begin to grow. However, as important as hospitality is, there is something else much more important which I have discovered in my community-building attempts (some successful, some abject failures).

I have realized a couple of things, actually: one is that women, it seems, are ill-suited in one sense to community building, and well-suited in another way. The other thing is that community building is an apostolate- and watered by prayer.

First, the suitability of women: they are highly sensitive and prone to talking. These are good and bad things, both. In being sensitive and talkative, they are showing their propensity to be experts at hospitality. Being sensitive to others' needs is the foundation of hospitality, and the beginning of community. In talking, 'word gets around' and families begin to get to know each other. The moms can help the dads and the children to understand one another, and encourage friendships between families and not just between individuals. Family friendships are the building blocks of the community, and hospitality is the mortar. The woman in a family is the primary producer of both: and if her vocation is primarily her family and home, she will pour into it not just effort and thought, but her very being.

The underside of a woman's propensity to be sensitive and to talk might be pretty obvious to anyone with any sense. The cure of it is not. I think that often the sensitive and talking issues as weaknesses are objects of fun and sterotyping, but they can actually wreck community. Gossip and grudge-holding, the bad fruits of sensitivity and talking, can destroy every tiny effort to build family friendships, choking these efforts in a tangle of weed-roots.

The Gospel commands to forgive- seventy times seven- and not to gossip, and following these commands is the practical way by which women can retain their natural propensities for good. Additionally, prayer and the understanding that community-building is an apostolate are the essential and supernatural ways by which we forgive and not give in to gossip.

An apostolate is a work which God has given a person. It is like a house built, and it must be built on Christ. It will be tested by fire, it is a work upon which we will be judged. It is also primarily Christ's, and it cannot be something that we hang on to for ourselves, no matter how big or how small it is. An apostolate must be given back to God and within it God must be given the glory, or it is built on sand.

An apostolate like community-building in all its forms, from little schools to bible groups to girl's or boy's groups, must be supported by and watered with prayer. "Pray without ceasing" the Apostle said, and we must pray while we are doing anything, any apostolate. We must pray with our willingness to forgive, to love beyond death even those whom we dislike, and with our determination to think the best of those around us and to protect their person and their reputation with our lives.

We must pray with our blessings and our goods shared, to the point of sharing what we ourselves need. We must pray with our desire to serve the other, and to see Christ in those around us. Only then will true community be built, a Christian community.

We must all of us, pray for the Christian communities in the world, those little cells of renewal, the new monasteries perched on the edge of the sea.

Savior Delusion

As St. Thomas Aquinas taught, no man consciously does anything purely evil. In any action, however evil it might be, there is some motivation for good- either the good of the self, or others. The perceived good may not be good in reality, but the point is that it is perceived by the doer as a good on some level.

One can see this easily with small children. Two-year-old Robin believes that the rabbits need some fresh air, and decides to do something about it without checking with the gatekeepers of reality (his parents). He is perceiving two goods: one, his own decision-making ability, and second the good of the rabbits (as he understands it). The rabbits are let loose in the yard, they crawl under the fence, and finally they are lost. Little Robin has created a wake of destruction while believing he is doing good.

It is much more difficult to see this same disorder in adults- mainly because they cover it up with onion skins of rationalization, slowly blocking out the truth to others and to themselves. Let me try to elucidate it with a fictitious example: Andrew is a very intelligent adult in his thirties. As he has grown in his faith, he begins to feel that he has much to give those around him, in terms of counseling and faith-based solutions to people's everyday problems. He sees two goods here, just like little Robin: the good that helping others will do for his own spiritual journey, and the good that he will do for others in helping them with their problems. There is one issue, though, that Andrew does not grapple with: just because he can help, should he? What does God wish him to do? What has God called him to?

Andrew, you see, has learnt a way of looking at his faith such that he is the center of it- but he doesn't know this, awash in the very self-oriented culture of both the modern culture and many churches of the day. Andrew believes in God, but believes in Him as Andrew perceives Him. Andrew does not know that he does not have a faith based on God's presentation of reality but rather a faith built on self-perception, the wishes of oneself.

Andrew begins his mission, his savior-like work. Because he is self-oriented, he lives somewhat in an enclosed world, a bit like an observer sitting in the dark under the canopy of 'stars' in a star-gazing room (the ones where the constellations are actually little lights placed in a ceiling). It is a safe and predictable environment, and this safety in a synthetic creation is where Andrew actually derives his incredibly alluring optimism and self-esteem. As he tries to help others with their problems, he is actually helping them to create their own synthetic realities, wherein they can claim to know that God understands them and that they feel certain about the decisions they have made. Andrew, the savior, begins to make disciples of Hell.

The most common problem of evil is not that there are these frightening people who decide they are going to cause havoc. Evil is a much more subtle problem of those who have made their own world, their own understanding of existence. They are people who are, fundamentally, lying to themselves. Thus they can actually believe they are telling others the truth, when in fact, they are creating versions of themselves. A sociopath is the extreme version of this, but a culture bent upon sowing the seeds of radical individualism and self-determination (even in questions of existence and the right thereto: think "abortion") will produce the same evil fruits, albeit on a spectrum of mild insanity to extreme sociopathology.

One only needs to read the history of the City Council of Santa Cruz to understand this kind of middling insanity. They're just now trying to declare Santa Cruz a 'Pro-Choice City', establishing a diabolical city-state religion of sorts, all the while believing they are establishing freedom.

Evil is the absence of good. In terms of a self-oriented person, reality becomes subsumed into their own encased bubble of 'reality'. Three important examples from literature come straight to mind: one is the scene in C.S. Lewis' The Last Battle. All had come through the door of judgement at the end of the world, and the little group of dwarves who had been 'sacrificed to Tash' were sitting huddled together in the midst of a bright meadow (heaven). They could not see anything beyond the darkness of the world of their own making, the cynical 'reality' of the dark stable. Aslan, to please one of the queens, attempts to break into their reality but is rebuffed at every turn. As He tries to help, He turns and says, "I will show you both what I can and cannot do." Even Our Lord cannot break in to a person's selfish construction of reality: Reality Himself is rebuffed, for the deluded person has made himself god and will not trade for the True God.

Another example is the unforgettable character in Flannery O'Conner's A Good Man is Hard to Find, an older woman who is waylaid by robbers along with her family. As they relate to the criminals, it becomes apparent that the older woman has been a tyrant and a destructive influence all her life, all the while believing that she was acting for everyone's good. As reality thrusts itself upon her in the form of a gun, she begins to dismantle her own reality for the truth. The great line in the story is from the mouth of the man who shoots her: "She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." In this, O'Conner brutally illustrates the terrifying nature of evil and the near-impossibility of a self-deluded person opening himself to reality.

In The Brothers Karamazov, the famous character of the Elder Zossima exhorts the people, "Beware of the lie to yourself". In this great passage, he begs those who come for his advice to search for truth, and above all, to avoid the lie to oneself, for this is the unbreakable prison.

Pride, or fear of hurt is the source of this kind of evil, and it is by learning to view ourselves as humble creatures and not the creators of our own existence, or the creators of whatever information or tradition we inherit, that we begin to live in true reality: thus we live in the good. Humble people, those who stand on the ground, or humus, are those who see themselves in the true light- they seek to see themselves as God sees them, and measure themselves against the standards of Christ and the teachings of the Church. They do not dance around a self-made golden calf, but rather follow God's laws which reflect reality and teach us how to live in it with peace and true love.

Inasmuch as we are humbly searching for the truth, for the True Savior, in reality, we are good. We may not be completely healed, or sane, but the will to strip ourselves of anything or anyone which would keep us from God, or from seeing ourselves how God sees us, is what means we are heading towards being good.

The Philosophy of the Broken Boat

We stand, you and I, on the edge of the languid pond; we are looking together at the small boats bobbing and bending along with the wind-sighs of a balmy, New York afternoon sometime in the Spring. Compounds of young and old move past us in differing versions of the same stroll around the sculpted edges of the pond, edges which seem to have an agreement with the water : to stay in concert with one another and to provide an orderly experience of boating.

One boat, a perfect red dash crowned with white triangulated splashes splayed outward to catch (to it, a gale) the soft-blowing wind, breaks from its compatriots who toddle safely at the far corner and dares the high seas at the center. It sails true and straight for a glorious thirty seconds and seems never to mind the end of the world ( it's world is rather squarish wherein one does not fall off, but rather splinters on an unforgiving and orderly wall). The wall, now, as we watch in fascination and some horror (imagining tiny people asleep at the helm), does not forgive. There is a splintering sound and a 'whosh-flap' as the sails crumple into the shallow water.

We do not speak, we wait- for what? Perhaps we are waiting in morbid curiosity to see what the owner will do with the remains of the red dash. A boy comes, plodding rather than running. To my surprise, he does not waste too much time in mourning his art-work toy: straight to the great green garbage receptacle he plods and without cermony, lets it fall to the bottom with a humiliating myriad of thuds.

You do not turn towards me, for we live in different universes now. I only hear you say, as if from very far away, "That reminds me of a relationship- you know, maybe that boy loved his boat. But he was not afraid to admit that it was broken beyond repair, and realized that he would just have to get rid of it-hard. That's why I like that 'thud' in the trash."

I do not answer, for you will probably not hear me; your philosophy comes from so deep inside that it is not something I can counsel you about; and also it places us far apart. I cannot be with you in this, the philosophy of the broken boat. I will not. But I live outside it, and pray; and discuss to myself, to make clear to my own heart what bothers me so about it.

I suppose I understand this philosophy from a natural standpoint: I guess I've had experience both as the broken boat and also the trash-man. However, my soul and all I know of God's love makes me reject this philosophy absolutely. I must here differentiate between a relationship which is disordered from one in which each person has struggles and deep flaws, causing hurt to the other. In the former case, the cause of the disorder must be remedied in charity, according to the laws and will of God-in charity. Sometimes the remedy is indeed an ending of the relationship- but it is done in prayer and charity. In the latter case, with the flaws and such, it is different: and I think of this now, as you begin to turn and walk away slowly...

When one person holds the philosophy of the broken boat, whether in a courtship, marriage or friendship, the other person becomes aware of the guillotine hanging unobtrusively over the relationship, and the whole thing becomes a dance of fear. It is a dance of control, of waiting for a flaw to appear and be judged: hurt does not become a chance for spiritual growth, but rather a tally mark on some ledger-sheet in the heart. A wall is built, and the one willing to love and work on the relationship will often feel a temptation to escape (and perhaps escape is just what is needed). The one who understands true love must call the other out and be willing to lose this relationship on the altar of reality, of real love: for love will be tested, either by the lovers or friends or by the providence of God and the trials of life.

For love is not meant to be a perfect sail on a balmy night. It is meant to help us grow towards Our Lord, who gave Himself up to death for love. Love is meant to make us heros and saints: it demands nothing less. That is why the disillusionment in any longstanding relationship is actually a good thing; for in the moment of disillusionment we have the profound and divine choice to really LOVE: not for gain, nor pleasure, but rather for the other. Our self-life begins to die as our life in Christ grows in exact inverse-proportion. Love is not fundamentally fun. It is fundamentally real, worth great risk and pain. The fixing and re-fixing of the boat is true love.

The other kind of relationship, the disordered kind, needs remedy before it can even approach the fixing and re-fixing of love. You and I, my friend, and all friends, how can we love if we are starving spiritually, or in sin, far from the Source of Love and Life? How can we navigate the storms on the pond without formation or the Sacraments, or the sanity of the True Theology? How can we discern anything through disorder? As you disappear into the trees beyond the pond, this is what I grieve the most: that I was not capable or willing, perhaps, to love the way God would have wanted me to, and to let you be His first and not mine.

In this fundamental disorder, God is ready to rescue at the slightest humility and willingness to let go: for even in disorder, to let go (not to throw in the trash, but more akin to the boy allowing Someone else to take the boat who could perhaps fix it and sail it better for him), yes, to let go is the beginning of real love and the beginning of hope of order.

In any real love, to begin to lose oneself truly in the love of God is to begin to be able to truly love anyone else. It is only after really loving this way, perhaps often in the dark, that one begins to understand the depth of love. It is the true meaning of the prophet who married the harlot as a sign of how God loves His own though they stray.

You know, my friend, as I watch your shadowed form slowly climbing the hill across the way, I sense that you know that real love is much more demanding than the toughest mountain-climb- and you say you don't have the courage for it. None of us do, I whisper, hoping the wind will carry my message of hope. That is why you need the Sacraments, the 'body and soul' love expressed in the life of the Church. It is Her purpose: to cause us to be able to love, like the wind in the sails. The strength of the Eucharist, the healing of confession...

How can I express it? I feel that I am failing to convey it! I remember that love of God you first felt, even as a pagan of sorts, when you were suspended in the deep blue; that infusion of the knowledge that He would never leave you, that He would reach you wherever you were and walk through death for you. It was a mark of deep understanding that was imprinted on your soul, it shone through your eyes: a kind of never-ending explosion. You thought that somehow a relationship was tied up with that- and in some sense you were right; but yet you carried the pagan broken-boat philosophy with you, like an extra change of clothes, a just-in-case.

And I failed you, miserably. The mysterious thing, is that perhaps He allowed us to fail-to give us a chance to learn to love as He does: or to know beyond doubt that He is the Alpha and Omega of everything, but especially of love. Love in courtship, or marriage, or friendship, must begin in Him and His law and will, it must continue thus, and end thus. When any relationship fails in His law, or tries to live outside it or in selfishness, it becomes demonic. The only remedy for this is not to trash it because it hurts, but to repent and to seek after His will once more: whether His will is to seek Him together or apart.

But when you are seeking His will, and His will for you is to have a broken boat, or to be one, do not despair. Rejoice. Again, I say, rejoice...for He gives you the power, His power, to love beyond measuring, beyond and in failure, and this makes you Christ in this sphere. You become a true witness to the other and to those who observe: and you give witness to the truth that the final end of any love-whether it be agape, philia, eros, or storge-is to draw everything to heaven through the love of Christ. No love can remain love and be an end in itself. You are only left with childish anger and despair at a broken, expensive toy.

I know, my friend, that God will ask from you a love no less than His love, for your good. If you ask for the courage, He will give you His own, the courage of the One who stumbled to Golgotha for love. Love those whom God has placed in your life with that love, a love that never forsakes, that always wishes for the other's good: that good of the other being to dwell in the House of the Lord forever. Heaven is constructed on this selfless love, and I pray that He will fill you with the grace to love this way, for it is all His doing. It is begun in our willingness to have God transform us as we surrender our own precious philosophies which do not conform to His Truth. It is the seeking after His Truth as the 'doe longs for flowing streams'.

For me, I know I am nothing, nothing, next to the love of God in the relationships I have now- I just want to be in that love, immersed in that ocean. My peace, in my clingings to selfishness, is that God knows He must change me, and that I want it. This wanting is also a grace given by Him. I know I always retain my free will: and I hope to use it to be willing to love without thought of measuring the cost, to love even when someone is imperfect or seriously flawed, or when I have been seriously hurt.

Perfect love casts out fear. Fear, begone. Sweet Courage of Love, enter in!

To Be A Man of Peace

"Keep thyself first in peace, and then shalt thou be able to pacify others."

This is harder than it sounds. I'm failing at it pretty miserably right now, so I feel the hardness of the good way, like the characters in C.S. Lewis' book The Great Divorce, who come from Hell on a busride to Heaven. They are like soft silver fishes flopping on diamonds: the very goodness of Heaven rubs like sharp points on their thin, selfish skin. But help is sent to them: the inhabitants of Heaven come with charity to lift them and strengthen them; but in the end, to be a good man and a man of peace requires great humility and the choice of the will.

" He that is well in peace, is not suspicious of any".

This is not so easy, especially in our closest familial relationships, when hurt has been passed around like a sour drink, me buying one round, and you another until we're dizzy with hurt and anger, it becomes very difficult to be at peace. I think of the Lord saying, "Forgive seventy times seven", completely blasting open the apparently more prudent Old Testament law to forgive seven times seven: that is a prudence which dictates one must have a limit on one's forgiveness.

A limit on forgiveness is a limit on love, the selfless love which lays down its life for the other: and with the grace of Christ, we became able to have charity, and thus to forgive endlessly. Thus, the suspicion ends, and you are well in peace. Easy? No. It requires the death of the selfish seeking in us. As in the New Testament, "Let me die with Christ, so that I may live with Him."

"Behold, how far off thou art yet from true charity and humility, which knoweth not how to be angry with any, or to be moved with indignation, but only against its own self."

I think this means that if you really understood the enormity of any sin you would realize your focus on rehabilitation must be foremost on the self, and that we have all sinned, and that I have sinned: I have sinned!! This brings either a despair from the proud, or a humility from the humble. The enormity of placing the self above God is the root of sin, it is pride: and this is enough to make us realize that we cannot treat others as if they are doing something 'that we would never do'. It is that feeling of 'how dare you' which falls against charity and humility. We, a fellow creature, a fellow sinner, have no business saying 'how dare you' with self-righteous indignation. This kind of pride is the sneakiest kind I know- that is, you are doing it before you realize it, and the more 'moral' a person, the easier it is to have this kind of pride.

Anger, however, is not an evil: it is, as Aquinas says, a motivating feeling; an emotional reaction to a real or apparent injustice. Anger is meant to motivate us to act decisively and courageously in the face of danger or evil. However, it is the anger and subsequent reaction of a perceived injury to one's self-image, one's ego, which is the bad kind. This is the hypocritical kind, because in the case of damaged pride, we are most at fault who have not first considered our own injustice to God and to others.

"But to be able to live peaceably with hard, and perverse, or undisciplined persons, is a great grace, and an exceedingly commendable and manly deed."

I would say this applies also to living with oneself in this regard: for often it is our own hardness and perverseness which brings us the most suffering, and lack of peace. But all of us, in whatever state of life we have been called, must suffer another's lack of discipline and hardness. Suffering another's burdens is a purgatory and when done with loving, manly resignation, can sanctify and purify us.

" And there are that keep themselves in peace and study to bring others unto peace. Nevertheless, our whole peace in this miserable life consisteth rather in humble sufferance, that in not feeling adversities. Who knowest best how to suffer, will keep the greatest peace. That man is conqueror of himself, and lord of the world, the friend of Christ, and heir of heaven."

Friend of Christ! What greater and sweeter title is there?


*Quotes from The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas 'A Kempis