The Star in the Storm

 

G.K. Chesterton once, now famously, saw a rhetorical question, "What's wrong with the world?" purported to have been in The Times, and answered it with a surprising twist: "Dear Sirs: I am." Today, in obscurity, I want to change that exchange, and imagine this: 

"What's right with the world?"

"I am." 

Now, I'm not advocating radical egoism; rather, I'm advocating an ideal, a hope, a reality in us that flashes off and on, like the star of the lighthouse amid the storms of the heart and the world. This trope, this lighthouse star is a way of life, a light in the world, a rightness in the world for wandering barques: I'm thinking of St. Therese of Liseux's "Little Way," the one Mother Theresa of Calcutta adapted for her own use, in a beautiful twist of fate: "Theresa" establishing the Missionaries of Charity following the spiritual path of "Therese" whose deepest desire was to be a missionary, but whose calling was a short, twenty-four year life in the Carmel desert. Their earthly paths, coinciding only spiritually and over a hundred-year span (they died almost exactly 100 years apart), nevertheless illuminate the working of God beyond our time-and-sense-bound apprehension. Both the Little Way and the way God uses these efforts, a dance between the willing self and God, can make me a "right," a small lighthouse star in this darkening world. 

For those who've not yet read St. Therese's Story of a Soul, the Little Way is one of the Saint's childlike conclusions about loving God and loving neighbor, "on which all the law and commandments hang"; in one part of her soul, she laments her inability to go out and do great things on the mission field, in the world who so needs the rightness, the cleanliness, the love, of God. In her time, she felt the weight of burgeoning atheism, just as Mother Theresa felt the weight of rabid secularism resulting in the economic and social injustice and inequality of her time; now, what is the weight we feel?

Many from all perspectives and faiths are beginning to come together in a chorus: disparate public voices in the US—from Naomi Wolf to Tucker Carlson—are beginning to call our present darkness "the face of evil"; many with the potential to be lighthouses in this world are beginning to see that, pervading all areas of life, which Roméo Dallaire, a Canadian military officer, experienced full-front in Rwanda: " I shook hands with the devil. I have seen him, I have smelled him and I have touched him" (Shake Hands with the Devil). Anyone left with any courage or sanity after the last few years, or the will to see reality, is now faced in their own communities with the disintegration of the human species of law: social, health, civil, criminal, constitutional, moral. These are of course symbiotic forms; when one begins to go, the others will follow, as any saint like Therese or Theresa knows; what is now making it so painfully obvious to the rest of us who, albeit imperfectly, deep inside desire what is right, and good, and clean, sourced in love? 

Perhaps it is that which God wrote on the heart of every human being ever conceived, that which is the permanent lighthouse within us—that which tortures us when the wood and sails, and the captain of ourselves, are all warped—that which remains our mainstay and comfort in times of distress: the natural law. We are faced with that force which has lost its own face before God, that force of unadulterated solve et coagula, that spiritual version of the hopeless and pagan alchemic belief in the power to dissolve back in chaos in order to create, virtually ex nihilo, gold from base metal. None is a Creator like that beside God, and so it is a Satanic ape of the law from which natural law is necessarily derived: the eternal I AM. When we see people being pressured to harm themselves and especially their children, we naturally know this goes against our creaturely mandate to participate in life, in God's creativity: Abortion (recently described by one of our "lawgivers" as a "positive good"); harmful health mandates and "scientific consensus"-backed medical malfeasance thinly veiled as "loving others," targeting children especially; people in all walks of life being socially and civilly pressured to go against common sense, indeed against biological and spiritual reality, and "identify their chosen pronouns"; school-approved cross-dressing adults "twerking" in front of school children; institutions meant to educate instead "counseling" children to consider transgender procedures without the knowledge of their parents, procedures potentially cutting their life span by decades, not to mention their God-given fertility at an age when they barely know what that means. In other words, we are a short, fatal step from the insane, self-mutilating dystopias of Orwell and Huxley. Like the Theresian saints, these secular authors saw beyond, like the prophets of old, to the consequences of the breakdown of the moral and natural law, as the later Roman historians Livy and Tacitus saw in their own time. Livy said of declining Rome: 

The subjects to which I would ask each of my readers to devote his earnest attention are these-the life and morals of the community . . . then as the standard of morality gradually lowers, let him follow the decay of the national character, observing how at first it slowly sinks, then slips downward more and more rapidly, and finally begins to plunge into headlong ruin, until he reaches these days, in which we can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies. (Preface to The History of Rome)

I've always thought, for the West, that Rome is a type of "elder sister"; Rome is instructive, much like the trajectory of an older sibling. We are faced with a similar situation, one that Tacitus further outlines in all its cowardice and ensuing horrors: It is the attempted destruction of natural law, as a precursor to having the tempest become the norm, the erasure of all lighthouses, of all solid ground; furthermore, in what is called a "Post-Christian" world, it is nothing less than the loss of a heavenly hope. Our sins, like the Tower of Babel, are imploding upon us, and a sure sign of this is what the great philosopher Josef Pieper phrased as "the abuse of language"; he further delineates that this abuse of language is, in reality, an abuse of power, just as Orwell shows in the oxymoronic slogans like "War is Peace" or "Hate is Love." CS Lewis follows this trajectory of the breakdown of all laws resulting in a cacophony of language at the bitter end in This Hideous Strength, as evil and the human society that harbors it, finally implodes upon itself in a maelstorm of nonsense: language is the external sign of the deep natural law within us, that which allows us to reason about the reality we apprehend. When we give up this search for truth through honest apprehension and the rational exchange in language for a slavish, cowardly aquiescence to those who simply assert nonsense or harm through the use of power with no real authority (either real scientific method-derived or rational or legal), we are faced with the kingdom of Pandemonium and that spiritual being with no face left, who crouches within it and drives it without reason, except that of dragging as many as possible to their own destruction.

What we face, and feel the weight of, simply, is the demonic end of the road which started, in our era, with the religious nihilism, atheism, that which St. Therese of Liseux saw like a prophet of old; St. Theresa of Calcutta also saw the result of this in the loveless world beginning to produce the fruits of radical poverty and abortion--and loneliness. Both Saints responded with The Little Way. I return, then, to a moment in St. Therese of Liseux's Story of a Soul, when she is wondering what use she, an unknown, tiny, but star-like flower growing in a back wall of the Lord's garden, can do. The moment that returns to me is not her heroic inner fight with the despair of athiesm as she lay dying, much as St. Theresa of Calcutta struggled deep in her soul; it is the moment when St. Therese of Liseux, walking an elder, unhappy, crochety nun down the hall to dinner, suddenly inhabits the joyful dance steps of the Eternal Youth, Christ, as she decides to take each step with this nun in love: nay, Love. Love personified. She feels the power of it, that "doing small things with great love." She obeys this invitation that in an isolated state of human power, would mean next to nothing beyond the moment that it is in. 

Battles are not won by those who speak for the war, or by generals, but by the collective of small actions on the battlefield; the war is won, truly won, when the final cause for each action is Love, is God, for each soldier. 

I've thought a lot recently about the frustration I feel, similar to that of St. Therese of Liseux in the hallway with the nun: what am I doing in the face of the great evil of our time? I am not a great missionary, or one of those whom I believe will be seen as the moral heroes of our time, those who stand up publicly and privately in the face of soft and hard tyrannies, losing jobs, platforms, licenses. I am a hobbit, a common man. Yet, in this moment, as I speak to Angelina, sixteen years old, who lost her mother last year, as I reach out to hug her, I can beg God to use me as a conduit of His love and providence; I teach Jordan how dialectic can be a means to find truth in the confusion of opinions and intransigent emotions; I call a lonely family member each day; I speak the truth in love when prudent; I scatter seeds as I stay in prayer and offer things for those I meet in the hallways of my present moments; I make myself ready to be a light in the darkness, whatever the cost. Like St. Therese of Liseux, I may never see in my lifetime the bigger purpose for all my small actions; perhaps my frustration is ill-placed, in that I am where I should be, as long as I do what I can to love God with my whole heart in each moment—and my neighbor as myself. 

In these darkest of present moments, as St. Louis de Montfort implied, the smallest of actions like telling the truth, living out the natural law that is fundamentally a law disposing us to both love and to see God, at whatever cost, actions that in former ages would be simple common sense, are now sanctified and sanctifying. There are no more Common Men: only the choice between being a shade blown about in the tempest, adding to the darkness, or a star in the storm, scattering it. A sign of heaven.

My dear, struggling twenty-something,

 

I've been thinking about your struggles with yourself and where you might be headed in life, where you should be. I'm fifty-four but have the same insecurities, in a way; I've always struggled with making choices and feeling the peace of doing the right thing; I get frozen at points, afraid to make choices for fear of doing the wrong thing, taking the wrong path, often conflicted within myself about what excites me, what I want, where and what will match with me.

This morning I was thinking hard about it, praying, really....it has an intensity about it because of my stage in life...interestingly, we have that in common: we are both in a more intense stage of life: yours because you are just beginning your adult life, mine because I am looking at the last years of an active, working life. I thought to myself about whether or not God wants us to make choices, or to wait on Him to tell us what He wants us to do. Does He want us to make choices? I've made so many mistakes; I've failed so often. I've also succeeded in some ways. 

How have I succeeded? As a young woman, something deep inside of me was always looking for truth, for what is real, for the good. I did not put that in there; God did...but I loved that truth, that good, at times more than others...sometimes I ran from it, but deep inside, I knew that I was in some ways, running from myself, too, my deepest heart. I succeeded when I chose education (college over life in LA), a man (your dad who also seeks above all for truth, following Socrates, following Christ), when I chose life (you and your sisters), my students as subjects of love, no matter who they were, when I chose the Faith over the objections of friends and family, when I chose to love in difficult situations of sin instead of to look from "above that" and reject, when I chose to tell the truth in love. 

When have I failed? When I chose to make decisions from fear, and when I chose based on the self isolated from the good of those in my life. But there's more depth beneath the apparently thin line between success and failure.

I think, as I make decisions with Dad coming up, I have to think about what I want to be able to see when I see my life passing by as I die. What I want to offer the Lord. And I thought of the verse, "Where your heart is, there is your treasure." And so now I know my prayer, as I think about my final steps as an active adult: May my heart be in the right place...and then, as St. Augustine says, to "love God [with my whole heart, mind, and soul] and then I may do what I will." 

There is an apparent, paradox, though...the deepest choice of the saint is to consistently choose God over the self---God's will over my will. The only place this "Do what I will" and "God's will over my will" meets and makes sense is in a heart given over to God, a heart loving God with one's whole being. So I must focus my life's effort on loving God each moment, and then, unless He makes it obvious to my oblivious mind, I must do my best to choose what to do from that place. I will make mistakes, I will fail, but I think I will be at peace if I try every moment to empty myself and always carry a willingness (in love) to prefer His choices over mine if there is ever a cross between the two. 

This is the race. This is the adventure. This is the cross. 

Love, 

Mama