Grace Finds Us Where We Are, Then Leads Us Further, Part II

GAINING A SENSIBILITY FOR GRACE

St. Anthony was a hermit who retreated from society in order to practice a very ascetic form of the Christian life. Are there lessons applicable to those of us who are helplessly immersed in society and whose lives are dictated by secular conventions and conveniences, not a religious rule?

Well first I wouldn’t overestimate the distinction between monks and the secular faithful. Monks are simply trying to live a coherent Christian life. They have no monopoly on such coherence. This is actually a theme of early monastic literature, a theme which I find both appealing and duly chastening. The theme is of an angel appearing to some stern ascetic out in the wilderness. The angel takes the ascetic into the city to visit a physician, or a clown in the marketplace, or a converted prostitute and thereby show them someone who is infinitely more advanced in virtue than are they. 

But it’s easy for people to naively nurse the impression that clergy or religious must be so much more sanctified because their whole life is oriented toward being a better Christian. Their attentions are not divided. They pray and read devotionally all day, everyday. For the rest of us, grace is always seemingly overtaken by the cares of this world. It just doesn’t seem to gain any real traction in our lives. We are stuck spinning our wheels round and round again in the mud and mire of the same vices. Does St. Anthony’s life have anything practical to say to those of us who can’t live in a monastery or follow a regimented spiritual life?

Again, I wouldn’t assume the experiences of religious and the everyday faithful are different in this regard. All of us are subject to the normal workings of grace.

Of course, Providence is well able to transform a life in an instant. We have examples of that. But those are exceptional interventions. More often than not, growth in the life of grace is like organic growth. It occurs imperceptibly. 

Athanasius shows us in the life of Anthony that growth in grace takes different shape appropriate to the stages or circumstances of one’s existence. There isn’t one set procedure. There aren’t set criteria to which everyone always must correspond. Grace finds us where we are and then leads us further. 

What we need to do is develop a sensibility for it, so that we recognize grace and collaborate with it as well as resist those tendencies and urges that would distract us from grace. 

I take your point that some might be tempted to think only intense forms of religious practice like those engaged in monasticism will bear any fruit. Here St. Athanasius, reflecting on the life of St. Anthony, has helpful counsel. He tells us to be extremely cautious about inspirations that occasion trouble or anxiety or a sense of perplexing vagueness. He says a genuine inspiration of the Spirit will be marked by clarity, peace, and bear fruit in joy. These are pretty clear lights to steer by, applicable to any life. 

TREASURES OLD AND NEW

A characteristic of your writing, Bishop Varden, is the attempt to reintroduce or re-purpose Christian practices from the past that we’ve forgotten, even discarded…

It’s one of the glories of living within the Church, that we have such an immense heritage! But it’s humanly impossible to keep it all before our eyes all the time. So it’s important that we do a regular inventory of what we have in our treasury. St. Benedict exhorts in his Rule that the abbot must be someone who can bring forth things new and old for the edification of the community. Sometimes invention or innovation is called for and at other times, rediscovery of ancient wisdom is required. Most of the time these two tendencies should exist in fruitful tension. 

One such forgotten practice that seemed to define the Christian experience for previous centuries of the Church is the practice of “doing penance.” I’m not speaking merely of doing the penance assigned in the confessional, but of making certain self-imposed sacrifices, even living a whole form of life that is sacrificial to make up for one’s own sins and the sins of the world. 

You write about this mentality in Towards Dawn: “Many good Christians [in times passed] assumed their share in the task of repairing – though Christ, in him, and with him – the damage wrought by others. To us, this may seem terribly passé, even a touch embarrassing…While it did occasionally assume bizarre forms, it rested on solid foundations. Before sin is ‘taken away’, it has to be assumed and borne.” 

Then, as if whispering a secret, you write: “I think there is an immense work of bearing to be done in the Church today.” (Towards Dawn, page 83).  

Is living a penitential life one of the long-forgotten practices we need to drag out of storage? How important is living a life of penance for acquiring a sensibility for grace?

Well, I think it’s just a matter of consenting to be realists – recognizing that sins I commit leave a mark. The guilt of sin can be forgiven, thank God. But the wages of sin, that is, the experiential effect of sin in my own life and others’ lives will remain and therefore some penitential procedure may be required for the sake of healing, for the sake of justice, and for the sake of enabling myself to interiorize and integrate the fact that I have actually moved on.

A wonderful and very powerful example of this is the sequence in the film, The Mission, when the slave hunter Rodrigo, who hoards great anger and murders his brother, isolates himself from human society and thereby faces himself fully for the first time. He realizes the extent of his wickedness; he realizes the responsibility he bears for the death of his brother and for the suffering of innumerable Indians he caught and enslaved. But even as he feels regret and receives forgiveness, he finds he still needs to enact publicly his remorse. As he goes to be a servant of the Indians he once enslaved, he carries around on his back a load of old armor and heavy things in a net. It is an image of the weight of his sin. He carries it for a long time, until that point when an Indian, seeing him struggle to climb up a mountainside, hacks away at the net. The contents fall into the river and are washed away. It’s then that Rodrigo realizes his load has been lifted.

It is part of the pedagogy of the Church to enable that experiential appropriation of grace. I think now, particularly conditioned by computing, we think we can just hit “delete” and it’s gone. But our heart and our body, carrying the wound of sin, need time to be repaired. These works of reparation are of importance both for our own healing and as a public witness to the justice of grace.

REMAIN ATTACHED TO THE CHAMPION

St. Anthony seemed to have a keen sense that the Christian life is a life of warfare, against sinful tendencies in himself but also against forces outside himself that were trying to destroy him and keep him from Christ. Today there is increasing interest in so-called spiritual warfare, with many people fascinated by accounts of exorcism and fretting about the demonic as though it were behind every nook and cranny. Is the Christian life best understood as a battle against demons? 

Anthony’s life goes through different phases. The recounting of his intense battles pertain to the initial stages of his monastic endeavor. Anthony, in order to become a fully mature and free Christian, had to encounter those aspects of his own makeup, his own personality and history that were enchained. He had to endure battles at every level – intellectual, sensual, corporal – in order for his entire being to be engaged in the work of conversion and sanctification. 

But the point of Athanasius’ retelling of these is not to get his readers overly fearful or fascinated by the demonic, but to show that Anthony is always victorious. And Anthony is always victorious not because of his own strength or natural virtue, but because he lets Christ live in him. Anthony confronts his temptations or diabolical illusions by invoking the name of Christ or recalling a verse from Scripture. 

The message of the text is that there is no reason to get too excited or preoccupied with attacks from the enemy because Christ has vanquished evil. Satan, says Anthony, is a bound sparrow – a terrific image. On his deathbed, when Anthony gives his brothers his final exhortation, he tells them that the demons have no power unless you give them power, so don’t be frightened of them. 

So by all means we need to recognize that the Christian life will have its dimension of combat and warfare. We can take that for granted. But let’s not get too heated up about it. We must always remember that the war has been won. As long as we remain attached to the Champion, evil has no claim on us.

Dr. James R. A. Merrick is Assistant Professor of Theology at Benedictine College.