Put on the Armor of the Holy Trinity

In his letter to the Ephesians, Saint Paul told us to put on the armor of God (6:10-20).  Saint Patrick, whose feast we celebrate today, sublimated beneath the celebration of Passion Week (on the old Roman rite calendar), gave us a beautiful prayer called his Lorica, the Latin word for breastplate.  His prayer is indeed a fitting spiritual breastplate, for it is putting on the power of God.  There is no greater power than Christ.  Let us place Him today then upon us, praying with Saint Patrick through an invocation of the Holy Trinity.

Seven years ago, I shared a bit of that prayer through the version in my hymnal and reflected upon how this prayer was written in imitation of the invocations of the druids: In Honor of Saint Patrick.  Today I want to share with you all the verses to the best of my ability, sung for you as a prayer for His protection upon you.

The Misfortune of Being Good

"Yes.  I had the misfortune to be born good.  And it is a misfortune, I can tell you, General.  I really am truthful and unselfish and all the rest of it; and it's nothing but cowardice; want of character; want of being really, strongly, positively oneself."

-the Strange Lady, "Man of Destiny" by George Bernard Shaw

When I first read this quotation it struck me by its paradoxical nature.  (Of course it also struck me rather personally, but that's another can of worms.)

As I continue to reflect upon these words, I marvel at how beautifully Shaw broke apart the culture of niceness in these few phrases.  For in our modern society we tend to think of qualities such as niceness and tolerance as being admirable.  Often we look at those quiet and pious by temperament as being advanced in holiness.

Yet I daresay Saint Paul would object strongly to such folly.  After all, he had to struggle mightily to live a virtuous life and even be knocked off his horse (literally enough) because he was going the wrong direction.  He was not afraid to stand up to Saint Peter and tell him he was wrong, nor did he have any trouble calling out those not following the right path.  And if you read his writings, there's the boasting....  In short, he was quite positively and unashamedly himself.  So I don't think he fits that mode of niceness in the least.

Now you might wonder how there could possibly be misfortune in being by nature good, or being a nice person, especially if you happen to be someone who struggles with temptations on a grander scale.  I will tell you.

First let me offer you an analogy: imagine that you are a long-distance runner and that running comes easily to you so that you win each race and never have to do much training while those around you must spend hours every day trying to get their bodies into shape and still never quite measure up.  Now imagine you injure yourself so that you are no longer able to run with such ease.  That handicap weighs down on your spirits and you lose race after race.  Soon you fall into depression because you cannot face the seemingly-insurmountable difficulties.  You give up on running and try to pursue another course, but to no avail.  Everywhere you meet failure.  On the other hand, one of your fellow runners who had to struggle so hard and had to deal with natural handicaps to his speed now outstrips everyone else because he has put so much into his training.  If you put as much into as he did you might take the lead again, but why would you when it came easily before?

Now obviously the competitive nature of this analogy does not carry across into the evaluation of the nice person.  However, the main thrust remains the same: if you do not have to strive hard after virtue and you suddenly come face to face with a difficult situation or great temptation, what will keep you from giving in?

Thus being by nature inclined toward what is good can prevent one from developing true goodness, the goodness that comes of virtue hard won by the grace of God.  Natural goodness may be no more than weakness, a fear of offending others, a fear of being seen as less than perfect.  This pseudo-virtue that stems from pride is the mask of a coward not a saint.  Niceness may yet bear fruit, but only through the same fire of purification that burns away the dross from the silver of those who seek God in all the messiness of their disagreeableness.

May you run, as Saint Paul says, to win a crown that will not fade!

The Battle Is Not Yours

Conflict.  Pain.  Hurt.  Heartbreak.  Betrayal.

These tear us from within, gripping us in endless knots, shattering our self-wrought pretensions of security and confidence.  They challenge our perception that all is well and all will be well.

Sometimes it is worse when these things happen to those we love.  When we suffer we are so busy grappling with the raw emotions that we have little time to think or reflect.  In those moments, we struggle for control of ourselves or the situation, our desperation aimed toward some hoped-for goal.

If we see others in pain, we have no control.  We have no choices.  We are even more powerless than when we suffer.

That is why it is so hard to see those we love hurt.  In some ways, it strikes deeper to see wounds struck that we can never hope to heal, to see decisions made in anger, to see misunderstandings and pain erupt into a chasm of broken relationships that we cannot bridge.  We see the evils and we want to take them away, to soothe the burning heat, to wave away the stain of sins past that tinges every fresh choice and every perceived affront.  But we can do nothing.

Still we search desperately for some way that we can become the savior of the situation.  We encourage those who feel alone to rely upon us, we seek solutions to illness, we advise counseling or medication, we pray continuously for healing and conversion, we try to make others see the light because if only they could then all would be well, and on and on and on....

We do not want to admit that we can do nothing.

Yet it is not about us and what we can do.  If we are to achieve true sanity, we must let go of our need to fix things.

When we admit that we can do nothing, we set ourselves free from guilt and expectations—expectations, which so often swamp our small vessels—and allow God to be God.  He allows nothing evil out of which He cannot bring a greater good.  Where we cannot save, He can.  He is our Savior.  Many times we need only step out of His way and allow Him to do what He alone knows how to do: to heal the broken heart.

That means we stand ourselves broken and powerless.  We feel the pain that signals to us that something must be done and we simply acknowledge its presence.  We choose not to fill that hole we cannot fill.  We embrace our weakness.

For in weakness is the power of Christ made perfect, as Saint Paul said.

Somehow that paradox is true, but only because of Christ.  Our inability to do anything surrendered to Him allows Him to work.

The path of life does not follow a barter system: we do not give x to get y.  If we do, we will regret giving x and resent others who have y.  Sometimes we must hit rock bottom before we recognize this truth.  Yet when we come to the crux of it all and feel our powerlessness, we know it is true.

Even our prayers and sacrifices when performed only as a manipulation of God to make Him give us what we want—however good that for which we ask may be—are vain.  That is not love, but only self-interest disguised.

If we can let go of what we hope to gain and simply give, we can find joy even in the depths of pain.  It is the joy that rejoices in the darkness because we trust in the Ruler of all.  That trust—that surrender—allows our Lord to transform deeds once done as manipulation into gifts of love, freely given.

And there is nothing greater than love.

Come Holy Spirit!

Joining friends in prayer for the Pentecost vigil stirred up for me so many thoughts and feelings about this pilgrimage that is the spiritual life.  It is amazing to me how powerful and yet how intangible is that interior battle.

"The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh weak." - Matthew 26:41

Sometimes it seems incredibly tempting to turn away from the battle and follow the easier path of doing my own will since I seem to keep trying to do that anyway even when I disguise it as trying to surrender to God's will.  I hear that those who choose to follow that path do not have to face temptations.  After all, if they are already doing what the enemy wants, why would he bother with them?

I used to think that once one followed the path of holiness, it would become easier to choose the right.  Yet the opposite seems true: those who choose to face that battle find it grow harder day by day.

As my grandma has reminded me, the closer we go to the light, the deeper are the shadows.

Although the battle grows harder day by day and the shadows deeper, there is no surrender, however dearly-bought, that does not allow the Lord to work.  Opening one's heart in surrender and trying to empty out the desire for anything but Him alone may allow the enemy to attack with all manner of doubts and the heart to rise up in rebellion, but grace remains.

"For the flesh has desires against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; these are opposed to each other, so that you may not do what you want." - Galatians 5:17

Saint Paul was a man of great wisdom, as is my friend who gave me this scripture verse in answer to my questioning about this interior battle and the heart's rebellion.  I tend to think that any sin—or even resistance to God—spoils the good that I wish to do.  Yet I must realize that is the attitude of pride: it comes from the self who wishes to be perfect and to do great things for its own glory.

The sword of truth cuts deep.  It must, for it must pierce between our illusions and the reality of God.

So long as we form our own ideas of God and what it means to please Him and belong to Him, we rush toward a fearsome precipice.  This is to build our own idols in the place of God.  We may find ourselves creating schemes of grandeur for our service in His sight also that we may find our worth, but our true value lies in belonging to Him alone.

We are already His.  We need to prove nothing to become the children of God.  For He has already purchased us with the price of His blood.  All we need to do is learn to accept that reality and open our hearts to being His in all our apparent weakness and uselessness.

Otherwise, we risk losing our very selves.  In the words of Father Thomas Merton (shared providentially today by another good friend):

"Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self.

"This is the man that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy.

"My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God's will and God's love - outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion.

"We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves - the ones we are born with and which feed the roots of sin. For most of the people of the world, there is no great subjective reality than this false self of theirs, which cannot exist. A life devoted to the cult of this shadow is what is called a life of sin.

"All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experiences, for power, honor, knowledge, and love, to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real. And I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface.

"But there is no substance under the things with which I am clothed. I am hollow, and my structure of pleasures and ambitions has no foundation. I am objectified in them. But they are all destined by their very contingency to be destroyed. And when they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am my own mistake."

In that void—when we are emptied of all our illusions—we come to the feet of our Lord and Master.  There we begin to receive true love: the love that counters all the deceits of the enemy and reveals how irreplaceable we are in the eyes of Christ, who longs for our friendship more than we can ever imagine.  When we allow that love to fill us, then our emptiness becomes transformed into something beautiful.

May the Holy Spirit bring us to that emptiness, and to the shores of mercy, by our own consent!

Veni Sancte Spiritus!