god

The Normality of Struggle

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Struggle is a normal and necessary part of human existence, with or without the Fall of Man. After the Fall of Man (Gn 3), the struggles involved in everyday human life did not suddenly arise; rather, they simply became difficult, frustrating, and unenjoyable. The reason is that after the Fall, man, wounded by concupiscence, seeks rest without struggle. Prior to the Fall, daily struggles that are part and parcel of human existence would have been as enjoyable and exhilarating as a well played game or sport. In this light, rest and struggle are not opposites.

Creation itself, the bringing into being of all things, involves a kind of tension or a battle of sorts: 

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.

Water is a symbol for chaos, for it is powerful, destructive and without form, and thus creation is depicted as a bringing order out of chaos, or form and content out of what is formless and empty, or light from darkness, as a sculptor stands before a heavy slab of marble that will resist his efforts to bring form and order out of its formless posture. Like an artist who contemplates his finished work, God contemplates all He has made and “behold, it was very good”. Rest comes after the struggle, and there is no rest without it. Beauty is its fruit.

Work is holy, but work is fundamentally a struggle, a kind of emulation of God who creates: “And the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.” It was only as a result of the Fall that work–or what is humanly good to do–became burdensome to man: “…in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life,…In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread”. 

The spiritual life is a battle, specifically a battle of love. It is only a battle against the self because it is a “battle of love”, and inordinate self-love destroys love and is the resistance that makes the spiritual life a genuine struggle. Without a spiritual life, human life is empty, for it is the spirit that brings direction (meaning) to the matter of the universe, and so human life as a whole is a battle, specifically a struggle to achieve love, which is unitive and creative, and thus it is a battle for universal fraternity (the kingdom of God). Inserting struggle into our lives is God’s way of dealing with us: “We should be grateful to the Lord our God, for putting us to the test, as he did our forefathers. Recall how he dealt with Abraham, and how he tried Isaac, and all that happened to Jacob in Syrian Mesopotamia while he was tending the flocks of Laban, his mother’s brother. Not for vengeance did the Lord put them in the crucible to try their hearts, nor has he done so with us. It is by way of admonition that he chastises those who are close to him” (Jud 8, 25-27). To chastise is to prune, which a gardener does for the good of the plant being pruned, that it may bear more fruit. And so a life without the struggle and dialectic of opposites, that is, a life of rest without arduous struggle bears very little fruit and leaves a person without a great deal of depth and light.

G. Studdert Kennedy writes: 

“Love endures all things.” The word of “endure” is translated patience, and so is long-suffering, but “endures” is the patience that works and plods at things. Love is a fighter, a reformer, not content with things as they are. “Endures” means “conquers through patience,” it is that which overcomes the world. Patience that fights and wears things down until they become expressive of order and love. It stands on the rock and is patience born of faith and hope in presence of love’s very self. It has the sense of going on along a road or climbing a hill and never giving up but going steadily at it. There is the description of what love does, it ends as this life, which consists in walking on steadily, will do. There’s this much joy in it, that the road gets easier the more faithfully we keep on. The first hills of childhood seem terribly hard and so the troubles of the young are harder than those of the old because the young do not realise that the flat part will come later, it won’t be all hills. But patience is its own reward and there is never a moment when we don’t need it. The troubles of a child seem quite heart-breaking, e.g. when it tells its first lie and is ostracized by its parents who hear it crying in the next room and cannot go to it. At last we must get our feet firmly set and know that if sorrow comes we will go through it. If we keep close to Love we shall win in the end. …The world is made for love and demands it. We are toiling and working out the problem of the perfection of love and we must learn to live in unity in the human race, bearing each other’s burdens and fighting the battle of love.” The Best of Studdert Kennedy, p. 190-193.

Some Thoughts on the Cross and the Lynching Tree

The Cross and the Lynching Tree, by James Cone

Deacon Doug McManaman

When I read about this terrible suffering and injustice, this complete indifference to the rights of black Americans during the lynching era, the utter brutality and mind boggling hypocrisy, all I can say is that indeed they are the Christ among white Americans. Christ is them, and they are Christ, and their suffering is the deepest possible sharing in the redemptive work of Christ himself. They are suffering for their persecutors, for white Christians who don’t know Christ, who are crucifying the Christ they allegedly worship. These laugh now (at the time), but will weep later, as we read in Luke. Those who are suffering in the Person of Christ achieve the greatest honor and they have the greatest joy in the kingdom, thanks to this identification between their lives and the crucified. Their persecutors, these cruel murderers and all those who cooperate with them, are forever connected to their victims, and this is their torment. They are immersed in the specter of their utter cruelty, the ugliness of their sin, and it is an intolerable sight. But in the midst of their crucified victims, these murderers see the crucified that they think they’ve worshiped. He is there among the lynched, tortured, and burned. He is their only hope. But if he is their only hope, it means that they, their victims, are their only hope, because the identity between Christ and their victims is perfect. They forgive their persecutors, because they are victorious in the crucified one who is among them, and they have received the forgiveness of their own sins in him, so how can they deny forgiveness to those who have murdered them. In fact, their greatest desire is to share in Christ’s victory over sin and death, which they do by their sufferings and the heart of mercy, which each one possesses. They can say with Christ: “…forgive them, for they know not what they do”, and indeed, they know not what they have done. But they will, because they are forever connected to their victims, and so they will forever behold what they have done until they cannot stand the sight of their own ugliness any longer. Their victims along with Christ, who is in their midst, are waiting to be invited by these murderers to defeat their evil with the victory of Christ’s charity and forgiveness. That will be their greatest joy, because it will be their greatest victory, their unique sharing in the victory of Christ. And they wait, and wait, but they won’t wait forever, because St. Paul tells us that “every knee shall bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father”. Finally, it is interesting to compare two perspectives. Today, so many have called for reparations; for they see black Americans as terribly disadvantaged by the allegedly superior whites. But in the light of a theology of the cross, in particular the theology of the cross that came out of this era, in their poetry, their music, their literature, it seems rather obvious that they have a nobility and power that is their glory. They entered into the struggle against sin and death, and they conquered, and many graces were bestowed upon America as a result of that struggle. What we are today is, in large part, the result of that victorious struggle. Black Americans stand higher, not lower. We look up to them, not them to us.

Pray to Want, not to Know

Deacon Doug McManaman

“If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. If your foot causes you to sin, cut it off, and if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out.” 

The hand, the foot, and the eye; all three are very dear to us, and to lose even one of them can make life very difficult. So, something very dear to us, it could be a job or someone we love, symbolized by the hand, by which we feed ourselves, can snare us in sin, and so we are feeding on something that is spiritually poisonous. And then the foot, something also very dear to us and so much a part of who we are, can symbolize a mentor perhaps, or an organization to which we belong, and which provides us with some direction, but can lead us into darkness and to our own eventual destruction. Finally our eyes, the most precious of the five senses, can blind us and thereby cause us to walk right into a pit. This can refer to a certain mode of thinking, a set of ideas that we might have embraced when we were young and which feels illuminating, but will in fact lead us astray. 

Because they are precious and feel so much a part of who we are, they are very hard to eradicate. In fact, it is difficult to become aware of their destructive nature. So, we can say “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off”, but we don’t always see clearly what is sinful and destructive, and the reason is that very often we don’t want to see it. There’s that old expression: “There are none so blind as those who will not see”. We don’t see it because we simply don’t want to see it, which is a kind of self-deception. I’m as guilty of that as anyone in this Church. We see this even in the hierarchy, made up of human beings; just consider the history of the Church, the sinfulness and blindness of the Church reeks from the pages of history. How do we explain the blood shed, the bigotry, the Church’s tolerance and defense of slavery, or the death penalty, or the buying and selling of Church offices, and much more? There are all sorts of factors involved, from plain ignorance, weakness, to willful blindness. Try convincing a person that something is a sin who just does not want to see it. It’s not going to happen. So how do we get out of this difficulty? Sin blinds, and so although I want to eradicate sin in my life, I don’t always see what is genuinely sinful, because of ignorance or worse, my own willful blindness. 

The one way out of this difficulty is to pray to want to see what God wants me to see. It’s very difficult to know what God wants me to see, just as it is difficult to know what God wants me to do in a particular situation. I remember in my final years of teaching, I said to my spiritual director: “I don’t know what I should do. I can retire, but I don’t know if God wants me to retire or to keep teaching. How do I find out?” He said: “Don’t try to figure out what God wants you to do, you’re not going to be able to know that, there’s a myriad of possible avenues you could take. Instead, pray to want to do what God wants you to do”. That’s a very different prayer: “Let me want to do what you want me to do”. If we are open and God answers that prayer, He will mold the heart, dispose it in a certain direction through grace, and we will eventually want to do what He wants us to do. It is the same thing with sin. This is important because we can be our own worst enemy, even the most religiously pious among us. Some of the most religiously devout people can go through their whole lives without ever moving past the immaturity and vices they’ve had since their younger days, whether that’s a matter of envy, or personal pride, a condescending spirit, or greed, lying, bigotry, the inordinate love of security, jealousies, abuse of authority, vindictiveness, looking at others with contempt, indifference to the poor and the suffering, etc. Piety does not guarantee that one will be freed from the snares of self-deception, and neither does ordination.

So, the way out of this darkness is to pray, asking God to help us want to see what up to this point we simply did not want to see, and to give us the courage to endure the pain of that vision. The result will certainly be painful, difficult at first, because it will be a death, and death is always painful, but it is an entering into the tomb of Christ, and the good news is that the tomb is empty. Christ rose. The result of this will be a new life, a resurrected life with a much deeper joy. We will begin to see the hell we lived in up to that point, sort of like Ebeneezer Scrooge after he woke up from his ordeal. Life on the outside did not change at all, but he changed, and the result was a joyful existence from that point onwards, as opposed to the miserable and blind existence he led before, which was spawned by his own avarice, arrogance, and lack of generosity. He acquired a sense of humor and referred to himself as a blind fool, weighed down by the chains of greed and indifference, like his partner in business, Jacob Marley. He could see it now. His eyes were restored. 

Archbishop Fulton Sheen of New York used to say that heaven and hell begin here; we create that heaven or hell for ourselves, and it really boils down to love of others. The greater our refusal to exit ourselves so that we remain the center of our own lives, the more we will be weighed down in misery, in our own hell, and the sad thing is we won’t really understand that it is a miserable hell, until we are on the outside. But the more we transcend ourselves in a self-forgetting exit of self in a genuine love of others, the greater will be the joy in which we live.