It’s hard, certainly — it’s painful and exhausting and fundamentally terrifying to rip yourself open and leave the guts at the mercy of the people you choose to love. But if I know anything, I know this: It’s better than being alone.
Category: LOVE
-
During your time in the community, you are testing yourself to see if you can bear with people. Do you lose your peace? Do you hate people? Or do you try to avenge oneself? If you try to isolate yourself in order not to engage in these troubles, you are likened to a person who refuses to take an exam for fear of failing. The result is that you will not graduate. The correct action is for a person to take the exam and pass. It is easy to sit alone and not make mistakes. Neither will the devil leave you; he will give you even more thoughts than people would, to the point that you will leave your cell saying, “It is better to deal with people than to deal with this mental warfare.” Take the test and succeed.
—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Monastic Treasures for All of Us
-
Community interactions provide an opportunity for you to try yourself, overcome your weaknesses, and gain virtues. One time, a monk went to the abbot of the monastery asking to be released to go to another monastery. The abbot asked if anyone troubled him, to which he responded, “No, but I need to go attain virtues. Here, no one wrongs me, that I may forgive him; no one offends me, that I may pardon him; no one persecutes me, that I may endure him. So, where will I attain these virtues? I need to go to a place where I can attain virtues.” If you remain steadfast, and the community troubles come to you, then say, “Yes, this is where I will attain virtues.” If someone upsets you, say, “Yes, God sent you to me so that I can attain the virtue of endurance.”
—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Monastic Treasures for All of Us
-
It is therefore of supreme importance that we consent to live not for ourselves but for others. When we do this we will be able first of all to face and accept our own limitations. As long as we secretly adore ourselves, our own deficiencies will remain to torture us with an apparent defilement. But if we live for others, we will gradually discover that no one expects us to be “as gods.” We will see that we are human, like everyone else, that we all have weaknesses and deficiencies, and that these limitations of ours play a most important part in all our lives. It is because of them that we need others and others need us. We are not all weak in the same spots, and so we supplement and complete one another, each one making up in himself for the lack in another.
—Thomas Merton -
Our Longing for Home
IT is important to read Jesus’s parable of the lost son in the context of the whole of Luke, chapter 15, but the story has an eVen larger context. If we read the narratiVe in light of the Bible’s sweeping theme of exile and homecoming we will understand that Jesus has given us more than a moving account of individual redemption. He has retold the story of the whole human race, and promised nothing less than hope for the world.
In Jesus’s parable the younger brother goes off into a distant country expecting a better life but is disappointed. He begins to long for home, remembering the food in his father’s house. So do we all.
“Home” exercises a powerful influence oVer human life. Foreign-born Americans spend billions annually to visit the communities in which they were born. Children who neVer find a place where they feel they belOng carry an incapacity for attachment into their adult lives. Many of us have fond memories of times, people, and places where we felt we were truly home. However, if we ever have an opportunity to get back to the places we remember so fondly, we are usually disappointed. For thirty-nine years my wife, Kathy, spent summers with her family in a ramshackle cottage on the shores of Lake Erie. The very memory of that place is nourishing to Kathy’s spirit. But returning to the actual, now-dilapidated property is a gut-wrenching experience. It won’t be much different if someone buys it and puts up new condos on it. An actual visit to the place will always present her with a sense of loss.
Home, then, is a powerful but elusive concept. The strong feelings that surround it reveal some deep longing within us for a place that absolutely fits and suits us, where we can be, or perhaps find, our true selves. Yet it seems that no real place or actual family ever satisfies these yearnings, though many situations arouse them. In his novel A Separate Peace, John Knowles’s central character discovers that Summer mornings in New Hampshire give him “some feeling so hopelessly promising that I would fall back in my bed to guard against it . . . I wanted to break out crying from stabs of hopeless joy, or intolerable promise, or because those mornings were too full of beauty for me.” In East of Eden, John Steinbeck similarly says of the mountains of central California that he wanted “to climb into their warm foothills almost as you want to climb into the lap of a beloved mother.”
The memory of home seems to be powerfully evoked by certain sights, sounds, and even smells. But they can only arouse a desire they can’t fulfill. Many of the people in my church have shared with me how disappointing Christmas and Thanksgiving are to them. They prepare for holidays hoping that, finally, this year, the gathering of the family at that important place will deliver the experience of warmth, joy, comfort, and love that they want from it. But these events almost always fail, crushed under the weight of our impossible expectations.
There is a German word that gets at this concept— the word Sehnsucht. Dictionaries will tell you that there is no simple English synonym. It denotes profound homesickness or longing, but with transcendent overtones. The writer who spoke most of this “spiritual homesickness” was C. S. Lewis, in his famous sermon “The Weight of Glory.” He refers to many similar experiences like those described by Steinbeck and Knowles, and then he says:
Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself. . . . Now we wake to find . . . we have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken in. . . . Our life-long nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation.
There seems to be a sense, then, in which we are all like the younger brother. We are all exiles, always longing for home. We are always traveling, never arriving. The houses and families we actually inhabit are only inns along the way, but they aren’t home. Home continues to evade us.
Timothy Keller, The Prodigal Son
-
We seldom fully realize that we are sent to fulfill God-given tasks. We act as if we have to choose how, where, and with whom to live. We act as if we were simply dropped down in creation and have to decide how to entertain ourselves until we die. But we were sent into the world by God, just as Jesus was. Once we start living our lives with that conviction, we will soon know what we were sent to do. These tasks may be very specialized, or they may be the general task of loving one another in everyday life.
—Henri Nouwen, Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life -
“Conquer men by your gentle kindness, and make zealous men wonder at your goodness. Put the lover of justice to shame by your compassion. With the afflicted be afflicted in mind. Love all men, but keep distant from all men.”
—St. Isaac the Syrian -
“Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it with another.”
—Thomas Merton, Love and Living -
Watch yourselves—your passions especially—in your home life, where they appear freely, like moles in a safe place. Outside our own home, some of our passions are usually screened by other more decorous passions, whilst at home there is no possibility of driving away these black moles that undermine the integrity of our soul.
—St. John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ
