When I began on a spiritual path, I wrote a letter to Chrysognonus Waddell, the hermit who introduced me to monasticism. I wanted to tell him I was considering entering a monastery. I don’t still possess his return letter, but I remember the essence of it. He hoped I’d recall something, and I do, to this day. “Remember,” he said “becoming a monk is a choice, not between good and evil, but between two goods.” He was saying this out of his many years of contemplative practice, and he was absolutely right.
But I bring it up because my “plans for goodness” became, over the years, increasingly driven by ego. My own vision of my spiritual path rested, more and more, on treating “lesser goods” as if they were evil. That made those good things easier to renounce.
So here’s the bit that reads like a PSA: First off, well intentioned as it may be, rejecting something good in God’s name—this maneuver comes from Ego. Secondly, goodness does not equal “shouldness”: embracing something good simply because it’s good is just as misguided.
I spent college going to Mass daily, at the expense of good hang time with close friends. I said to myself “because the Mass is good, we should attend it daily. In the monastery, that became “because Mass is good, I should even enjoy celebrating it multiple times per day.” On Easter, there are three Masses available to be celebrated: the “Vigil mass,” the “Dawn Mass” and the “Day Mass.” In the monastery, we celebrated all three. Because we could, we did. I’m not arguing with the motivation: The resurrection is awesome. But three masses in 18 hours borders on too much of a good thing.
It’s not only in my own Catholic identity that this has been visible and operative. All of the Catholic Institutions that I’ve attended, worked for, or interacted with—they’ve all had egoic plans for goodness. The Catholic School I presently work for forces all students, through my theology classes, to sit in adoration of the blessed Sacrament monthly. I am expected to maintain “proper reverence” among a group of students, over half of whom aren’t catholic. I end up forcing Catholics, protestants, hindus and the school’s few muslims to be quiet in front of the exposed Eucharist, though they have no belief in it whatsoever. And this is the case because “The amount of Grace available in the Eucharist is enormous, and God can use Adoration powerfully to draw a person to himself.” Just like “Goodness doesn’t equal shouldness,” just because “God can act” doesn’t mean he will. In the end, Jesus learned this same thing, tempted by Satan in the desert. For Catholic Institutions to build their Catholic identity on the expectation that God will act is tantamount to testing God. It’s not good P.R. to say “At my school, we routinely ask God to turn stones into bread.”
Near Greenville South Carolina, there’s a mountain called “Bald Rock.” The name is apt: it’s just a big, treeless outcropping of rock that affords a wonderful view of the Upstate. High school kids—and this cracks me up—have graffitied generations of proposals on Bald Rock. Someone recently decided to memorialize the fact that “Stephanie is a whore” on its smooth surface. This is why I bring it up: “egoic plans for goodness” would have us out there with solvents, scrubbing the thing. The result would be beautiful, but we’d end up exhausted, because we’re forcing a rock that isn’t blank to become so. The cleaning would be compulsive: it would simply cover our insecurities. Bald rock, made spotless, would afford us no peace. To overextend the “Bald Rock” example, in the end I can only come to rest, not by planning a graffiti-cleaning party, but by focusing on the fact that bald rock is a rock.
I can tell you this from experience: anything egoic is exhausting. I can force thoughts out of my head through sheer force of will. But then my head will be nothing more than quietly full of myself. In reality, creation was good before our egos forced us to recognize it. The real rest of contemplation takes place only when we appreciate what is given by God. We don’t need to do more, think more, or feel more to follow our vocations or do God’s will. Rest is a matter of doing less, not more.
I think I’ve said this before: my mind works in a very “Obsessive Compulsive” kind of way. For years, my belief that “faith” requires doing more, thinking more or feeling more aggravated my latent tendencies to OCD. To this day I live with slight nervous ticks that are the fruit of that mistake. When we force ourselves to “unite our sufferings with Christ,” or we act on our own ideas about how to “imitate Christ.” we may be guilty of unduly worsening our suffering, and living a life that isn’t our own.
However those early years in the monastery didn’t just lay bare the problem, they also contained the seeds of a solution. One day, standing in front of the mirror, I had the thought “how do I unify myself with the crucified Christ while I’m brushing my teeth?” The answer came, in the form of a clear repetitive thought: “You unite yourself to Christ while brushing your teeth by brushing your teeth.” 4 out of 5 dentists agree: brushing our teeth was a sacred act before sin made us think we had to make it so by forcing ourselves to do, think or feel anything particularly pious.
Remember, goodness does not equal shouldness. And increased goodness does not equal increased shouldness. The church has made “embracing the highest good” morally obligatory—failure to do so justifies not only the church’s judgment, but also its condemnation.
I’ll offer two examples then a third little consideration: First, sex. Sex, at best, is unitive, procreative, and monogamous. The popular Catholic mind has translated that into “sex is bad unless its procreative, unitive and monogamous.” This denies the many ways sex can serve to grow health and intimacy while still being non-procreative. A catholic professor of mine had a friend once wax frank with him, and ask “don’t you ever fuck your wife just for the sake of fucking your wife?” My professor’s friend was unwittingly reminding us that “doing things for their own sake” is a fruit of contemplation and a gift from God.
Secondly, and as another example, the Eucharist is “the source and summit of all we do.” That’s wonderful, but it lead the Church to speak of the faithful’s “Sunday Obligation” and condemn, somewhat subtly, those who fail to keep it. This heaps guilt on parents who lack the energy to get kids into Sunday-best and to Mass weekly. It also causes guilt for people like me who are allergic to gluten and can’t receive the Eucharist. Telling people they should embrace the good does not help them do so.
It is egotistical to demonize any good but the highest good, and it bypasses the contemplative journey’s highest lessons. The consideration I wanted to offer, the one I mentioned above, is this: unwillingness to embrace a particular good is different than inability to embrace a good, and the church has lumped them together into a teaching that’s highly prejudiced toward “the able.” If a person is wheelchair bound, placing too much emphasis on when we stand or kneel at mass is not compassionate. If a disabled person is non-verbal, placing emphasis on saying prayers is silly at best, cruel at worst. Even insisting that someone correct his habits of mortal sin by force of will—when indeed, it requires long years of prayerful and deep looking into his psychological wounds—this is not compassionate. Those who know their own limitations avoid this, but those denying their limitations tend to talk louder.
There is a solution, and—no surprise here—it is found in Buddhism. In short, instead of “ranking what is good,” Buddhism says that “All good is contained in each good.” The Buddha taught about the “interdependent co-arising of cause and effect.” Later buddhist tradition would call it “interbeing.” Interbeing turns with different gears than the hierarchy of goods does: the teaching states that, looking deeply at a pile of dirt, I can see the rest of earth, the sky that waters it, the future trees that might take root in it, the basic elements of my own existence, and my own Buddha nature all at once. The microcosm is a door, not just to the macrocosm, but to the cosmic itself.
So the goodness of the present moment—as I’m writing this, it’s an increasingly-caffeinated Saturday morning—leads to the same cosmic awareness the Eucharist does. This would be a comfort to the parent who can’t get their kids to Mass, and it is a comfort to me, who would have an allergic reaction to the Eucharistic elements.
It should be mentioned that Interbeing is richer than relativism. It’s not just “All good is accessible everywhere.” The Buddha would say that Right mindfulness leads to right concentration. In other words, the bloke who lets go of his Catholic “Shoulds” long enough to fuck his wife for fucks-sake is doing a good thing. But the Interconnected Dharma may lead him to acknowledge that calling it “fucking” might be a bit more crass than his wife is comfortable with, and he should speak more compassionately. Buddhism’s sense of morality clearly comes from the Dharma itself. The West, so often guilty of substituting Ego for God, is much more liable to wax unnecessarily puritanical and call it God’s will. But it's Buddhism that's right on this score: moral speech is only right speech when it comes from the mahatman, the true self.
To sum up: Egotistical definitions of “the good” will get us only so far. They exhaust us. And as obscure as the God-given connection between goodness and moral obligation is, that exhaustion cuts us off from discovering it. Our inability to rest can lead us, at best, to presumption, and at worse, to substituting ourselves for God.
Buddhism speaks of “thinking in which all the leaks have been stopped.” That is to say, thinking that is grounded in the eightfold path, that’s marked by non-self, impermanence, and remembrance of suffering (or “remembrance of Nirvana” in another “transmission” of the teaching.) Catholic teaching, when disconnected from the prayer journey, leads quickly to selfishness. All the leaks in this kind of teaching have not been stopped. The things that Under the Influence addresses, they all leak and come to nothing if they aren’t grounded in prayer, humility and silence. In the end, it’s only in being similarly rooted that Catholic teaching holds water.
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