I’ve always been attracted to intentional living, and clean ways of explaining what the game is about. As a monk, just because I’d asked a visiting buddhist for a word that’d help us live our monastic lives, I watched him count out the four noble truths and the eightfold path on his fingers. After that I’ve always been attracted to simple ways of explaining core doctrines.As an instructor of theology at a Catholic school, I often get questions about the bottom line. Ever interested in doing the least amount of work possible, my students will ask “What’s the least you have to do to call yourself Christian, and what if I differ with it?” The first time I got that question, I could only answer its second part. The next time I addressed it, I had an answer. After a bit of preface, I hope to address the answer I feel sums up Christianity’s bottom line. [bxA]
First, allow me to say how I arrived at the answer I give. On a level that’s 1/3 nerding out, 1/3 puppy love and 1/3 academic curiosity, I’m very much in love with Islam. I’m sure I wouldn’t escape being called grossly underinformed. But I love Islam because it has such extensive points of contact with Trappist monasticism. The movie “Of Gods and Men” will always move me deeply: the movie is about 7 Trappist monks who were martyred in Algeria, solely for being quiet Christians committed to their way of life, to living it alongside the local muslims they’d come to call friends. In that movie, the monks are shown praying 7 times daily, as I did for 7 years. Muslims pray five times daily. The monks are shown serving the poor who come to them. All muslims are duty bound to serve the poor. The movie shows the monks giving even their personal medications to the sick among the town’s muslims. History has answered questions the movie didn’t guess at: the monks were most likely executed by kidnappers from the French-backed Algerian Army, posing as jihadis from Jama al-Islamiyya. All indications point to the probability that the Algerian government needed a reason to go after the Jihadis, and found that reason in the murder, which acted as a sort of smear campaign against the jihadis.
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| Lambert Wilson and Farid Larbi, as Of Gods and Men's Christian de Cherge and Ali Fayattia. They shook hands to close their Christmas Conversation, and departed less at-odds than they'd come. I own no rights to this image |
To get back to my main point: lacking a Catholic answer for “What’s the bottom line?” I turned to Islam. Inshallah, I’ll say what little I know, and am attracted to: muslims explain their beliefs in terms of “Five Pillars.” Zakat (Generosity) Salat (Prayer, facing Mecca, five times daily), Shahada (A creed saying “There is one God, and Muhammed is his prophet") Sawm (Fasting, during the holy month of Ramadan), Haaj (The “once in a lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca.) If you don’t even contend with these, says Islam, you’re not a muslim. I wanted to boil Christianity down to similar basics for my kids.
I stewed on it for a while. As I thought about the strengths of Islam, new possible ways to package Christian Truth emerged. Soon, when a student raise next raised their hand and asked “What is the least she needed to do to be Catholic” I had a response. “The Five Pillars of Catholicism” are Prayer, Service, Creed, Seasonal Awareness and Practice of the Presence of God.
Prayer was obvious. We do it, I explain, both alone and together. It’s both Liturgical and free-form, and moves the mind and body back and forth between 3 different states. Vocal prayer uses words, Meditation uses thoughts—both help us to get to God. When words and thoughts become, as they inevitably will, a hindrance to being with God, Contemplation is our way to pray just by being with God. And we’re so close that we don’t even recognize a conceptual difference between God and the Self.
Service was essential, I explained. I talked about an assortment of “Works of Mercy:” the “Corporal” ones, like Sheltering the Homeless, Feeding the Hungry, Visiting the Imprisoned, for instance. You’d be drawn to do more of some, less of another, I said, and that’s how it’s supposed to happen. I talked about Admonishing the Sinner, Counseling the Doubtful, and since no one can give what they don’t have, the importance of doing Spiritual Works of Mercy for ourselves first.
Creed was liberating because it clarified “the ideas that all Catholics, in the end, accept.” Trinity (3 persons in one divine nature), the Four Marks of the Church (we say it’s “One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic) and the three beliefs about life, (One Baptism, Resurrection and the Life of the World to come.) Those ten beliefs are essential, I said. As a Catholic, you had to ultimately buy into them. But how you did so was up to you, I explained. What does the Oneness of the Church mean? Each of my students would have their own answer to that. And that was the real stuff of their freedom. “Think, for instance” I said “of Grace. On the books, grace is ‘the action of God.’ Most people think grace is an energy you’re given, like caffeine—they think Grace is a reason to overwork on Christmas and Easter. I think Grace is the ability to let go without anxiety. If we do less, God will do more. Jesus was the most graced human being ever. He died having lost everything. All he lost, all the emotions he felt—he experienced them without anxiety because, when we let go, God takes over. The sacredness of life is not manifested in doing more, it’s manifested in letting go of what you’re doing. This isn’t a conventional way of talking about grace. But I’ve just found that using grace as a reason to overwork is, to a great extent, about ego, and as a recovering egomaniac, I can’t afford that. So the principle is clear. If you describe yourself as Catholic, whether you believe is not optional. How you believe is. You can broaden this to all five pillars. Being Catholic means interacting, somehow, with all of them. If you want to be Catholic, you can’t choose whether to interact with them, but you can choose how.”
Seasonal Awareness was a tricky one. I tell my students “either you believe time is linear, or you don’t. The fact is, the life of Jesus made time sacred, no matter what kind of time you believe in. If you buy into linear time, seasonal awareness means knowing how the fact that it’s the season of Lent, for instance, changes what we’re invited to think about. If you don’t buy into linear time, seasonal awareness is means knowing what the different layers of the present moment are.” Take sadness, for instance, I say. At a certain point I realized that I felt so sad that I was starting to make myself sad because it felt familiar—because I was comfortable with it, and making much of my sadness got me attention. There are times, like Lent and Good Friday, that sadness is really appropriate. I do cling to things, and that does make me miserable. Even as I’m feeling that, though, it changes, because Jesus’ life teaches me to let go. And learning to let go of feeling is as important as learning to accept feelings in the first place.
I told my students “whatever you have to do to realize that the present moment is sacred, do it. We even have a way to remember that a particular part of the day is sacred. When I was a monk we used to think about every day as if it were the last day of Christ’s life. Our day was just a following of Jesus through his crucifixion. As we were getting up to pray at 3 in the morning, Jesus was in the Garden of Gethsemani crying tears of blood. Apparently he didn’t like waking up either. As we were going out to work, Jesus was beginning his work of carrying his cross. At noon, when the day’s heat conspires with food coma to make you give up on life entirely, Jesus was being nailed to, and dying on the cross. As we get “taken” by the day, Jesus gets deeper into his work of dying for our sins. By the day’s last prayer, Jesus is being laid in the tomb, and that’s when we go to bed. When we sleep, he dies. When he rises, we do.”
The last Pillar was the big one. To me, it is the most important. The last pillar is “Practice of the Presence of God.” Ultimately, this is an exercise in letting our thinking yield to “just being.” The premise is that we are all attached to the Eight Evil Thoughts, the compulsive thoughts Under the Influence has talked about before, that give rise to the ego. “Practicing the Presence of God” is a way of seeing everything around us, not as a commodity to be consumed, but as an attempt, on God’s part, to be with us. It was a method of practice coined by Br. Lawrence of the Resurrection. Most of us look at the world as if God is absent from it. The fact is, he’s there and trying to be with us. Giving egoless attention to that—simply being present to reality, rather than being hyper-focused on it—these are the “Present Moment Goals” of the spiritual life. We might find that our thoughts of God, of ourselves and of Heaven change in the process, but that doesn’t matter, I say. Just be present, and don’t let that goal make you uptight. The rest will take care of itself.
And then I make the students say it back to me: “What are the Five Pillars?” I ask. And I get the answers, one each from a different student, in rapid fire “Prayer!” “Service!” “Creed!” “Seasonal Awareness!” “Practice of the Presence of God!”
And I finish with a couple of questions “If you want to be Catholic,” I ask, "what do you have to do?” And they respond “You have to practice and believe.”
“But what part of that,” I ask, “is up to you?” And someone says “How to believe!”
And class ends. And I’m not sure if I’m right, or if I’ve done enough, or if my students totally get it yet. But until the bell rings, I try.
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