Learning to Pray with Tears

by Hilary White

Remnant Columnist | Perugia, Italy

Part II

(Continued from Last Issue)

Why do it the hard way?

Peter Owen Jones is an Anglican minister who moonlights as a "presenter" on BBC television programmes about religion and the spiritual life. Or at least, about the Anglican/BBC version of them. Mr. Jones did a series in which he investigated "extreme" asceticism in various "faith traditions" including visits to Hindu and Buddhist ascetics. His final experiment was a visit to St. Anthony’s mountain in Egypt, where he spent three weeks praying the Jesus Prayer under the guidance of a Coptic Orthodox monk, Fr. Lazarus El Anthony.

1 https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=9VjU_505i6E At the end of the one-hour segment, Mr. Jones, though he acknowledges its greatness, rejects the ascetic way of the saints of ancient Christianity as a kind of masochistic madness, as though he thinks there is another, easier way. He finds an excuse by an evasion that is perhaps semi-deliberate, by a twist of Scripture:

"I’m taking solace in the fact that Christ said some wonderful words which were ‘In my father’s house there are many rooms,’ and to a certain extent I think we choose the rooms that we inhabit. The mistake is

1 Fr. Lazarus, an Australian convert from Marxist atheism, is a popular figure among Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox people.

Apart from his faulty ecclesiology, his devotion to prayer and the ascetic life is inspirational, and his video interviews – available on YouTube – are well worth listening to, particularly the story of his conversion through a mystical experience with Our Lady.

~ See Hilary/ Page 4

How to Pray with Tears

H. White/ Continued From Page 1

to assume that all rooms should either be like that or all rooms are like that."

"The room that St. Anthony chose to inhabit is really a very fearful place that very, very few of us would choose to go into knowingly. And it speaks immensely of his bravery and his faith that he was able to endure it..."

But, no thanks.

Thus speaks the modern man. The Anglican dilletante, the syncretist, who clings desperately to the notion that God Himself has no particular preference about how we spend our lives, and that there are no stark choices that we must make, and that whatever "room" we happen to prefer is good enough. A man who likes his religion easy and his grace cheap.

To modern man, including modern, novusordoist Catholic man, such holiness is wholly separate from the experience of the "average Christian2."

A man like Anthony is some different kind of man, almost a different species who, specially gifted with holiness, can safely be kept on a special shelf of icons and ignored. His is not an example to be followed, but a kind of religious freak of nature. We are in awe of his choice to "inhabit a fearful place," and thank God that we are under no obligation to be like him, a terrifying and impossible suggestion.

It is true, as St. Philip Neri said, that not all are called to the rigors of religious life – still less to the desert life on an Egyptian mountain. But it is unequivocally true that all – not merely all Catholics or all Christians, but all people – are called to a life of intimate union with God, to the exclusion of all other things, and that there is only one way to that union. And Philip, following all the other saints from St.

Anthony of the Desert, understood that the Purgative Way, the embrace of a life of penance and mortification, is not an optional step. It is not a "room" that one can choose to take or leave. It is the only door to life, and the one who refuses it, and "fears going down to hell in his lifetime, runs a great risk of going there when he dies."

It’s not hard to imagine that this is the normal reaction of most of us when we first hear the command of Christ, "Be perfect, therefore, as the Father in heaven is perfect." It seems so impossible as to be insane, and we

2 …as Cardinal Kasper called him while denying the "universal call to holiness."

would be tempted to think it so if it came from any other source. But the Lord who never lies later clarified when His own disciples were aghast at this, asking how it is possible that anyone is saved: "With men this is impossible." He agreed. "But with God all things are possible."

No, St. Anthony and the Desert Fathers were not strange, otherworldly, angelic beings of a different species of men.

They simply didn’t rely upon their own strength and powers.

The Fathers of the Church – the earliest writers on the life of the Spirit, never had the idea we have now, that mere membership in the Body of Christ, merely being baptised and passively receiving the Blessed Sacrament at Mass could possibly suffice for our sanctification. Even the sanctifying grace of the Sacraments cannot take root if there are no dispositions in the soul to receive it. Until our own time it was understood by all generations of Christians that we must be radically changed. As St. Paul put it, that we must put off the Old Man – the self that desires only fleshly, creaturely comforts and satisfactions – and put on the New Man, that is, put on Christ Himself. And this is no easy or brief task.

The poverty of the Protestant ideology, that has sunk deeply into the Catholic Church since the 1960s, was to deny that we could be radically changed, sanctified, by the life of the Holy Ghost within us, or that God ever intended this for us. The new doctrine holds that that we are only "covered" like snow over a dunghill, by grace, as though the Lord had said nothing to the contrary. We Catholics have followed this depressing and hopeless, worldly, Protestant path and consequently forgotten what the spiritual life is, and what it is for. This tendency to passivity has been present in the Church from the earliest ages. St.

Basil of Caesarea, in his treatise De Spiritu Sancto, gently chides us for thinking we "pick up" holiness merely by osmosis, by being in the right Church, or that the path to God can be followed while keeping our comforts.

"Now the Spirit

isn’t brought into intimate association with the soul by local approximation. How indeed could there be a corporeal approach to the incorporeal?"

Basil puts paid to our easy-going notion that we don’t really have to do much; as the popular expression has it: that "God loves us as we are" or "meets us were we’re at." It is as if the Lord had said nothing about it, and we are left believing there is no hope. If we cannot become "perfect as the Father in heaven is perfect" what hope is there for us?

Protestantism, and the New Paradigm of post-conciliar Catholicism that follows it, says only that we, in effect, sneak into heaven like thieves still carrying our Egyptian swag, with our baggage of depravities intact. But this is unthinkable, unbearable; it puts the lie to the promise of the Lord Himself.

No. The truth is something much larger, much more extraordinary and astonishing: He doesn’t come to us "where we’re at." We are to go to Him where He dwells in glory forever. But this change doesn’t come for nothing.

There’s work to be done, and that is the work of purification, that was in later centuries to be called the "Purgative Way," the first stage of the Way of Perfection.

St. Basil writes:

"This association [of the soul to God] results from the

withdrawal of the passions which, coming afterwards gradually on the soul from its friendship to the flesh, have alienated it from its close relationship with God."

By our sins, by our "friendship with the flesh," by allowing the passions to govern us according to the rule of the flesh, we have alienated ourselves from our original purpose, that is, from union with God. Basil sets forth here the inescapable choice before the soul; God or the World, God or the flesh, eternal life or everlasting death. The Israelites took the gold of Egypt with them, as if a golden idol or even a single gold coin could be useful in the desert, where no one bought or sold and what water and food there was came directly from God Himself. And slowly, with many notable failures along the way, they let the worthless idols fall from their hands.

This is the basic principle of the spiritual life that was laid down all the way back in Deuteronomy, that we should not follow the ways of the Egyptians – the ways of the flesh and the world that are the ways of death – but come out, leave the trinkets of the world behind in the desert like worthless things.

God "knows you’re going through this great wilderness; these forty years the Lord your God has been with you; you have lacked nothing.

3" But Israel had to be cleansed as a people: "Not one of these men of this evil generation shall

3 Deut 2:7

see the good land which I swore to give to your fathers.

4" So Israel wandered in the wilderness, "until the entire generation, that is, the men of war had perished from the camp, as the Lord had sworn to them. 5"

All those who had known the life of the flesh in Egypt had to die, and only the generation of the desert, who depended not on gold or on their own works but on God alone, would see the end. Only "your little ones…who this day have no knowledge of good and evil," that is, who were below the age of reason, were to see the promised land. There can be no divided hearts, no imperfection, in heaven.

The Fathers of the Church tell us that there is not only a historical reality in this story – the events of the time of Moses – but a spiritual reality applicable directly to us as individuals in every age. The people of Israel, the chosen people of God, is likened to the soul on its journey out of sin back to Him. The soul begins to hate its bondage, to chafe at its slavery to sin but is immersed still in the "fleshpots of Egypt."

But the soul in reality is not a slave, but the chosen one, the beloved-butadulterous bride of Hosea, who must be "lured out" or even driven out of the bondage of Egypt, into the radical freedom of the desert. And she must dwell there homeless and dependent until every desire for the old life – the "men of war" – has died out and the soul is left entirely dependent upon and reoriented to her love only of God.

Hosea describes Israel as the adulterous bride, the harlot people who turned away from Him and worshiped the idols of the gentiles. At first she is repudiated and punished by the Lord, the husband, who says, "Therefore I will hedge up her way with thorns; and I will build a wall against her, so that she cannot find her paths. She shall pursue her lovers but not overtake them; and she shall seek them but shall not find them6… And I will lay waste her vines and her fig trees…And I

4 Deut 1:35 5 Deut 2:14 6 Hosea 2:6-13

"

Until our own time it was understood by all generations of Christians that we must be radically changed.

As St.

Paul put it, that we must put off the Old Man – the self that desires only fleshly, creaturely comforts and satisfactions...

"

Continued Next Page