Idolatry is Both Unavoidable and Must be Avoided!

[[Hi Sister Laurel! You wrote that "idolatry is a temptation and reality none of us [can avoid]. It strikes all of us." I don't think I have ever committed idolatry so could you say more about this? Oh, I wanted to say I am sorry about your computer. I hope you are getting it fixed! Thank you!]]

Important questions and objections! I am glad you asked. You may remember that I once gave an Advent homily: In What Story Will we Stand?. It referred to the capacity for story which is part and parcel of being human. More specifically it spoke of a place in our brains which is responsible for spinning stories. We are in search of meaning and are terrified by absurdity and chaos; a central piece of having a meaningful life or appreciating the meaningfulness of reality involves context. Most of the time the contexts we supply to events are forms of narrative or story. Stories are the way we supply the context which combats absurdity and chaos. They are the way we give ourselves a place to stand in a universe which might otherwise be frustrating, terrifying, and even a source of desolation or despair for us.

Human Beings as Storymaking and Storytelling Animals:

When a doctor makes a diagnosis, for instance, she will tell (or rehearse!) a story which wraps the symptoms up or makes sense of them in a neat and coherent way; it will be a story of anatomy and physiology, how x is working with y, how z has ceased to respond to w, how t has gone off on his own and is creating chaos, or v is entrapped by the inflammation of q, etc. But it will also have personal dimensions: "When patient x experienced y, the reason was z and she responded by doing a, b, and c --- only to find these were not helpful. Together we have to find a better approach to y." When a cosmologist or astrophysicist discovers a new particle or something like dark matter, they will invariably begin to work out a narrative or story of how this fits in the universe's own story. Theories are, in fact, good stories which fit the facts as we know them; they are most effective when they have room for the developments called for by new discoveries. No matter who we are or what field is involved we try without ceasing to make sense of things. In part this "making sense of things" is an act of discovery but in part it will also involve us in the creative act of story-telling as a part of this discovery process. Often it is in the process of working out the story that the discoveries are really made.

Theology is no different here. Moreover our religious quest for an ultimate meaning, our quest for a God who will make sense of everything and in whom everything will cohere (hold together) is simply a deeper form of the process described above for the physician or the cosmologist. (Insofar as cosmologists are in search of a grand unifying theory they echo the work of theologians who believe God is the ultimate reality which cosmologists pursue.) In any case, we are constantly taking the bits of revelation we have and spinning stories about God which, we sincerely hope, provide a theological context for what has been revealed. Similarly, we spin stories about ourselves, our universe, the nature of hope, justice, and any number of other things which lead to a more or less consistent worldview glimpsed through the lens of this revelation. Systematic theologians do this in a formal, educated, and conscious way by relating the pieces of revelation (and thus, of the faith) to one another as they search for and formulate a consistent framework in which all of the partial and disparate pieces of theological knowledge can mutually illuminate and make sense of one another. Moreover, we do this with our eyes on the Christ Event where we believe the fullest revelation of both divinity and humanity was made real among us. This event/person is the norm which challenges, contests, or confirms every piece of the theological narrative we create.

But, whether we have studied systematics or not we all do theology! We can't help it!! We do it every day whenever we draw conclusions about God or explain why something in our lives ultimately does or does not make sense. Agnostics do it when they question the consistency of religious beliefs or try to measure these against "objective reality". Atheists do it when they deny the existence of God! (That God does not exist is a theological assertion and atheism is a religious position.) There is no such thing as a naked, uncontextualized, uninterpreted, or completely anomalous  experience in our lives. We simply cannot leave things that way. It is too uncomfortable and anxiety provoking. We NEED to understand and that means we need interpretive contexts which make sense of things, first smaller or more immediate ones, and gradually more and more ultimate ones. If I am in pain, for instance, I immediately explain it (" Ah, must be tension; it's a passing thing. No problem!) and determine how to stop it; less immediately, especially if the pain returns or is not eased, I try to find answers and solutions from professionals. Especially my concern here is what I can do to avoid or minimize the pain in the future, what can I do to function normally and live fully? Eventually with ongoing or chronic pain my questions become more ultimate ones: I wonder what it says about me, how it will affect my life; I want to know why this has happened to me, what has God to do with it, is it the way things are meant to be and if not why are they this way, etc etc. Bit by bit, in my ongoing grappling with this problem or experience, I build a personal theology of suffering, a theodicy if you will.

Similarly, if something good happens to us we spin a narrative explaining that. Our "story" will reflect on the universe, on our worthiness or unworthiness for this good thing, on the place of God in this good thing, etc, etc. Wherever there are gaps in our understanding, wherever we are restless and feel incomplete, we will search for answers AND we will spin stories (e.g., theories, hypotheses, theologies, philosophies) to provide meaning, understanding, and intellectual and emotional rest. This does not mean there are no answers and we have to make them up; it does not mean that these explanations or narratives are necessarily fictions (much less complete ones!) or some sort of "opiate" for the merely insecure. It means rather that we open ourselves to the One who is the ultimate answer via these stories. We hold these stories lightly allowing God to change and expand them as they need to be changed and expanded. They are vehicles through which we pose the question of our existence and attend to the answer to that question. When these explanations harden into certainties which cannot be changed by new more ultimate revelations of Godself, certainties we grasp at in spite of these revelations, then we are in trouble. It is here that idolatry becomes particularly problematical.

The Place of Idolatry in all of this:

Our own incompleteness, our yearning for an ultimate story in which we can rest, an ultimate narrative in which everything in our lives is rendered meaningful and coherent coupled with our innate tendency to spin stories which give us temporary rest even as we search for something more final is the source of both our openness to God's own revelation of Godself, and our daily acts of idolatry. There is the additional fact that everything we say and think about God is entirely inadequate, always partial, and often downright wrong. Theologians know they are on the verge of committing heresy and betraying the very God they so love and serve with every word they write, every theological conclusion they come to, and so forth.

When I was first studying theology as an undergraduate I had a professor who allowed us to take a theological position and explore it by arguing for it as fully and convincingly as we could. He did this again and again through the years I studied with him (I also did most of my MA work under him). We held a position until we clearly saw its defects (usually because of the counter position someone else assumed) and then we took up another one --- often one which exaggerated its move away from the distortion or defects in the earlier one just like all heresies tend to do --- and the same process occurred. What my teacher was doing was a kind of recapitulation of the history of heresy and of theological and doctrinal development. We would fall into an heretical position until we understood it from the inside out and then, in correcting the heresy, innocently fall into another one and so forth. Over time we adopted more and less sound theological positions which made pastoral sense but were measured against the norms (and especially the norma normans non normata) of theology as well. We came to understand the history of theological thought, the development of doctrine and dogma, and the nature of heresy as well as specific heresies per se pretty well in all of this.

But we also came to understand very clearly that every position a theologian adopts and argues is inadequate to a transcendent and ineffable God. That simply cannot be avoided. Our language is inadequate, our categories of thought and our understanding is inadequate, even our sense of the questions which human beings pose (and are), the questions which give rise to theology and the articulation of the ultimate answer which is God are partial and more or less inadequate. The images of God we draw or conceive are, to one degree or another, idols. This is always and everywhere true. They must always be submitted to the norm which is the Christ Event for correction, and they must be held lightly in a way which is open to clarification or restatement, correction, challenge, and purification. God is always greater than anything we can conceive. The prayer of the theologian is always, "God forgive us our theology, perhaps our theology most of all!"

What is true of trained theologians is even truer of the rest of us who naturally and often unthinkingly carve out theologies every day of our lives. Is someone we know suffering? We spin a story, a theology in fact (the technical word for this kind of theology is theodicy), which explains and makes sense of it. Is our world chaotic? We spin a theological answer to explain it. Does something happen which seems unfair? Again, the reason we tell ourselves to explain the presence of injustice is a theological narrative, whether that is explicit or merely implicit. Are we aware of good things happening to us each day which are entirely undeserved? Once again the explanation we conceive is a theology (or at least a theological one). We may borrow bits of theology from those who lived before us, we may make these theologies up out of whole cloth (mistakenly thinking we have come up with something new!), but how ever we do it, we are idol-making factories because we are in search of and made for meaning. We are meant to be completed by and rest in the Ground of Being and Meaning we call God and until we do, we naturally work to make it true. This is the source of sin and to the extent it causes us to theologize endlessly about a God we can never truly comprehend, it is also the source of idolatry.

The Forms Idolatry Can Take:

Thus, I am not necessarily speaking of idolatry as adopting or making golden calves we can worship. Usually idolatry is much more subtle (and so, more dangerous) than that! Anything in our lives which pretends to offer us a sense of rest and completion apart from God, any image of God which falls short of the whole truth but which we embrace with an ultimate concern, anything at all which takes the place of the real God in our lives is, at least potentially, an idol.

In the post I put up about a week ago I was thinking about a situation in which some truths about God had been distorted by human ideas of justice and perhaps more so by a tremendous need for meaning and yearning for a life of true significance. Our God is a God of justice; in loving us and our world he recreates these in his image, he perfects them, completes them, and raises them to new and abundant life, significant life. He loves them into wholeness and makes them to be all they are meant to be. This is the very nature of Divine justice. To substitute distributive or retributive justice for the love that does justice by freely and mercifully recreating things is a serious theological error which substitutes an idol for the real God. Similarly, to take a theology of divine sovereignty and conclude that God wills us to be miserable or live less than fully human lives, to suggest or affirm that God authors or is the architect of the misfortune and tragedy in our lives. is to believe in an idol. Moreover, to adopt a piety which calls sadism love and cruelty justice may make one unable to hear the Gospel message of gratuitous love. When this occurs the enmeshment involved may rise to the level of unforgiveable sin, again, not because God will not forgive this, but because he has been shut out and made incapable of effectively forgiving (healing) it.


While idolatry is unavoidable it must be avoided (or, better said, perhaps, since we can't avoid it we must be rescued from it). That only occurs when we allow God to be God within our lives, when we let the God of life and love reveal Godself on his own terms and to do so again and again every single day! Our faith involves knowing but even more it involves being known. The cure for idolatry is a faith which is really an openness to being grasped and shaken by the eternal and always new and surprising God. This will involve us in attending to the spirits at work in our own lives. Do they make us deeply and truly happy, whole, and alive? Then they are good spirits even if they cause a bit of discomfort in the process. Do they make us miserable, less open to love, more concerned about the preciousness and meaningfulness of our own lives? Do they lead us to partial images of God which speak of his justice as retributive or distributive for instance? Then they are "bad spirits".

The dynamic of theology is one of searching and openness --- we are open to having our theologies informed and changed by the real God, our certainties made uncertain and questionable by God's own truth. We keep our eyes on the cross of Christ because it is there that the deepest truth of ourselves, our capacity for idolatry and the cruelty, intolerance, homicide and Deicide associated with our incompleteness and terrible insecurity (as well as our idolatry!) are revealed. Similarly it is here that our capacity for sacrificial love and real obedience to God are most clearly revealed. Of course, it is also the events of the Cross which reveal the humbling depth of God's unconditional, gratuitous Love, and so, the very nature of God as Love-in-Act. God's own Self and presence is the only sure solution to idolatry. God must be allowed to bring us to rest in Godself. When that occurs our searching is really at an end, and so too is any grasping at false (or partial) gods, any profound unhappiness, any incapacity to love others, any fear that our lives are wasted or senseless, etc. These are also part of what we call the fullness of redemption.

Thinking About (the) Sin Against the Holy Spirit

In my post on God humbling us by raising us up I said that the situation in which a person's friend found herself reminded me of what Scripture calls the Sin against the Holy Spirit or the Unforgivable Sin. Because I don't want to leave any reader with the sense that I was describing a single personal act of sin on that person's part but rather, a situation of enmeshment and bondage involving a piety so paradoxical and destructive that the real God could not get a hearing, I want to clarify some.

I have been thinking about this situation since I first read about it and I am feeling somewhat awed (in the sense of being appalled) by the bind this person was described as being in. It is one thing to think of someone who has repeatedly chosen and chosen again something which is anti-God in a blatant way. We can understand how a person doing that might empty themselves of the capacity to respond to love (and ultimately to that Love-in Act we identify as God) and thus be in a state of unpardonable sin or alienation from (the REAL) God. But it is very hard to think of someone embracing a form of piety which is replete with references to God and who does so desiring on some level at least to embrace God, but who is really only embracing an idol in the process. The upshot of this choice is what I described as an incredible downward spiral, a situation of enmeshment and self-will which God may not be able to effectively penetrate and redeem --- at least not this side of death.

I never thought I would hear myself say those words: a situation. . .which God may not be able to effectively penetrate and redeem this side of death --- at least not about someone embracing some form of piety or religion. But then neither had I thought enough about the importance of the commandment against idolatry understood in terms of distorted forms of piety. Neither had I reflected sufficiently on the fact that when we believe in an idol our hearts are formed similarly. We take on the characteristics of that in which we believe. The hardening of one's heart can occur in many ways but essentially it is always caused by giving our hearts over to something which is other than God or to attitudes which are not of God (e.g., ingratitude, fear, or bitterness, for instance). But, as I think about the situation of idolatry what is really terrifying for me is the fact that the name "God" is given to the idol and to accompanying attitudes or ways of seeing, and that these are likewise said to be "divine" or "of God, " when in fact they are not.

The idolater yearns for God; that yearning is innate because God is present as a constitutive part of our being and makes us "meant for" and capable of union with God. No idol can meet this yearning or complete the person in a foundational communion but it (falsely) PROMISES to do so. When one puts one's trust in THIS false god and this empty promise, idolatry can also effectively close the person to the real God who is vastly different than the person imagines or has "bought into". What happens then is understandable but truly terrifying: when one speaks of a God of absolute futurity, of a love that does justice, of an unceasing love which is exercised in mercy, to a person who has come to think of God as One who causes suffering "in reparation for sin" or whose justice is distributive or retributive, for instance, the message may not be heard. The God proclaimed may be rejected, not out of spite, but because the person really cannot "hear" this proclamation.

Such a person may speak of God incessantly, explain the events in her life in terms of this "god", pray often (in the sense of crying out to God), and even have what seem to be extraordinary religious experiences of some sort, but, unless there is genuine growth in love, in human wholeness, compassion, and the ability to see others with the eyes of God, that is, unless the person truly grows in the dynamic presence of Love-in-Act, then all of this is empty. I believe this is a piece of what Jesus meant when he said, "Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. Many will say to Me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?'"And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from me you who practice lawlessness!"' (The Law of love, the Law which Jesus fulfills and is the incarnation of, the law which is truly written on our hearts is what is being referred to here.)

This blindness or deafness to the real God, this inability to accept a God of unmerited love and mercy coupled with a person's own need to justify themselves with their own accomplishments (even when these are paradoxically spelled out in terms of victimhood and failure) constitute a blindness and deafness the Lord may not be able to effectively penetrate this side of death. In effect they may represent a degree of enmeshment in something which is not of God which is so substantial as to be considered the sin against the Holy Spirit. Whether the choices for the idol were driven by fear or personal woundedness or the bitterness which attached to circumstances in life through which this woundedness occurred, they have resulted in a state of bondage in which the person finds it impossible to accept the gratuitous, unmerited, and life-giving love-in-act which is the God of Jesus Christ.

It is the fact that this state of bondage is caused and exacerbated by numerous choices for an idol which matches what the person already calls justice or mirrors her own woundedness, and further, that this is supposedly done in the name of various partial or even outright heretical pictures of God found throughout the history of Christianity which makes it so truly terrifying I think. One can say to such a person, "The God of Jesus Christ NEVER wills the suffering, much less the personal decompensation of those he loves," and in response she can point to the literature which insists God punishes us as an instance of tough love or something similar. One can say that God's love always results in greater human wholeness, profound happiness and stillness (shalom, hesychia), and never in despair or profound depression, and the response might then be, "But God gives both consolation and desolation; St Ignatius says as much" ---inaccurate as is this interpretation of what St Ignatius supposedly teaches!

 (N.B., One problem in this case, besides the assertion that God gives us desolations --- desolation is the work of "bad spirits" not of God --- is the fact that St Ignatius taught that consolations (like the pain sometimes associated with healing) may be associated with a somewhat uncomfortable experience so long as they bring us closer to God and thus increase our capacity for love and our growth in human wholeness; a desolation, on the other hand, was associated with anything that leads us away from God --- even if it is or was a relatively blissful experience. The measure in each of these is not the affective quality of the experience per se so much as it is the degree to which it makes us greater lovers and truly holy in the manner of the God who is Love-in-Act. It would be hard to argue, in such a case, that God causes experiences which are made to move us away from Him. It would similarly make discernment impossible if both consolations and desolations were from God; how would we discern what was right and best for us if misery, selfishness, and personal deterioration were as authentically Divine as growth in human wholeness, the capacity for love, and profound  and genuine happiness?)

Idolatry is, of course, a temptation and reality which strikes each of us. None of us escape it. Our hearts are the places where God bears witness to Godself and this is the defining reality of what it means to be human. But our hearts are ALSO the places where a battle for ourselves goes on as we create idols to console and sustain us only to turn to the real God more fully and exhaustively as these fail us again and again. I have written here before that a vacant house is a perilous place and that a heart not given over entirely to God will be given over to that which is not God. When this ongoing battle is given over not to money or materialism or other "simpler" forms of idolatry but instead to a distorted piety which reshapes one's entire personal reality, both inner and outer, then one's heart is indeed "hardened". As a result our enmeshment in this distorted idolatry may prevent the Holy Spirit from truly empowering us or shaping our hearts in God's own image. When this is true we may well be dealing with a form of the Sin against the Holy Spirit. Again, it is not so much a single act as it is a state of enmeshment or bondage which keeps us estranged from God despite our yearning for communion with God.

Recommendations for Reading: Beale, GK,  We Become What We Worship: A Biblical Theology of Idolatry, Meadors, Edward P, Idolatry and the Hardening of the Heart: A Study in Biblical Theology

Ransomware Strikes Stillsong!!

It is probably not the common lot of hermits to be struck by Eastern European terrorists but this week it happened here at Stillsong. On Tuesday my laptop became infected with a virus known as CryptoWall 2.0, a form of malware known as "ransomware." That means that all of my files (documents, pictures, music, etc) have been encrypted with a two part code key. One key was left on my computer but to unlock or decrypt the files takes the second key as well. One is required to PAY the terrorists to get this second key --- though of course there is no guarantee that a key would truly be forthcoming much less that it would not unlock and unleash some other virus or Trojan horse, etc! (Besides, one DOES have to HAVE the money, which I do not! Neither do I have the inclination to pay, however.) What I see on my computer when I try to open documents is a clear list of the documents in whichever folder I open (100's of them!); they show up fine and the list is pristine and promising. But when I click on a file Word tells me the file is unreadable. If I persist beyond this error message Word opens the document window with editing tool icons, lists of recent documents, etc, but the main window in the frame, the window where the document should be is grey. Nothing shows up there at all. Meanwhile my access to dropbox, etc is blocked so files there are inaccessible on this same computer. (The contents of storage options like Dropbox are accessible from other computers and the files are apparently fine --- though I have read there is danger in the virus taking over such storage options too.)

So here is the deal. . . after speaking to a technician at a company that does virus removal and disinfection and unsuccessfully trying one of the Spyware solutions they use for a computer in safe mode the files that were infected are a complete loss! The computer itself can be saved, the HD reformatted, the OS and other programs reinstalled but everything else on that computer is lost. Of course, many of those files are backed up, either on an external HD or in cloud storage. While I may have lost some recent writing (or, more likely, some from a couple of years ago) I am not apt to have lost a whole book, for instance, nor the work from my Rule (done over a period of years) or even many of the articles I have written. I am relatively okay in all of this, relatively unscathed. But really, at this point I don't know how much writing has been lost, nor how much other stuff either. That part of things makes my stomach go a little queasy with the uncertainty.

And, though I am relatively okay in all of this, I am also angry! You see, I am careful in my use of the computer. I do NOT click on unknown links or download suspicious materials. I have clicked on popups representing themselves as Java or Adobe for instance and announcing it is time to upgrade or that an upgrade is available; as far as I can tell, that is how my computer got infected. (That means I will not do that any more; instead I will check with the program's creators directly on their own website and see if it is time for an upgrade.) The anti-virus computer technician I spoke to said that one family had been away on vacation and when they returned their computer was ruined! The point is one does not need to be doing anything dangerous or reckless, or even anything at all for this virus to gain entry and, in a short time, ravage through your system. Similarly I use well-known anti-virus software which I trust but this virus apparently can sneak in under the radar. Even in safe mode an anti-virus program may be prevented from doing its work (as was the case with my own computer today).

How people can do such a thing is beyond me. Greed, of course; it's all about money but the level of sociopathy required is startling. I heard several stories from the technician about lost libraries of music, years of writing, etc as he spoke of cyber warfare and this new war which is worse than the "cold war".  All of that work still exists. It has not been changed or corrupted but the key to unlock/decrypt and look at it or play it is in some criminal's hands in Russia or Eastern Europe and will stay there until the desired ransom is extorted by those same thieves. Of course the lesson is a simple one: BACKUP everything! Do it regularly. flash drives, external hard drives, cloud storage, whatever it takes! Corollaries exist too: always check before clicking on a link or popup, even if you have clicked on the same (?) popup before. Use the websites instead if you can. This particular virus is a really nasty one (I have been told a number of times by people fighting it!).

One interesting thing all this occasioned for me was my first ever "report to the FBI"! I did indeed report the infection and how I thought it had been contracted and though I don't expect a response beyond the acknowledgement the complaint was received, it was still kind of "cool" as well as not-so-cool to be contacting the FBI with something like this.

God Humbles us by Raising Us Up

[[Dear Sister Laurel, I have a friend who attributes every bad thing that happens to her to the will of God. She claims that God humbles us and that sometimes he "brings us very low indeed" through all kinds of catastrophes, persecutions, and disasters. Somehow this humiliation is supposed to move the person away from sin and even let them make reparation for sin. It helps them to deal with pride and other things, but I admit that I don't really understand it. Surely God is not One who teaches lessons in this way; surely God does not will disasters and catastrophes in our lives! What kind of God would that really be? And yet, what else might be the source of unremitting tragedies and disasters in my friend's life? Is there any way to help her let go of the theology she has embraced? She reads your blog by the way.]]

God Humbles Himself and Raises Us Up:

Thanks for the question. Let me assure and reassure you both of my prayers in this situation then. I will keep both you and your friend in prayer. I admit, I do not believe that God wills catastrophes and disasters. I don't believe God humbles us by bringing us low in pain and torment. I don't accept that evil of any sort is the work or will of God. You see, God has a much more effective way of humbling us and "bringing us low". (Note the difference in the word here; humbling and humiliation are different realities.) He does so by loving us, by reminding us how precious we are to him, how there is nothing we must or even can do to change that. God humbles us by asking us to set aside all of our own preconceptions about God, our own autonomous goals and projects, our own brief forays into the world of power and influence, of status and prestige for God's own Kingdom, God's own Lordship, God's own projects and commissions. In effect God says I love you with an inalienable, exhaustive, and unconditional love; I want the best for you; you will have that by serving me; you will serve me by letting me love you and treat you as infinitely precious. This is a humbling which raises up, not a humiliation which demeans even as it brings torment and catastrophe in its wake.

In yesterday's first reading from Paul's letter to the Philippians we listened to the great Pauline kenotic hymn: God empties himself to create the world; God empties himself even further by taking on sin-stained and broken human existence (flesh) out of love for us and commitment to the coming of the Kingdom. He empties himself by accepting death even death on a cross (that is, sinful, godless death) and he does all of this so that one day all might be redeemed, reconciled, and God might be all in all. In none of this is there a sense that God's work is inadequate or that reparation for sin is something you or I must or even can make. God reveals his very nature in all of these ways, but especially in Christ via the Incarnation, passion, and resurrection. These events are not contrary to God's nature. They are the paradoxical way he exercises his divinity --- not as something to be grasped at but as something lived for and freely given to others so that they might share God's life and he theirs.


Now, it is true that God's victory over sin and death is not complete. We experience relative godlessness in many ways for God is not yet all in all. I wrote about this just recently. Sin and death, chaos and catastrophe are still present and effective in our world but not in the same way they were before or apart from the Christ Event. They have been defeated in an ultimate way and no longer have ultimate power. They will never be the bottom line (or the final word or final silence) in our world or our lives and because they cannot be these things, they have lost much of the power they had to frighten, control, and destroy. God's love has proven more powerful. That is the new bottom line, the new and definitive last word we so needed to hear. God's love has penetrated the deepest darkness imaginable and has raised Jesus to new life; it has subsequently taken humanity into itself in the Ascension. It has entered into the unexpected and even the unacceptable (the literally godless) place and established the truth of the hope that one day the victory of God over sin and death will be complete and God will be all in all.

God's Justice is Neither Distributive nor Retributive

But what we must also hear in all of this is that God's justice is NOT retributive. He does not overcome sin by punishment but by love. He does not demand we pay the price for sin, whether that which besets us or that which we commit as a symptom of the sin that besets us. The price paid for sin is God's own price, the price God himself pays; God gives himself so that things may be set right, so that justice may be accomplished. He quite literally loves death and sin out of existence just as he does with nothingness and chaos in creating all that is. Not least, he does so by taking death within his own life without being destroyed by it, but (when the Christ Event is seen from another perspective) he also does so by transforming godless reality into a sacrament of his presence among us. He does this in the world at large, he does this in our own hearts, he does it in his own heart of hearts. God's love is a love that does justice; it destroys sin and death and the demeaning violence associated with these and replaces them with God's own love and life in abundance. Wherever this happens, and to whatever extent it occurs, the Kingdom of God has arrived and we have a new heaven and a new earth which one day will be a single seamless reality.

Of course, we must allow ourselves to be loved in this way, sinners though we are. We cannot instead make ourselves judge, jury and executioner in this matter. Human beings mainly think of justice in retributive and distributive senses. We think in terms of giving others what they deserve or of exacting (retributive) punishment in the name of "rehabilitation" for instance. We even project such notions of justice onto God so that God becomes the one who punishes us for our sin, demands reparation for it (impossible though that would be -- in this Anselm was surely correct!), gives us only what we truly deserve, etc. The God of Jesus Christ, however, does not think or act in these terms, and for this reason one of the things we must let go of, one of the bits of "dying to self" we must accomplish (so to speak) involves our renunciation of the idea of a God who exacts retribution or reparation from us for sin. Again, it is humbling to think that there is nothing we can do to "make things up" to God. It is humbling to be faced with a love which is eternal,  inalienable, and unconditional. But this is the humility Christianity calls for and it is the foundation for everything else in Christian life.

This is the source of real contrition. When we realize that the only good we do is the result of a grace we can never earn while the evil we do is the result of needing to justify ourselves (which includes the need to punish ourselves or refuse God's free gift of love), we are empowered to repent, to let God be God, to accept God's love even more fully and to hand it on to others who are as helpless to help themselves as we are. The turn from self to God in this matter is the essence of conversion. We let go of the various idols we have created for ourselves (or been given by others): the God of vengeance, of course, but also the God of a justice different than one rooted in unconditional love. We allow our minds and hearts to be remade in the name of THIS merciful God, the God who empties himself and suffers for us so that sin might be healed rather than asking us to suffer in reparation for sin.

The Source of the Catastrophes and Disasters:


I don't know the immediate source of the catastrophes in your friend's life except to point in a general (and less immediate) way to sin and death, which, because of the many ways human beings choose that which is not of God, are powers still at work in our world. As Bonhoeffer pointed out during his struggle with Nazism, and as I have posted here before, [[ Not everything that happens is the will of God, but inevitably nothing that happens does so outside the will of God.]] It becomes crucial that your friend not blame God for things which are destructive or personally harmful. She must understand that there are powers and principalities still at work in this world in which God is not yet all in all. Similarly, she must understand that attributing evil to God, suggesting that God demands retribution or reparation for sin from us, substitutes an idol for the real God revealed in the Christ Event. That way would produce a terribly dark and deadly spiral in a person's life --- a spiral in which the Holy Spirit is actually rendered powerless to redeem the situation. Not only would such a position make of God a kind of Golem, (or, as one friend suggested, a Mafia Godfather kind of figure), but it would make the person who saw God in these terms far less open to the message of the Gospel of unconditional love and mercy. It would also cause the person to be open to attitudes and acts of self-sabotage and other forms of capitulation to or collaboration with the powers of sin and death in the name of a false piety.

I hope your friend trusts and listens to you, especially to your own knowledge of God because to be honest I  don't believe you will be able to get through to her otherwise. I also expect this to take time and real patience on your part. You are asking her to let go of an entire "theological" vision and to embrace a very different one --- one where she is not a victim and where the meaning in her life does not come from victimhood. Let me be clear, you (or I, in any case) use the name God in a vastly different way than your friend apparently does. You say the same sounds (God, love, justice, dying to self, conversion, humility, etc) but signify antithetically different things by them. Moreover, the God your friend believes in allows her to blame God for things which may truly be her own fault or at least the result of choices she has made which collude with death and chaos.

The degree of humility and self-emptying required of her for letting go of all of this is immense. The grace of God is present seeking to empower and heal her in this, but she seems caught (trapped or bound) in a way which reminds me of what Scripture calls the sin against the Holy Spirit. In that sin the person cannot be forgiven, not because God withholds it (he does not), but because they can no longer hear (or they otherwise refuse to ask for) the graced word of forgiveness God makes present there. When the word justice, for instance, speaks to us of retribution and the demand for personal reparation rather than of a Divine love that is entirely sufficient and sets everything to rights (thus bringing heaven to earth) then the Holy Spirit has been rendered mute and powerless by our own deafness.

Choosing Life, not death: The choice of humility rather than humiliation, victory instead of victimhood:

Unfortunately it is possible to find older theologies of reparation and retribution that support your friend in her victim stance. These tend to be psychologically and theologically discredited today. Today when we read the Scripture about "making up what is lacking in Christ's sufferings/cross" we understand that Paul is referring to allowing God's love and the new life of resurrection and ascension to fill and transform us. That work still needs to be done and if we don't allow it through the grace of God, it will not happen. The Christ Event changed reality; God can now be found in the unexpected and even the unacceptable place --- but knock, call, invite, attempt to seduce us, etc, as God might, if we are really saying yes to a different God, if we are embracing the Golem that accompanies and grounds our ultimate victimhood, then we are rendering God's Word void and making Christ's Cross of no account. It must always be remembered that Christianity is built on a singular victimhood embraced by God so that NONE OF US would EVER have to be victims again!!! Especially, we would never need to be the victims of a vindictive God whose idea of justice is that of human retribution-writ-large!!

The choices before your friend are those of humility versus humiliation or victory instead of victimhood. We are humbled and made victors (raised up to new life) in Christ by a God who loves us without condition or limit as Jesus' Abba does; we are humiliated and made victims (cast down into the depths) by a "God" (Golem) who demands retribution and reparation for our sin and thus sends catastrophes our way regularly. Here is another version of the choice put before us during Lent: Choose life not death!!! Today,  it must be said clearly, victimhood is truly the way of the world, the way of "worldliness" in all its tragedy and distortion; those who reject that which is worldly, and choose instead the Kingdom where God is sovereign, reject victimhood and any false theology that tends to make them victims rather than victors. It is my sincerest prayer that your friend can find the courage to reject the ways of the world and embrace those of the Kingdom and that you might have some small place in helping this occur!

I wish you both God's own peace, hesychia (stillness), quies, shalom!

Questions about Spiritual Direction

[[Dear Sister, you do spiritual direction, don't you? When someone speaks of spiritual accompaniment does this mean the relationship is mutual? What I am asking is if I seek a director to accompany me, does she expect me to accompany her on her spiritual journey? If a person advertises through the parish that they offer spiritual direction as a form of "spiritual friendship" does this mean the relationship is one of peers or is it one of superior to inferior? That's not stated very well I guess but I think you understand what I mean. I would like to be friends with my director. I would like us to accompany one another. I would like to meet for lunch somewhere and talk about spiritual matters like equals. Why shouldn't I want this? Two other questions. My experiences in the spiritual life are kind of unusual. How do I find a director who has also had such experiences? Also, if a director charges for her accompaniment what do I do if I think that is inappropriate?]]

Yes, I do spiritual direction and the word accompaniment is one I use a lot to describe something of the relationship. What it means is that the director accompanies the directee in aspects of her spiritual journey with God. A person comes seeking direction of someone experienced in and a regular practitioner of prayer so that she (the director) may assist the directee in discerning and responding to the movement of the Holy Spirit in her life. The SD relationship is ordinarily a long-term one, is not oriented to problem-solving --- though it will also do this from time to time --- and does not work according to the transference/counter-transference dynamic which drives therapy or counselling relationships. In fact, it eschews letting such a dynamic drive the relationship or the growth which occurs there. For this reason among others it is a relationship which is often misunderstood in a culture so familiar with therapeutic relationships and the dynamics which dominate there.

On Friendships and Soul Friends:

While a Spiritual director may indeed develop a friendship with a directee, especially over a period of years, the term "friend" as in "soul friend" or Anam cara, for instance, does not refer to friendship in the ordinary sense. The director is a friend whose focus is the relationship between the directee and God, a friend whose focus is the directee's heart where this relationship is centered and which is the truest core of the directee. She serves to guide the person's journey into this realm of the heart, that sacred place where God bears witness to Godself, and stands in silence and prayer, watching and listening as the journey takes place. Ordinarily, therefore, the director tries to convey a reverence for the person's self and intimate journey; this implies she maintain some conscious distance, especially in the early stages of the relationship. Friendship in the common sense is not the aim of spiritual direction and it can actually throw off the focus of the work (namely, the much more central  and personally constitutive relationship which exists between the directee and God) if it becomes the aim or even an aim of the relationship.

Personally, I have dealt with a number of persons who expect (or hope) to become close friends, and especially in the beginning of the relationship, wonder why I am not sharing my own story, my own prayer experiences, my own concerns, etc. At this point they really have no sense how profound the sharing of SD actually is, nor how deeply they will be asked to go into their own hearts so that the focus can truly be their relationship with God. This initial expectation or hope is pretty normal, especially in someone who has not participated in a formal SD relationship before. In time they usually come to understand that my refusal to change the dynamics of meetings in this specific way serves to facilitate their own focus on this relationship, and more exclusively on their own growth in prayer and human wholeness and holiness. When the person refuses or is unable to accept that the SD relationship is not one of friendship in the common sense it usually means we will not be able to continue working together. (Whether or not a more usual form of friendship subsequently develops via another avenue is another question.) Similarly, when a person who has come for spiritual direction expects to accompany the director and persists in this expectation, the relationship is destined for failure. People come to a SD for many reasons, some thinking it's a good place to discuss books and ideas or to talk "about God" in a general sense, some in search of a friend and others in place of a needed therapist; none of these, however, is what spiritual direction is really about and a good director will not allow the relationship to be redrawn in these ways.

The Intimacy of Direction:

There is a profound intimacy involved in spiritual direction, and a degree and form of love which is very special, but it may well preclude friendship in the ordinary sense except in certain circumstances. For instance, I have a couple of directees I have worked with for a number of years. They no longer live near here and we meet by skype these days except at regular points when they come to the Bay Area so we can meet face to face. This usually means that we will go to lunch first and talk about what's happening in our lives in a general way. Then we return to the hermitage and meet for spiritual direction per se. Yet, the period of meeting for direction is, by definition, not a period of equal sharing. I am there to listen in a specifically discerning way to both the directee and the Holy Spirit at work in the situation (and in myself), to suggest ways of moving forward, or to offer some resources for prayer based on what I hear. Sometimes I will share part of my own story if I think it can be helpful, but only if it seems it will be illustrative, etc.

Regarding mutual accompaniment: when two people are both mature in the spiritual life and have worked for some time with directors on their own, as well as done some direction themselves, mutual accompaniment can be something which is helpful and wonderfully enriching. The skills required are those one learns in accompanying and being accompanied over a period of years. Otherwise, however, the directee must remember (as I would remind you to remember) that the director is already working with a SD and often (at least occasionally) a supervisor as well. She already has someone accompanying her as Anam cara and is not looking for a directee to come in and take his/her place! If you, for instance, are looking for friends with whom you can discuss spirituality or theology, then there are other ways of seeking such persons out. It is more than a little presumptuous to contact a spiritual director for SD while expecting her to entrust her heart to you in the very same way --- even if you are an experienced and skilled director yourself. Neither, then will a director expect or encourage a directee to function as an accompanist to herself.

While I understand your difficulty with terms here (it is indeed hard to characterize the inequality along with the equality of the relationship without thinking in terms of superior and inferior polarities); but I think we must find ways to do this. The direction relationship is one between persons relating to one another in two different roles. The director and directee are equals in Christ and the director serves Christ and the directee with her time, her commitment, her prayer and her expertise. At the same time, she necessarily sets her own story, desires, and needs aside (including the desire or need for friendship in the usual sense if it exists) for the benefit of the directee and her relationship with Christ. Everything that occurs in SD must serve Christ and his desire to love and be loved by the directee and it must do so in a focused  and self-deferential way.

While some directees may want the relationship to be more like two violins playing the Bach double together, the work of direction makes the relationship more like that of a solo violin accompanied in her attempt to play Bach's A minor concerto with passion and integrity. In this situation the accompanist serves both the soloist and composer and/or the composition by stepping back. Her work requires a strong sense of what Bach wrote and what the soloist desires the music to be to reveal that fully. As accompanist she also needs technical virtuosity (and a psychological capacity) of a different kind than required in solo work; she may be a soloist in her own right, but in this situation she is there to facilitate the expression of a kind of union between artist and composer and/or composition. Her role is indispensable but unless she is able to work skillfully as an accompanist rather than someone playing a principal part of a duet, the entire theological dramaturgy will be damaged and the revelation that was meant to occur will be prevented or at least significantly impeded. Most directees come to understand such limitations on the director's part are part and parcel of a significant form of reverence and love.

On Unusual Experiences and Spiritual Direction:


The idea that a director needs to have had the very same experiences you have had, especially when these are unusual, in order to direct you is a common misconception. It is true that the director must be experienced in prayer, she must pray regularly, be under spiritual direction herself, and be open to meeting with a supervisor should something in her work with directees trouble her or trigger something in her. She should be experienced in a wide variety of forms of prayer including contemplative prayer, lectio divina, Divine Office, knowledgeable re Scripture, etc. She should be skilled in human psychology, knowledgeable regarding mystical prayer, and be able to gauge or discern whether something is of God or not, as well as skilled in finding ways to help facilitate the movement of the Holy Spirit in those situations which are, for the most part, not of God. She will also work to help and encourage the directee to draw wisdom from extraordinary experiences which are of God. In  every case she must be patient and grounded in the sense that God as Love-in Act is profoundly and, to some extent, inalienably present within the directee; she must be aware that this presence takes time to grow and reveal itself ---  just as a tiny mustard seed 1) is present despite its near invisibility (or similarity to other seeds) and 2) takes time to grow.


She must trust in the God who is profoundly present in the ordinary events of daily life, and be able to hear and respond to that presence; only then will she be able to assist a directee to do the same. Above all, she must be a person of hope who trusts in the grace of God whose power/love is made perfect in human weakness. She does NOT need to have had visions or other extraordinary experiences, nor does she need to have experienced serious or chronic illness (for instance) to listen with both compassion and empathy to the way these condition a person's spiritual life, but she does need to understand both the potential and the drawbacks of these realities in a spiritual life. While she should be open to the surprising ways God manifests Godself, she will be sensitive to the fruits of God's presence and activity and she will discern the nature of a directee's experiences on the basis of the fruit associated with them. Always she will seek to enhance the good fruit of prayer and find ways to allow the inauthentic to drop away or be rendered less compelling. Ordinarily the latter will happen as the former is facilitated.

On Payment for Direction:

If you have a problem with a director being paid on a fee-for-service basis I would suggest you speak to her and see why it is she accepts fees. You and others need to understand that SD in the Western Church, especially, is a ministry which requires training, education, supervision and regular work with a director; this means that even when it is carried on by religious it is often the primary way the individual helps support her extended religious family with many retired Sisters. Some religious communities will subsidize Sisters who do SD but this is less prevalent today than it once was. It is wonderful when a person can accept clients and work with them gratis --- I suspect most directors would love to be in this position --- but it is simply not possible for many spiritual directors today. Even so, most work on a sliding scale and accept at least some clients who cannot pay. Some of us even accept some form of barter, for instance. So long as the fees are reasonable, the scales can be worked out between director and directee and revised when the need arises, and the directee is assured of the director's care, competence, and experience, then the Scripture that should be kept in mind is probably, "The laborer is worthy of (her) hire."

Go Giants!!

[[Hi Sister Laurel, I just wondered if you are a baseball fan and if so, are you rooting for the Giants! Do you pray for them?]]

Well,  this is a new question! Unfortunately, I am not much of a baseball fan, though I like the game. But like most folks in the SF Bay Area I do root for home teams during important series. Given that tonight is the last (and seventh!) game of the World Series I am indeed rooting for the Giants (and may even watch the game), but, to be embarrassingly honest, I was not even sure when the World Series began. Had it not been for a friend in orchestra (who IS a big fan) and the fact that the Safeway sales clerks were wearing Giants' shirts this past week and more, I might still be ignorant of this.  Do I pray for the Giants? Well, no, not really and certainly not that they might win games or series. No. On the other hand, GO GIANTS!!

On Natural and Unnatural Deserts

[[Dear Sister Laurel, in your own life when you refer to "the desert" you are not referring to a geographical place then are you? I understand that Thomas Merton wrote about the unnatural solitudes of the slums. You have referred to that here several times. Did Thomas Merton also mean the desert of chronic illness? Is this a valid extrapolation from the Desert Fathers' and Mothers' flight to the physical or geographical desert? Shouldn't hermits be living in physical wildernesses like these hermits or like John the Baptist, Elijah, and others?]]

No, you are correct that I am not ordinarily referring to a geographical place when I speak of deserts though I must say that the geographical places we call deserts are wonderful symbols or paradigms of the internal realities associated with desert spirituality. Further, while I don't think Thomas Merton was referring to the desert of chronic illness with his comment about city slums, neither do I think he was necessarily excluding it. I am not sure he considered it directly. Merton's concern was the isolation brought about by poverty and the harsh landscape poverty created in terms of human potential, the need for distraction, and the yearning for meaning and a sense that one's life was of some real worth or value. He was concerned with contemporary environments which lead to boredom and futility (as well as enhancing our fear of these) and he was concerned with situating the hermit's life and witness in a central place where the terrors of desert existence defined in terms of these specific contemporary realities could be effectively dealt with. Chronic illness is one of those "desert experiences" which calls out in all of the ways any desert experience does. I don't recall Merton addressing this directly but I have no doubt he would have included it in his reference to the unnatural solitudes associated with urban slums and other settings as well had he considered it at all.

Your question about a valid extrapolation asks if it is alright to understand desert in this non-geographical way. This objection is one that some hermits today make regarding those of us who live in urban areas and not in a physical wilderness. There is some validity to their objection because the physical silence and external solitude of the physical desert is so very different from the relative solitude of an urban hermitage. When one visits the desert both the physical silence and external solitude are palpable realities. There is a depth to them which one can almost touch and taste and smell. They press on one's skin and call to one's heart seeking a response, an answering embrace of sorts. They constitute a living presence which is undisputed and awesome in and of itself. Further, these interlocking pieces of desert wilderness form a reality which only seems to deepen in the face of the odd noise, movement, or other distraction --- a characteristic which makes it not only awesome but terrifying to us. I can completely understand the objection of hermits who contend the unnatural solitudes of an urban area are discontinuous with the awesome natural solitudes of the desert. Still, I cannot completely agree with them, especially when they begin to argue urban hermits are not real hermits, or the unnatural solitudes of urban life and chronic illness, for instance are not real solitudes.

Because I have written about the nature of wilderness in the Scriptures I am going to refer you to one of those posts Hermits are desert Dwellers with the request that you check it and others under the label "desert spirituality".  In these posts I have pointed out that the real importance of the desert is as a place of meeting between a person whose poverty is writ large and the God whose merciful love transforms that poverty into the richness of adopted Sonship and Daughterhood. It is the place where one does battle with the demons of one's own heart and the world as well, the place where one consolidates the truth of one's identity in and for Love-in-Act --- or loses it entirely, whether in death or the various absurdities and insanities associated with human isolation.  If this understanding of wilderness or desert is the heart of the Scriptural understanding, and I have no doubt that it is, then geographical setting, while not unimportant, is not critical to our definition of "desert dweller". More important by far is the potential for meeting God created by an intense and profound experience of human poverty and impotence.

So, my answer to your last question is no, not necessarily. While physical solitude can help get us in touch with a sense of our smallness and need for God there are other situations and contexts which are every bit as huge and intransigent, every bit as humbling and existentially challenging, every bit as much authentic "deserts" as those the desert Fathers and Mothers fled to in order to really live an authentic  and edifying Christian life. In every case the stories of hermits' lives remind us that an external situation can allow and call for a response to the God who brings life out of death and meaning out of absurdity, but of itself it does not make one a hermit. Sometimes human poverty remains merely that. Sometimes the proffered grace of God remains unaccepted, unembraced, and rendered powerless to transform or make fruitful. Sometimes the desert crushes the would-be hermit and instead of an eremite we get a personally desiccated casualty of human weakness and the desert's inexorable power. Again, it is the heart of the notion of the eremite that they be desert flowers blooming in the midst of life's harshest realities through the grace of God. Wherever this happens we have authentic hermits and authentic desert spirituality.

I hope this is helpful.

On Making the Transition from Lone Person to Hermit and then Diocesan Hermit

[[Dear Sister, I have the impression that you did not choose the circumstances that eventually led you to become a hermit. I also get the impression that you stress that those circumstances weren't enough to make you a hermit or to discern a call to eremitical life. What was it that made the difference for you personally? Did your circumstances change? How did you make the transition from being a lone person to being a hermit "in some essential sense," as you put it, and then, a diocesan (Catholic) hermit who embraced not only an individual vocation but a place in fostering the eremitical vocation in the Church? Is this typical of diocesan hermits?]]

Wow, I am impressed! You have managed to summarize so much important stuff in a few sentences, some of it stuff I have not really written about directly here. Your impressions are spot on too. Add to that your questions are good ones and I have to give you kudos across the board! Thanks! But that being said, the question about making the transition from being a lone person to becoming a hermit in some essential sense is not an easy one to answer. That is true because it is not about any one thing that was helpful, but about a number of things which all came together to confirm a call to eremitical solitude. Anyway, great questions. Let me give them a shot!

No, I did not choose the circumstances which eventually led me to become a hermit. As an adult (and while still a Franciscan) I developed or manifested an adult form of  mixed seizure disorder (Epilepsy) which later proved to be both medically and surgically intractable. Coupled with that, probably because of injuries that occurred during seizures, I developed chronic pain, eventually diagnosed as Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy or (the preferred term these days) Complex Regional Pain Syndrome. Both conditions isolated me from others (including from Mass attendance, or contributions to parish and diocesan life), prevented me from pursuing the career I had been educated and trained for (mainly teaching systematic theology but some clinical pastoral work as well), and caused me some serious and extended questioning about the meaning and value of my life more generally. Today the seizure disorder is better controlled for several separate but mutually contributory reasons (including physical solitude and silence!) while the chronic pain remains a daily reality which requires medications and adjunct therapy "to keep the fire down." While this was enough to isolate me from others, including from the local faith community and most friends, you are correct that it was no where near enough to conclude, 1) I was actually called to become a hermit, nor (much less!) 2) that I was actually a hermit in some essential sense! A transition was required!

Making the Transition from Lone Person to Eremite:

The first real shift occurred in my prayer. Over time I began to develop a more contemplative prayer life and I began to trust that more and more. By the early 80's besides my own doctors who continued to try to control both the seizures and the pain, I was working regularly with a spiritual director and was developing the tools I needed to work through the various bits of healing required by having my life sidetracked by illness and injury. At the same time she helped me begin to trust the various ways God was working in my life and I began to imagine this thing called eremitical life as a result of reading canon 603, which had been published in October of 1983, and then Merton's Contemplation in a World of Action and LeClerq's Alone With the Alone. Merton's work especially fired my imagination here. More and more my work with my director had to do with essential wholeness in the face of disability and my work with doctors became less about control of seizures and more about dealing with disability. While I continued medications, etc, for the medical stuff, the work I was doing with my director became far more important in freeing me to embrace life and become open to seeing the good God would bring out of the situation.

I had begun to experiment with living as a hermit in a conscious way and it began to be the focus of reading, discernment, research, and so forth. Early on in this process I began to write for publication (mainly Review for Religious) so it became clear that as a context for my life eremitism of some sort was truly fruitful in these terms and would lead me to contribute to the life of others and to that of the Church more generally.

Within this context then several things happened. Among them, I embraced a contemplative prayer life marked out by monastic regularity and liturgy, I undertook the lifelong work of regular spiritual direction in a focused way which led to my own increasing and essential wellness in spite of disability, I began to understand the importance of a vocation to be ill within the Church as potentially a way of proclaiming the Gospel of God (whose power is made perfect in weakness!) with a special vividness. This meant that I had begun to see my life and prayer as an important opportunity to make God manifest to others where in the past I would not have seen disability as anything other than an obstacle to a life of such significance.  In time I began to consider and write about Chronic illness as vocation and, for some relative few, as a potential call to eremitical life. Additionally then, I began to understand the main focus of my prayer as being there for God's own sake; solitude took on a distinctly communal hue, the silence of solitude assumed a more Eastern and Desert Elders cast of quies or hesychasm, while ministry to others seemed the natural expression of the compassion empowered by the silence of solitude. Thus, over time I also came to understand the terms of canon 603 radically differently than I had in 1983. All of this growth and integration was spurred by reflection on the eremitical life outlined in Canon 603 and expanded on in other texts.

Throughout these years (@1983-1995+) then, my life shifted from being mainly about myself and my own disability along with the lost opportunities or potential associated with disability and grew in this new perspective. The focus on the illness, and all it brought in its wake had been necessary for a time but now it needed to become more of a subtext in my life -- even as it continued to bring a degree of pathos and gravitas to my life. That is the shift that occurred during this period.) It became very clear that whether I eventually lived my life as a lay hermit or continued pursuing perpetual profession as a diocesan hermit,  eremitism was truly the vocational path which made my own life fruitful and other-centered. Thus, I continued to reflect on and research canon 603; I did so within a Camaldolese context now because I understood the threefold good of the Camaldolese (community, solitude, outreach or evangelization) to be a dynamic expression of the very best that eremitical life could be, not only for hermits but for the whole Church and world-at-large as well.

In other words, eremitical life began to be not only the context of a life of essential wholeness and communion with God which embraced disability and transformed it into an opportunity to proclaim the Gospel with my life, but it was the vocational pathway which made essential wholeness as well as real generosity and concern for others possible. It drove my reading and my theology to some extent (though my theology, which centered on the cross in Paul and Mark, supported this vocational pathway at every point), and it challenged me physically and spiritually to become both more truly solitary (in an eremitical sense) and contemplative as well as more open to community. In short, it engaged me on every level in a constructive way; it made me more compassionate and capable of love, more genuinely dependent on the grace of God for the meaning and shape of my life, and, while it did not bring physical healing, it deprived illness of the power to define, fragment, and dominate my life and over time would even make a gift of disability and limitations. It is what allowed me to eventually write here:

[[In the power of the Spirit and from the perspective of the Kingdom --- it is all of a piece:  Mountaintop experiences and years in the desert; a power made perfect in weakness; a  bit of human brokenness and poverty made a gift to others by the whole-making grace of God; mute isolation  transfigured into the rich communion and communicative silence of solitude; a life redeemed and enriched by love. It is all of a piece ---  epilepsy and ecstasy. I am grateful to have learned that. In fact, I am grateful to have needed and been called to learn that!]] Ecstasy and Epilepsy: It is all of a Piece

When I look back at the main stages this journey required it involved (in a pretty simplified form) movement from 1) being a lone or isolated person who merely imagined what being a hermit might mean to 2) being a hermit as the Church herself understands the term, and finally to 3) being a hermit who lives the life in the name of the Church. Each stage was either preceded or accompanied by significant and entirely necessary theological preparation and spiritual formation. This process has taken 31 years so far and exploring the last stage, both in terms of communion with God and the ecclesial implications of the vocation as I continue to grow personally, will no doubt occupy the rest of my life. I am grateful to God for what (he) has done; God is indeed a master story teller who, from the perspective of absolute futurity, weaves amazingly coherent tapestries with the most inadequate and broken threads!

Transition to Diocesan Eremitical Life:

The last question you ask has to do with the last piece of transition, namely embracing canon 603 life in a way which allowed me to be concerned not only with my own vocation, but with the eremitical tradition itself and diocesan eremitical life as a piece of that living reality. I pursued canon 603 profession beginning in 1985 or so and continued doing so right through perpetual profession in 2007; this is a complicated story and there is no reason to detail it here or now. What is important is that until a few years prior to admission to perpetual profession in 2007 and the years immediately after that, I did not have a particularly strong sense that I was part of a living eremitical tradition, much less that I would have some (small but very real) place in handing on or nurturing that tradition.

Oblature with the Camaldolese certainly was important here but I found that with perpetual canonical profession one comes to know that one has been gifted with rights and obligations beyond baptism; this sense developed especially as people asked questions about the difference between private and public vows or between personal dedication to God and public consecration by God. The difference between validating one's isolation and allowing God to redeem it so that it is transfigured into eremitical solitude was another huge piece of my developing sense of the gift and obligation held in my own eremitical life. It also developed for me as I became more sure I not only understood canon 603 but embodied it in my own way.

Something similar happened with regard to the Camaldolese charism as I moved from understanding it intellectually to having the sense I was a living expression of it and the dynamic within the threefold good which is so characteristic of it. (My life in my parish during the past 8 years contributed greatly to this bit of internalization and integration; in fact it would be hard to overstate its importance here.) A final piece of all this, and one which is not yet solidified within me has to do with my own Franciscanism and where that actually fits. You see, St Francis lived as a hermit for a time and wrote a Rule for hermits which is pretty different from the monastic approaches to eremitical life. I have the sense that my own Franciscanism is stronger than I realized and I am freer to explore that now that I have not only understood but internalized the Camaldolese charism in a foundational way.

I don't know how this Franciscan piece of things will actually shake out but it is part of my own history and life which I am currently examining more closely; in one way or another it will be another piece of becoming responsible for the living tradition we call eremitical life in the Church. It seems to me this concern with the vitality of the tradition itself is really a normal culmination of the movement in my adult life. I moved from an active and largely other-centered life of ministry and preparation for ministry, to a life isolated by chronic illness and concerned with making sense of itself; from there my life shifted again to a solitary and contemplative one which, through the context of eremitical life, was empowered to be lived for God and others in the silence of solitude. Next my life shifted to one which consciously embraced and reflected the place of the Camaldolese charism in achieving this movement, and finally, it involved canonically and publicly embracing eremitical life more generally as a gift of the Holy Spirit to the entire Church and world. Many things mediated the grace of God and brought me to embrace eremitical life; it is this vital if rare and fragile tradition which has made a gift of my life. I am responsible for it both morally and legitimately (in law) --- a responsibility I accept with real joy and not a little awe.

Is this Typical of Diocesan Hermits?

To be honest I don't know if there is a "typical story" for diocesan hermits. I do know that a number of us contend with disability and chronic illness of various types and severity. I also know that none of those with whom I am acquainted believe it is enough to be chronically ill or disabled and isolated in the way this can bring about to conclude one has a vocation to eremitical life! Still, over time each of us discerned that eremitical life created the potential for significantly meaningful and fruitful lives when our illnesses militated against that. We each recognize that eremitical life allows us to live an authentic religious life which is not self-centered even while it requires signifcant physical solitude. Moreover my sense is that each of us has come to an essential wholeness and even holiness in which illness is deprived of its capacity to define and dominate our lives despite the symptoms that trouble us every single day. (This is one of the reasons I personally have very little tolerance for self-labeled "Catholic hermits" for whom eremitical life is little more than an opportunity to justify and wax endlessly about their own "God-willed" isolation and unrelenting physical problems.) Here as in everything in Christian life the truth is, "By their fruits ye shall know them!" --- that reflection of what God has done in one's life in the desert is, perhaps, the only really typical (and compelling!) piece of any genuine hermit's story!

I hope these answers are helpful. It is unlikely I will write about some parts of this again very soon. Still, if I have been unclear or raised additional questions, I hope you will get back to me with those.