Brief history of Catholic monastic spirituality:
Monks alone in desert (going crazy), monks together in
deserted places (Benedict), mendicant orders roaming world (Francis and Dominic),
men and women organized for good works (Jesuits and Ursulines). Constant practice
existing in all these movements: mortification—afflicting the flesh, ranging
from penitential virtuosity (spiked chains under your clothing) to the everyday
mortification of fasting and abstinence from meat.
Then came Vatican II, fasting and abstinence became optional,
optional led to extinction.
Every Lent we hope to reverse the extinction. We look for some
way besides fasting to observe the season. Let us go back to the basics.
Why practice mortification?
Old spiritual writers quoted I John 2: humans suffer from lust
of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. Lust of the eyes meant
yearning for material stuff. Pride of life meant wanting to disobey authority.
Tactics against those two are hard to operationalize. Lust of the flesh—ah,
here you have something to get your teeth into. Fast, wear hair shirts, sleep
on boards. Authors who told the stories of saints competed to describe the
means their saints used to mortify the flesh—one gets the sense that there was
a spirit of conspicuous consumption operating—my saint is penitentially more
drastic than your saint. The saints themselves were surely less competitive,
and the readers of the stories not likely to imitate the virtuosos.
In the United States fish on Friday was a badge of persecuted
identity in a predominantly Protestant nation, not always a way to come closer
to God.
“Come closer to God.” Here is the deeper reason for
mortification. When you voluntarily frustrate your desires you become more
aware of your limits—you are a creature, which makes you think about a Creator.
Mortification was meant to open our eyes to God. When we abandoned
mortification, we lost an effective way of experiencing God.
Recovery in our day.
People around the world have been undergoing terrible
suffering, made even worse by the pandemic. Climate change has made refugees
out of millions of people when the rains no longer water their farmland. Poverty
breeds violence, in the form of movements like Al Qaeda and ISIS, which magnify
suffering.
There are things that wealthier nations can do to feed the
hungry and give drink to the thirsty, not to mention freeing the imprisoned. But
nations do not act without public support. In our country we have a leader who
retains power by appealing to the worse instincts of the public. Ignorance of
conditions beyond our borders is one of our worst instincts. Thus the leader can
demonize immigrants and get crowds to cheer “Build that wall!”
No one who follows international news can be ignorant of the
plight of people beyond our borders. Catholics who use abortion as the only
reason to vote for politicians who build walls and demonize immigrants cannot
be sensitive to all the conditions that strangle life. My sense is that such
Catholics are blissfully ignorant. Blissful ignorance needs to be cured by
mortification.
Mortification for our time is paying attention to the world
beyond our life space. It is watching, reading, listening to what is happening
to people around the world. Doing that is uncomfortable. The 2020 hair shirt is
informing ourselves and, when God calls, embracing respectful and patient
political discussion and even action.
Surely the Lord calls us to this. God did not give us
democracy so we could eat, drink and be merry. What we do to the least of our
sisters and brothers we do to the Lord. When we ignore the wounded person beside
the road and pass on our way, we are not neighbors to that person. When we do
not care whether our leaders feed hungry people, we become the ones who will
hear “what you did not do to the least of my children, you did not do to me.”
Mortification was never easy. Staying informed about the
plight of others is not easy. Vatican II did not abolish mortification—opening our
hearts more to God. All of us need to use the means appropriate to our time.
