“Order your soul; reduce your wants; live in charity; associate in Christian community; obey the laws; trust in Providence.” St. Augustine
“Reduce your wants.” Now there’s a rule to live by. I can only think, however, that it needs a bit of a reminder beside it, like – “Reduce your wants; recognize, acknowledge, and celebrate your haves.”
“Order your soul; reduce your wants; live in charity; associate in Christian community; obey the laws; trust in Providence.” St. Augustine
Who doesn’t love a good set of rules to live by, even a set of rules that is some 1,600 years old. (I guess “time-tested” would be preferable to “old.”)
“Order your soul” seems like a tough one to start with. First I have to identify my soul, then the contents, then put them in the proper order. My on-line dictionary defines the “soul” as the spiritual or non-material part of a human being. With that in mind, as I read “order your soul,” what comes to mind is the more colloquial “get your s$#t together,” “s$#t” being not so much “tangible stuff” as the intangibles. In this (here I go mixing saints) what comes to mind is the concept of “disordered affections” of which St. Ignatius wrote. “Disordered affections” are, as one commentator wrote, not generally when we choose bad things, but when we put the good things in the wrong order. Or, as he wrote, when “we make good things god things.” There is nothing wrong with liking a sports team, alcohol, work, fishing, etc., but if I set those up ahead of God, if they start to control my life, then I engage in idolatry, so to speak, and I have a problem – a disordered affection.
How is my soul ordered?
Too often I think of God as a vending machine – put something in, get something out. Heck, I suppose sometimes I don’t even put anything in, but as I walk by I look to see if by chance something has come out of the machine for me to take. Yet it occurs to me that merely possessing the object that comes out of the “machine” is not the point. Having a quality, a blessing, a skill is of little use unless and until it is exercised. I could be a great painter, but have to pick up the brush and paint. I have to do something with what I have, with what God gives me, otherwise the gift is of no real value and the chain ends there.
All that to say that merely having is only part of the story. What I do with what I have is the rest.
Listening to Don Williams (along with Willie, perhaps the last of the living country singers worthy of only one name) recently I came across these lyrics from The Answer, a song of his I had not heard before. I can’t determine who wrote the song:
The more I learn, the more I learn how little I know. But I’m close to understanding just how far I have to go. We give our hearts. We take our chances. And know the fool ain’t the one with all the questions. To tell the truth, its someone who believes they have the answers.
It occurs to me that I am about there also, “there” being “close to understanding just how far I have to go.”
“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens….” Ecclesiastes 3:1
I have a client/boss retiring today after twenty-eight years with her company. I have worked with her all of those twenty-eight years. Two thoughts came to mind. Well, more than those two came to mind, but among them were these two. First, it occurred to me that I have been involved in or attended a lot of events lately related to retirement and death. If I thought about that much it would certainly make sense to me, but I am choosing not to do so. Second, it occurred to me how little I respect time. As I contemplate that I realize that what I focus on are events in time, those things that are talked about in Ecclesiastes 3:2-8:
“a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace”
I focus on those events as they occur, worry about them occurring, or fret that they did/did not occur. Somehow I fail to see that “time” is involved in all of those events. The one constant throughout that passage is that word – “time.” Those events are markers of time, but time is the constant. In that sense, time has its meaning and its own intrinsic value, whether a second, a minute, an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year, or twenty-eight years. Time has meaning.
Photo taken in Puerto Vallarta late last year.
“Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.” Bill Watterson – Calvin & Hobbes
I sigh deeply and relate to Calvin’s comment to Hobbes with some frequency. I mean, if you were capable of building a vessel that could transport you across the universe over a course of light years, and then, having gotten in the neighborhood of earth, observed a bit of what is going on here as this mass orbits the sun, would you want to stop and strike up a conversation? I fear extra-terrestrials see the earth as the (warning: dated societal reference) Stuckey’s of the universe, and the ETs are not hankering for a pecan log roll.
Of course, who knows. There’s a chance we are the best the universe has to offer.
Very little brings me the sense of renewal to me as well as opening day of baseball season (yesterday). Each team opens the season looking at 162 games of possibility. The grass is green, the uniforms crisp. Batting helmets are not stained with pine tar. Each team starts off with the same record and anything can happen – and does. This year in particular that is more than a saying, a year following the Cubs ending their 108 year drought by winning the World Series. Opening day, when anything is possible!
Of course, in life, we get 365 Opening Days each year, sometimes 366! As the hymn (and the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens) notes, each morning, this morning, “has broken, like the first morning.” Today, it occurs to me more than ever to be open to its possibilities.
“Inherited Responsibility”
Reading from Mary Oliver’s Upstream she reports hearing a phrase spoken By Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. The last two names are connected to the New York Vanderbilts and to the namesake Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. In other words, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was doing alright financially. Anyway, Oliver wrote of hearing Ms. Whitney use the phrase “inherited responsibility” and notes that she (Oliver) “slipped it from the air and put it into my own pocket.” I guess I have appropriated it onto my computer screen via Oliver’s pocket and book.
As Oliver notes in Upstream we may not all inherit financial wealth as Ms. Whitney, but all of us inherit something, or perhaps more appropriate, some things. We may inherit a set of values or a way of thinking. We may inherit a mess. If nothing else, we inherit our surroundings, this orb rotating around the sun. Significantly, though, we all inherit something different. As Oliver puts it:
“Thus, the great ones (my great ones, who may not be the same as your great ones) have taught me – to observe with passion, to think with patience, to live always caringly.”
In the end, it occurs to me that the issue is less what I have inherited than what I do with what I have inherited.
It was enough to make me stop in my tracks as it caught my eye walking through the office yesterday — the Time magazine cover – “Is Truth Dead?” That is, of course, what a good magazine cover is supposed to do. It worked. I stopped and read the article, and thought about it long enough to look into some commentary on it after I got home. This is perhaps my favorite commentary from Jacquelynn Floyd:
“Truth isn’t dead. You can’t kill gravity, you can’t kill science. Objective reality exists, whether you choose to believe it or not. The cold universe of facts doesn’t care.
But truth is taking an awful beating. It’s staggering and gasping for breath; its brow is furrowed with dismay that it has turned out to be so easily ignored.”
Floyd is correct. Truth remains, and it always will be. Yes, we will, always will, have lively debate about what is and is not true regarding some issues, but that doesn’t diminish the reality that there are truths. Even if “easily ignored” they remain truths. I am reminded of something we regularly used to (and still do occasionally) tell our kids – Pretending something is not true doesn’t make it not true.
It occurs to me that the nuns of my youth, though wrong on some things, were correct on this front. There is value to truth. There always will be value in truth, even if and when it is ignored. No, truth is not dead. But Floyd is correct, it “is taking an awful beating.” Lord, please help me from becoming one of the perpetrators, the co-conspirators in the death of truth. And if I may be so bold, help me step in, where appropriate, as appropriate, and give truth some protection.
It occurs to me... 