Fat Man's Misery, Purgatory Chasm, Sutton MA

I took my girls to a place called Purgatory Chasm and had a metaphor experience.  Metaphor experiences are of course those things you do which, once they are accomplished, emerge as perfect metaphors for life.  And I tend to encounter them frequently because I look for them, and that, according to my wife, makes me unusual.

Entering the place I had visions of Dante running through my mind (purgatory and all that, though the place looks much more like the entrance to Dante’s inferno).  But I’ll cut to the chase: a place called Fat Man’s Misery–a cleft in a massive wall of granite which some people can slide through sideways.  So here’s the story: of course I wanted to do it, and so I lowered myself down into the cleft.  A man high above the rock indicated that there was another way down and out of the cleft, a way which was not visible from where I was standing.  I trusted him, and went further down and into the cleft, lowering myself again to another level before emerging out the distant side.

Now on one level this is not a bad metaphor for the spiritual life: we trust those that have gone before, those who tell us that the path may be difficult but that it gets us where we’re going.  Trusting people is part of the spiritual life, and a certain amount of courage is necessary.  So far, so good.

But here’s where it gets interesting: my two girls wanted to go through the cleft as well, and so now the trusting of the other had an altogether different import.  I was responsible not only for myself, but also for my girls.  I could not make a reckless decision which I as a younger man might have made just for fun.  When I emerged out the other side, I had to proceed up and out of the chasm in order to judge whether the way was safe for them; otherwise we would have had to retrace our steps through Fat Man’s Misery.

Here’s my point: faith takes on new dimensions of meaning when one acts upon it mindful of how it will affect those he loves.  (I think of someone like Thomas More, whose martyrdom left five children without a father.)  As I left the chasm, I considered how fatherhood has affected my own faith, and what is most clear is that it gives shape to the kind of decisions I make about how to be a disciple of Christ.  Whatever I do, I do as a husband and as a father, not as an individual.  And in my experience, those relationships add depth and meaning to faith.  At the end of the day, I can return to a basic question: how have I loved my wife and daughters?  (A good question to include in an examen.)  As I look back over seventeen years of marriage and ten years of parenting, I think that above all else, the vocation to family life is about beginning a pilgrimage of learning to love, and that pilgrimage constitutes the life of faith.  It is not always easy or fun; sometimes the way is difficult and unclear.  Sometimes I need people like the guy up above the rock to tell me what the path is like.  But always I am traveling with my family, and when I finally meet Jesus face to face he will ask me how we managed to stick together through it all.

Something to think about | “The Examen of relationships asks that you grow conscious of a reality we take so much for granted that we do not think about it at all. How often do you note that the sun rose this morning? How much do you value the water that comes from your tap? We treat our relationships rather like that. They are just there. They do not take thinking about except perhaps in special circumstances like an argument or a celebration. But each relation is a gift greater than today’s sun, and each person given to you to love and be loved by is as indispensable as the pure water you thoughtlessly drink.”

Joseph Tetlow, SJ

Something to think about | “Something in our soul has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue. This something is much more closely connected with evil than is the flesh. That is why every time that we really concentrate our attention, we destroy the evil in ourselves. If we concentrate with this attention, a quarter of an hour of attention is better than a great many good works.”

Simone Weil

Fr. Jim Blumeyer, SJ, suggests some questions for your daily Examen:

Where in the last 24 hours did you experience God’s touch in the events of today?

What various energies dominated your mind and heart today? For instance:

• Experiences of satisfaction and dissatisfaction at home, at work.

• Experiences of interpersonal relationships with others, whether of love or rejection, that caused joy or frustration in your life today.

Where have I been inattentive to the sense of beauty and truth and goodness in my life today?

Where have I failed to respond to the needs of others?

Where do I experience regret about this day?

For what am I most grateful to God for this day?

These are from an excellent article on the Examen and Ignatian Spirituality.

How do I know God is speaking to me? It’s not easy to tell, and it’s hard to explain to others when it happens. I suppose that’s the question at the heart of spiritual direction and praying the Examen. I recently read something in a memoir that helped me understand something about hearing God.

The book is Lit by Mary Karr. The title has two meanings: “Lit” for literature (Karr is a poet and professor) and “Lit” for drunken stupor. Karr is an alcoholic, and the book is about her descent into misery and her recovery of sobriety. The heart of the story is her spiritual awakening. Karr was an atheist. To get sober she had to find God. (She eventually became a Catholic and made the Spiritual Exercises.)

A pivotal moment comes one night in a psych ward where Karr is confined after hatching a plan to kill herself. This is the bottom, and she decides to talk to the God whom she barely believes in. She goes into a stall in the bathroom, locks the door, and rages at God for all the terrible things that have happened to her and her family. Then something happens:

I feel something stir in me, a small wisp of something in my chest, frail as smoke. It is–strangely–the sweetness of my love for my daddy and my son. It blesses me an instant like incense.

My eyes sting, and I blurt out, Thanks for them.

I feel the stillness around me widen a notch.

Thanks that my son is sleeping safe at home without fever or coughing; and my husband, who may yet take me back.

The boundaries of my skin grow think and I kneel there squinting my eyes shut. For a nanosecond, I am lucent.

Inside it: an idea, the thread of a different perspective than any I’ve ever had. It’s a thought so counterintuitive, so unlike how I think, it feels as if it originates from outside me.

The thought has to do with how God has cared for her even as she drank.  It’s the quality of the thought that allows her to see that it’s from God.  It’s different.  Karr comments: “Vis-a-vis God speaking to me, I don’t mean the voice of Charlton Heston playing Moses booming from on high, but reversals of attitude so contrary to my typical thought–so solidly true–as to seem divinely external. And quiet those thoughts are, strong and quiet.”

Since I read this I’ve been on the lookout for strong quiet thoughts that are different from the way I usually think.  I’ve found a few.

Something to think about ¦ “The examen frequently identifies sin at the source of an apparently faultless failure.  It also quite consistently exonerates me from sin in any given failure.  The examen must be able to help me make that distinction: Is my experience my sin, a sin, or sin in me?  The question begs for long study by a Church plagued by narcissistic individualism.  Perhaps even more, it begs for some method of probing the Christian self, a method available to the merest beginners as well as to someone who falls in love with God again on every starry night.”

Joseph Tetlow, SJ

It occurred to me just a few days ago that without thinking about it, my family and I were doing a group Examen at our dinner table.  I don’t know why it took me so long to recognize this fact, but now it’s obvious to me that one of the very important reasons families and friends should eat together is that it sets the perfect stage for reviewing one’s day in a thoughtful, and potentially prayerful, manner.  “How was your day?” — we ask this of each other, wanting to share in each other’s experiences, to deepen our sense of community.  When my girls were still very young, we started the practice we call “two things,” a simple exercise of sharing two reflections on our day, after beginning our meal with a shared prayer.

So it’s gotten me thinking: I wonder if other traditional spiritual practices might be ways that people pledged to lives of celibacy might substitute for practices embedded in family life.  In families, spiritual practices can be seen as ways that families come together after the centrifugal force of various activities.  If meals are opportunities for an Examen, perhaps it’s possible to see wakeup and bedtime routines as a kind of liturgy of the hours, a way of structuring the day around acts of love and attentiveness.  Laundry, cleaning, planning around work and school and sports and various lessons–perhaps all these can be seen as opportunities to reflect the basic Benedictine motto of ora et labora, pray and work.

For many, the paradigmatic expression of a lived Christian faith is monasticism.  To be sure, it was a foundational movement in the history of the Church, arising as it did from those women and men who went off to the desert to live radically in imitation of Christ as spiritual athletes.  But with the Franciscan, Dominican, Jesuit and various women’s orders, there developed complementary models of living one’s faith in the world.  It was Ignatius’ right hand man Jeronimo Nadal who famously described the place where Jesuits worked, in contrast to monks: “the world is our house.”  For the early Jesuits (see John O’Malley’s fine book The First Jesuits for more on this), too much prayer in chapels or churches took time away from building God’s kingdom.  There’s even a letter from Ignatius himself dissuading some Portuguese novices from staying in choir too long.

I am a lay person.  What I see today is a new movement among many other lay people to develop yet another movement in the history of Christian spirituality, one that sees work in the so-called “secular” realm as itself an expression of a deep, sustained, lived faith in Christ.  I work among Jesuits; I visit monasteries for retreats; but I live at home, and that is the place where I live out my salvation in fear and trembling.  I do not think God calls me to live in the monastery, or in the community of Jesuits on mission, but rather in the home and in the world.  And to the extent that my living in those places is rooted in the sustained desire to serve Christ our Lord, it is (I think) no less a religious vocation, no less a spirituality, than that of the monk, friar, sister, or priest.  We are, after all, all members of the one Body of Christ, and we all break bread at the same dinner table.

What the deal with self-flagellation?  (There’s a lively discussion in the comments.)

Jim Martin, SJ, sets Glenn Beck right.

Jesuits go green.

Some thoughts on the Examen.

Paul Coutinho, SJ, on forgiveness in Lent.

Ann Boyd on the benefits of the Examen (“It connects my seemingly irrational emotional life with the workings of God”).

An Evangelical compares the Ignatian charism to Rick Warren’s and Bill Hybel’s (and Francis’s, Dominic’s, and Benedict’s).

Running the Catholic numbers: Catholics, bishops, priests up; women religious down.

Jake Martin, SJ, on snark (“the glorification of the mediocre”).

Vincent L. Strand, SJ, asks if modernity or postmodernity is the greater threat to Christianity.

The Examen works for children too. A blogger at Christianity Today’s MomSense blog writes about it. “The examen creates a rich tradition for our family of listening and being heard—which is helping all of us learn how to hear and speak not just to one another, but to God as well.” Go here for another look at families praying the Examen together.