It's the Little Things

My father-in-law, Bill McGaw was many things, including an actor in a movie with Clark Gable and Barbara Stanwyck, no less, but he always considered himself a newspaperman first and foremost. In the 1970’s in El Paso he started a weekly newspaper dedicated to getting at the truth of many stories that seemed to always go unreported in towns with a very strong and closely knit power structure. One thing that he always said was that, for many powerful people, it was usually some small and very trivial mistake that tripped them up, something they never considered important at the time. As an example, think of Al Capone and the failure to file tax returns in a timely manner. 

It turns out this is good advice in the Christian life also. Here’s a good quote from Blessed Peter Favre, SJ (no I don’t think he was a quarterback long ago).

"Seek grace for the smallest things, and you will also find grace to accomplish, to believe in, and to hope for the greatest things. Attend to the smallest things, examine them, think about putting them into effect, and the Lord will grant you greater. Many seek anxiously for grace to perform good works of a more general kind while neglecting in the meantime particular tasks for which it would have been easy to find grace. "

Monastic Musings, Monday, Febuary 7, 2011

Image via Wikipedia

Why do we need to know about our negativities? Because, such negativities surface without our ability to control them at times. Think, for instance, about being in a line at a grocery store. Make it a rather long line, say, with 10 people. Just as your turn is about to come, the manager comes and closes that line and you have to move to another line, which is as long as the first one originally was.


Listen to the feelings that go on within you. Some people can accept such happenings without any kind of negative reaction. Others cannot. The early monks and nuns were well aware that we must listen to our thoughts as they are provoked by our feelings and begin the battle for freedom at that level. In our present culture, there is at times an enormous emphasis on listening to our feelings and honoring them. That can be most misleading to any of us.

Certainly we need to know our feelings and in that sense honor them. Feelings are not yet actions or choices, but they condition our choices very often. It is not easy to resist anger if everyone around you is angry. On the other hand, a person of peace, walking into a crowd of anger, can change the atmosphere incredibly. The peace and love must be very deep, however, to resist the tug of the anger of others.

From Abbot Phillip’s (Christ in the Desert) Notebook, Wednesday, February 2, 2010

Listening to Tradition, Staretz Silouan

“Love takes to itself the life of the loved one.



The greater the love, the greater the suffering of the soul.


The fuller the love, the fuller the knowledge of God.


The more ardent the love, the more fervent the prayer.


The more perfect the love, the holier the life.”

Staretz Silouan

The Salt of the Earth

The first degree of humility, then,
is that a person keep the fear of God before his eyes (Ps. 35[36]:2)
and beware of ever forgetting it.
Let him be ever mindful of all that God has commanded;
let his thoughts constantly recur
to the hell-fire which will burn for their sins
those who despise God,
and to the life everlasting which is prepared
for those who fear Him.
Let him keep himself at every moment from sins and vices,
whether of the mind, the tongue, the hands, the feet,
or the self-will,
and check also the desires of the flesh. (From Ch 7 of the Rule of St. Benedict)

The word “humility”, as many of you will already know, comes from the latin humus which is a root for our English word, earth. The implication is that, by “humility”, Benedict didn’t mean to imply the modern idea of submission and weakness, even mousiness. The idea he had in mind is the trait of knowing exactly who we are in the world. As Fr. Michael Casey put it, the idea is of living in the truth, about ourselves, about others, and most importantly, about God.

People today have lost touch with this reality. The tendency I see all too often, is to try to bring God down to our size. We want to make him a good buddy, a friend and companion, a big sugar-daddy, forgetting all the while just who exactly he is: the Lord, God Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth. He is something entirely Other from any of us.

Benedict wouldn't agree with our modern tendencies. He would ask us to be mindful of just exactly who we are and who God is. He's not afraid to remind the monk, and the Christian, that there is, indeed, such a thing as “hell fire” and that it is something to be feared. I don't think there can be much doubt that Benedict seems to be talking about real, almost visceral fear, not just “respect” or “love” as I’ve heard it described all too often lately. Benedict means the real thing, because if we forget all this, the consequences will be eternal.


But, when Benedict talks about fearing God and hell fire and brimstone, is he just showing himself to be another Christian fundamentalist extremist whose only desire is to squeeze all the joy out of life? Is he really advocating that Christians must live their lives in fear and terror of an unreasonable and judgmental God?

At first glance, it might look that way. But a further reading of Chapter 7 gives a different picture. At the end of the chapter, Benedict writes:

Having climbed all these steps of humility, therefore, the monk will
presently come to that perfect love of God which casts out fear.

At this point, those souls will have attained that perfect loves that drives out fear. It becomes clear that Benedict sees the Christian journey as just that, a journey on the road to final beatitude. In keeping with what he wrote in the Prologue, he sees this life as a “school” of service to the Lord. In the early, simple stages of development, the initial motivation might be little more than fear of hell. But this first step is the necessary prelude to further growth – it’s what first gets our attention. The goal is the driving out of that fear through love. And progressing along this road, if that is the right term, means that we come to know and accept more of the truth about the reality of our existence. It means growing in humility.