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Lent Life is the best spiritual director
Third Sunday of Lent
By JOAN CHITTISTER
I once owned a huge golden retriever
named Duffy, who taught me the flesh-and-blood meaning of this weeks
Lenten gospel. Duffys first owner was an avid show dog trainer. She had
brought Duffy to the kind of perfection to which show dog aficionados aspire.
He came on command. He heeled to the knee. He sat without moving for minutes.
He finished slowly and ponderously but with never a flaw. He
watched his handlers every move. Duffy had a problem, however. Without a
command to respond to, he was clearly nervous, timid and afraid. You could see
it in the hang of his head. You could tell that new things confused him. You
knew that risk, dare and exploration were not his strengths. He was perfect but
he was not happy. He was a healthy dog but he was not a frisky one. He was a
good dog but he was not a playful one. He simply lived his life waiting to be
told what to do next.
So after a while, I decided to stop showing off all his training
exercises. I gave him no orders at all after that. I simply depended on the
relationship between us to keep him near me on our walks. It took a long time
before Duffy could trust stopping along the road to smell the flowers. It took
ages before he chased a butterfly. It was a long time before he ran to retrieve
a tennis ball. It was ages before he lunged at me, big paws flailing, tail
high, drooling with delight. But when he got to that point there was something
new in him. It wasnt obedience. It was development. Duffy had
outgrown perfection and become good instead. He
wasnt an automaton anymore; he was a dog. And, interestingly enough, I
began to see in him what had been lacking in my understanding of Lent for a
long, long time.
The question with which we are brought to wrestle in the Third
Sunday of Lent -- Are we expected to be perfect or are we expected to be
spiritual? -- raises the issue of development again, only this time in
regard to our own. It requires us to look carefully at our surrender of self to
a religion based on fear, at our own eventual defiances, at our own straggling
attempts at life, at our own disappointing selves, at our own stumbling
excursions into adulthood, at our own hearts. The gospel leads us to ask
ourselves precisely what we are really intended to be: Pursuers of the
spiritual life or pursuers of perfection? Dont be fooled into thinking
that one is necessarily the other.
The history of spirituality is a very sobering chronicle to
explore. It is sometimes hard to imagine how those reading it could even think
of committing themselves to a pursuit of the spiritual life in this day and
age. The extremes of asceticism abound there. Spiritual athletes perform feats
of self-mutilation, self-abnegation and self-sacrifice on those pages that defy
human comprehension. As a result, we live with an honor roll of saints in our
minds who punished themselves to control themselves: desert monastics who lived
on locusts and wild honey and fasted even from those for days, Simon Stylites
who lived on top of a pole for years, women who mutilated themselves to
preserve their chastity, men who beat themselves with whips to subdue the
impulses of the body.
We admire them, these religious Olympians, these holy fools of
history, in a reluctant kind of way, but we hardly ever set out to emulate
them. In fact, if truth were known, we are inclined to suspect those who do. At
least my scholastic mistress did. It was sufficient for her that you were in
chapel on time, not that you set out to kneel there all night long. Sufficient
that you didnt eat between meals during Lent rather than that you starved
yourself into a physical state too weak to do your work. Enough that you kept
silence not for the sake of inducing a vision or two but simply so that
everyone around you could think. No one ever approaches perfection,
William Hazlitt wrote, except by stealth and unknown to themselves.
My scholastic mistress would agree. Her philosophy was a clear one: Life was
its own spiritual director; none other need apply.
Jesus, it seems, thinks the same. To make the point, he tells a
story that sets up a tension between expectations and reality, between the
average but always artificial standards of any system and the incalculable
effects of time and circumstances on the individual soul.
Every farmer in the audience knew three things for sure as they
heard him speak. They knew, first, that it takes a fig tree three years to
mature before there could be any hope of produce at all. There would be years
of wasted time to the process of growth, in other words. They knew, as well, as
they looked out over the thin strip of green belt in sallow, dry Israel, that
land could not be wasted on a plant that was useless. A tree that did not
produce could not be kept. They knew, finally, that the three years were up for
the tree in the story and the owner expected results. In fact, they knew, the
owner had a right to expect results.
But there was a conundrum to the story as well. The groundskeeper,
wise in the way of living things, knows that everything in life does not run
according to schedule. Instead of uprooting the barren tree, he suggests more
time, more care, more seasoning. To the owner of a vineyard who sees no use in
giving more time and resources to a tree that has borne no fruit, the
groundskeeper cautions patience. The tree is not perfect, no, but the tree is,
after all, yet alive and might still mature, might still develop, might still
grow, might still produce something of real value, might still become its best
self if only it gets the time it needs. It is a parable about risk, hope and
trust. It is a parable that weighs perfection and growth in the balance and
chooses for growth.
Who is there who does not understand the impatience of the owner?
Who does not want instant success and permanent achievement? And who is there
who has not been the patient groundskeeper who, when patience seemed foolish,
asked for it nevertheless -- for a child, for a project, for themselves? Who of
us can possibly claim that we have not also, at times, even been the tree --
the one who disappointed everyone elses expectations, the slow learner in
a sea of confusion, the one who took years to see through a thing and change
it, the latecomer to responsibility, productivity and maturity and what the
family called good sense?
Who is there who has not expected perfection of someone only to
watch them shrivel under the pressure of it? Who is there who has not expected
too much of themselves too soon and so stumbled through life ashamed, drowning
in self-hatred, despairing of future possibility?
But only perfection is superficial enough to be gotten so easily.
Growth, real growth, the kind that changes us internally forever, comes slowly,
and often through the hard, searing, humiliating, disappointing experience of
failure. Its when we can no longer face ourselves, when we can go beyond
guilt to possibility, only then are we ready to grow.
This Sunday in Lent takes us down into ourselves, into our
families, into our relationships and makes us rethink all our own expectations,
revisit all our guilt, redefine all our errant efforts from failure to success.
We discover that we can fail in honesty and learn openness, that we can fail in
chastity and learn love, that we can fail in greed and learn values, that we
can fail in obedience and learn truth.
This is a story about not giving up on the self. As the ancient
story puts it, the old monastic, asked by the young seeker, What do you
do in the monastery? answers simply, Oh, we fall down and we get up
again. And we fall down and we get up again. And we fall down and we get up
again. All of life is about failing to meet standards and, as a result of
each failure, growing in ways we could never have dreamed without those
failures. That is, after all, what life is about: about seasoning, about
experience, about wisdom, about failures that make us grow. Lent is the
reminder that we are being given, by a patient God, everything we need to
become whole. Lent is the call to answer some important questions about what
our lives really need now.
Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister, author and lecturer, lives in
Erie, Pa.
National Catholic Reporter, March 9,
2001
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