Works and Prayers of a Fils Prodigue

We finally have a third roommate, and I feel as though some great and exhaustive trial is finally coming to a well-received end. We have a refrigerator, a working stove’s on the way, I have a job, I have my *own room,* our third roommate is from ROME, which will be wicked awesome, I’m sure. I will have the money to pay my rent…

All thanks be to God!

Hm — readership is down. This semester has been one of the most hectic and unstable of my life — you’d think that would make for interesting reading! Only it hasn’t, and perhaps I ought to write a little more and a little better.

Here’s hopin’

At the end of a shift of dishwashing, you’ve got the lines closing and the waiters bringing in all the dishes caked with cheese and lettuce, spaghetti sauce and burnt butter. You’ve been scrubbing all night the same ten skillets, 4 pots, and the two dozen or so plates that circulate between the kitchen lines and the front. Your hands are raw because the water gets soaked up into your skin, making your skin soft, like the white and yellow cheese you scrape off of plates — and just like the plates get scraped clean, so do your hands, and filled with half a dozen little nicks from the metal bristle pad. By the end of the night, you can’t even stand the sight of water. You’re tired, you’re disgusting, and you just want to give up and go home, far from the clatter and the shouts of “hot” when an used skillet is placed on the rack.

You just want to give up, because it hurts, because you’ve done the same thing for 9 hours, because you haven’t eaten anything except that burnt and overspiced meatball — you just want to give up.

I do just want to give up. But not on dishwashing.

I think the hardest thing about the spiritual life is patience. Not zeal, not silence, not poverty — but patience. I can scarcely wait for anything I want. I want to be somewhere-that-isn’t-Baton-Rouge, I want to be a father, I want to be a husband, I want to be an oblate, I want to be a saint… But, I don’t want to wait. I often think of St. Peter, walking on the ashen walls of wave toward his Lord, and think that perhaps he was not only lacking faith, but that he lacked patience. He couldn’t endure, he couldn’t pace himself. He panicked, became frantic, looked down, and the laws of nature resumed unhindered save by the hand of our Lord.

But I’m the same way. I can fiercely set my eyes to the Lord, seeing him across the sea, and I’ll even set out. I’ll set foot onto the liquid floor and stride. But I’ll panic, I’ll become frantic, I’ll look down, and gravity will wrap its iron fingers around my ankles. Yes, patience is the hardest part of the spiritual life, in my opinion.

I think I’m somewhat reputed on the Z-Re for being…obsessed with Gospel poverty and frugality, superfluity and necessity, riches and the wealthy, poverty and the poor. You know what? They’re probably right. It’s one of the defining characteristics of my spiritual life — this transfixation upon the Gospel, the Incarnation of Christ into a human body, meeting the road at this particular financial junction. We all have our things, right? St. Thomas Aquinas was obsessed with reconciling Aristotle to Christ, St. Theresa of Liseux on being childlike before God, St. Simeon Stylites on Gospel asceticism, and so on through all the tomes and volumes of the Acta Sanctorum. As Chesterton writes, all the saints are a particular antidote for a particular time. In a time of ecclesial corruption and worldiness, Sts. Francis, Benedict, Anthony of Egypt; in a time of intellectual darkness, Sts. Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, Bonaventure. Even more recently, in a time when the disease of materialism and wickedness had reduced the quintessence of God’s creature, the iron center of life’s meaning — the body — into nothing more than savage and lascivious flesh, (St.) John Paul II.

And so we see that, throughout history, the aim of the saints is to bring the Gospel from its lofty heights, its esoteric podiums, its pristine paper-pages to the filthy, black-sutted, dirt-embalmed trials of daily existence. Now, I am in NO way calling myself a saint, in the true sense of the word. I am not one intimately sanctified as St. Francis was; but this obsession which drove the saints to eat their stale barley cakes, to smash the statues of Jupiter, to rend their bourgeois clothing, to take Jesus seriously, burns furiously within me. It is this relentless and agonizing longing for sincere discipleship which drives all that I do in the religious and economic sense.

And it is this conviction, if that is the right word, which makes me so discontent with my fellow Christians. Perhaps, though, my mal-ease with their lives is not just, considering the glaring imperfections of my own. This could very well be a great obstacle to my own sainthood — I cannot love men as they are, but as I want them to be; thus, I’m tremendously conditional and exacting, without even being appointed judge over a single one of them! But the issue of sparing-sharing, of giving out of your need so that others might have their needs met, is so clear and integral to the Christian life that I cannot sit idly by and watch my brothers and sisters neglect it.

For example, if I were to mention to a fellow Christian that he ought to sell all his coats but one, he was glare at me scornfully, and perhaps even take up the fight in defense of his coats.  Yet, there are few phrases as lucid in Scriptuers as these from St. John the Baptist: “if you have two tunics, sell one.” If I suggest that all Christians ought to sell their iPods (barring, of course, those who for some reason have made an absolutely necessity of their ipod, i.e. they use it to provide for their children, their own perfection, and the needs of others), I am treated “as a Gentile,” Christ might say. And this, my friends, is the sad state of Christianity. Can we not even muster up the conviction to sell our luxury items?

When Christ was speaking to his disciples, to all his followers in fact, and he says “sell your possessions and give to the poor,” was he speaking only to the rich? Was he speaking to the upper classes, the well-to-dos of first-century Palestine? Or was he, in fact, speaking to all men, even those, no, perhaps even primarily to those who were of the poor class? You might say that the only specific command to sell one’s possessions is given to the “rich young ruler,” but I think you would be mistaken. Do the disciples not chime in after this disheartening scene exclaiming that THEY had done just that? The fact of the matter is that, however rich the average peasant was in Palestine at the time, the Christians of America are unimaginably more wealthy.

This brings us to the question I’ve wrestled with for years: are we not rich young rulers, ourselves? Do we not enjoy more luxury and leisure than any race has in the history of the planet Earth? And yet, we won’t even sell our iPods, extra coats, rolexes, for the kingdom — we won’t even forgo flat screen TVs, plastic surgeries, digital cameras for the kingdom. And not just to give to the Church, so that she might live luxuriously. We refuse to feed those wriggling with hunger. When we refuse to sell our extra coats, we tell the poor (and Christ) that our fashion is more important than their warmth. When we refuse to sell our electronic luxuries, we tell the poor (and Christ) that our entertainment is worth more than their nourishment.

Am I being unjust? No. Because the fact is that our luxuries are never more important than the necessities of others. Superfluities never trumpt necessities. And to refuse to provide necessity in favor of superfluity is a crime against God and against the dignity of man. Admittedly, I am not perfect in this respect either. I enjoy a good beer or a tasty cookie as much as the next guy. But Christ is asking so much more of us than the large majority of us seem to be willing to give. This conflagration consumes me constantly. Hell is not the only place for flames; the Gospel has its own sort. And it burns against me as I hope it burns against you.

Peace

To you, my avid and invisible reader, more blogs shall be coming soon! Searching for a job and trying to keep all my school work from further snowballing has taken all the ‘umph’ out of me to blog.

But soon!

I know what you’re thinking. “Gee, Ryan, were you reeeally going to be happy as a middle school teacher, what with you not wanting to teach literature or, I don’t know, say the pledge of allegiance?” Don’t hide it — I know it’s true. And to answer your query, the response is “no. no I wouldn’t.” And thankfully I am changing my concentration from Secondary Education to Literature. I hope to teach English as a Second Language abroad.

This concludes your semesterly update of my current academic situation. As you were!