Importance of Self-Knowledge - Ministry Exchange (MX)

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Selected Readings Our greatness and wretchedness are so evident that the true religion must necessarily teach us that there is in us some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness. It must also account for such amazing contradictions. To make us happy it must show us that a God exists whom we are bound to love; that our only true bliss is to be in him, and our sole ill to be cut off from him. It must acknowledge that we are full of darkness which prevents us from knowing him, and so, with our duty obliging us to love God and our sin leading us astray, we are fully unrighteous. It must account to us for the way in which we thus go against God and our own good. It must teach us the cure for our helplessness and the means for obtaining the cure. —From Pensees Blaise Pascal The priest’s (staff workers) wounds require greater help, indeed as much as those of all the people put together. They would not have required greater help if they had not been more serious, their seriousness is not increased by their own nature but by the extra weight of dignity belonging to the priest who dares commit them.” —From On the Priesthood, John Chrysostom, Any venture into leadership is hazardous. The long and well-documented
Christian tradition confirms this. Leaders are necessary, but woe to those
who become leaders. In leadership, possibilities for sin emerge that previously were
inaccessible, possibilities exceedingly difficult to detect, for each comes
in the form of a virtue. The unwary will embrace immediately a new
“opportunity to serve the Lord,” innocent of the reality that they are
swallowing bait, which turns, soon or late, into a curse. “Let not many
become teachers,” warned James, who knew the perils firsthand. The temptations we face in the early years of our faith are, if not easily
resisted, at least easily recognized. If I kill a man, I know I have done
wrong. If I commit adultery, I have the good sense not to advertise it.
If I steal, I make diligent effort not to get found out. The so-called
lower sins, the sins of the flesh, are obvious. But the higher sins, the sins of the spirit, are not so easily discerned.
Is a certain instance of zeal energetic obedience or human presumption? Is
one person’s confidence a holy boldness inspired by the Holy Spirit or
merely arrogance instigated by an anxious ego? Is this suddenly prominent
preacher with a large following a spiritual descendant of Peter with five
thousand repentant converts or Aaron indulging his tens of thousands with
religious song and dance around the golden calf? It is not easy to tell. Deception is nowhere more common than in
religion. Wiser generations than ours did not send men and women into this
perilous country without a thorough briefing of the hazards and frequent
check-ups along the way. Even then shipwreck was frequent enough.
The foolishness of our times is no more apparent than in the naivet6 with
which we grant leadership and the innocence in which we rely on leaders’
sincerity and motives. The religious leader is the most untrustworthy of
leaders; in no other station do we have so many opportunities for pride,
covetousness, and lust, and with so many excellent disguises to keep such
ignobility from being found out and called to account.
.. The congregation (chapter) is the pastor’s (staff worker’s) place of
ministry: we preach the Word and administer the sacraments, we give
pastoral care and administer the community life, we teach and we give
spiritual direction. But it is also the place in which we develop virtue,
learn to love, advance in hope. By providing us contact with both
committed and frustratingly inconstant individuals, the congregation
provides the rhythms, the associations, the tasks, the limitations, the
temptations – the conditions – for our own growth in Christ —From Under the Unpredictable Plant Eugene Peterson In the sixth century St. Benedict of Nursia called the disconnection of ministerial action from God “wicked zeal.” It is wicked, because it subtlety uses religious activity, disconnected from God, as an instrument of oppression and domination of the self and others. It is pious action that flows not out of an organic relationship with God, but out of the willful exercise of power. It is the type of religious zealotry that makes a god out of religious devotion and action, and leaves behind the living God. While on the surface it appears to be all about God and others, it is, in fact, mostly about the self. Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun of forty years comments on Benedicts distinction between good zeal and wicked zeal (also called “bitter zeal”) We must learn to listen to what God is saying in our simple, sometimes insane, and always uncertain daily lives. Wicked zeal is that kind of religious fanaticism that makes a god out of religious devotion itself. Wicked zeal walks over the poor on the way to the altar. Wicked zeal renders the useless invisible and makes devotion more sacred than community. Wicked zeal wraps us up in ourselves and makes us feel holy about it. Wicked zeal renders us blind to others, deaf to those around us, struck dumb in the face of the demands of dailiness. Good zeal, monastic zeal, commits us to the happiness of human community and immerses us in Christ and surrenders us to God, minute by minute, person by person, day after day after day. Good zeal provides the foundation for the spirituality of the long haul. It keeps us going when days are dull and holiness seems to be the stuff of more glamorous lives, of martyrdom and dramatic differences. But it is then, just then, when Benedict of Nursia reminds us from the dark of the sixth century that sanctity is the stuff of community in Christ and that any other zeal, no matter how dazzling it looks, is false. Completely false. The Rule of Benedict Joan Chittister The letter which you did me the honor of writing to me, Madame, has been
long on the road. I have just received it, judge the speed by that. I
understand that you are suffering, and are making others suffer. You must
work bravely and steadily to bear your own burden and to relieve your
neighbor. Every hint of distrust and of superiority, every spirit of
criticism and of mockery shows a self-centered mind, which is not conscious
of its own wretchedness, which gives itself up to its sensibilities, which
takes all its pleasure in the faults of others. Nothing should be so quick
to humiliate us as this kind of pride, easy to wound, mocking,
supercilious, haughty, jealously wishing everything for itself, and always
intolerant towards the faults of others. We are surely imperfect, when we
can not stand the imperfections of those about us. For so much wrong I see
no remedy but hope in God, who is as good and as powerful as you are weak
and bad. Nevertheless, he will let you languish a long time, without
uprooting your nature and habits, because it is much more important for you
to be crushed by your own wretchedness, and by feeling your powerlessness
to emerge from it, than it would be to enjoy all of a sudden the pleasure
of seeing yourself made perfect! Think only of bearing with others, of
turning your eyes away from people who are not good for you, as we shut our
eyes against a temptation. Such people are a very dangerous one for you.
Pray, read, humble your spirit by a taste for simple things. Soften your
heart by uniting it with the child Jesus, and be serene in your
humiliation. Seek your strength in silence. —From Spiritual Letters of Fénalon Françios Fénalon

It is men’s ignorance of themselves that makes prayer little in request:
Hunger best teaches men to beg. You would be oftener on your knees, if you
were oftener in your hearts. Prayer would not seem so needless, if you
knew your needs. Know your needs, and be prayerless if you can.

Françios Fénalon In “hyperactivity” our soul becomes anxious about, the ordering of things that are without, and ignorant of itself alone, it knows how to think of many things, while itself it knows not. For, when it implicates itself more than is needful in things that are without, it is as though it were so occupied during a journey as to forget where it was going, so that being estranged from the business of self-examination, it does not even consider the losses it is suffering, or how great they are. From Pastoral Care Gregory the Great The more a sinner’s heart is consumed by the fire of love, the more fully is the rust of sin consumed. . The pleasure of the spirit increases our inner longing even while it satisfies us, since the more we savor it, the more we perceive that there is something more to long for. —From Be Friends of God Gregory the Great One must cross the desert and dwell in it to receive the grace of God. It is in the desert that one drives out everything that is not God. The soul needs to enter into this silence (of the desert) It is in solitude, in that lonely life, alone with God, that God gives himself to the soul, and that thus the soul gives itself entirely to Him. Charles de Foucauld Prayer that is regular confounds both self-importance and the wiles of the world. It is so easy for good people to confuse their own work with the work of the creator. It is easy to come to believe that what we do is so much more important that what we are. It is easy to simply get too busy to grow. It is so east to commit ourselves to this century’s demands for production and action until the product consumes us and the actions exhaust us and we can no longer even remember why we set out to do them in the first place. But regularity in prayer cures all of that. Regularity harnesses us to our place in the universe. Morning and evening, season after season, year after year we watch the sunrise and set, death and resurrection daily come and go, beginnings and endings follow one another without terror and without woe. We come to realize that we are simply small parts of a continuing creation, we take hope and comfort and perspective from that. —From Wisdom Distilled From the Daily: Living the Rule of St. Benedict Today Joan Chittister What are the four degrees of love? First, we love ourselves for our
own sake; since we are unspiritual and of the flesh we cannot have an
interest in anything that does not relate to ourselves. When we begin to
see that we cannot subsist by ourselves, we begin to seek God for our own
sakes. This is the second degree of love; we love God, but only for our
own interests. But if we begin to worship and come to God again and again
by meditating, by reading, by prayer, and by obedience, little by little
God becomes known to us through experience. We enter into a sweet
familiarity with God, and by tasting how sweet the Lord is we pass into the
third degree of love so that now we love God, not for our own sake, but for
himself. It should be noted that in this third degree we will stand still
for a very long time … Blessed are we who experience the fourth degree of love wherein we love
ourselves for God’s sake. Such experiences are rare and come only for a
moment. In a manner of speaking, we lose ourselves as though we did not
exist, utterly unconscious of ourselves and emptied of ourselves. If for even a moment we experience this kind of love, we will then know
the pain of having to return to this world and its obligations as we are
recalled from the state of contemplation. In turning back to ourselves we
will feel as if we are suffering as we return into the mortal state in
which we were called to live. But during those moments we will be of one mind with God, and our wills in
one accord with God. The prayer, ‘Thy will be done’, will be our prayer
and our delight. Just as a little drop of water mixed with a lot of wine
seems to entirely lose identity as it takes on the taste and colour of
wine; just as iron, heated and glowing, looks very much like fire, having
lost its original appearance; just as air flooded with the light of the sun
is transformed into the same splendour of the light so that it appears to
be light itself, so it is like for those who melt away from themselves and
are entirely transfused into the will of God. This perfect love of God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength will not
happen until we are no longer compelled to think about ourselves.. Only
then can the soul attend to God completely. it is within God’s power to
give such an experience to whom he wills, and it is not attained by our own
efforts. —From On the Love of God St Bernard of Clairvaux