Going to hell by inches
Garvey, John
many people who have been helped by the writings of C.S. I~wis. But the older rationalist proofs don't "wash" any more for most people. They have to be communicated differently, starting from the...
...It may not bring you any closer to stillness, or it may, but it will at least let you understand the thicket that lies between you and peace a little more clearly...
...314: Commonweal...
...This reminded me of what Meister Eckhart wrote about fasting: it means not imitating the physical conditions of Christ's fasts, but noticing what you want to do or are most inclined to do, refraining from it, and watching yourself very carefully...
...It took earth, and encountered heaven...
...That's idolatry--the most profound temptation against true faith...
...Part of the obstacle to faith in most of the English-speaking world comes from a church that is complacent and under-challenging and under-nourishing...
...Greed is another ancient root...
...But in time I hope to find some way of staying in touch with the wounded and victimized...
...They have to be communicated differently, starting from the experience of questioning and searching...
...GALLAGHER: Very simple really...
...We often use our wealth to build walls or to create distance...
...There is a sense of humanity here...
...with lust to make him very helpful in that over-advertised Augustinian realm), or Therese's problem with depression...
...For this reason it makes good sense, it is even an obligation, to hate what our children are offered by this culture...
...Clarity comes with some distance from those things that move us, more than from identification with them...
...At the Paschal liturgy of the Orthodox church a baptismal sermon of St...
...That isn't to say that a person at that moment feels free, is in fact not enslaved, driven, controlled...
...At the center of Christian faith is the fact that evil has been overcome, and death--by Christ's death--has been overcome...
...Christ is risen, and thou art overthrown...
...PHALAN: Can we turn the question a bit, then and ask, "What militates against community, against prayer, against service...
...Understanding the ways anger, anxiety, depression, fear, and even common forms of impatience are all knotted together at the base is essential...
...I need them to keep my heart in Christian focus...
...But choices and surrenders have always been made within the context of cultures that either encourage or discourage going through the process of choosing, accepting, rejecting, or discerning in a reasonable way...
...It makes a lot of sense...
...It is our freedom that makes murder and suicide possible...
...It never occurred to me, though, how much, how deeply, those stakes really mattered-how important it is to see that to choose freely is a matter of a sometimes very intense struggle, and the clarity it requires is hard-won, and there may be no feeling of clarity or satisfaction in the process...
...And I think it is important to understand that the murderer is not unlike you or me...
...This occurs on a planet where at exactly the same time Kurds are watching their children starving, the sound of television quiz shows fills the rooms of old people, a woman gives birth to her first child, someone is moved to tears by the glory of Bach, sharks feed, frogs snap at flies, a couple driving on a remote country road wonder about what it would be like to live the lives of the people in the farmhouses they pass, parents abuse small children, a walrus dies with something like wonder on its mind, a young wife on the telephone to her mother forgets that the roast has been too long in the oven, beekeepers in South Texas fret over the advent of killer bees, and monks send up praise to God...
...To have your world so fill up with a single passion that it crowds everything else out of your life except stopping another person's whole world this is, among other things, intriguing...
...This goes against the grain of a lot of pop-psychology, which would have us give vent to anger, allow us our outrages, ask for honesty in the expression of feeling...
...In the New Testament text there are, of course, only twenty-eight chapters in the Acts of the Apostles...
...Both roots are versions of rigidity...
...People have said, "Let's write Acts, chapter 29...
...A series of choices and surrenders makes that moment possible...
...It is important to look at what anger does at some specific place in the center of our chests, and watch what happens there carefully...
...What emotion would take us there...
...When I first read the desert fathers I wondered why they spent so much time dealing with the problem of anger...
...Their bodies were found in the plane's wreckage...
...One way of understanding evil is the recognition that something h a t e s : humankind and wants to see it destroyed...
...That shows only how young I was when I first read them...
...Many people have strange gods who cannot reveal and challenge their lives...
...GALLAGHER: I fear there is a price to be paid...
...Who knows all this...
...TIMOTHY PHALAN Timothy Phalan, a free-lance writer, lives in Enniskerry, Ireland...
...Idolatry means that I want a god who doesn't challenge me and a god I can manage--like a golden calf...
...Honesty in the identification of feeling is certainly essential...
...PHALAN: Yes, in the most inhospitable environment...
...I think that's part of the modem thing--that the heart can't be touched if I am a fully paid-up member of the wealthy club.., too well insulated...
...This is the result, how17May 1991:313 ever, of lots of small choices and surrenders...
...Impatience and anger have formed a lot of whatever it is I am, and I ' d read this advice and taken it to heart before...
...Where a certain sort of life is offered as exemplary, and another is offered as a cautionary tale, we have at least some sort of guideline, and there is then at least the implication within a culture that some real world exists beyond the realm of choice, a landscape in which choice takes place...
...They are not evil, but they can lead us into evil places, and we are not free, as it is our vocation to be, as long as we feel any compulsion, any drivenness...
...It was embittered, for it was fettered in chains...
...It was embittered, for it was slain...
...O hell, where is thy victory...
...At least initially I don't imagine I will be able to have anything of the same contact with the poor...
...It could be argued that all human evil consists precisely in the denial of this freedom, everything from war to murder and suicide...
...There are ancient roots and there are more modem roots...
...It is very hard to take the advice (make that a command) "Be not afraid" to heart...
...A fascination with evil, though, is another victory for evil...
...Killing done for political or business reasons we can understand, much as we might loathe it--but what passion could make us do this...
...It is also helpful to know how much Jerome and Augustine disliked each other...
...Where I live in Dublin, in a poor area, in spite of all its brokenness, community is natural...
...At the beginning of Lent, I attended a retreat at which a priest recommended something I ' d seen recommended elsewhere...
...We are hurt by the fact that saints mean less to us now than they did in previous ages...
...It was embittered, for it was overthrown...
...We have to create community, it isn't there naturally...
...It was embittered, for it was abolished...
...The gospel is best heard when people are listening and vulnerable to the other side of history...
...In fact does not the Latin root of the word decide mean cutting off...
...The ancient roots are idolatry and greed...
...It needn't create crippling guilt.., but a good guilt--"I'm here for something else than what I have been living...
...People speak of being driven to murder, and no doubt that is what it feels like, an uncontrollable passion, a possession by something alien...
...So the decision to accept this request by the Vatican means for the moment letting go of things that are dear to me...
...It is also important not to worry too much about it, as a presence...
...Something (I'm willing to call it Satan) wants us not to see that we are made in God's image...
...Where choice is seen as a moral category in itself, we have no help at all...
...What it feels like now isn't the point, and what it feels like has nothing to do with our freedom...
...In our modem societies, especially in our wealthy societies, community has been killed...
...It involves a struggle...
...The fact that choice has been made a primary moral category in our time is something I ' v e written about before...
...The next time you' re angry or really impatient," he said, "watch yourself...
...It was embittered, for it was mocked...
...The point is that the passions--the things that move us--are not to be seen as having an automatic claim to authenticity, to being sources of a kind of emotional authority...
...I'll be living in a large community of over a hundred in the center of Rome and the marginalized are literally on the margins--far out from the center...
...This freedom is the reason for asceticism, which is a struggle for clarity and not a denial of the flesh...
...It is the deepest sort of horror, a terrifying denial of the deepest reality, when someone made in God's image puts a gun to the back of the head of another person made in God's image...
...Christ is risen, and life reigns...
...Even more common forms of anger can feel like this...
...What a place...
...we have to see the gravitational field they generate, and see it calmly...
...The whole adventure of the church is one long ~eries of experiments in imagination, of trying to express the Good News of Jesus Christ in different languages, translating it, translating it, translating it...
...Look at the way you feel, even the physical location of the feeling...
...That question may be the reason that there are more good murder mysteries than there are books about war, or about hit-men...
...He embittered it when it tasted of his flesh...
...It didn't help, though, that when they were offered to us as models, they were offered in ways that minimized their struggles, not showing us Jerome's problem with anger, Augustine's problem with patience (it is my opinion that he never had enough interesting problems "'If 1 forgive you, next thing you know, l' ll have to forgive everyone...
...We are all here for something else than what our societies are living...
...I need them more than they might need me...
...Then there are more modem accumulations, as it were, on top of these ancient temptations...
...Our age, which exemplifies evil on a massive, genocidal scale, denies the reality of evil--which, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, is the devil's greatest victory...
...It took a body, and met God face to face...
...They are to be noticed, not denied...
...PHALAN: As you set off for the marble corridors of the Vatican do you have any fears about losing touch with "the other side of history...
...O death, where is thy sting...
...What can take a person to such a moment...
...It took that which was seen, and fell upon the unseen...
...Christ is risen, and demons are fallen...
...But that feeling is, putting it mildly, not to be trusted as a guide to behavior...
...It means that I cling to my egoist needs at the expense of anybody else...
...Chesterton said somewhere that every decision is a self-limitation...
...They struggled against the passions-against the things that rule and take us over, and take some of our brothers and sisters in Christ up into planes where they kill each other and then themselves...
...and to seek too deeply into the sources of anger can be a form of narcissism, though to avoid looking at all at those sources can be a form of unhealthy and destructive denial...
...OF SEVERAL MINDS John Garvey GOING TO HELL BY INCHES OBSERVE YOUR PASSIONS ' ~ ot long ago an insurance executive and his wife got into their private airplane, took off, and while they ~K were in the air he shot her in the head, and then killed himself by downing a quart of scotch in fifteen minutes...
...Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice...
...I don't want to be disturbed...
...He was speaking to the right audience...
...John Chrysostom is read, and it is wonderful: "By descending into hell, he made hell captive...
...What would it be like to go from here to there...
...A church that is perhaps still using the language that helped a pre-sixties generation...
...GALLAGHER: But there is community here...
...As soon as I read the newspaper account of the murder/suicide I wondered about that murderous husband...
...We live isolated lives...
...But it is really the result of choices made beforehand...
Vol. 118 • May 1991 • No. 10
