voice dictation
One of the things I’ve noticed lately is that current events, public and private, seem to have exposed something that is fused with or hard-coded into the human condition.
That thing is anxiety.
In my experience and in my judgment based on everything I’ve read, we are all deeply anxious and that anxiety could be palpable and obvious and in the front of our minds and something that we are experiencing directly or it could be suppressed, buried or it could be self-medicated with addictive substances.
By the way, I will admit that I’m not a doctor or a psychologist and there’s a lot of complexity here and sometimes biology and other things are outside the scope of a spiritual practice and certainly I know the Buddhists would readily refer people to medical attention when they seek to treat psychological or medical conditions with Buddhist practice and responsible Christian traditions would do the same thing and there’s no intellectual or spiritual conflict in integrating medical practice and other types of knowledge into our lives despite some groups that have an erroneous view on this topic and a view that is harmful to their parishioners.
I won’t mince words there, but again we’re coming back to this topic of anxiety.
To me, the biggest life task that we have is to discover a healthy way to confront, acknowledge, come to terms with and heal our anxiety and then maybe rinse and repeat and then maybe rinse and repeat again and I know that in the Christian tradition, it’s not supposed to be a seamless clinical calm process.
It’s a, I think Thomas Hopko, I don’t want to put words in his mouth but I think he talked about it as a violent, brutal, I don’t think that might have been the right words to use but he was giving an address to some graduates of an Eastern Orthodox seminary and he had a nice long speech and basically was saying that the spiritual journey is not smooth sailing.
It can be dramatic, it can be metaphorically bloody and you can look at St. Anthony, the founder of desert monasticism, the early founder of the desert fathers, I don’t remember the details but he basically went nuts in the process of becoming a great saint and of course it’s dangerous for those of us today to try to take some of those extreme examples as normative for us.
They can be guideposts but for most of us living regular lives, I don’t think God calls us to be radical desert fathers.
That’s why I come back to St. Joseph as my model but anyway, getting back to this idea of anxiety, there are a lot of metaphors that can be used to describe the process.
There are lots of different metaphors that can be used but to me, I think it really comes down to the fact that we worship a crucified God.
We worship a God who took on flesh in the most humble way possible and his greatest glory was revealed as a crucified dead man and I think that is the core of the Christian faith and I think it’s what distinguishes us from generic theism because I dearly love Pema Chödrön the Buddhist teacher and I keep picking up her book lately called When Things Fall Apart and she’s constantly distinguishing the Buddhist path from theism and distinguishing it from what she calls the babysitter that’s never going to show up and I don’t think our God is a babysitter and I think our God is someone who is in the trenches with us to the point that he was even crucified and tortured.
He didn’t save himself through some omnipotent act.
He took the hit and as I’ve said before, we’re never going to solve the riddle of the problem of evil.
I don’t even like that phraseology but in Rowan Williams has talked about how God is in the midst of it and is working through people but I think that the essence of our faith or maybe that’s too strong a word but we have to look reality in the eye and Pema was going through this with a Buddhist lens and basically saying hey Buddhist people that are looking at this way, you’ve got to come to grips with impermanence, you’ve got to come to grips with the fact that things change, the sand is constantly slipping through our fingers and things are constantly not working out and to me I think that that is most fully revealed and most permanently revealed on the cross, that Christ on the cross reveals the essence of what this world is and that is a world that if you do the right thing you’ll be crucified and if you do the wrong thing you’re going to be miserable because all the idols, all the trinkets that the world has to offer, I love how one of my favorite Christian authors talks about the awards that men give each other, it kind of makes it absurd and funny to think about one person giving another person an award seen from a Christian perspective when we’re all in this state of spiritual sickness and you know in need of the Savior—not to check the box so that we can get into heaven—but we’re all just in this human condition and trying to cope with it consciously or unconsciously and the idea that you know one man on a sinking ship would give another man a trophy on the same sinking ship and that the idea that that would actually make any real difference is absurd but yet we do that to ourselves, we give each other gifts and we give each other trophies and we seek all these different distractions to try to avoid coming to grips with the nature of reality and we have anxiety because life’s a bitch then you die, that is reality and so as I’ve said before I don’t think there’s anything we can do on our own, we can analyze and analyze and analyze and I do have great respect for the Buddhist tradition and as much as I’m enticed by it, number one it doesn’t account for my experience of the Holy Spirit and God’s presence and guidance and number two I will never be able to come to grips with this idea of non-self or no-self, it just doesn’t compete with me and I think that maybe if you’re a monk in a Buddhist monastery you can have some kind of you know I won’t call it esoteric but some kind of experience of meditation but that’s just not, that’s just not reality, that’s not dealing with reality in terms of living an everyday life and so anyway we come back to this idea of anxiety and really that we have anxiety because we don’t want to face the fact that this world will crucify you, you can do everything right like Jesus did and you can be crucified for it and then you can do things that will try to salve or that will try to alleviate this sense of emptiness or this sense of despair, you can try to fill that sense of despair with any number of things but they don’t deliver.
I try to keep Thomas Aquinas and his thoughts kind of quarantined from my thinking but I did read a pretty good summary of, I have a summary of some of his thoughts and they had this idea that all these different things in the world are reflections of God and so we’re supposed to look at these things in the world as evidence of something more rather than things in themselves and so I think that to me the reason, I have a crucifix on my desk and the reason I think about the cross and the reason that I’m drawn to this idea of the paradox of the cross that St. Paul writes about is also known as the word of the cross, he says it’s foolishness to Greeks, a scandal to Jews but to those of us both Jews and Greeks who are being saved is the power of God and I think the reason it’s the power of God is it gives us a way to look reality in the eye and say yes, yes if I do the right thing I will be crucified just like Jesus, just like the martyrs, just like everybody else that has any sense of whatever but looking that reality in the eye but we have this idea of the resurrection and I’ve said before that I don’t know what the resurrection was, all I know is that there are many people that were willing to be martyred rather than to deny the resurrection and so I think that we have to say yes, life will crucify us but we’re not surprised by that, we’re not going to try to run away from that, we’re not going to try to deny that, we’re going to look at the cross, look at squarely in the eye and say yes, life will crucify us all day every day but we’re not surprised by it and we’re not defeated by it, we connect our crucifixions to Christ’s crucifixion and then we are resurrected as he is resurrected and you can think about that existentially, you can think about it physically, you can think about it psychologically but at the end of the day you have to look reality in the eye and come to grips with it and recognize that this world is a trial, this world is not heaven, this world is existential hell or whatever you want to put it and then if you recognize that and you live into that reality then you can start to have peace because if you know you have nothing else but the cross to cling to and you abandon all these existential idols, all these things that we look to for security, if you abandon all that and put all your chips on Christ, you know people think you’re nuts just like St. Paul says they think you’re a fool but they say God’s wisdom, God uses foolishness to shame the wise and so all your chips are on a crucified dead man and that’s where you look through your hope, you’re not going to look for your hope anywhere else ultimately and so when those other things blow up you’re not going to be fazed by it because you know you’re not surprised by it because they all blow up, all these things around us change, all these idols they don’t deliver but Christ delivers but that’s a deep mystery, it’s a deep deep mystery we have to live into every day and the more we do that the closer we get to Christ as St. Bernard of Clairvaux or whatever said he sees the five wounds of Christ as lips saying I love you and the deeper we go into the Christ’s crucifixion the deeper we go into the lives of the saints the deeper we go into the deep depths of scripture and the deep depths of prayer and the rosary and the Jesus prayer all that stuff we go deep deep deep into that and the more we go into that the more we meditate on Christ crucified the less all this other stuff is even on our radar it’s only on our radar to the extent we have to use it to do our normal chores and live our practical aspects of our lives but we’re not looking for these things for identity for security for anything we put all our chips on Christ and that’s where the wisdom comes from and it comes from Him it’s not something we gin up it is infused contemplation as the Catholics call it it comes from him and we give everything up and that’s how we get peace and now I gotta go deal with the family stuff God bless
Boyd Camak 