If finding an insight can, in baseball terms, be called hitting a solid single, finding the same insight in five different spiritual writers is like hitting a home run with the bases loaded. Yesterday, I was listening to cancer recovery stories at the Relay for Life and found this:
Fill your bowl to the brim
And it will spill.
Keep sharpening the knife
And it will blunt.
Chase after money and security
And your heart will never unclench.
Care about people’s approval
And you will be their prisoner.
Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.
Lao-Tzu, translated by Stephen Mitchell
Along with my centering prayer group, I’ve quarreled with John of the Cross, and his insistence in Chapter 13 of Ascent of Mt. Carmel, that we conquer our own appetites if they get in the way of our progress towards God. (Put this way, the idea sounds reasonable. John makes it much harsher). Now that I’m approaching senior citizen status, I’m not sure that this is even possible.
Setting out to conquer ones appetites conjures up a picture of a statue’s taking hammer and chisel out of the hands of the sculptor. “I, says the statue, can do a better job of shaping myself, than you are doing. I know which appetites and talents are good for me and which are not. I will shape myself into a better statue.” The sculptor, having given the statue freedom of choice, says: “Go ahead, but come back if you change your mind.”
The statue, ignoring Lao-Tzu’s advice, keeps on “sharpening the knife,” only to find that “it will blunt.”
Barbara Breaud, O Carm,, makes use of the ideas of the late psychiatrist Gerald May to connect the writings of Bill Wilson with John of the Cross. She writes:
“I believe with Gerald May that all people are addicts, and...addiction to alcohol and other drugs are simply the more obvious and tragic attachments. To be alive is to be addicted, and to be alive and addicted is to stand in need of grace. The 12 Steps and the terminology of addiction address today the inordinate sensory appetites and imperfections and the need for purification that John described. Addiction is a state of compulsion, obsession, or preoccupation that enslaves a person's will and desire. Addiction sidetracks and eclipses the energy of our deepest, truest desire for love and goodness. We succumb because the energy of our desire becomes attached, nailed, to specific behaviors, objects, or people. Attachment, then, is the process that enslaves desire and creates the state of addiction. Our addictions fill up the deep caverns of the soul, which John describes:
The person has only one will, and if this gets caught up in a particular thing, it will not be free, complete, simple or pure-yet that is what is needed if God is to transform it.”
Here is the hard part. Suppose that we grudgingly admit that Lao Tzu is correct and that we must eliminate some of our attachments. What do we do if we find ourselves unwilling or unable chisel them away? Worse, left to our own devices, we can’t even know which attachments ought to be chiseled away and which we should keep.
I’m reminded of a story about a Russian general officer who, in his youth, protested the actions of one Communist Party official in bringing about a famine. The party purged that official. The officer later found out that famine was a result of party policy. He wrote that, if he had been smarter, he would have protested the party policy and he would also have been purged. He observed that “God protected me by not making me too smart.” Had he been a self-sculptor, the general would have sharpened his intellect.
Some attachments - Bill Wilson calls them character defects – ought to remain on the statue because the sculptor has use for them.
The best we can do is to become “entirely willing” to have God remove these defects of character and then ask God to remove them. It is the “entirely” part that makes it difficult and progress slow.
St Ignatius makes a similar point in regard to created things. From this it follows that man is to use them as much as they help him on to his end, and ought to rid himself of them so far as they hinder him as to it. He did leave an “escape” clause: “For this it is necessary to make ourselves indifferent to all created things in all that is allowed to the choice of our free will and is not prohibited to it." There are some things that we should not give up because of our station in life.
In one afternoon I connected Lao Tzu, John of the Cross, Gerald May, Bill Wilson, and St. Ignatius – five writers identifying the need to rid oneself of disordered attachments.
The problem is, even after a player hits a grand slam, he has to run the bases and touch every one of them. It is hard to run when you're carrying a hammer and chisel.
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