Down with Idols!

At first glance, the rant of prophet and psalmist against the worship of idols might seem out of date to contemporary readers.  A little reflection, though, tells us that it is as current as can be.  “Idol” is defined in modern dictionaries as a representation of an object of worship, carrying the connotation of “false god”.  Nowadays, with religious idolatry a matter of concern only to select circles,  it is more common to see the title “idol” attached to any person who attracts adulation, regardless of personal qualities, or any perceived good that determines how we live our lives.  Idols are identified by their popularity rather than by what they represent.  A movie star might be an idol, sometimes for no apparent reason, certainly not acting talent. Wealth or power might be a goal to which we render obedience and devote our lives as to a god.  These idols and their implications for people’s lives make countless appearances in the media, enhancing their power over people’s thoughts and behavior, no less than did the idols of Egypt in the days of the Pharaohs, though normally no one would consider them real divinities. 

 The idol we recognize less often is more dangerous.  The psalmist warns, “Pagan idols are silver and gold,/ the work of human hands. They have mouths but they do not speak; /they have eyes but they do not see./ They have ears but they do not hear; /there is never a breath on their lips./ Their makers will come to be like them, and so will all who trust in them!” (Psalm 135:15-18) Think about these idols not in the usual sense of statues or even all-consuming goals, but as the images we have used as models, creating selves made false and rendered lifeless, There are many means at hand to disguise ourselves behind exteriors of silver and gold, the work of our own hands, or the hands of others—makeup, clothing, plastic surgery, clothing designed to convey a desired image, styles of speech or accents not the ones we grew up with, letters after our names, a certain house, a certain car, even appearances of piety.  We have learned how to look good to our chosen audience—parents, children, teachers, employers, co-workers, neighbors, voters, whoever’s good opinion we have come to value above our own integrity.  But skill does not supply reality. The image is an illusion, not the living, breathing human being we really are—or were.  In this case, we have ourselves become idols to ourselves.

 In most cases,  fortunately, we don’t remake ourselves over entirely by the pattern of false images.  But we can take on the bits and pieces of the images and so, to some degree, falsify ourselves. And, with God’s help and the intervention of people who love us as we are, we can outgrow the falsity as we mature. If we look back at the teenager or the twenty-something or the ambitious “newbie” we once were, we can breathe a sigh of relief at having left that “self” behind!

 St. Benedict offers us two powerful tool for abandoning self-falsification and self-worship. The first is humility, which he presents as a process rather than a finished achievement (RB 7).  He might have rooted it in an earlier line:  “Do not aspire to be called holy before you really are, but first be holy that you may more truly be called so” (RB 4:62).  The hidden trick is that if we truly become holy, we will no longer worry about another person’s opinion or seek to make ourselves  look better to impress others because our life will be devoted to Christ who is himself our “truth” (cf. John 14:6), a truth far greater than we alone could ever become.  In a larger sense Benedict’s directive really calls us to be who we truly are right now and seek to become who we will ultimately really be in the next life by the power of God, our real Creator., not some hollow image we have made of ourselves according to some pattern we have thought might be to our advantage.   Each real self is unique.  There are no duplicates in the reign of God, only vivid originals.

 The second tool, more surprisingly, is community in whatever broad sense our way of life provides.  Surrounding ourselves with others committed to the same quest for God as we are, the same values as we aspire to live, and the same ultimate goal we are pursuing, as oblates do, is the best way to protect ourselves from the falsities that might tempt all of us.  A network like this binds us to people who love us enough to offer us inspiration, encouragement, and, yes, honest feedback to keep us on the path integrity. And it invites us to do the same for them.  Human truth is never simply individual; it is always shared in Christ, belong as we all do to the Body of Christ.

 Believe it or not, with Christmas now behind us, Lent is not too far ahead.  Ash Wednesday this year is February 16.  We need not wait.  We could start now to tear down whatever idols we have made of our own gifts, talents, or empty dreams.   How small, tacky and tarnished they appear next to the reality seen in the bright light of Christ!  God much prefers the real thing. So do the people who genuinely love us.  And so, in our best moments, do we. 

 Copyright 2021, Abbey of St. Walburga

 

 

 

 

 

Psalm 46: An Advent Prayer

 This entry was reposted with permission from the new blog at Give Us This Day, https://blog.giveusthisday.org/.  The essay first appeared in the December 2020 issue of Give Us This Day.  New entries from Give Us This Day will be posted daily on the Give Us This Day blog. I encourage you to visit the blog, where you can sign up to receive the post daily by email.  This service is free, but of course the publishers, The Liturgical Press, would be delighted if you would subscribe to the publication itself.  A paid subscription also gives you access to the online (and downloadable) issue.  Since they publish both my essays and my books (just one so far, two more in the works), I like to support them!

Every Advent we hear: this is the season for listening quietly to God’s Word. And every Advent we remember: it is also the busiest season of the year. What to do?  

Psalm 46 offers a suggestive geography. It pictures an outside world where chaos is imagined as earthquake, tsunami, political turmoil, warfare. But there is also an inner world where God’s presence and protective power banish all turmoil. There we can sit quietly and hear ourselves think. The obvious Advent strategy is to find the way into that quiet place within while the holiday-mad world around us is in turmoil. Lucky for those who can, but many of us find it nearly impossible. Are we then shut out of the holy season’s gift?  

Maybe not. What if Advent shifts the strategy? As we prepare to celebrate God’s entry into human history as Word-made-human-flesh, perhaps we could reconsider where we might go to hear God’s Word in the midst of the season’s bedlam. Advent and its Christmas sequel remind us that God’s point of entry was never a silent sanctuary, outward or inward. After long, tumultuous years of promise, the Word arrived in a stable in Bethlehem—a town bursting with incomers who were summoned for a census, a murderous dictator hovering in the background. So wouldn’t it be appropriate to listen for the Word not just within our own hearts but also in the less-than-quiet world around us? What if we learned to recognize the Word in raucous shoppers, quarrelsome family members, and the muttering of homeless people we pass by?  

We might rather not. Our own inner sanctuary offers a quiet retreat, but the surrounding babble invites us into the chaos of real human dramas where we often don’t know how to help. Psalm 46 offers a strategy for that, too, but not the one we usually come up with. “Be still, drop that heavy fix-it toolbox, and just be there where God is.” Learn to hear God’s ever-creating Word spoken in the human voices of expectation and despair, joy and suffering, desire and anger.  

On the Advent doorstep of the Good News made flesh among us, be present, pay attention, listen, and seek to love all those speakers milling everywhere, the welcome and the unwelcome alike. Presence, awareness, listening, and love—God’s fix-it toolbox—are far more powerful than bows, spears, and shields. They are, after all, the tools that Christ, the ultimate Word, brings into the world for our salvation. Let us study them now, in this season of listening—even if only in hurried snatches—so we may learn to put them to use in doing the Gospel’s work year-round.  

Copyright Give Us This Day 2020.  Reprinted with permission.

Psalm 1:1-2 Blessed!

Blessed indeed is the man 

who follows not the counsel of the wicked,

Nor stands in the path with sinners, 

nor abides in the company of scorners,

But whose delight is the law of the Lord, 

and who ponders his law day and night.

Psalm 1:1-2

Revised Grail Translation

           

What an odd beatitude!  Not “Blessed is the one who does thus-and-such” or “Blessed is the one who is thus-and-so.”  Not, for example, “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness” or “Blessed are the merciful” (Matt 5:6-7)).  Rather, blessed is the one who does NOT do any of  the following:  follow the counsel of the wicked, stand in the path of sinners, abide in the company of scorners. 

Parents worry, as many of you well know, and as all of us discovered when we were kids.  Parents worry about where their kids hang out and with what companions.  Apparently, God worries about it too.  The point at issue in parents’ concern about the company kids keep and God’s concern about the company we keep comes down to the matter of listening.  The people we hang out with are the voices we hear most often.  The voices we hear shape us:  they shape what we think, what we value, what we aspire to, what we do.  For kids, those voices were once most likely to be the voices of their friends.  Parents might speak, teachers might speak, preachers might speak, but the voices that most often got through in the moment were the voices of the crowd the kid ran with.  The other voices might have had a longer impact, or at least so the speakers hoped, but the voices that defined “now” were the voices most often heard, and the voices most often heard were those of friends.  Nowadays, the voices most often heard might come from even more frightening sources as media of every kind feed into the ears of many kids through ever-present earphones.   

Kids grow up.  We did.  We grew into a world where we discovered a wider range of voices to listen to, and where, no doubt, we became a bit more choosy about which ones we chose to hear.  But we are still most affected by the voices we hear most often, as advertisers well know.  That is God’s concern, as expressed by the psalmist: With whom do you hang out?  What voices do you hear?  To which voices are you most likely to listen?

The psalmist apparently names three sets of undesirable voices:  those of the wicked, sinners, and scorners.  However, in the psalm-world, all three are essentially concrete descriptions of what Psalm 14:1 calls the fools who say in their hearts, “There is no God.”  A bit of cultural translation might help here.  The people of the psalms didn’t live in a world of rampant atheism of the kind that speaks to us from every side now.  They did live among two rather more subtle kinds of unbelievers.  The first, to whom Psalm 14 refers, were those members of the covenant people who had abandoned the covenant code of  comprehensive justice that governed all relationships.  Some of its laws sound alien to us now, but they were in fact intended to protect the poor, the helpless, the outsider, and, indeed, all God’s people from their own worst selves.  The godless of Psalm 14 and other psalms were those who no longer held themselves accountable before the God of their people for their behavior toward others.  It was a useful kind of atheism-in-practice for those whose lives were governed instead by self-interest.  The second kind of unbelievers were, of course, Israel’s neighbors and enemies who worshipped other gods who called for different values.  However, they were of less concern to the psalmist than the “godless” who lived next door or down the street and congregated in the marketplace where anyone might join them. 

Both kinds of unbelievers are with us still, though they wear different clothing now and hang out in other places.  We usually know them.  We often hear them in the media.  We might work with them or even, sometimes, live with them.  To us the psalmist says what our parents said:  be careful of the company you keep; watch out who you listen to.

However, the monastic tradition knows of a subtler crowd of unbelievers who pose a greater danger than the ones among whom we live our daily lives.  They inhabit the recesses of our own hearts.  Father Gabriel Bunge, in his excellent book Despondency (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Yonkers, NY, 2011) offers a bit of wisdom from the desert:  we all host collaborators--inner weaknesses, selfish inclinations, perhaps even bad habits we thought we had abandoned--who open the door from the inside to let the Tempter’s minions in.  Especially when we are tired, lonely, or disheartened, we may more or less unintentionally allow them in without much resistance.  Perhaps the most dangerous of them all are the ones who whisper, “Prayer?  Come on.  You can do that later.  Today you deserve a break.  Be good to yourself.” So, without clearly making the choice, we shut out the one Voice that matters in favor of the wicked, the sinners, the scorners of God’s word who clamor quite persuasively to be heard.  We make Eve’s choice, and Adam’s:  we listen to the wrong voice and obey a different word than God’s and go away the very opposite of “blessed.”

St. Benedict warns us.  “Listen!” he urges at the very outset of the Rule.  But he goes on to specify which voice we should listen to and obey:  “Listen carefully… to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart. This is advice from a father who loves you; welcome it, and faithfully put it into practice. The labor of obedience will bring you back to him from whom you had drifted through the sloth of disobedience. This message of mine is for you, then, if you are ready to give up your own will, once and for all, and armed with the strong and noble weapons of obedience to do battle for the true King, Christ the Lord” (Prologue 1-3) Commentators have noted that “the master” can mean St. Benedict himself, but it can also mean Benedict’s Master, Christ, the Word of God.

Indeed, the psalmist says, “Blessed are they who don’t hang out with those who follow other gods, even the powerful god we call Ego, but rather listen to the Voice that brought us into being, the Voice that shapes us into our own true selves, the Voice that speaks salvation throughout the length and breadth of the bible and indeed of human history:  “Blessed the one          whose delight is the law of the Lord, and who ponders his law day and night.”

And there you have as succinct a description of lectio divina as you will ever read. We will explore it further in later postings.

©Abbey of St. Walburga, 2014