Daily Archives: 2013/01/21

Caveat lector: There are more dangers about this autobiography which ought best be voiced, dangers for readers, and dangers for myself. A word also needs to be said, then, about mirth amidst danger.

Dangers for readers

Wanting to understand can be a difficulty, even for really good people. Having lived in Rome for some twenty years, I came to know many excellent priests who now work in various dicasteries of the Roman Curia, the Vatican, the Holy See. I showed one of them, a good friend of many decades – whom I have never ceased to hold in the highest regard – some seven hundred and fifty pages of a little project on which I had been laboring in my free time.

After some weeks, he said that it was this that was a travesty, surely written by a Judas-priest, though I was his best friend! He insisted that it was the most incisive bigotry against Catholics that could ever be published. Now, for someone who works in the Vatican, that is saying quite a bit. All of the worst heresies and anti-Catholic writings make their way to Rome to be examined. “The author hates the Church,” he said, continuing in the third person, “handing over on a silver platter the best arguments against the Church to those who hate the Church.” Perhaps the vulnerability of John the Baptist’s head on that silver platter, a kind of faith by the sword experience, wasn’t this priest’s idea of religion at the time. Too bad, that. The martyrdom of saying things the way they are when others should but do not is not at all an argument against the Church, but is her very glory (no thanks to us, but to Christ Jesus). People who have suffered know what a great encouragement it is to see that someone, anyone – by the grace of God – has survived such things. He didn’t finish reading, rejecting, it seems, perhaps without knowing it, the Pope’s call for what is also “self-critical dialogue”. Perhaps I should add that another friend of many decades, who works in a much more important dicastery in the Holy See, and who also read those 750 pages, said that I must continue writing, saying things the way they are.

I recount all that to you, dear reader, since I’m quite afraid that someone else, in reading these pages of autobiography – not all that different from the project mentioned above – might get the same idea about my betraying the Church like Judas. To avoid scandal, a crash course in irony by the great Hilaire Belloc is necessary, for, you see, my life is filled with the most cutting irony, so much so, that I have left many an ecclesiastical superior aghast, whether they were proud of me or embarrassed by me, depending on their appreciation of irony. The life of each one of us should and must be filled with irony if we want to be saints. Everyone, no matter what, can become a saint. If we do not become saints, we will have utterly, catastrophically wasted our lives. That a sinner becomes a saint has a glorious ferocity that can only be described as mirth, but one must be terribly, caustically alive to be aware of the realities of good and evil all around us:

To the young, the pure, and the ingenuous, irony must always appear to have a quality of something evil, and so it has, for [...] it is a sword to wound. It is so directly the product or reflex of evil that, though it can never be used – nay, can hardly exist – save in the chastisement of evil, yet irony always carries with it some reflections of the bad spirit against which it was directed. [...] It suggests most powerfully the evil against which it is directed, and those innocent of evil shun so terrible an instrument. [...] The mere truth is vivid with ironical power. [...] The mere utterance of a plain truth labouriously concealed by hypocrisy, denied by contemporary falsehood, and forgotten in the moral lethargy of the populace, takes upon itself an ironical quality more powerful than any elaboration of special ironies could have taken in the past. [...] No man possessed of irony and using it has lived happily; nor has any man possessing it and using it died without having done great good to his fellows and secured a singular advantage to his own soul. (Hilaire Belloc, Selected Essays (2/6), ed. J.B. Morton; Penguin Books (1325): Harmondsworth – Baltimore – Mitcham, 1958. See the essay “On Irony” on pages 124-127.)

So, if not happiness, irony brings blessedness, living life on the edge, marginalized as obscurantist, cut down by the sword for reflecting light. As for me, without grace, I am not ironic, but self-affirmingly trample on others, claiming a moral high ground swamped by my weakness. Given the circumstances, and without grace, I would be more evil than the worst monsters mentioned herein. Nice circumstances do not justify, but tend to deceive. Those saying differently are liars, selling something, prostituting themselves to buyers deluded in the self-congratulations that are despised by the prostitute.

Any irony in this autobiography is most ironic, for, with the prodigal son, and with Saint Peter, I learn not from any failure, but in being forgiven for culpable ineptness by the One I have often betrayed. Irony is not diablerie. It is about being brought to life. But the understanding that it is God’s chosen irony to bring others to heaven by way of us inevitably casts light on the misunderstanding of those who do not want to understand, who want only to bully others into having their own tunnel vision of themselves. That God will bring others to heaven by way of us – we who are so very unworthy, we who have known understanding as a gift, we who have had the benefit of others suffering for us in like manner – is my entire hope, without which irony I would want to run straight into hell and remain there forever. My hope extends to those who presently go out of their way not to understand. Dum spiro spero.

Dangers for myself

Pride and lockstep ingratitude, whenever there is a question of speaking of one’s life, are always a risk. There is no way around this except grace. Even Saint Paul did not dare judge his standing before God (see 1 Cor. 4,3). What to do except take his example, regardless of his holiness and dedication?

For I reckon that God has appointed us apostles last, as those condemned to death, so that we became a spectacle to the world and angels and men. We are fools on Christ’s behalf, but you are wise in Christ; we are weak, but you are strong; you are in glory, but we are in dishonor. Up to this very hour we are hungry and we are thirsty and we are poorly clothed and we are beaten down and we are gyrovagrants [instabiles sumus; ἀστατοῦμεν] and we labor, working with our own hands; being reviled, we bless; being persecuted, we endure; being slandered, we respond with kindness. We have become like the off-scouring of the world, the scum of all, to this very moment (1 Corinthians 4,9-13).

Surely one of the slanders Saint Paul had to endure was that he had a “martyrdom-complex”, but, as he indicates, it is all for Christ’s sake, all done according to His will, by His appointment. I love the bit about gyrovagrancy, for I have often been condemned, even with extreme severity, for that aspect of my life. Saint Benedict, in chapter one of his rule, also condemns gyrovagrants as the worst of the worst. Of course, he wasn’t speaking of the type of gyrovagrancy mentioned by the Apostle to the Gentiles or that which is mentioned by our Lord, when He predicts how his Apostles will flee from one town to the next. I think some have thought rather badly of me, calling to mind the gyrovagrant Russian monk by the name of Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin.

But when the angels see what Christ does with us, we are a spectacle to them. Christ takes us to Himself and has us work greater things than He ever did (John 14,12) for the simple reason that any work we do in Him must be “greater” in that we are otherwise just so very much nothing before God, having been lost in sin. What a privilege it is to be thought of as fools for Christ, the greatest of all works we could ever do.

While having come to know, now and again, on the one hand, being weak, dishonored, hungry, thirsty, poorly clad, beaten down, laboring with my hands for upkeep while at the same time being marginalized to the point of gyrovagrancy, I have also many times known great difficulty and even failure in blessing, enduring and responding in kindness when reviled, persecuted and slandered. Yet, I have also come to know at least how to begin to rejoice in becoming the off-scouring of the world, the scum of all, to this very moment. If, by the mysterious will of God, I am also to be a spectacle for angels and a fool for Christ (and I think that is true for us all, in Him), then surely being formed in His goodness and kindness in this very way is also His will.

Some months before writing this, a modern-day gyrovagrant of the streets stopped to speak with me, thinking that I might be somebody “important,” but I said that I was always expendable, always available to be marginalized – and often was – a nobody. When he heard the words “a nobody”, he lectured me with the ferocity of an angel sent from God, saying that I was never ever to call myself “a nobody”. Circumstances never made anyone less than somebody.

That’s true, of course, about external circumstances. However, to be appointed to be a nobody by our Lord is an honor. Horrific, however, is the fact that I have often, in my sin, designated myself to become a somebody, and therefore less than a nobody. Yet, in failure, I can learn to rejoice in the Lord’s goodness and kindness. It is in Confession that I have learned to be a fool for Christ. With the repentance of just one sinner, even me, there is more rejoicing before the angels in heaven than over a multitude who consider themselves to be just. It’s great to be a spectacle to the angels in this way. They are eager, then, to instruct us, often through the world and men. However adept we are at perceiving this, such instruction is not so easy to receive. But it is always according to God’s will. It’s about humble thanksgiving.

Mirth amidst danger

“Aaarrgh!” exclaimed a seminarian, laughing, “You can’t have had that many outrageous experiences in your life. It’s just not possible for one person!”

I was just one of the storytellers that prompted frequent remarks that seminarians should have to pay to eat at the same tables as myself and some of the other storytellers for the entertainment and lessons we shared.

“If you are faithful in the smallest things,” I answered, “never compromising faith or morals, that’s when life becomes interesting, not that I’ve always been faithful, mind you. Far from it. But the way back to the Lord is just as extraordinary, just as life-giving.”

That kind of autobiographical methodology seemed to be good for conversations, which were often hilarious or even had a rip-your-face-off, stunning gravity to them (as the seminarians put it), but such levity, however true in detail and interpretation, hid the fact that I was just making light of the circumstances the Lord provided or permitted in my life. However much anyone laughed or cried, the pride which makes light of all things cannot provide irony and the in-your-face paradoxical mirth-making that reflects life.

The written word of this autobiography, however, brings with it at least an opportunity to go to the heart of what, that is, Who life is all about. Instead of just making people laugh or cry about the details of unrepeatable circumstances, instead of moralistic pontificating, I hope to point in all vulnerability, in all irony, in all mirth, to the One who supplies life to us all, who provides or permits all the circumstances in our lives.

I fear I do not have the spiritual agility necessary to understand our fallen condition before God, who loves us enough to bring us back to Himself. Original sin, however forgiven by God, leaves us with its consequences: weakness of mind, weakness of will, emotions all over the place, sickness, death, and the annoyance of suffering the effects of our own sin and that of others.

Yet, mirth admits of such a fear, which is why it is what it is. Mirth is the most wonderful and the most elusive aspect of Judaeo-Catholic faith, wonderful for the joy found in the power of God’s ever so loving irony, elusive since one cannot pursue such mirth, only be drawn up into it by the Lord. He patiently teaches us that mercy and justice and His great love for us are but one and the same in Him.

Great is the joy to be had in realizing that God does not hold our weaknesses against us, but even commands us – in His justice geared to mercy – to carry weakness as a cross upon which narrow-minded egoism is to be crucified to the point of us giving up trying to trust in ourselves so as, simply, to trust in Him. He puts our weakness to work for our sanctification. We take up our cross, being honest, and follow Christ, being lifted into reality. Those who know the life which any good autobiography should reflect are aware that such irony does not bring with it a jump up and down for joy emotionalism, but is rather an introduction to a peace adequate to march after Christ until we meet Him.

Those who do not want to understand, think that actual justice – a love which will not compromise love – is only for fools, the spectacle of whose lives are best ignored or mocked. It is in just such a circumstance that humble thanksgiving flourishes. We know God’s love is good. We know we are unworthy. It must be shouted from the housetops. He who said, “One who talks does not know; one who knows does not talk,” spoke of nirvana as if it were sane, not of autobiographical hilarity. To remain silent would be a travesty.

Irony, not an autobiographical laxative

This is not a psychological study, a return to the way things were so as to divine my present and future. The love of God is always readable in the wounds on the Body of Christ Jesus and, at the same time, always exquisitely unpredictable in that He draws us to Himself in ways we cannot now comprehend.

This is simply an account of someone who has, by the grace of God, desired, in all irony, to understand, even at the risk of being misunderstood. Pop-psychology, with no understanding whatsoever, rejects irony as satire, a projection of self, an auto-biographical laxative. Before such obtuseness, such niceness, Saint Francis described irony as understanding willingly at risk of being misunderstood, with the being misunderstood part always but always being the price for understanding. My hope is that this account of irony will strike a chord in those who want to understand, and that those who want to misunderstand might have a change of heart. Again, anyone’s account of the Lord’s irony with us is a treasure, no matter who writes it, even me, no matter the circumstances that are related, even mine. It’s all about Him, not about any one of us, especially not me.

Vomiting for some minutes, soaked in sweat, with bursting capillaries reddening the whites of my eyes, gasping loudly between individual retchings, my head bowed low into the excrement-filled toilet, and then spinning around to explode yet again with diarrhea, a seemingly endless and dizzying cycle when, two weeks into Bangladeshian entamoeba histolytica, I was able, finally, just to sit in that “Saly” dorm room toilet stall, giving my lungs a chance to heave the hot, humid and ever so rancid air of my of new surroundings of inner-city Calcutta. The odors of the toilet stall mixed with those from just outside the barred and paneless window, where the locals were using dung to cook their food, giving the hazey air outside a quality without which all of West Bengal would be incomplete.

Sitting there, hoarse from near hyperventilation, my eyes tried to tear up from non-stop exertion, but I was dehydrated, and without nutrition for weeks. My head seemed to be whirling about in a continuous vortex of sewage, even when I would be able to lie on the heavily stained, infested mattress for a few minutes, just five feet from the toilet. I was much thinner than I had been a couple of weeks previously. The full impact of culture shock was upon me. I was as far away from home as a youngster could ever be.

With blurred vision, I stared at the cockroach carcases littered about the edges of the toilet stall. Someone with more energy than I had managed to kill most of them and push them off to the side. They came in all shapes and sizes, some as big as mice, not counting the legs and antennae. I didn’t realize how many there were until someone came in to the dorm room late one night and turned on the lights. I thought I had been taken to a different room as the walls seemed brown. I was wrong. The walls were also moving, the brown color being the multitude of cockroaches. Everyone and everything was thickly covered with them, every night.

As my mind became a bit clearer, sitting on that toilet, just before the next bout of vomiting and diarrhea, I began to study intently the not so typical graffiti. It wasn’t the usual erotic imagery one finds in affluent countries. Instead, there were proverbs and poetry, even an admonition or two. One of the latter went like this:

If you think the bottom is falling out of your world, come to Calcutta, and you will think that the world is falling out of your bottom.

• Is this the despair of two for one, spiritual and physical suffering at the same time?
• Or is this the bitterness of nihilism, holding everything and everyone to be no more than the liquid excrement exploding from one’s bowels?
• Or is this an expression of humor and levity mixed in with moralistic platitudes?
• Or is this a kind of beginner’s mirth, a wisdom putting perspective on the relativity of suffering so all-inclusively that it places one before God? In such a place as this, my eyes lit right up. For many decades, I have wanted to thank the author. The next cycle of diarrhea and vomiting was upon me, but I had new strength. Little things confirm one’s hope.

Our unrepeatable circumstances – even dysentery – become interesting to others only when there is some interpretation given to the events. What is it that makes such a person tick? In finding that truth for one person – on a most profound level – we find that truth for all. It is no beginner’s mirth that I wish to provide in this autobiography. The project here is to speak of Incarnate Mirth, who brings us to life, Christ, our God-with-us.

~ ~ ~

My father was the first one to encourage me to write about my exploits, perhaps seven times over the years, beginning when I was only a teenager. At the time, I did not understand. Later, I happened upon a diary he had written during the years of his combat pilot missions in Guam, the Philippines, Japan, China and Korea, as leader of the famed Corsair Checkerboard squadron of Marine pilots. My mom had often encouraged me to read it. It was filled with his aspirations of service to his fellow man and to God.

My dad’s patriotism – enlivened with a sense of the natural law he had learned at the Catholic University of Saint Thomas and which was enshrined in the Constitution of the United States (though often ignored) – spurred him on to political and legal endeavors. He was an honest statesman. Once, when I was just twelve years old, a friend pointed him out in a crowd, staring at him in wonder. He said, “Just look at him. He’s an example of integrity. I want to be just like him.”

As the baby of the family, I had always been dad’s favorite, and he had set his hopes on me to further his own aspirations both legally and politically. Yet, I was reticent to begin writing as he had asked me to do. It’s not that there wasn’t anything to write about. It was that my own spirit wasn’t up to the task, and I knew it. Something was missing, but I didn’t know what.

Then there were others, many of the laity, across the decades, who have been after me to write. The same goes for many priests, who, again and again said that I should, and even must write an autobiography, becoming upset that I would rebell at such an idea. Since they were not my ecclesiastical superiors, they had no say, though they had come close to convincing me. Yet, something just didn’t sit well with me about all this.

Then cloistered nuns and “spiritual mothers” all urged me to write. They all know I have lived a rather raucous life and were interested to know how this had been an occasion for the Lord to draw me to Himself. They said that people who suffer much might well benefit from knowing something of my own life. That, of course, would make it imperative to interpret recounted events, precisely what I thought myself incapable of doing.

Eventually I understood what I needed to know: the one who goes about writing an autobiography is almost irrelevant to what is written, the details of the story even less so. It is the skill with which one points to what is essential to the life of every man that matters. To be worth the time of the reader, an autobiography must be about the lives of the readers themselves. It should be a kind of rough mirror, reflecting, at least to some small degree, their own souls, that they might more easily see how their own autobiographies are being written out with all the unrepeatable details of their own lives.

One nun in particular was persisting in her requests for years and years. But I always had some excuse to give, such as my ever present unworthiness, which overrides any understanding I came to have. She just would not take “No” for an answer. I finally said, “Never! Not an autobiography, not without my being put under obedience by an ecclesiastical superior, at least the priest who is my spiritual director and confessor.” I said that that command under obedience would be highly unlikely, so she should just forget all this.

Some days later I spoke with her and she said that she was putting me under obedience herself. After all, she explained, she was a Spiritual Mother for me, so why shouldn’t she put me under obedience? To make it all very official, she got permission from a priest to do this, and recounted the all too serious conversation they had.

This, of course, just wouldn’t do. I repeated that I would have to speak with my own spiritual director and confessor. Sigh. It must be a conspiracy to have me make a fool of myself, though everyone who knows me already knows that I am such a fool, particularly my spiritual director and confessor. He’s a hilarious and holy priest, full of the joyful mirth of our Lord. He said that the point of me, of all people, writing an autobiography, was not that I’m anything special – and I’m not – but because, in his opinion, I might sometimes have a certain way of phrasing things that might be useful to others.

Of course, he might just want me to see in print what he’s been trying to point out to me all along, that the Lord wants me on this earth for a reason, at least so as to offer the service of a being a purgatory for those the Lord has put in my path, so that they might have the opportunity of going straight to heaven when they die. Who am I to stand in the way of such a great plan? Whether some of these others in my life think of me as an unforgivable Judas, or, more hopefully, as Peter the Apostle in all his weakness, I nevertheless hope that — should they make it to heaven before me – they will welcome me into the eternal habitations when it is my turn to meet the Lord.

Besides the dangers of this autobiography for myself and the readers – detailed in the next chapter – my other, equally serious objections, were all dismissed.

My most serious, preemptive objection is that writing an autobiography is redundant to and a dumbing-down of the detailed biography that is written for each one of us by the Lord (see Rev. 20,12-13). Will not the autobiography written by man be compared for accuracy to the biography written by Him who is Truth? If the autobiographer has even unknowingly dissimulated, will he not be judged on this? Is this not a risk that is eminently avoidable?

More frightening is the fact that anyone’s biography can be read, even now, in the five wounds of the feet, hands and heart of the Living Word of God the Father, whose eternal speech of Living Charity is readable in that One Word. Could I possibly think that I could write better, or more completely, of His love for us?

Indeed, if our lives are written out on the wounds on the One Word of God, what’s the point of the multiplication of words in an autobiography, even if I were to succeed in being honest? Isn’t the account of just one of the trillions of men who have lived in past ages, are living now, and who will live in the future, just an exercise in narcissism, a distraction to those who could better spend their little time in this world in getting to know their Creator, the One who has loved them right to death, the One who brings them to life?

And yet, again, a good autobiography is not about oneself. Saint Paul speaks of the enigmatic mirror (1 Cor. 13,12) by which we see the Lord in this world, that is, by way of love of the Lord and love of each other before the Lord. He adds that, because we now see by way of this dark mirror, we only understand imperfectly, but then, when we see God face to Face, we will fully understand just as we are fully understood. It is the goal of this autobiography merely to reflect such a reflection. If an autobiography polishes up the mirror just a bit, manifesting the presence, by love, of the Word Incarnate, in whose very being our lives are written, then the writing and the reading is worth the effort.

Should this be the case with any given autobiography, the effect would always be the same, no matter the person writing it, no matter the circumstances with which his or her life has been intermingled, in all irony, with God’s truth and charity. It’s just that not all have the time to write in this life. That’s alright. We will hear all the stories in the next life. Again, my account is nothing special, but our Lord using even my weakness, not only for my sanctification but also that of others, is awesome in His irony. The Lord Himself says that His power is being completed in such weakness (2 Cor. 12,9). The Lord’s irony is always awesome.

But I, of course, having been pushed on this for years, have more objections. For instance, just because it was not my idea to write an autobiography does not guarantee that I won’t write it with the most despicable pride and insufferable arrogance, perhaps even more so. Even if I intend with all my heart and soul to write with a spirit of humble thanksgiving doesn’t mean I will.

• I can complain that self-promoting autobiographies – always evidenced by the lack of interpretation of the details which become, then, just more fodder of the braggart – are deathly boring.
• I can express my displeasure with autobiographies in which honesty is equated with a mere recitation of one’s degradation on the written page, so that it is all just a prostitution, a selling of oneself for new-found “celebrity” status in which neither vulnerability nor honesty are rightfully claimed.

However, who’s to say that I will not do these same things in, perhaps, a more hidden way?

The reader might think to have the consolation that at least with this autobiography one has the words of the author, not of a literary hack, who, despite whatever flair he might have with the written word, ironically destroys the very reason why any autobiography could possibly be interesting to read in the first place: the personal touch, the personal presentation, the personal agony so evident with the one who writes for himself. Yet, writing for oneself might only be a circumstance necessary to a dishonest autobiographer, who must be in complete control of the all-encompassing lie he wants to produce.

The one true consolation, dear reader, that you can have in all this, is that the only reason you are reading these words now is because they have been given the go ahead of my spiritual director. He was also my confessor until I became a hermit. But my new confessor, out of the blue, pushed me to write an autobiography. Sigh. That is not to say that my spiritual director and confessors can be blamed for my ineptitude for such a project, for I always seem to make more difficult what should be an easy matter. Anything unhelpful is my fault entirely.

Saint Augustine’s Confessions constitute the incomparable masterpiece of autobiographies for the reason that theseConfessions arebut one long love letter to the God of all. How could he not remain honest? How could he not plumb the depths of who we are before the living God? This method of writing kept him honest on so many levels. It would be a pretense to imitate the inimitable. I can only pray to the Lord that I will write in a straightforward manner by addressing myself to the reader. There is no difference in writing either way, for, as the Lord said, what you have done to the least of these, you have done to me. As far as I am concerned, I am writing to the Lord, placing all these words before Him, directly burdened with the time of those who will read these pages. This is, at the same time, crushing and freeing.

I know I will have achieved what I set out to do when people who are unaware of how much they are loved by God all of a sudden know this to the point that they will say: “That priest-hermit who wrote that autobiography? He’s not special. I know Jesus that way, too.” Perfect!

If the effort expended in writing results in anyone coming to understand just a bit more that the Father speaks that One Word, that Verbum of His into our souls, that we might all together re-Verb-erate, in a symphony, with the Holy Spirit, the very life of the Most Holy Trinity, now by grace and in heaven by the very glory of God, I will be more than compensated. We are nothing if not alive in God. He is, as Saint Paul said to the Athenians in the Areopagus, the One “in whom we live and in whom we move and in whom we are [...] for we too are His kindred” (Acts 17,28).