the devil you know

     Sometimes it seems impossible to turn good intentions into lasting change. New Year's resolutions rarely last. We usually fall off the wagon, gain the weight back, go shopping instead of saving or paying off debt. Abused women, when they've gotten free, often get into new relationships with new abusers. Big lottery winners go broke again before they know it. Why? Why do we go right back to the devil we know, even when we know damn well it's the devil? Even when we know it's going to hurt us just the same way it hurt last time, and every time before? 

Gluttony

    Well, so I said I would write about the approach of the ancient Christian monastic desert fathers & mothers to sin, starting this week with gluttony. But can I just stop here for a minute and acknowledge the weight of imposter syndrome on this? Because what do I know? I'm not a scholar of ancient Christian asceticism. And I'm not a very good practitioner of modern monastic asceticism, either. What I am is a glutton, honestly. Any moderate progress I made during my first 3 years as a hermit, I've lost during the last year of stress since I decided to move overseas. I have no credibility on this topic, least of all with myself. That said ... I do believe in this stuff! I believe in it enough to want to keep trying it myself, to try again to get on track.

    The desert monks did not expect to master the tendency to gluttony quickly, it is one of the most fundamental and fiercest of the struggles with the will we can face. So, I'm writing this for myself, to explore my own relationship with food and drink, informed by the teaching on gluttony from John Cassian's Institutes. Because failure doesn't mean impossibility. It's just the "error" part of "trial and error." Again, I have come to see self-flagellation as prideful, because beating myself up for my weaknesses implies that I thought I wasn't supposed to have any. I'm weak. I'm human. I fail. Piling drama on top of my failures distracts me from learning from them. 

Monastic Mindfulness

    I've been promising to write about the ancient monastic approach to sin, and how it's different from the guilt, shame, and threats approach. So this goes back before St. Benedict, to the Egyptian "desert fathers and mothers" of the 3rd-4th century. To drastically oversimplify, it's pretty much Greek Stoic philosophy overlaid onto Coptic and Syriac Christian asceticism. The guy who seems to have been most responsible for developing this synthesis of different traditions is Evagrius Ponticus, a Greek who ran away to Jerusalem after a disastrous love affair with a married woman, and finally ended up among the Egyptian desert monastics. It was further refined and translated back to the European monastic movement by John Cassian, whose books of monastic Conferences and Institutes are cited in St. Benedict's Rule. It's Cassian's version that I've mostly read myself.

ordinary garden-variety sin

     The thing I'm trying to address in these last few blog posts is the crippling sense of guilt, shame, and/or fear of punishment that too many people have been taught to feel about sin. Sin is a thing ... we all do it ... we all sin every day. So, looked at from one side, it's really no big deal. It's just the ordinary humanness, it's just all the little ways we all mess up all the time, overspending, overeating, surfing porn, little white lies, bigger lies, padding the expense account, losing our temper, lashing out, yelling at the kids, gossiping, flirting (or more) with someone we shouldn't be flirting with, compromising our values for the paycheck, taking more credit than is due, goofing off on the job, whatever it is. They're bad habits, they're weaknesses, they're so ordinary.

The Problem of Evil

     The existence of evil is one of the greatest enduring theological dilemmas. If God is both all-good and all-powerful, why is there sin and suffering in the world? Why did God put that fruit tree in Eden, and how was the serpent corrupted? It seems like Adam and Eve were set up to sin, and then they and all their descendents were punished for it ever since. Theologians have come up with various answers to this dilemma through the ages, none of them satisfying.

    And then there's Julian of Norwich, my favorite medieval mystic recluse, with her wonderful series of deathbed revelations. That is, it was expected to be her deathbed, but she recovered to write this all down and spend the rest of her life meditating on it.

    Dame Julian wrote that God told her these mind-blowing words: "synne is behoovabil." OK, maybe that's only mind-blowing after it's translated into modern English. Unfortunately, there is no simple translation for the word "behoovabil." It means something like, sin exists for a purpose, it needs to exist, there's a good reason for it. And this shocking sentence is the immediate context for the most famous words from her whole book of revelations: "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." 

Spirit and the Law

     Lately I've been thinking a lot about the phenomenon of religious trauma, and how incredibly lucky I am to have missed out on it. I hear people talking about being raised in a thick atmosphere of guilt, shame, and fear, under the constant threat of eternal punishment. It comes from the whole spectrum of Christian churches, from the most tradition-bound, high-church Catholic and Orthodox all the way to the newest, most fundamentalist, Bible-literalist Protestant sects. I am SO glad I wasn't raised in the Church! I'm so glad I came in through the side door, as it were, as an adult, and got what I really think is a much healthier and holier relationship with religion than what seems to be typical out there.

Becoming a "mature hermit"

     Being a hermit can be a very vague kind of a thing. I have a Rule of Life, but it's only a 2-page outline of the principles by which I intend to live, some notion of parameters for the life. I pray the monastic Office, I read and meditate on spiritual literature, I live alone and celibate. But then, less than a year ago, I abandoned my nice forest hermitage and moved across the ocean, where (for now) I live in a city apartment. And now I'm preparing myself to work with people, as a life-coach or mentor of some kind, and with a focus much more on neurodiversity than religion (although, stay tuned for something on healing religious trauma in upcoming weeks). So what do I mean by calling myself a "hermit"? What is a hermit, anyway?