reflections

“We cannot find God in noise or agitation. Nature: trees, flowers, and grass grow in silence. The stars, the moon, and the sun move in silence….”¹– Mother Teresa of Calcutta

In the preface to the 40th Anniversary edition of Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster wrote that over the course of those four decades, “distraction” has replaced “hurry” as the primary spiritual problem in contemporary culture. His reasoning was that while hurry can lead to a superficial life, it is the constant presence of distractions that renders us unable to discern the “voice of the Lord.”²

With mobile phones always within reach, instant messages notifying, calls waiting, and emails not waiting, our attention is constantly being called away from both God and those right in front of us. This makes it very difficult to keep the two supreme commandments.

So why do we put up with this? It almost seems we have a deep inner desire to be anywhere but the present moment. But when we leave it, we become victims of the easiest heist that the “Thief and the Robber” ever pulled off, as we become absent from the only place life happens, the present moment.

All of this makes me wonder what advice the saints and devotion masters across the centuries might have to offer, which is why I picked up a copy of Robert Ellsberg’s book, The Saints’ Guide to Happiness. As it turns out, a chorus of voices from premodern times has quite a lot of treatment suggestions to recommend as cures for the disease of distraction. Their own herculean accomplishments often drew on the distraction-fighting qualities of stillness, attentiveness, and learning how to listen to love.³

Stillness and the Awakening of a Busy Saint

While Blaisé Pascal is not an “official” saint, he has my vote and did become a widely recognized devotion master.

Pascal was a very busy man. Both sides of his brain must have been firing at all times. He was a philosopher and a scientist. He lived in Paris during the middle decades of the 1600s. To say that he was an overachiever would be a great compliment to overachievers everywhere. In his too brief 39 years, he developed a computer (a calculating machine), contributed to the foundational pillars of calculus, invented the vacuum cleaner, determined the weight of air, and designed the first public transportation system in Paris. And he did all that with the left side of his brain.

However, on November 23, 1654, the right side of his brain awakened, and his appreciation of reality—the really real—changed dramatically. Much like his predecessor in Aristotelian-type thinking and accomplishments, Thomas Aquinas, Pascal also bumped smack into what is most real. For about two hours one evening, he had a deep mystical encounter with “the God of Jesus Christ.”

Pascal recorded his impressions on a sheet of parchment, which he sewed into the lining of his jacket. He kept it on his person until the day he died, eight years later, at the age of 39. His testament included these words: “Certainty, certainty, heartfelt, joy, peace, God of Jesus Christ. … Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.”⁴

After Pascal’s intimate encounter with the “Source of Reality,” and for the remaining years of his short life, he shifted all his attention to the problem of faith and spiritual thriving. And it is for this work, Pensées, that Pascal is best remembered. It was published after his death in 1662. Within this spiritual masterpiece, he makes the oft-quoted statement: “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”⁵

Pascal came to believe that the appeal of activities, the things that distract from the present moment, is not their ability to bring happiness. Instead, he proposed the idea of negative reinforcement, centuries before B.F. Skinner would coin the term. That is, Pascal believed that distractions are so powerful because they remove, for a little while, the pain of our underlying unhappiness. He went so far as to claim that our principal attraction to wealth and power is that they provide increased access to diversion from unhappiness.⁶

To state the painfully obvious, most humans need to learn better ways to be alone if the world is to find how to be together.

Following his profound mystical experience, Pascal began to focus his keen mind on the mysteries of the human heart, with particular attention given to the tug-of-war between our internal pain (he used the term “wretchedness”) and happiness. The former he saw as a result of life without God in our thoughts and actions, and the latter, happiness, he believed, depended on developing a constant awareness of God.

Like St. Augustine before him (as well as St. Ignatius of Loyola), Pascal saw human beings as torn between a desire for happiness and an innate confusion about where to find it. He boldly claimed that it is not silence that worries us so much, but what accompanies times of silence and solitude—our own company.

Fortunately, “wretchedness” did not have the last word for Pascal. In fact, he thought this condition contained the key to its treatment. He came to believe that our internal misery is experienced precisely because it tells us we maintain a whisp of a memory of a better way to live. We are like a deposed king for whom the pain of deprivation is made worse because of the memory traces of a different way to live. His belief echoes St. Augustine, who wrote, “God alone is a man’s true good, and since man abandoned him it is a strange fact that nothing in nature has been found to take his place.”⁷

Attentiveness: Finding a Better Way to be Alone

To state the painfully obvious, most humans need to learn better ways to be alone if the world is to find how to be together. Through the centuries, saints, especially those known as desert dwellers, invented better ways of doing both. What they learned continues to irrigate the spiritual life of the Church.

St. Gregory Palamas (d 1359), a Greek monk of Mt. Athos and one of the most famous proponents of meditative prayers from the desert, such as “The Jesus Prayer,” also found in this prayer form a path for connecting to God’s love in a profound way. He taught how it is possible to achieve inner stillness (hesychia) through continuous prayer and described it as a way to latch on to the love of God, “much like a rope flung over a rock, and thus to pull free of worldly attachments.”⁸

Fast-forward 600 years, and J.D. Salinger prominently featured The Jesus Prayer in his book, Franny and Zooey. It is a central element in Salinger’s exploration of Franny’s spiritual journey, and her search for authenticity and freedom from disillusionment and unhelpful attachments. It is a modern-day application of irrigation from desert spirituality.

Jean-Pierre de Caussade and Brother Lawrence are other notable examples of how one can learn to be fully alive in the present moment, perform everyday tasks, and maintain awareness of God’s love in each activity. Those learning to practice the “sacrament of the present moment” have discovered how awareness of God’s presence can transform the earth into paradise as the nearness of heaven is experienced. Every moment can reveal God to us.”⁹

A Better Way to Be With Others: Sharing the Love We Found

Poet William Blake famously expressed his conviction that “we are put on earth for a little space that we may learn to bear the beams of love.”¹⁰ This concise definition of holiness, if you will, harmonizes with the wisdom of the saints. They agree that sanctification is a matter of being conformed to God by steadily putting off the old person, and its self-preoccupation, and putting on Christ and His focus on love for all.¹¹

We learn to love by loving. That was the conclusion of Theophan the Recluse, one of the early desert fathers: “You say that you have no humility or love. So, long as these are absent, everything spiritual is absent. Humility is acquired by acts of humility, love by acts of love.”¹²

So, what do we do with the growing awareness of the invisible ocean of love in which we swim? The saints are those who learned in the present moments of life how to be transformed into reservoirs of love that can overflow into canals for others. If we want to return to Eden, I think we need to listen to St. Thérèse of Lisieux. She famously said: “My vocation is love. My mission is making souls love the good God as I love Him, to teach my little way to souls. If my desires receive fulfillment, I shall spend my heaven on earth even until the end of times.”¹³

Love allows us to see with new eyes. However, this seeing requires developing habits of stillness, attentiveness, and the ability to listen to God, who is love. We never know when we might have an experience like the very busy Pascal and Aquinas and bump right into unfathomable love in the middle of the present moment. It is enough to make you want to put down your iPhone, silence your computer, close your eyes, and wait and wonder, “How can I next show love?” ?

Endnotes

1. Mother Teresa of Calcutta. (2003). No greater love. New World Library. ?

2. Foster, R.J. (2018). Celebration of discipline, special anniversary edition: The path to spiritual growth. HarperCollins Publishers. ?

3. Ellsberg, R. (2003). The Saint’s Guide to Happiness. New York, North Point Press, 61. ?

4. Ellsberg, R. (2003). The Saint’s Guide to Happiness, 63. Note for all quotations from Pensées, Ellsberg references “Diversion,” 66-72. “God alone is man’s true good,” 75. ?

5. Ellsberg, R. (2003), The Saint’s Guide to Happiness, 62. ?

6. Ellsberg, R. (2003). The Saint’s Guide to Happiness, 62. ?

7. Ellsberg, R. (2003). The Saint’s Guide to Happiness, 66. ?

8. Ellsberg, R. (2003). The Saint’s Guide to Happiness, 68. ?

9. Ellsberg, R. (2003). The Saint’s Guide to Happiness, 73. ?

10. Blake, W. (1789). Songs of Innocence. He wrote, “And we are put on earth a little space, That we may learn to bear the beams of love,” in his poem, The Little Black Boy. The line appears in the third stanza of the poem. ?

11. Blake, W. (1789). Songs of Innocence, 79. ?

12. Blake, W. (1789). Songs of Innocence, 93. ?

13. Blake, W. (1789). Songs of Innocence, 95. ?

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