Читать книгу Writing the Icon of the Heart - Maggie Ross - Страница 13

To write about discretion today seems almost subversive. In an age when we now must legislate behavior that once was recognized as common decency, the constituent adjectives of discretion are seditious: courteous (in Middle English, the word has theological overtones of God’s graciousness), modest, unobtrusive, reticent, patient, humble (that is, seeing things exactly as they are), respons­ive, supple, patient—all in service of something other than self. Discretion requires unflinching honesty and disinterestedness, both of which require commitment.

Discretion flows from an essential absence, an inviolable space where knowledge arises concerning the appropriateness of action or inaction. Discretion means tο know when to leave things alone to work themselves out; to recognize when situations would be made more complex by our interference. In our noisy world we are often too quick to react. Immediate responses may make us feel more secure, but far too often they compound the problem we are trying to resolve.

To understand why discretion is important and what we have lost, it might help to address some of the history and context of this word.7 We cannot consider discretion without its companion, discernment, for in antiquity they were the same word, discretio, and were considered inseparable. They were two sides of a coin: discernment of the truth, and the ability to act appropriately according to that truth.

Before the eleventh century, students were taught not only how to construct an argument, but also how to discern the difference between what was true and what was false, particularly within themselves, and the discretion to act on that truth or not. It was only then they began to study rhetoric, the art of persuasion by which they learned to convince others of what they themselves had already come to believe to be true.8

However, discernment does not entail discretion. To substitute the word discernment for discretion eliminates the notion that there might be additional factors outside the discernment process that determine wise choice. We may see perfectly well the differ­ence between good, questionable, and bad options (discernment), but because we commonly make choices based on short-term gratification, not to mention the frisson that comes from doing something contrary, we frequently cast discretion to the winds, if indeed we pause tο think at all.

Discretion ponders choice of action—or, more frequently, non-action. It determines how we decide to use or not to use what we have discerned. In Ursula Κ. Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore, Ged the mage says, “It is much easier . . . to act than to refrain from acting. . . . [Dο] nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble . . . do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must dο and which you cannot do in any other way.”9

Discretion entails and elaborates discernment. It has two poten­tially conflicting meanings, according tο the Shorter Oxford Dictionary: “Deciding as one thinks fit,” and—outrageous tο an in-your-face culture—“being discreet, discernment, prudence, judgment.” It defines the word discreet as “judicious, prudent; circumspect in speech or action; unobtrusive.”

•

Discretion is a space apart. It has to do with preserving an empti­ness where creative, even salvific potential can emerge, which is beyond what we could determine by self­-conscious reason alone. Within it is the possibility of harmonious integration of every aspect of our lives, a potential that is brought to bear on every decision to act or refrain from acting. Within this space are silence, stillness, and waiting. Discretion is what Aristotle referred to as the space where virtue is found.10

Jesus gives a perfect example of discretion when he is confronted with the woman taken in the very act of adultery. He is entirely aware of the many agendas that her accusers bring along with her. He knows that he holds someone’s life, perhaps many lives, in his hands. He is silent. He squats and writes in the dust. (Much ink has been spilled speculating on what he wrote, from doodles to the names of the mistresses of the accusers.)

But the accusers—“the devil” is “the accuser”—cannot bear Jesus’s silence. They force the issue and, by doing so, elicit one of the great rejoinders of all time. Jesus stands up. “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” (One hears, perhaps, a quiet, quizzical, ironic voice.) He squats again and resumes his writing. After the men have left, he stands to address the woman. “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you? . . . Neither dο Ι condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again” (John 8:7, 10–11).

Jesus could have taken sides. He could have thrown the first stone to his political advantage. He could have blasted the scribes and Pharisees for their hypocrisy. He could have allowed himself the short-term, personal gratification of inflaming petty factionalism for his own benefit. He could have ignored the woman after the men went away, which would have been proper protocol in his time. But Jesus’s discretion brings the resolution of the situation to a completely different and far more profound and relevant level. Nο one is condemned but no one can go away unashamed, either. By simply creating a space where all the resonances of the situation can amplify one another, Jesus has chosen to enable the potential for a greater good.

•

The previous Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, took office at one of the most difficult periods of history for the Anglican Communion. He set aside his own preferences in order to keep all groups talking and, more importantly, to try to get them truly to listen tο one another. He kept silence, eschewing empty public statements, when many people thought he should have spoken in support of one faction or another.

After the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the United States elected a woman primate in 200611—while in the same moment the Church of England was still debating whether it would allow women bishops at all, or whether a woman bishop was even possible—the Archbishop deemed the time appropriate tο speak. But rather than promulgating a diktat, which in any event would have been inappropriate to the largely symbolic jurisdiction of his office, he issued some “reflections,” which amounted to neither a judgment nor a proposal, nor a declaration. His words were exactly what he said they were: reflections, no more, no less.

His rationale became evident the following week in his opening address tο the Synod of the Church of England, when he summed up his vision of Anglican unity:

I make no secret of the fact that my commitment and conviction are given to the ideal of the Church Catholic. I know that its embodiment in Anglicanism has always been debated, yet I believe that the vision of Catholic sacramental unity without centralization or coercion is one that we have witnessed to at our best and still need to work at. That is why a concern for unity—for unity (I must repeat this yet again) as a means to living in the truth—is not about placing the survival of an institution above the demands of conscience, God forbid. It is a question of how we work out, faithfully, attentively, obediently, what we need to do and say in order to remain within sight and sound of each other in the fellowship to which Christ has called us. It has never been easy and it isn’t now. But it is the call that matters, and that sustains us together in the task.12

“How we work out, faithfully, attentively, obediently, what we need to do and say . . .”—this is an instruction in learning discretion. Williams does not use these words casually; they arise from a lifetime’s study of classical and Christian tradition. All three adverbs point to a discretion that arises from a matrix of silence.

“Faithfully” means releasing our tightly held prejudices and opin­ions concerning the way the world should work; such opinions can reflect only a small and blinkered aspect of truth. Faith is the acknowledgment that there is a larger vision than we can ask or imagine, and the willingness to be taken into it.

“Attentively” means not only listening but listening at a level of receptive responsiveness, allowing the words of the other to reach deeply into our hearts so that we may behold, however obliquely, the vast mystery toward which they gesture, the mystery of the human person, which is as deep as the mystery of the God whose nature each of us shares.

“Obediently,” in its root sense, is the attentive listening of the heart that Christ teaches (Phil 2:5–11). In other words, “putting on the mind of Christ” is the refusal to grasp or claim our prejudices, an attempt at possession that gives us an illusory sense of our own omnipotence and creates interior noise that impedes listening. Instead, obedience entails a continually expanding self-knowledge, a heart that knows there is nothing good or evil of which it is not capable, a heart that longs for conversion from the conviction of its own judgment tο being filled with the spacious perspective of the mind of a merciful God.

•

Discretion cannot be taught; it is supremely mimetic; it is learned by example. This mimesis is especially clear in the desert tradition. The seeker divides his or her time, more or less, half in the cell and half taking counsel with the elders, who are exemplars of discretion. One learns from such people not so much by baring one’s thoughts, although this practice is often mentioned, but far more by absorbing the elders’ example through a kind of spiritual osmosis.

When one visits an elder, perhaps the light of charism is lit, perhaps it is not. Often the disciple lacks the discernment to recognize the light, even less the discretion to receive it. His mind is too full of his own ideas. The abba or amma may offer food or not, may allow the seeker to stay or not, most probably will not speak. On the other hand, the disciple may receive a word to do the best she can, tο eat when she is hungry, and sleep when she is sleepy, and pray as she is able. On rare occasions, the disciple might be allowed to stay and imitate in silence what the elder does.

Discretion is not always what our genteel sensibilities might expect. Abba Abraham left the desert to go to the brothel where his niece had immured herself after being raped. He paid the brothel keeper for her time, ostensibly for sex but in reality to persuade his niece of her continuing worth as a human person, no matter what she had suffered, and of God’s loving welcome, and his.13

The desert tradition reveals that discretion is not simply a skill; it is more like an art, the creation of an atmosphere where new connections can be made. We learn this art by repeated immersion in the resurrection to be found in the silence of receptive waiting, in the spaciousness of God, which is the true wellspring of our lives and our truth.

We have forgotten that the school of discretion has always been found in fidelity tο our own core silence. Silence has become so alien tο institutional practice that the Archbishop’s discretion, described earlier, was not recognized as such even by most of his fellow clerics. Indeed, religion today is not, generally speaking, a place where one would look for discretion. For the most part, religion has become indistinguishable from the culture, polarized between “extreme” (fundamentalism) on the one hand and “whatever” (vague, fuzzy, warm feelings) on the other. The cultivation of a pressure-free space where faith can grow without distortion appears to be a notion almost entirely foreign to contemporary religious hustle and bustle.

•

The present state of affairs is not unique. For example, the author of the fourteenth-century Cloud of Unknowing, a master of discretion, writes to a reluctant disciple:

I say all this to let you see how far you still are from knowing truly your own interior dispositions; and second to give you warning not to surrender tο nor follow too quickly in inexperience, the unusual movements of your heart, for fear of illusion. I say all this to explain to you what my opinion is of you and your stirrings, as you have asked me. For I feel that you are over inclined and too eagerly disposed toward these sudden impulses for extraordinary practices, and very swift to seize upon them when they come. And that is very dangerous.14

How far this mentality is from the twenty-first century attitude, “If it feels good, do it,” that often passes for discernment; from narcissistic self-regard, or fatuous, overconfident claims of biblical inerrancy and literalism; from thundering condemnations of other human beings for the way God happens to have made them—all such indiscreet activities masking, of course, agendas of power and self-promotion.

[The Devil]15 will sometimes change his likeness into that of an angel of light, in order that, under the colour of virtue, he may do more mischief. . . . He persuades very many to embrace a special type of holiness above the common law and custom of their state of life. The signs of it are . . . devout observances and forms of behaviour, and openly reproving the faults of other men when they have no authority for it. He leads them on . . . always under the pretext of devotion and charity; not because he takes any delight in works of devotion or of charity, but because he loves dissension and scandal.16

The Cloud-author shows us the source of destructive religious dissension in our own day. It is a mentality that arises from the sloth of yielding to distraction (medieval people would use the word fornication, for from the beginning of the Christian era to the high Middle Ages, distraction was considered a greater sin than sexual infidelity), of indiscretion, and the idolatry of experience. He is perhaps glossing Matthew 12:34–35: “For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. The good person brings good things out of a good treasure, and the evil person brings evil things out of an evil treasure.” In every age, religious demagogues—and, in ours, atheistic ones as well—are quick to censure people and situations they not only do not understand but also refuse to understand. This deliberate closing of the mind is not only culpable; it exposes bitter, narrow hearts that lust for power. This kind of judgmentalism is at the root of much of the evil abroad in today’s world.

If we are to recover discretion in our lives and in our world before our heedlessness makes our planet uninhabitable at any level—physical, moral, or spiritual—we must start by choosing silent, receptive awareness, “the hidden love offered in purity of spirit,” which is God’s working in us.17 But we face a Herculean task. To merely begin even to attempt to alter our knee-jerk response of anesthetizing our sin and pain to make room for this working in us requires extreme cultural ascesis.

To make space for God means examining every daily pressure to which we are exposed, both the pressures from within ourselves, and those we receive from others, allowing each to fall away unexercised. It is in this pressure-free space that discretion is born. This space is not “my space,” but a space in which the mystery of the other and of ourselves takes on a far greater significance: a space where God’s working may perhaps find a way of sorting things out beyond human limitation; a space where we may learn the discretion of doing “only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way.”

If . . . grace is ever to be won, it must be taught from within, of God, when you have yearned longingly after him for many a day with all the love of your heart, and by emptying out from your inward beholding every sight of anything beneath [that is, other than God] him; and this even though some of those things that I bid you empty out should seem in the sight of some to be very worthy means whereby to come to God.

For to him who wishes to achieve his spiritual purpose, the actual awareness of the good God alone suffices as the means along with a reverent stirring of lasting love. He needs no other.18