Читать книгу Seeking God with Saint John Henry Newman - Ryan J. Marr - Страница 6

Life is fleeting! The biblical authors warn us as much. The Letter of James, for example, summarizes the human condition in particularly stark terms: “What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes” (4:14). The psalmist drives this same point home, comparing mortals to the flowers of the field: they flourish for a time, but then the wind passes over them, and they are gone, never to be known again (see Ps 103:15–16). Time marches steadily onward, and if we are not careful, we can reach the end of our days only to find that we have wasted our time pursuing meaningless things.

We all want our lives to matter — to have some sort of lasting significance. But this can prove elusive, even for those who have the best of intentions. Think back, for instance, on the past ten to fifteen years of your life. If you are anything like me, there are many things that, with the wisdom you have now, you would have done differently. Yet, here you are today — your past frozen, as it were — living with the consequences of the decisions that have brought you to this point. I’ve heard more than one older acquaintance remark that “youth is wasted on the young.” For whatever reason, as human beings, we don’t seem to realize how precious time is until it’s gone. But once time has slipped through our hands, there is no recovering it. Life can be lived only forward; there are no mulligans.

This is one of the reasons why it’s so important to find a trusted spiritual director — someone who is able to see shortcomings in our character that we are prone to overlook and who can help us to avoid pitfalls that might hamper our spiritual progress. And it’s not only young people who suffer from shortsightedness and willfulness. The human heart is incredibly prone to self-deception, such that good intentions, on their own, are rarely enough to keep us on the right path. Even the saints testify to the need for a good spiritual director. Saint Faustina, for example, once admitted, “If only I had had a spiritual director from the beginning, then I would not have wasted so many of God’s graces.”¹ A good director, Faustina added, “knows how to avoid the rocks against which the soul could be shattered.”² Saint John Henry Newman had a similar outlook, noting that “we should all of us be saved a great deal of suffering of various kinds, if we could but persuade ourselves that we are not the best judges, whether of our own condition, or of God’s will towards us. What sensible person undertakes to be his own physician? Yet are the diseases of the mind less numerous, less intricate, less subtle than those of the body?”³ Long story short, we can spare ourselves a lot of potential heartache by turning to a trustworthy spiritual adviser.

As a supplement to (not as a replacement for!) a living spiritual director, we can also invite into our lives holy figures of the past who offer a different kind of guidance through the memory of their witness. These are almost always saints, holy men and women whose writings have been identified by the Church as theologically sound and devotionally fruitful. Certainly, there is much to be gained by sitting across from a director who can provide a listening ear and immediate feedback. It’s also true, though, that we are unlikely to find a spiritual director who has attained the level of sanctity that was evident in the lives of such figures as Saint Thérèse of Lisieux or Saint Francis de Sales. Ultimately, it’s unnecessary to pit one method against the other. We should all seek out a spiritual director with whom we can meet on a regular basis, while seeking to learn as much as we can from the lives of the saints since we know that they were filled with the Holy Spirit in a profound way.

The book you hold in your hands is an invitation to receive spiritual direction from one of the towering Catholic intellectuals of the nineteenth century: Saint John Henry Newman. Now, if you are worried that this book is going to be overly intellectual or impractical, I encourage you to stick with me, for Newman was much more than a thinker. He was a man of deep prayer, who exuded personal holiness and had a compassionate, priestly heart for those who came under his pastoral care. Newman’s thirty-one volumes of letters, many of them written to parishioners who sought out his counsel, are a monument to the far-reaching impact of his priestly ministry, and the concerns of this ministry remained always at the forefront of his thoughts. Certainly, Newman’s intellectual gifts were immense, but for him, they mattered only insofar as he was helping others to grow in faith, hope, and love.

Newman was also one of the finest preachers of his day, and his sermons have produced thousands of conversions, some of these during his lifetime and many more in the intervening years since his death. His body of sermons contains a rich treasure of spiritual insights, and reflection on their content makes up the bulk of this book. A recurring theme in those sermons is the urgency of setting aside our selfish desires in order to do God’s will. In one of his most convicting treatments of this topic, “God’s Will the End of Life,” Newman contrasts what God wills for us with the way the vast majority of people live. He notes that, if you peer into the lives of most modern persons, you will find an underlying lukewarmness when it comes to the things of God. Many of us “do not bargain to be rich or to be great; but we do bargain, whether rich or poor, high or low, to live for ourselves, to live for the lust of the moment, or, according to the doctrine of the hour, thinking of the future and the unseen just as much or as little as we please.”⁴

Notice, here, that Newman does not focus on grave wrongdoings but highlights a far more common spiritual malaise, that of apathy or lack of attention to spiritual realities. For many of us, our sins will never be the stuff of tell-all biographies. The greater danger, rather, is that we will be lulled to sleep by the comforts of this life, mistaking material comfort for a sign of divine approval and viewing the sacrifices that Christ calls us to make as either unnecessary or, worse, as an intrusion upon the life that “I have made for myself.” Newman says it is a “shocking thought” to consider that “the multitude of men are living without any aim beyond this visible scene.”⁵ From a spiritual vantage point, so many of us are like frogs swimming in a pot of water that is slowly being brought to a boil. Even though our well-being is becoming more precarious by the moment, we fail to recognize it because we have become so accustomed to our surroundings, and we figure that things will always remain just as they are right now. Newman’s writings, if one takes the time to meditate upon them, can serve as a much-needed wake-up call for those of us who might be prone to approaching life on those terms. Saint John Henry Newman has had an enormous impact on my faith, and my goal in these pages is to channel just a fraction of his wisdom for the sake of others who might be looking for a charge to their spiritual lives.