Nobody in their right mind would look to me for advice on how to have a strong, consistent prayer life. All my life, I have struggled with prayer, and I have mostly won. (Think about what that means for a moment. It’s not good!)
But if you could zoom out and look over my life, you could see one thing: The times when I am most at peace and seeking God’s will most often are the times when I was consistently making a morning offering.
This is not a straight “if x, then y” causal connection, of course. It is not magic to make a morning offering. It may even be the other way around: I am more likely to make a morning offering when I’m at a time in my life when I am already feeling connected to God or when I’m already remembering consistently to turn to him to help with hope and trust. One thing I know is that there are not any shortcuts.
Nevertheless, if anyone asked me what was the one thing they could do to start off on a better path spiritually, I would recommend resolving to make a morning offering. It hits that sweet spot: It’s fast and it’s easy, but it takes a small amount of discipline on your part, which signals to you that it is worthwhile. But it also puts the ball in the Holy Spirit’s court, which, well, I am starting to think is the whole entire point of life.
It is also something you can do no matter what your current relationship with God is like. If you’re feeling distant, you can offer up your day as a wistful act of hope, no harm done. If you’re angry, you can do it defiantly: Hey, You! See this sack of garbage you left me with? How about you carry it for a while? [Flings life down at foot of cross with horrible splatting noise.] If you’re feeling lazy, you can do it because it’s quick and easy and better than nothing. If you’re feeling very connected, it can be a beautiful and profound way to begin another day with the Lord. If you’re feeling trusting, you can thank him in advance for whatever is about to come.
The big thing is, you don’t have to be…anything. You don’t have to have particular plans or expectations for your morning offering. It may even be better if you don’t. … Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine.
Several years ago, I started saying a novena to St. Michael. There were several serious situations that needed rescue, and I thought, there’s clearly a battle going on here; why not go to the guy with the giant wings and the big, flaming sword?
Imagine my surprise when the novena talked mostly about . . . humility.
Opening prayer:
St. Michael the Archangel, we honor you as a powerful protector of the Church and guardian of our souls. Inspire us with your humility, courage and strength that we may reject sin and perfect our love for our Heavenly Father.
In your strength and humility, slay the evil and pride in our hearts so that nothing will keep us from God.
And the closing prayer is even more striking:
St. Michael the Archangel, you are the prince of angels but in your humility you recognized that God is God and you are but His servant. Unlike satan, you were not overcome with pride but were steadfast in humility. Pray that we will have this same humility.
It is in the spirit of that humility that we ask for your intercession for our petitions…
A strange virtue to emphasize for a figure we’re used to thinking of as a conquering hero. Why would the prayer stress Michael’s humility?
One reason is to draw out a contrast between him and his virtue, and their opposites. We’ve all heard very often that Satan’s downfall was pride. Without thinking too deeply, we might be led to believe that this means Satan just got too confident, and God had to squish him down into hell to avoid competition. This is, of course, a comic-book version of cosmology, and has nothing to do with actual theology.
Let’s be clear: When we talk about the sin of pride, whether it’s Satan’s fateful cosmic sin or our own homegrown variety, we don’t mean self confidence, or believing in oneself, or even vanity. We mean an inordinate love of self. Literally inordinate, as in out of order, as in putting oneself in a place where only God belongs. Pride means that, for all the things for which we should look to God, we look to ourselves, instead.
It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but if you do it often enough, it literally ruins your life. When pride is really serious, we look only to ourselves, and never to God. This is why it takes an angel with a sword to fight back against the sin of pride. It’s a big deal.
Humility is the opposite of this horrible error. Humility is when we have things in the right order: We know when to look to God and when to look to ourselves. We understand what our place is in relation to God. We understand who we are. We do not confuse ourselves with God, or try to take on roles that belong to him.
I’m struck how, in the prayer, it describes a sort of battle that takes place not in heaven, but in every human soul: the battle between pride and humility. Unlike angels, we live in time, and don’t make cosmic choices for all eternity. Instead, we make choice after choice after choice, building habits, growing in virtue, failing, backsliding, starting again.
And I’m realizing, as I get older, how often these battles aren’t always a matter of good vs. evil, of the powers of the world, the flesh, and the devil vs. the human soul. Sometimes they are! But some of the struggles we find ourselves fighting are, perhaps, a different battle in disguise.
In his spiritual memoir He Leadeth Me, Fr Walter Ciszek speaks of the dreadful shame and horror he felt after he cracked under the pressure of psychological torture in the Russian gulag. But eventually he came to see that his very failure was a kind of release for him — a chance to stop looking to himself for strength and courage, and instead to depend totally and radically on God.
The battle he had been fighting wasn’t exterior at all. It was actually within himself. It had been hard to see, because what he was struggling to do was God’s work; but he was struggling to do it using his own strength and perseverance, rather than relying on God’s. That’s why he identifies his struggle as a lack of humility.
“Learning the full truth of our dependence upon God and our relation to His will is what the virtue of humility is all about,” he says.
“For humility is truth, the full truth, the truth that encompasses our relation to God the Creator and through Him to the world He has created and to our fellowmen. And what we call humiliations are the trials by which our more complete grasp of this truth is tested. It is self that is humiliated; there would be no ‘humiliation’ if we had learned to put self in its place, to see ourselves in proper perspective before God and other men. And the stronger the ingredient of self develops in our lives, the more severe must our humiliations be in order to purify us. That was the terrible insight that dawned upon me in the cell at Lubianka as I prayed, shaken and dejected, after my experience with the interrogator.”
Later, he says:
“It was not the Church that was on trial in Lubianka. It was not the Soviet Government or the KGB versus Walter Ciszek. It was God versus Walter Ciszek.”
A strange battle indeed.
Sometimes, spiritual battles really are a matter of taking up our swords and fighting courageously against a clear evil in front of us. But sometimes they are more subtle, and more insidious than that. Sometimes the terrible pressure we feel is coming from the inside, as we try to maintain an agonized control, or illusion of control, over our own lives. It can’t be done. I do keep trying, but I know it can’t be done.
It’s God vs. me, and I at least know who I ought to want to win, even if I don’t always feel that way. St. Michael, come to our aid, and help us stop fighting God.
Because I’m friends with a lot of creative people — painters, poets, authors, poets, clothing and jewelry designers — there is a lot of talk about impostor syndrome, the deeply internalized fear that one’s accomplishments are all a sham. Even though they have successful careers, they routinely have to hush the little voice telling them have no business calling themselves a professional, and that either everyone is already laughing at them, or it’s only a matter of time before the great denouement begins. (I am also friends with a few people who ought to feel this way, but don’t. Somehow it’s always the genuinely talented and accomplished people who feel the most like phonies, whereas there’s no shortage of confidence among the fakers, hacks, and bums.)
So a little service my friends and I perform for each other is to point out the obvious: But you’re doing it. You’re making a living. People are paying you for what you do. Your skills are in demand. If you’re not the real thing, then no one is. The objective evidence proves you are productive and successful.
The task has been a bit different lately. Lots of creative people are in a bit of a rut. Can’t seem to come up with any ideas. Can’t seem to come up with any enthusiasm for expressing what they do come up with. Can’t seem to drum up a persuasive argument for why it’s worth while to try to express anything to anyone anyway, when everyone is so . . . well, you know. It was one thing when we were doing drawing challenges to get through a two-week lockdown to flatten the curve. Headed past the bend of two years, and the flattening effect has become pervasive, and very flat indeed.
So the task becomes a bit different. Rather than persuade ourselves that what we produce really is extraordinary, really is above average, really is something special, my friends and I are busily reminding each other that we are valuable and worthy even when we’re not producing anything. And this is a steeper hill to climb.
But it is a time that will come to all of us, sooner or later. Night, when no man works. The hour when the clock has run out, one way or the other, and we will no longer be able to point to our busywork as evidence for our worth.
For some people, this hour is their entire lives: They never make anything, they never accomplish anything. They simply exist, and the Christian ethos has always insisted that these souls are as worthy of love and respect as the most productive among us. There are saints who never did anything but sweep the floor, and saints who never did anything but pray. There are saints who only became saints after they lost their ability to accomplish the things they thought God put them on earth to do.
I wish I were writing this essay as a guide to tell you how to get from A to B — how to remind yourself that you have intrinsic worth in the eyes of God, and that your value was never a matter of what you could accomplish or produce. I do know that God sometimes gets our attention by letting our accomplishments be taken away from us.
I’m in no place to teach any lessons, but I can at least point to them. I’m reading He Leadeth Me, and woof, that’s the story right there.
The author, Servant of God Walter Ciszek, tells about how he thought he was going to be a bold and amazing priest who evangelizes Russia, but when he gets there, it turns out he’s not allowed to preach; then he gets arrested and it turns out everyone he talks to has been taught to despise priests; and then he doesn’t even get to talk to anybody at all, except interrogators . . . for five years.
And he breaks. He agrees to sign his name to a false confession of spying for the Vatican, and is horrified and grief-stricken at his own weakness. And this is the place where he finds himself totally reliant on the mercy and will of God.
About halfway through the book, after he describes a strange and profound conversion where he fully surrenders to God’s will for the first time, he says:
“Somehow, that day, I imagined I must know how Saint Peter felt when he had survived his denials and been restored to Christ’s friendship. Even though our Lord had promised that he, being once converted, would confirm his brethren, I doubt very much that Peter ever again boasted that he would never desert the Lord even if all others deserted him. I find it perfectly understandable that Peter, in his letters to the early churches, should have reminded his Christians to work out their salvation in fear and trembling. For just as man begins to trust in his own abilities, so sure has he taken the first step on the road to ultimate failure. And the greatest grace God can give such a man is to send him a trial he cannot bear with his own powers–and then sustain him with his grace to he may endure to the end and be saved. “
I am not going to pretend I know what this really means. I’m just going to keep reading the book, which is fascinating and brutally honest about his interior struggles. I’m sure it’s no accident that this book came into my life when the theme of the last many months has been distress over how little I seem to be able to get done. Fr. Ciszek puts a lot of stock — his entire heart, in fact — in the value of being where God puts you, to do God’s will. I wish he had been more explicit about how to tell what God’s will is; but I have gathered, at least, that it’s more about being than about doing. And the good news is, he found tremendous joy, freedom, and relief when he surrendered to being entirely at God’s disposal, rather than trying to be productive.
This is some good company, my friends, with Fr. Ciszek and St. Peter. If you are, like so many other people, struggling and feeling discouraged, or if you are not only struggling but have actually failed, then this is a time to pray that the place you’re in is a path toward God. It’s not a time to stop praying. That’s always a mistake; that much I know. It couldn’t hurt to pray to Fr. Ciszek. You know he’ll understand.
Anyway, one thing “impostor syndrome” has taught me is that it’s one thing to recognize my own talents and skills objectively, but quite another to act as if I deserve special treatment because of them. I don’t. But the deeper lesson is that we’re all imposters, as long as we insist that our worth lies in what we can produce.
Because I’m friends with a lot of creative people — painters, poets, authors, poets, clothing and jewelry designers — there is a lot of talk about impostor syndrome, the deeply internalized fear that one’s accomplishments are all a sham. Even though they have successful careers, they routinely have to hush the little voice telling them have no business calling themselves a professional, and that either everyone is already laughing at them, or it’s only a matter of time before the great denouement begins. (I am also friends with a few people who *ought* to feel this way, but don’t. Somehow it’s always the genuinely talented and accomplished people who feel the most like phonies, whereas there’s no shortage of confidence among the fakers, hacks, and bums.)
So a little service my friends and I perform for each other is to point out the obvious: But you’re doing it. You’re making a living. People are paying you for what you do. Your skills are in demand. If you’re not the real thing, then no one is. The objective evidence proves you are productive and successful.
The task has been a bit different lately. Lots of creative people are in a bit of a rut. Can’t seem to come up with any ideas. Can’t seem to come up with any enthusiasm for expressing what they do come up with. Can’t seem to drum up a persuasive argument for why it’s worth while to try to express anything to anyone anyway, when everyone is so . . . well, you know. It was one thing when we were doing drawing challenges through a two-week lockdown to flatten the curve. Headed round the bend toward two years, and the flattening effect has become pervasive, and very flat indeed.
So the task becomes a bit different. Rather than persuade ourselves that what we produce really is extraordinary, really is above average, really is something special, my friends and I are busily reminding each other that we are valuable and worthy even when we’re not producing anything. And this is a steeper hill to climb.
But it is a time that will come to all of us, sooner or later. Night, when no man works. The hour when the clock has run out, one way or the other, and we will no longer be able to point to our busywork as evidence for our worth.
Speaking of books, let’s do this thing about what we’re reading! (I can’t remember why I wrote “speaking of books,” but apparently I was when I started writing this. Well, there are worse things to speak of.)
1. What book are you reading right now?
Meh. I’m in the middle of a bunch of books and not happy about any of them.
is a sequel to a book I loved, The Dogs of March. The series takes place in Darby, a fictional version of the exact spot in NH where I live, and boy does he understand what it’s like here. Dogs of Winter was like Faulkner meets Hemingway. Whisper My Name is veering a little bit into Walker Percy-style “man meets troubled girl, and va va voom” territory and it’s making me itchy, but I guess I’ll keep going.
which is making me laugh out loud but feel bad about it. I just finished scene where he makes several choices about how to deal with the fact that he set his boss’ wife’s guest bed on fire and it just about murdered me. The protagonist has a habit of swiftly and privately making grotesque faces that express how he feels about people he encounters, and that reminds me, it may be okay that we’re supposed to start wearing masks again.
If you haven’t read an Anne Tyler novel (and there are about 700 of them), I would recommend Dinner At the Homesick Restaurant, where I think she was at her full powers — the least prone to precious quirky self-indulgence, and the most fearless and tender toward people doing dreadful things for understandable reasons. (Homesick Restaurant has scenes of child abuse.) Morgan’s Passing is pretty good, but I think she’s a little too patient with Morgan and his midlife problems. I just want to kick his ass.
The kids had a bit of a love/hate relationship with it, as is appropriate for George MacDonald. I know I’ve complained before about the profoundly Victorian unreadability of some of his sentences, and I’ll do it again. Just say it, man!
But the Curdie books are probably the most accessible of his, except for The Light Princess, which is the easiest to read and also the most coherent and straightforward story. The Princess and Curdie is a sequel that’s better than the first book (The Princess and the Goblin), which we also read aloud. It has such good images in it: Young Curdie and his aged father meeting each other halfway up a hill, and if you saw them from a distance, you wouldn’t immediately know who was climbing and who was descending. This idea is carried forward when Curdie is given the power to identify what it is that people are becoming by touching their hands. Some hands feel human, but others feel like the paws or hooves or tentacles of animals. And the reverse is also true: There are fabulous avenging monsters in the story, who are apparently working out their salvation and becoming human again.
You can see how MacDonald’s great admirer C.S. Lewis was influenced by (or at least agreed with) this idea that, by the way we live, we carry heaven or hell within us even before we die. This idea is in The Great Divorce and The Last Battle and probably several others.
Anyway, between that and the imagery of the great princess purifying her beloved children by heaping burning roses on them, and weeping as she does it, I’m glad we read it. BUT THE ENDING. If I had remembered it ended that way, I would simply have skipped the final page. I was reading the book to the six-year-old and the ten-year-old, and some of the teens were listening in. The ending is basically: The young princess grows up and marries the hero and the kingdom is wonderful. But they don’t have children and then die, and then there’s a bad king, and things get worse and worse until he literally undermines the kingdom and it all crashes down and everyone dies, and then no one even remembers it existed. Well, goodbye! Generally, I respect authors to do what they want with their stories but there was no preparation for this happening, other than a general feeling that the story was a broad analogy for humanity in general. Truly unnecessary and the kids were rightly horrified. Boo.
The Green Knight movie comes out soon and it looks absolutely swell.
I read the Sir Gawain by Marie Borroff to the kids many years ago (that’s the one we read in college), in our last year of homeschooling, and they were spellbound. I remember skipping all the other lessons for the day because they wanted me to keep reading to the end. But [sighs until dead] it was a lot easier to spellbind them in those days.
Here’s how the Tolkein begins:
When the siege and the assault had ceased at Troy,
and the fortress fell in flame to firebrands and ashes,
the traitor who the contrivance of treason there fashioned
was tried for his treachery, and the most true upon earth–
it was Aeneas the noble and his renowned kindred
who then laid under them lands, and lords became
of well-nigh all the wealth in the Western Isles.
More fun to read aloud than ol’ George MacD, anyway! Heck, maybe I’ll pay the kids to give the first few chapters a fair shot. And then buy them movie tickets. Those poor children, how they suffer.
At first this struck me as a rather heavy handed “Have you ever seen such cruelty” kind of book, ala Isabelle Allende’s Island Beneath the Sea or Tracy Chevalier’s The Virgin Blue, but it grew on me, and I was impressed at how the author brought two stories together. It follows the lives of two girls in Afghanistan, one born in the late sixties and one in the late seventies. The prose is a bit movie storyboard-y at times, but it’s very sincere and creates a strong mental image of the setting. A painful and beautiful read. As far as I know, it’s a faithful rendition of the history, and fleshed out my skimpy understanding of the era before 9/11 (but it definitely reads like a novel, not a sneaky history lesson). The reading level seems aimed at smart middle school or high school age, but it includes fairly graphic scenes of rape and violence, so reader beware.
This one is a YA book, but Joan Aiken always uses her whole butt and doesn’t talk down to younger readers. Really never read a dud by her. The Shadow Guests is a weird, compelling story about Cosmo, a teenage boy who’s sent to live in the countryside with his great aunt after his mother and older brother apparently killed themselves to avoid succumbing to a family curse. But the past isn’t done with his family, and Cosmo becomes entangled with previous generations. It sounds dark and awful, but it’s very entertaining and funny in parts, and the dialogue and characters are so skillfully and realistically done even as the plot itself is outrageous. We recently read Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase out loud, and it was just as good as I remember. Aiken’s male teenage characters are the most appealing people you’ll ever meet.
3. What do you plan to read next?
Watership Down by Richard Adams
I started it several years ago and didn’t get very far, but I hope to keep going this time. Damien’s been recommending it for years.
4. What book do you keep meaning to finish?
ANY BOOK. I have almost completely ruined my brain with social media, so if I could finish anything at all, I’ll be pleased.
5. What book do you keep meaning to start?
With God In Russia by Walter Ciszek
I’m a bad Catholic reader and I should feel bad. I have now officially lost this book under the bed twice, once under the old bed and now once under the new bed. With God under the bed, I guess.
