I do not like to make the first move in any endeavor. … I leave it to
Divine Providence to make the first move and then I am satisfied. When it is
clear that I am acting only under the direction of Providence, I have nothing
to reproach myself with. When I make the first move, it is only I myself who am
active, so I don't expect to see much good result; neither does God usually
give the action his special blessing. [1]
- St. John Baptist de La Salle -
De La Salle’s life sparkled with a
radical adherence to Divine Providence – the conviction that God speaks to us through
people, circumstances, events, and requests that arise in the course of our
daily affairs; not fate, luck, happenstance, or coincidence, but God’s
invitations to move in a certain direction, do a certain thing, respond in a
certain way. It’s like the gaze of a young child towards its parent, acutely
conscious of the many ways concern, direction, interest, and care are communicated
non-verbally. It is the language of loving attention, of contemplation.
Yet there is another piece that
might be easily overlooked; i.e., he knew that you actually have to do
something in order to learn something; you actually have to act in order to
move forward. One of the striking things about De La Salle is that he acted, he
responded. He did not just think “Oh, boy. I better do something about this
sometime.” Instead, he listened carefully, prayed deeply, thought fervently,
consulted widely, concluded courageously, and acted confidently.
This combination of radical trust
and conscious action–of faith and zeal if you will–is worth paying attention to
vis-à-vis our contemporary engagement with the Christian tradition. A few years
ago, America magazine had a book
review that disagreed with the book’s substance but also admitted that the
thing the author got right was “… his steady insistence that in order to be
Christians today–to bear the name of Christ in truth as well as in title–we
must relearn two things: practices and disciplines. … [W]hen it comes to the
question of how we build Christian persons, how we become Christians in habit
as well as in mind, ‘what we think does not matter as much as what we do–and
how faithfully we do it.’ [2]
The shivering importance of this emphasis on practices can be better seen when
we notice that we are, all of us, being formed by the things we do every day.
As the philosopher Will Durant put it in his one-line-synthesis of Aristotle:
‘We are what we repeatedly do.’ And what do we do every day? We check our
phones; we watch our televisions; we drive our cars. We perform these ‘cultural
liturgies,’ as James K.A. Smith names them, by rote. They sink so deeply into
us that they become muscle memory. It is these repeated actions that shape our
habits, our habits that shape our character, our characters that shape our
tastes, and our tastes that shape ourselves.”[3]
It is a long quotation, but every
word speaks to our capacity to be aware of God’s Providence. Can the language
of mutual loving attention with God survive amidst the habits that are our
second nature? Do we have any habits
that resonate with God or God’s life in our midst? God’s providential care warrants
a cultivated capacity to habitually engage that presence. But this is not very
easy today. According to another author, “the convergence of two major trends
in our own time calls for a new assessment of the barriers of faith. … These
two major trends are (1) the practice of continuous engagement in immediately
gratifying activities that resist reflection and meditation, and (2) the growth
of secularism, defined as a state in which theism is seen as one of the many
visible choices for human fullness and satisfaction, and in which the
transcendent feels less and less plausible.” [4]
His proposed solution is the title of his book.
De La Salle’s combination of
praying and doing, trusting and acting, faith and zeal, was just as difficult in
his own time as it is today. Unfortunately, you can’t just think your way to
salvation. If we live in a time where our attention is structured by largely
unconscious habits introduced and shaped by popular culture, then it makes
sense to 1) be aware of that dynamic in our lives, 2) find opportunities to
step behind and beyond such habits, and 3) include at least a few practices and
disciplines that resonate with our faith-informed convictions. Without such
plain and simple measures, Thoreau’s “lives of quiet desperation” remain society’s
default norm.
So what will you do this summer?
[1] De
La Salle, John Baptist. The Letters.
Translated by Colman Molloy, FSC. Edited by Colman Molloy and Augustine Loes.
Romeoville, IL: Lasallian Publications, 1988. Pg. 75
[2] Dreher,
Rod. The Benedict Option: a Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian
Nation. Sentinel, an Imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2018. Pg. 52.
[4] Noble,
Alan. Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth
in a Distracted Age. InterVarsity Press, 2018. Pg. 2
