1. Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 350.
2. Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary, 24.
3. Rolheiser, Domestic Monastery, 41.
4. Rolheiser, Domestic Monastery, 44.
5. Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 174.
6. Warren, Prayer in the Night, 17.
7. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 153.
8. Hauerwas, “Christian Practice and the Practice of Law,” 750.
9. Eisenhower, At Ease, 52. The verse from Proverbs quoted by his mother is a paraphrase of Prov. 16:32.
10. Personality tests such as Myers-Briggs, Enneagram, and StrengthsFinder, as helpful as they are in some respects, seem to be about discovering people’s “true selves” without reference to God. I may not go so far as to say they are bad. I find them interesting and have been helped by all three. However, I do think they have limits. The discovery of ourselves is meant to happen in and through conversation with Christ rather than through independent studies of personality data. In Christian spirituality the goal is to know ourselves more reliably and to root out sin more extensively.
My hesitation is that personality tests can become an excuse for vice. I think we should be critical in our evaluation of our own sin and gracious in our evaluation of others’. I think we often get that reversed. We are typically gracious in regard to our own sin. “I’m a little off-putting and harsh with those around me, because I’m a 1.” Or “I’m an INTJ, so I don’t really trust authorities.” But then, just as quickly as we excuse our own sin, we judge others’ sin. Since I’m an introvert, I can look at extroverts and think, They just want to be the center of attention. What vanity. Meanwhile, I think of myself as a refined introvert, as someone who’s thoughtful and reserved. I am not inclined to ask whether I just don’t love people enough to go out of my comfort zone to talk to them. It must be someone else’s problem. Rather than use our understanding of ourselves to fight sin, we use it as an excuse for sin. This is not to say we all need to be bubbly people or there’s some overall standard of sanctification. Yet within our unique personality, we should become comfortable with the way God made us but ruthlessly root out sin where it’s present.
11. Isaac the Syrian, Mystic Treatises, chap. 8, “What Is It That Helps a Man to Come Near unto God?” (Wensinck, 70).
12. Williams, Looking East in Winter, 31–32.
13. Cassian, Conferences, 75.
14. Nwigwe, “I CHOOSE YOU.”
15. Basil, Ascetical Works, 256.
16. Mohler, “Nearing the End.”
17. Buechner, Wishful Thinking, 99.
18. Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary, 31.
19. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 131.
20. Charry, By the Renewing of Your Minds, 242.
21. Lewis, Great Divorce, 351.
6
Dorothy Day
WE MUST LOVE ONE ANOTHER OR DIE
As you survey your life, what would you point to as most formative? When was a time you grew the most?
I’ve recently begun to put this question to some friends and students. It has been interesting to hear how people respond.
Some mention an experience based on an activity—maybe a mission trip or a discipleship relationship. But the most common answer I receive is a time of intense suffering. Most people wouldn’t wish such an experience on their worst enemies, yet these moments, events, or periods are the things that made them who they are. They have been the most spiritually formative.
I sure wish that weren’t the case. But I know it’s true for me. The most soul-shaping times were the times when God felt the most distant. God was actually closest when he seemed furthest away.
This idea puts us in direct confrontation with our age of authenticity. Authenticity is “the notion that each of us has an original way of being human” and that “each of us has to discover what it is to be ourselves.”1 It’s rooted in expressive individualism, which says people’s feelings dictate their lives. God wouldn’t conflict with people’s feelings, right? Reality is oriented around how people feel. But if God shapes us in suffering, then maybe our feelings aren’t that dependable. Maybe an authentic life means conforming not to our feelings but to the image of God.
Suffering forces us to become acquainted with ourselves. There’s no way to hide from pain. This confrontation with pain forces upon us a realization of how much of life is out of our control and how utterly dependent we are. This knowledge shatters our illusions of power. Suffering also allows us to comfort others (2 Cor. 1:3–7) with a sense of deep gratitude. It is not that we are thankful for the suffering we have experienced; this reaction would trivialize suffering. Yet there’s a sense that the suffering shapes us to become deeper people, more whole and holy people.
A podcast called The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill documents the rise to fame and then the fall from grace of a pastor in Seattle named Mark Driscoll. One of the most powerful lines for me came in a late episode. One of the members of the church was describing why his dad didn’t like Driscoll. He said, “Mark Driscoll is a harsh man. He doesn’t understand mercy. And he doesn’t understand mercy because he hasn’t suffered.”2 I heard that while driving to work, and I broke down and wept. For maybe the first time, I was grateful for my suffering. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t want to go through it again! Yet as I looked back on my life, I was profoundly thankful for the suffering that shaped me. The comedian Stephen Colbert once expressed the same sentiment. Referring to the grief of losing his father and two brothers when he was young, he declared that he had learned to love the things that he most wished hadn’t happened, saying, “What punishments of God are not gifts?”3
What I have just said in the preceding paragraph invites a reconsideration of one’s own spiritual autobiography. Perhaps we should rethink how and when God is at work. God may be closest when we think he’s furthest. He may be closer than you think when you feel like he’s absent.
DOROTHY DAY: A SUFFERING SAINT
One woman’s life confirms the formative shape of suffering. By “showing up” in regular and mundane ways, she found herself transformed. Dorothy Day allowed pain to shape her.
If you want to live an easy life, don’t read Dorothy Day. Skip this chapter. But if you want to live an easy life, Day would likely remind you, then don’t read the Bible either.
The title of her autobiography is The Long Loneliness. But in her loneliness, she wasn’t alone. She lived a life with God by choosing to love, even when it felt like loneliness. The line is a quote from a nun named Mary Ward: “I think, dear child, the trouble and the long loneliness you hear me speak of is not far from me, which whensoever it is, happy success will follow. . . . The pain is great, but very endurable, because He who lays on the burden also carries it.”4 The thing about suffering that makes it bearable is that God is with us in it. He helps carry the load. He is walking with us when we limp along.
Day starts her autobiography with an explanation of confession, which places her in line with Saint Augustine. She is confessing her life and faith and confessing her sins, “not the sins of others, or your own virtues, but only your ugly, gray, drab, monotonous sins.”5 She is acquainted with her true self because she is acquainted with the humiliation that accompanies humility. She does not ignore or hide her sins but brings them into the open to be forgiven and healed.
Dorothy Day begins by confessing that she did not have a saintly start. Growing up in the early 1900s, she was haunted by God but not yet rescued. She was born into an Episcopal family, yet there wasn’t much religious practice or conversation. It was not necessarily the truthfulness of God that exposed her to Christianity; rather, the relationships that God weaved into her upbringing showed her Christian life. There were people like a friend in Oakland named Birdie or a mentor named Mrs. Barrett, whom she saw kneeling. “This posture, this gesture, convinced me that worship, adoration, thanksgiving, supplication—these were the noblest acts of which men were capable in this life.”6 So, when she and her sister were growing up, they would, at Dorothy’s prompting, “practice being saints.”7
This practicing of sainthood was formative, but faith didn’t “take” during her early life—at least not in a conscious way. There were several precursors to transformation in her life. Day’s religious life came in fits and starts, like a motor than won’t quite turn over. Once, she was arrested for protesting and found herself at the proverbial rock bottom, sitting in a jail cell. Day asked for a Bible on the second day, and she “read it with the sense of coming back to something of my childhood that I had lost. My heart swelled with joy and thankfulness for the Psalms.”8 Yet, as much as she clung to the Bible for comfort in this time, her socialist sensibilities led her to see religion as, in the oft-repeated phrase, an “opiate of the masses,” a sort of pill to quell the cries of the exploited. Moreover, she didn’t want to come to Jesus in weakness. As she describes it, “I did not want to go to God in defeat and sorrow. I did not want to depend on Him. I was like the child that wants to walk by itself, I kept brushing away the hand that held me up.”9 She was attracted to the person and ethic of Jesus but became convinced that radical care for the poor was not meek like Jesus taught. Governmental policy and radical protest were the ways to change.
