What are some examples of answers being given in the world around you?

Pharmaceutical companies often sell cures for ‘surface’ symptoms that might otherwise draw our attention to deeper needs and disorders. Ads for products play upon deep emotional states – fear of death, need for affection, feelings of alienation and loneliness, worries about being good enough or fitting in. “Buy this product now (and you won’t have to face the discomforts lurking just beneath the surface of consciousness)!”

Any appeal for a speedy decision, a knee-jerk reaction, or a quick fix is likely to be an ‘answer’ that helps you avoid deeper questioning. Promises of easy ways to solve problems such as financial needs, obesity, or social ills tend to shut out any questioning about the many dimensions of such struggles. Magazines, talk shows, movies are full of advice, stars to emulate and solutions to buy.

I’ve laughed at products that were ‘answers’ to problems I didn’t know existed – baby wipe warmers and egg sandwich cookers, for instance – and labor saving or time saving devices that don’t remind you to ask deeper questions about the value of work and time. Then there are hugely expensive research projects that seem to want to find answers for problems such as the autism epidemic, or the high drop-out rate from high schools, but don’t ask obvious questions – breast cancer researchers who will not explore the connection between abortion and breast cancer; studies of juvenile delinquency that do not look at the positive influence of fathers, married parents, religious faith, or healthy foods.

Why is bondage attractive?

Remember the exodus of the Israelites? Finally free to move toward the Promised Land, they began to encounter the hardships of freedom. As slaves, they’d been fed and housed and told how to spend their time. There was no room in bondage for dreaming their own dreams, or planning to carry out their own ideas. They worked hard, but weren’t sent into battle; lived in poverty, but were kept ‘operational’.

Freedom meant the constant renewal of willing obedience to leaders who did not compel that obedience, and to God. It is surprisingly easy to assent to discomfort when the only option is a worse punishment, and correspondingly hard to keep choosing discomfort when you have freedom for greater ease, or pleasure.

Freedom asks you to work hard, fight, struggle, experience the ways you let yourself down, come face to face with the muscles and virtues and skills that have atrophied, and take responsibility for what you become. Going with the flow a la ‘natural man,’ or with the imposed pattern a la ‘contrived man,’ saves you this discomfort.

What constraints make freedom possible?

Truth and virtue are the necessary constraints for human freedom. One cannot correspond to reality without coming up against the true factors that make up reality. I am not ‘free,’ for instance, to fly without an airplane that ‘corresponds to’ the truth about aerodynamics, physics, weather patterns, etc….

Since God is the ‘most real thing,’ I must ‘take him into account’ as well, must correspond to the fact of His existence, His revelation of Himself, His authority over me, if I’m to be free.

This submission to God – Reality in the Highest – is the basis for development of virtue – power, human freedom. Freedom is really virtue-in-practice, or the interior capacity for Christ held open by correspondence to truth.

How can a right idea lead us away from freedom?

When an idea becomes a bright, shiny, mental plaything it can distract us from the work and necessity of realizing the idea as form, gesture, act. We can get so caught up with the idea that it grows more and more ‘perfect,’ and thus farther and farther away from the imperfect reality we face. The gap dwarfs the power of our own action and can lead to an ‘inanition of despair’ – an impotence to act at all.

In the face of the huge Ideal, an act seems pointless, powerless. I call this ‘idea-olatry’ to distinguish it from ‘ideology’. Ideologies are often imposed upon persons without regard to the reality of those persons, or the many other factors of reality that are affected by such imposition. So, on the one hand, the idea is idolized, but not realized, and, on the other hand, idea is idolized to the extent of human sacrifice for its realization.

Why is response necessary for freedom?

Response is action. Without it, the things we understand can remain disconnected from the world of practice, actuality and realization. Stuck in our minds, such ‘mental constructs’ lack power to change us, or to change the world. We can’t grow in correspondence to reality – freedom – without being affected by it and then by having an effect upon it. To act, we must make a “judgment with heart in it”. This is Fr. Giussani’s phrase, meaning that we connect the way our mind and heart ‘get’ something real, and render our own judgment, such as, “That is a good worth seeking after,” or, “This must stop.”

Unless we then act upon the judgment we’ve made, the idea of seeking good, or interfering with evil, has no real effect. Exercising the capacity to act upon our own resolutions also helps ensure we take seriously the need to make them. Without this step, mind and heart can become, in a sense, disconnected, and our decisions may become unbalanced toward warm emotionalism (follow the feeling), or toward cool intellectualism (analytical appraisal with no ‘heart’ in it). Mere action is not what is needed, but response that flows from our own interior work of rendering a judgment, or crafting a resolution, based on our encounter with reality.

R.C.Y.F.!

What happens if someone does not hunger for reality?

If someone has no appetite for food, we call him sick, because food is so necessary for his health and development. Reality is food for the soul, but if we have no appetite for it, we may not realize we are ailing. The soul has been called ‘capax omnium’ – capable of containing all the created world – reality – and of Christ himself – Reality in the Highest form. The soul’s hunger to know reality is hunger for the Creator, for Truth, Goodness and Beauty. It is no virtue in a meant to be uninterested in the world and people, the forms and works of art, the messages and needs that surround him.

Granting the possibility that God will call some to contemplation only of Himself (in Whom is all reality), it is a mistake to assume that turning away from ‘the world’ is necessarily ‘spiritual’. Many Christians would do well to develop a full-bodied interest in the world and would find themselves humbled by the work and sacrifice necessary to walk that path as a spiritual practice.

G.K. Chesterton has made fun of those who ‘love humanity’ without any capacity to love actual persons. C.S. Lewis bemoaned education that produces ‘men without chests’ – people who are capable of the cold appraisal, “That thing is good,” without any energy to actually get, or achieve that good.

Encounter with reality makes demands upon us that exercise our capacity to take in more – to become ‘capax omnium’. Without this exercise, all that have may be taken from us. Don’t let your hunger for reality atrophy!

How can we tell if someone hungers for reality?

How do you know if someone is hungry for food? He talks about food, seeks food, looks at food with apparent yearning, jumps at the chance to grab food! Long deprivation can dull all these natural responses to hunger, leaving a gaunt trace of a man with no power to move toward fulfillment even by imagining food. Such a man will need slow and careful feeding to return to a robust capacity. We’ll know he’s well by the power of his appetite.

Granted he may even need to exercise self-control over that appetite, the fact is that health and desire-for-the-means-of-health go together. Spiritual health involves ‘taking in God,’ so we hope to see ‘hunger-for-the-means-by-which-God-gives-himself’ in all souls we love.

“He who, tasting and seeing that Reality is good, hungers for more, seeks it out and digs into it, builds the skills needed to fully appropriate it, and allows his own being to be profoundly formed in correspondence with it will receive an overflowing abundance through the kaleidoscope of forms that mediate God’s presence to him.” (Souls at Work, pg. 11)

The one who hungers for reality will also grow in awareness that every reality – even pain, interference, obnoxious people, poverty – offers the adventure of an encounter with Christ. You should expect to find him more and more joyful as a result!

What is a ‘hyper-child’?

I use the term hyper-child to mean one whose growth is retarded by lack of self-awareness and weakness of will to move himself toward higher maturity. Naturally, a real child is still developing in these areas (and we all are works in progress – continually growing, hopefully), so this term is not meant to denigrate children, or childhood. The problem is when a person remains unable, in adulthood, to reflect honestly upon himself, or to act positively to move himself toward good intentions (or away from bad ones). In Souls at Work, I speak of the ‘plant model’ of formation which results in a hyper-child mentality: the belief that a person will naturally and effortlessly manage to grow up without any external discipline, or imposition upon him of constraint, obligation, or standards. This naïve view of personhood avoids the reality of original sin and the possibility/responsibility of cooperation with God.

What is a ‘hyper-child’?

I use the term hyper-child to mean one whose growth is retarded by lack of self-awareness and weakness of will to move himself toward higher maturity. Naturally, a real child is still developing in these areas (and we all are works in progress – continually growing, hopefully), so this term is not meant to denigrate children, or childhood. The problem is when a person remains unable, in adulthood, to reflect honestly upon himself, or to act positively to move himself toward good intentions (or away from bad ones). In Souls at Work, I speak of the ‘plant model’ of formation which results in a hyper-child mentality: the belief that a person will naturally and effortlessly manage to grow up without any external discipline, or imposition upon him of constraint, obligation, or standards. This naïve view of personhood avoids the reality of original sin and the possibility/responsibility of cooperation with God.

What is a “Hyper-Adult” Mentality?

A hyper-adult thinks more about the goal than the journey, the product than the process. Hyper-adults care about progress – which can be good – but may do so without enough concern for the person involved in getting a goal accomplished. They may be willing to stomp on themselves or others, in a way that violates personhood, or dignity. Hyper-adults are characterized by a narrow, objective focus, or ‘tunnel vision,’ and need some help slowing down, accepting interference (especially when caused by the weakness of others), and taking NO for an answer.

How is a Free Person ‘Three-Dimensional’?

‘Three-dimensional’ is just a way of expressing ‘wholeness,’ or ‘fullness’. It’s a great metaphor for freedom, because the free person is characterized by an interior spaciousness that gives him a wide range of ‘movement’ and a large capacity to take in being (beauty, other people, meaning, Truth). He seems to inhabit a ‘large place’ instead of a ‘small space,’ and this can be true even of someone who is physically confined, or restricted in some other way.