THE EVADED VIRTUE: PENITENCE

THE OLD TESTAMENT is always telling us to do penance: the Prophets spoke about little else. The New Testament repeats the same call: St. John the Baptist and our Lord are as emphatic as their predecessors. Penance was practised by the saints, is written about by the authorities, is (on occasions—notably during Lent) preached from the pulpits. Then we look around and ask ourselves: yes, but is it—by the ordinary run of Catholics—ever done?

There is a whole catalogue of evils which can be cast out only by prayer and fasting; the and fasting is apt to be overlooked. Will it do if I give up sugar in coffee after lunch? Will it do what? It won’t move mountains or bring about the conversion of England, but perhaps it will do something. At all events it will show that there is a realization of the necessity of penance, and it is precisely this that is so conspicuously lacking in the milk-and-barley-water Christianity of today. Still more is it lacking, of course, in the neo-paganism which exists in Christian countries but outside the Christian churches. After all, the ancient pagans had their sacrifices; the moderns recognize no need for the placating of their gods.

There is no escaping it: where there is sin there has to be sorrow for sin. Effective sorrow, not mere sentiment. When a nation has sinned, it has to humble itself afterwards and ask pardon. How many nations even admit sin—let alone beg to be forgiven? This book is not going to be an indictment against nations; it sets out to enquire into, and assist, the mind of the individual. But the individual conscience can’t always be separated from the corporate conscience, and sometimes we see our personal responsibility more clearly when shown up in the light of the responsibility of the whole. Appeal after appeal has come to us in our own time to do public penance, and it is worth considering whether as individuals we are entirely free from blame for the conditions around us.

It is not always the voice of a prophet that is used by God to call a wayward people to its senses. A crisis of some sort can be made to serve instead. Intelligent beings should be able to find out, from the events which shake and shape their world, which way the wind is blowing. This generation has seen crisis following crisis—the word itself means judgement—and men have deliberately not asked themselves where the wind was coming from and why it was being blown. We have been warned by the findings of the scientists and the forecasts of the economists. We have been warned by the farmers, the doctors, the politicians. Even the weather has been a warning to us. A Judgement. And we say we have not been warned by God.

Oh, but all these things would have happened in any case. It’s absurd to put them down to an Almighty with an avenging sword in one hand and an hour-glass with the sands running out in the other. Besides if He’d wanted to pull us up, why didn’t He speak to us through the mouth of one of His servants as He did in the Bible, or by means of miracles? In the first place, would these things have happened in any case? God uses natural means to bring about His supernatural plan, and it looks very much as if the world has been asking for punishment. Absurd to think of God threatening mankind? Why absurd? He’s done it before—and with much the same sort of sword. Threats of war, famine, dispossession, social and economic collapse...there is nothing very new about this. While if we want to hear Him speaking through the mouths of His servants we have only to listen and we shall hear the refrain repeated time and time again. But we don’t listen. The Pope has preached repentance. Our Lady has appeared to a number of people and told them that the time has come for penance or there will be trouble for mankind. Lourdes was primarily a call to penance; the invitation to be healed came second. Père Lamy clamoured for a change of heart, for repentance. Do penance, he said, or there will be war. And there was war. The message from Fatima was even more explicit: the time is getting short...do penance or Russia will rule the West. Our Lady is appearing in Belgium: her preaching is everywhere the same. We can’t say we haven’t heard. If we want the tide to turn we know what we have to do. But we are still dancing on the shore with our backs to the waves.

Now to leave the general need for the particular one: the place of mortification in the life of the individual soul. It used to be considered axiomatic that the spiritual edifice rested upon the twin supports of prayer and penance. But twins have a way of growing up unevenly. For every twenty sermons or articles on prayer, there probably isn’t more than one on penance. (Look, for instance, at the chapter headings of any spiritual book—this one included.) The raising of the heart gets its measure of attention; the afflicting of the flesh—both as a subject and as a practice—is left to the ancients. This escape from penance takes two forms, and both of them have the backing of excellent reasons. We will deal with each in turn.

In the first place prayer is claimed to be a more spiritual thing than penance. It is higher and nobler, and will be continued in heaven long after penance has been done away with. Prayer unites us positively with God, and therefore must be given far more attention than penance which is at best a negative affair, a going against self. Prayer looks upward and outward, expressing love, desire, hope...while penance looks back, expressing contrition for past failure. Prayer offers to God the soul: penance offers only the body. Now all this is true enough as far as it goes, but the point is not which of the two is the better, but how to get the best out of each. It might be argued that to think is more noble than to eat, but the point is that we need to do both. In our preference for prayer we are inclined to leave out of account the fact that though penance may be less important than prayer, it is also far less pleasant. We should remember, moreover, that if penance is being practised as it should be, it is an act of prayer—positively uniting us with the Passion, positively expressing love, positively surrendering self. In fact, if penance is not found to be actively bringing the soul nearer to God it had better not be practised at all: it is a sheer waste of energy: much better be employed in something else. Will it do if I give up etc. misses the main idea. The second line of argument which is used for avoiding the more uncomfortable forms of mortification is based on the supposition that the human race is declining in stamina, and that therefore the austerities which were all very well for our ancestors are happily inappropriate today. This consoling theory finds expression in slightly differing formulae: asceticism must keep in step with the development of man’s cultural activity and the increasing refinement of his nature. That’s the first one. Next: the rough type produced in the Middle Ages required a correspondingly rough system of control, and where the simpler, more objective mind of former times was able to take self-inflicted punishment in its stride, we, introspective and leaning more and more upon the conclusions of psychologists, are liable to see in voluntarily chosen pain something rather morbid. Then there’s this one: the darknesses of prayer which the mystics of the present day are always talking about must be very much more purifying than all the chains and flagellations of the older tradition. These catch phrases—and there are others—all add up to the same thing: namely that the appeal of St. John the Baptist no longer applies, and that when our Lord spoke about the necessity of everyone doing penance (or you shall all likewise perish"—in the way that those perished upon whom the tower of Siloe fell), He didn’t really mean it.

Take the objections one by one as they are set out above. It has yet to be proved that the present generation is less physically robust than those that have gone before. One would have thought that the war might have exploded this theory. It looks as if people’s powers of endurance are as good now as ever they were; and as for nerves—if it is on the mental side that our weakness is supposed to lie—there have been nerves in every age. By the way people speak it might be supposed that neurotics were something new in the history of mankind. If there is any truth in this idea of a declining stamina, physical and mental, it is that by letting ourselves down gently, we of this generation have come to dislike physical hardship more, and that by exploiting our nervous upsets we have created a wider field for nervous disorders. It is only a pity that we have met with a wider sympathy. A case of demand and supply. The bigger the nursing home, the more people to put in it.

Further: to rule out self-inflicted punishment on the grounds that the whole thing is probably rather unhealthy when you get down to it...probably suppressed sex or something of that sort, is to throw countless generations of saints under a darkening and quite ridiculous suspicion of sadism. If it is the fanatical excesses of Buddhism that we are afraid of, we in this country have little cause to be alarmed: there is something preventatively un-English about Thibet. Nor is it easy to see why the danger of extravagance is so much more to be feared with regard to corporal penance than with regard to these interior penances which we hear so much about. If there is risk attaching to body-culture, there is certainly much more risk attaching to culture of the spirit. By all means mortify curiosity, vanity, uncharity and the rest, but these should be mortified anyway. Mortifications of an interior kind may be both more necessary and more sanctifying, but that—as in the discussion above regarding the relative merits of prayer and penance—is not the point. The point is that if the flesh is not mortified as well it will get the upper hand of the spirit. One or the other has got to be in control.

To the people who say that the state of their prayer provides them with all the mortification they need, it might be suggested that though prayer may be very mortifying—and while it nearly always is—it doesn’t hurt. Penance does. Or should do. The worst that we get in prayer is boredom, and most of us do not shrink from boredom as we shrink from downright pain. The feeling that our prayer is a complete waste of time is humiliating in the extreme and is very good for us, but it is a feeling we cannot escape. It is allowed us by God to test our fidelity. We can’t suddenly decide not to feel it. Whereas here we are discussing penance: humiliations and sufferings undertaken in a spirit of atonement and with a view to sharing from choice in the sufferings of Christ. Aridities in prayer, because they are sent to us by God, are obviously more advancing to the spiritual life than anything we can hit upon in the way of selecting tortures—there can clearly be no comparison between the relative value of God-sent and man-devised crosses—but the point I am trying to make here is that we can never afford wholly to discard the crosses that are voluntary, though we must never take them up without the sanction of advice and the approval of those responsible for our souls—otherwise they may do more harm, spiritually, than good.

In the end we come back to the axiom with which we started, and say that the balance must be maintained between prayer and penance. Prayer without penance is liable to become a culture; penance without prayer is liable to become an obsession. Prayer is not to be dabbled in as a rare and precious hobby (if there is one dilettante who is wholly objectionable it is the dilettante mystic), while penance is not to be wallowed in as a misery or an advertisement. Prayer and penance safeguard one another, help one another out, express one another. Like Gilbert and Sullivan, each is incomplete on its own.

Though we may not feel called by God to embrace the camel-hair of St. John the Baptist, we should occasionally examine our wardrobe on the question of soft garments. Garments have a way of becoming softer and softer. So have we.

THE POINT ABOUT PRAYER

PEOPLE are apt to make two mistakes about prayer: they either imagine it to be so easy that they can manage it at once, or else so difficult that it is not worthwhile going on with. The answer is that because it is open to all it can’t be very difficult, and because it is part of the burden of religion it can’t be very easy. Whether we find it difficult or easy we have got to do it, so the more we get ourselves used to the practice and the less we worry about our reactions to it the better. But taken all in all it is perhaps more satisfactory to think that prayer is going to be easy than to think it is going to be difficult, because it means that we shall at least start off. If we look only at the difficulties we are handicapped by discouragement before we begin. And right the way through this business of prayer there is no tiling that acts as a more formidable obstacle than discouragement. So it will be mainly about this that the following paragraphs are concerned.

St. Paul’s Pray without ceasing should provide the answer to those who are weighed down by the sense of their insufficiency. The saint is not exhorting to the almost impossible. He is telling everyone—even the people who feel they are no use at it and that for them it is a complete waste of time—that their whole life can become a prayer. You must make a habit of prayer, St. Paul is telling us, and to make a habit of anything you must repeat and extend the act. First easy acts, then difficult ones. It is like learning a language: easy to make oneself understood, difficult to become really fluent. The way to become fluent is to practise often. Prayer is learned by repeated acts. There is no short cut to a habit. A resolution to go on once one has begun is not a short cut. It is a good start but it is not a short cut. A method learned from a book is not a short cut. It may be a further step towards acquiring the habit, but it is not a short cut. A book of meditations is not a short cut. It is a guide to fall back upon when the