What a 17th-century monk can still teach us.
What a 17th-century monk can still teach us
P ope Leo XIV may not be God’s gift to the media. When asked to name a book that best explains his faith and worldview, the Chicago-born pope pointed to the work of a 17th-century monk.
Pope Francis was known for creating a media frenzy nearly every time he was on a plane returning to Rome from an international trip. Get him in front of the press, and all bets were off about what might be said. It began with “Who am I to judge?” — infamously misinterpreted, manipulated, and yet supremely useful for getting people who have grievances and differences with the Catholic Church to take a second look at it.
Pope Leo is different. When meeting the press on his way back from Lebanon, our first U.S.-born pope talked about a French Carmelite monk who died in 1691. Born Nicolas Herman, Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection wasn’t a great preacher or teacher in the traditional sense, but he was renowned for his peace. “He knew the shalom of God does not originate in the glitter of the world, nor in the deceptiveness of things,” Donald E. Demaray writes in the preface to the 1977 Society of Saint Paul edition of The Practice of the Presence of God. I’ve had it in my Kindle account for more than a decade — downloaded one Saturday afternoon after I visited an elderly priest in his hermitage in Massachusetts shortly before his death at 80. The book was a key to the Christian life, my friend had said — well aware that I was struggling with peace and seeking to solve all manner of problems that weren’t my business to solve.
Brother Lawrence demonstrated that living for God was possible, with profound simplicity. Leo says that Brother Lawrence’s teaching explains his spirituality. He could have more predictably cited Saint Augustine’s widely studied The City of God or Confessions, being a missionary priest from the religious order that bears his name. But here we are, with a monk who had no formal education.
Leo has been warning of the dangers of artificial intelligence, loneliness, and addiction — including to our screens. There are, of course, multilayered approaches to addressing these issues. And there is also this one: the kind of Divine encounter that makes true human encounter possible. And vice versa.
Just the other day, an Uber driver asked me for the confession times at a church where he was dropping me off. We had had a lovely conversation about his four-year-old and his fascination with the elf on the shelf. In some ways, it’s that easy: In the hourly living of life, remember God. In your family life, as you work, in the way you interact with people. Putting aside time to pray and worship on Sunday and every day in ways appropriate to your vocation. Always in balance, never swinging for the extremes. All this is not quite in our culture, which is probably why Pope Leo might just be the perfect spiritual leader for this moment. As Brother Lawrence said,
Our sanctification does not depend on changing the way we do things, but doing for God what we normally do for ourselves. How sad to see many people mistake the means for the end, addicting themselves to certain works, which they do very imperfectly because of their human or selfish motivations!
Not everyone can do explicitly religious work for their employment. But everyone can offer their billable hours — whatever they happen to do during them — to God, in loving gratitude, with a prayer that it all might work to the good and do him honor. It’s about being good stewards of what we’ve been given: our fragile lives and precious time.
“God would give him strength to bear whatever evil He permitted to happen to him,” his brothers said of Lawrence. “Therefore he feared nothing and had no reason to consult anybody about his thoughts. Whenever he had attempted to talk to somebody about his problems, he always came away more perplexed.” Leo — or Lawrence — wouldn’t want us to misinterpret that to mean that isolation is good, or that reaching out for advice and counsel and mental and spiritual help is bad. In fact, both Lawrence and Leo (in the case of the latter, before he was elected pope) lived in communities of men — not on their own, even under religious obedience.
So, how do you get on and stay on that path? “Reject all useless thoughts. Reject them the moment they rear their ugly heads and show their useless impertinence. After all, they could clobber your salvation. Reject them all and return to inner communion with God.” Lawrence advised: “we should establish ourselves in God so that we sense His presence. How do we do that? By having frequent conversations with God.”
When asked what it was like for him when it became clear that he was going to be elected pope, Leo said: “I resigned myself to the fact when I saw how things were going, and I said that this could be a reality. I took a deep breath, I said: ‘Here we go Lord, you’re in charge, you lead the way.’”
You don’t have to be pope to pray that prayer, and we don’t have to overcomplicate things to hope for serenity amid the chaos of life on this earth.
This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.