Holiness in Darkness
Salt and Light Readings....
As the Franciscan friars have known through the grace of the Holy Spirit — as they began to do in 1987 in the South Bronx and continue to do today — and as Christians have done for centuries, we are fully equipped and capable of holiness in darkness.
— Habits for Holiness, Fr. Mark-Mary Ames CFR
A couple of months ago there was a recurring format of question circling websites like BlueSky or Mastodon that started with the question "What radicalised you?" The political-focus of asking such questions aside, I found it contained an interesting admission. The phrasing of radicalisation confesses, finally, that not only are we reactants more than catalysts in much cultural commentary, but that our reactions are increasingly overt and extreme to the problems we're facing.
Of course, it reminded me of my post last year on outrage. But also it put me in mind of other questions: How ought the modern Catholic live in an age of such radicalisations? What does it mean to live in a time of conflict or a struggling social climate and yet pursue patience and hope?
Sadly I'm no sage, so lack a nice or neatly parcelled aphorism to address such loaded and pressing questions. But I do have some insights from readings and personal prayer that may help us glean something of an approach.
Salt and Light Reading
Such insights draw heavily from a short book I've been leafing through lately by Fr. Mark-Mary Ames, CFR, Habits for Holiness.1 For a book about prayer and spiritual habit-building, I think it speaks something into our current context of rage-bait and outcries of dissatisfaction.
The text promises no quick-fixes for the struggles of a spiritual life, or any shortcuts to great sanctity. There's no flashy selling-point or overly-romantic granduer about the contents of this book. Instead it promotes a slower approach:
Building solid spiritual foundations, namely via prayer and service in community.
Franciscan friar and priest Fr. Mark-Mary Ames, of note from his work with outlets like Ascension Presents, plays his hand very early in Habits for Holiness and shares his optimism that, in fact, we are each capable of "...holiness in darkness."
That phrasing has lodged itself quite well in my mental lexicon regarding this sort of topic matter. It echoes back to St. Matthew's "salt and light" passage during the Sermon on the Mount2, especially the latter half about the lamp and city on a hill. Rightfully so, too. For I think the key to living out our holiness in darkness is not due to an active struggle against the growing nightime shadows, but rather a passive result of true surrender to the Light of Men.
Surrounded by Shadows
What does that mean at it's core? Well, firstly, it means to be in places that are shadowed or unholy to begin with. Such locations aren't much past a stones throw out the front door in modernity. Sometimes they may even included the local parish or cathedral. Therein lies part of the difficulty.
Scandal and outrage, as we explored before, are two very easy options to take.
The temptation can be to take Thoreau or Muir to their final point, abandoning this whole urban-cultural-melting-pot fuelled by industry and build our own lakeside huts away from the hustling throngs. But this will not be our cure. Still we may find the evening light of transcendentalism give its way to the creeping nightly shadows.
There is a reason you have to live well in the cloister before being allowed to contend with the hermitage. The call to live a holy life in a culture that oft seems apathetic, or possibly even hostile, to sanctity is to change from the inside-out. We must look at the darkness bare-faced, and radiate the fruits of Holy Spirit. Easier said than done, I'm aware.
I'm reminded of Tolkien's letter about "sagging faith....":
The only cure for sagging or fainting faith is Communion...Also I can recommend this as an exercise (alas! only too easy to find opportunity for): make your communion in circumstances that affront your taste. Choose a snuffling or gabbling priest or a proud and vulgar friar; and a church full of the usual bourgeois crowd, ill-behaved children – from those who yell to those products of Catholic schools who the moment the tabernacle is opened sit back and yawn...Go to Communion with them (and pray for them). It will be just the same (or better than that) as a Mass said beautifully by a visibly holy man, and shared by a few devout and decorous people (it could not be worse than the mess of the feeding of the 5000...)3
I think J.R.R understood that escape and retreat is not the answer to scandal we always think it is.
Radiation
Frankly, however, to radiate the truth of the faith is much easier to say than to do. Partially because that "doing" bit is a bit more counterintuitive than it first appears.
The doing we're looking at here is less about the big moments of faith, those final professions of the martyrs and heroic self-sacrifices, and more about the groundwork we put in that enables us to take those leaps when we need to: A solid sense of a faithul prayer life, time in community to grow and patience and hope for each other, and growth in love for God and neighbour to sustain it all.
Basically all the things Fr. Mark-Mary talks about in his book, which you should go read. In a sense, this is the paradox Our Lord is getting at when he tells us, "Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven."4 Which can only be achieved once we have truly grappled with the humility it takes to "...go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret."5
It takes humble, private prayer that garners no interest from others to be able to shine as light from a city on a hill. It's why I said earlier that we need to radiate the fruits of the Holy Spirit.
As C.S. Lewis' notes in chapter 12 of Mere Christianity:
Christians have often disputed as to whether what leads the Christian home is good actions, or faith in Christ...but it does seem to me like asking which blade in a pair of scissors is most necessary...
The Bible really seems to clinch the matter when it puts the two things together into one amazing sentence. The first half is, ‘Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling’—which looks as if everything depended on us and our good actions: but the second half goes on, ‘For it is God who worketh in you’—which looks as if God did everything and we nothing. I am afraid that is the sort of thing we come up against in Christianity.
Really, I think here Lewis is grappling with the strange paradox of holiness in darkness. God works in us and through us, and we work outward from God's interior work for his glory.
Raditation is a thing achieved as a result of that interior process.
A lamp does not exert itself to shine, it's the electrical process inside that generates the necessary components to let the bulb radiate light. Much like a lightbulb, as faithful we aren't the soruce of our own energy supply.
Fully Equipped
That is the genius of Fr. Mark-Mary's wording, really. Through the sacrament of our baptism, the Lord has always been supplying enough energy for faith to shine brightly in our lives through our words and actions. Sometimes we just get in the way of our own light.
But the truth is that with an open heart, to the Lord and to those around us, we are fully equipped to radiate as a guiding light to everyone we enounter. A lot of the time, we just need to get out of our own way. I talked more about that process, commonly called Kenosis, last week. Feel free to read that too, if you haven't got you copy of Habits for Holiness beside you currently.
I'm sure that pun was fully intended.
See Matthew 5:13-16 for the text mentioned.
This commonly letter no. 250 in collections of Tolkien's correspondence.
Matthew 5:16
Matthew 6:6