A Spirituality That’s Not a Luxury

Simone Weil

People often ask me what my “spiritual practice” is like. It’s a weird notion, when I think about it. Because I don’t think of it as something on the side, an a la carte indulgence for the leisure class, or for people with more leisure time than I’ve ever had. American Buddhists seem particularly interested in one’s “practice,” and a kind of judgmentalism often accompanies the inquiry. In that way, a “spiritual practice” becomes another idol of middle class consumerism, kind of like flaunting a tan in January by trips to Florida or California or Hawaii was in the seventies and eighties. “Check out my disposable income!”

It’s also the case with those with the leisure to indulge in various forms of “retreat.” Now, I like the idea of a retreat, but, for me anyway, leaving my life to focus on “inner spiritual work” suggests only a kind of selfishness. I would surely feel overwhelming guilt for gifting myself with such spiritual “me time.” All the tasks I would leave to my wife or my children, just so I can, quite literally, retreat.

Don’t get me wrong, prayer and contemplation are central to my life—but only because they are part of my life and not something superadded as a bourgeois indicator of status, if only to myself.

In my twenties, like many people, I tried out various meditative disciplines—a half hour of meditation each morning before heading to work, for example, or following various instructive paths in search of the possession of some kind of spirituality. Before we were married, my wife and I used to visit the church of the now defunct Duns Scotus Friary in Southfield, Michigan to pray the rosary and sit still for a while—it was a beautiful Romanesque building with an incredibly beautiful rose window and an imposing walnut carving of the Virgin standing before it.

But then we had children. Lots of them. And a farm. And animals.

For a while, I used to carry a pocket-sized edition of The Way of the Pilgrim, and I was intrigued by the message of the book, taken from 1 Thessalonians 5, to “pray without ceasing.” I like this idea. I also bought the Philokalia as a way to get into the secret of prayer. I also read Thomas a’ Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ. Ultimately, they only served to discourage me. Then I realized what the problem was.

The problem wasn’t with me. The problem is that I was turning to men who were neither married nor had children for spiritual advice—rather an affliction in Christianity and to Christians, I think. Their answer was to turn the world into a monastery. What a horrible cultural project. As Vladimir Solovyov—also unmarried and childless—observed, Christ sent the Apostles into the world, not into the desert. I know a lot of people are convinced that monastic principles applied to life in the world, even family life, offer the key to Christian living (Yo, Ephraimites!), but that model also offers the kind of spiritual keeping-up-with-the-Joneses ethos I saw with the Buddhists, the same implied spiritual snobbery, and, even if it didn’t, is unsustainable for a family for very long.

So, in my social context of family and in my varied worklife—the farm, teaching, editing, writing—I try to keep things as simple as possible—and as contemplative as possible. As I’ve written before, the rosary is a kind of anchor in my spiritual life, though praying it is not some regulated, every-day-at-the-same-time deal. Often I pray the rosary in the middle of the night, after our English shepherd Sparrow wakes me up to go outside and I can’t fall right back to sleep. Sometimes I pray it while driving, or in my deer blind in the autumn, or by the beehives in summer.

I wake Professor Martin up every day at 3:00 a.m., which is why I am so tired.

Another useful approach, that I’ve found at least, is that offered by the anonymously written medieval text The Cloud of Unknowing which recommends simplicity as method. In contemplation, the Cloud author recommends, besides the traditional prayers of the Church, to pray without words, or at least with as few as possible:

“And if they be in words, as they be but seldom, then be they but in full few words; ye, and in ever fewer the better. Ye, and if it be but a little word of a syllable, methinks it better than of two and more according to the work of the spirit.” [1]

But perhaps the most helpful guide I have found in leading a prayerful life while still in the world has been one of my patron saints, the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil—who also had neither spouse nor children. For Weil, the entire secret to the spiritual life resides in attention. Her prescription is something available to anyone, even schoolchildren, as she writes in the essay, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God”:

“Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired with we are forced to make use of. Our thought should be in relation to all particular and already formulated thoughts, as a man on a mountain who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains. Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to prepare it.” [2]

She sees this happen even in the mundane school tasks of working out an algebra problem or translating from Latin or Greek:

“it does not even matter much whether we succeed in finding the solution or understanding the proof, although it is important to try really hard to do so…. Without our knowing or feeling it, the apparently barren effort has brought more light into the soul. The result will one day be discovered in prayer.” [3]

“Every school exercise, thought of in this way, is like a sacrament.

“In every school exercise there is a special way of waiting upon truth, setting our hearts upon it, yet not allowing ourselves to go out in search of it.” [4]

And, of course, attention is not only for children, as Weil writes in the essay “Attention and Will”:

“Attention unmixed attention is prayer.

“If we turn our minds towards the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.

“Extreme attention is what constitutes the creative faculty in man and the only extreme attention is religious. The amount of creative genius in any period is strictly in proportion to the amount of extreme attention and thus of authentic religion at that period.” [5]

And, finally, in “Human Personality,” Weil speaks most directly: “The name of this intense, pure, disinterested, gratuitous, generous attention is love.” [6]

This is my primary answer to the question “What is your spiritual practice?” I try to pay attention—to my farm, its plants and animals, waters and woods; to what I’m reading, what I’m writing; and to the people in my life. I can’t maintain that level of attention all the time, but it is the still spot to which I always try to return. It may not be very glamorous, but it’s sustainable. And you don’t need to have a “spiritual father” or “spiritual mother” to do it. It is also the essence of Sophiology.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine.

1. The Cloud of Unknowing, ed. Patrick J. Gallacher (TEAMS, 1997), 65. I have modernized the spelling.

2. Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Crauford (Harper, 1951), 62.

3. Ibid., 58.

4. Ibid., 63.

5. The Simone Weil Reader, ed. Siân Miles (Grove Press, 1986), 212.

Call No Man Father

Perhaps you have seen this meme above? Talk about butch! It’s pretty much the religious equivalent of this:

I have often wondered from where such a masochistic sensibility arises. It is very perplexing, but there does seem to be something in the human psyche that craves discipline and bowing to authority, despite the simultaneous triggers that resist the same. In watching the Christian, and especially Orthodox and Catholic traditionalist, landscape over the past decade, I am starting to come up with a theory of why this is.

You may not have noticed, but over the last decade or fifteen years a surprising number of millennials and post-millennials have been drawn to Orthodoxy and Traditionalist Catholicism. I certainly understand the attraction of beautiful liturgical structures, especially considering most forms of Christian worship these days (including the Novus Ordo of the Catholic Church) range from a kind of ceremonial brutalism to a flaccid “infomercial-for-Jesus” aesthetic to the pop-culture appropriation of the praise band and hi-tech inspirational graphics. So I get that young people, starved for something authentic, would turn to the great works of art of the past—and the Divine Liturgy and Tridentine Mass are nothing if not great works of religious art.

But part and parcel with this attraction to the beautiful often comes a doctrinaire fundamentalism which, for me anyway, destroys the very beauty of Christianity it seeks to exemplify. Suddenly the world (or, more properly, the internet) is populated with self-appointed heresy hunters and inquisitors.

So here’s my theory: I think the attraction to traditional Christianity for a number of millennials and post-millennials (mostly male, from what I can tell), as it is manifested in Eastern Orthodoxy and Tridentine Catholicism is at its core a search for the missing father. According to this website, 57% of millennial mothers are single moms and as of 2019 15.76 million children in the US were living with single mothers. That’s a lot of missing fathers.

It seems to me, then, that a factor in the attraction millennials and post-millennials feel toward the traditional churches is a psychological need to connect with the father. Both forms of Christianity are also heavy on rules and laying down the law concerning what is allowed and what is not—precisely what many children miss in a relationship with a father. I’m not, of course, saying that mothers don’t have rules, but it’s a different dynamic with a father—and a father a child only sees on Wednesdays and every other weekend does not offer the same guidance. So Traditional Christianity comes in to fill the void in the soul. And you get to call the spiritual leader “father” as an added bonus.

This has been particularly apparent to me in the phenomenon (“fad” is not quite the right word, but it is close) in some Eastern Orthodox circles for millennial and post-millennial converts to seek a “spiritual father,” as if their own priest were not enough. This arose, according to my understanding, with the appearance of Ephraimism in the last decades. An Orthodox priest friend of mine is exasperated by such converts and their “spiritual fathers.” “You’re not a monk. You don’t have a ‘spiritual father,’” he tells them, “you have a father confessor: me. If you want a spiritual father, memorize the psalter and then we’ll talk.” I think almost zero of them memorize the psalter.

This is a very understandable phenomenon. People like clear rules and like to follow the directions (as we have seen all too often over the past sixteen months), and the burden for discernment can then be outsourced to the authority. But this comes with all kinds of spiritual dangers as well.

One of these dangers is surrendering agency to a monastic sensibility that is in no way healthy for life in the day-to-day, whether in terms of one’s job or in parenting. Man was not made for monasticism; monasticism was made for man (and I even have my doubts about that).

What results is described by the 20th century Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev as a “false asceticism.” “This type of asceticism,” he writes, “with its hostility to man and to the world, may obscure the true end of mysticism, which is transfiguration in God. It may place upon men burdens too heavy to be borne and also produce a great deal of tension in the soul.” [1] Thank you, sir; may I have another?

Of course, the phenomenon is not only one-sided. As with the example of the Elder Ephraim, the temptation for the clerical order is to become precisely this type of “holy father” none of us have had—and that the holy fathers themselves could never, ever be (outside of the imaginary of puerile fantasy). Not all priests do this, to be sure, but it is an element of the clerical environment. Matthew 23 speaks directly to this, Jesus railing against the Scribes and Pharisees:

For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.

But all their works they do for to be seen of men: they make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments,

And love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues,

And greetings in the markets, and to be called of men, Rabbi, Rabbi.

But be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren.

And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven.

Neither be ye called masters: for one is your Master, even Christ.

But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant. (4-11)

You know it and I know it that we have a couple millennia of apologia telling us that Jesus didn't really mean what he said here. But okay.

An Illustrative Digression

One Easter about twelve years ago I was attending liturgy with my family, three of my six sons serving on the altar. Our pastor had been very ill, and he looked horribly weak at the altar, his face ashen. Just prior to Communion, one of the older altar servers, a young many of about eighteen, came to me to ask if I could distribute Communion—Father was too weak to continue. I did my best, but was so nervous I was shaking. It must have been noticeable because in the hall for the blessing of baskets afterwards a friend of mine took a can of beer out of his basket and handed it to me, saying, “Maybe this will help you with those shakes.” I continued to assist our pastor for the next seven years, until he died. He was often too weak to even stand for long.

At his funeral, I served along with our bishop and a number of other priests, as well as a deacon or two and two of my sons as altar boys. At the Kiss of Peace, usually reserved only for the clergy (not by law but by custom) a friend of mine, a married priest with seven children, came to me to offer the kiss. He said, “None of these guys here understand what you’ve done for this place. You deserve this more than they do.” He did me a tremendous favor, not by honoring my service, but by destroying the Myth of Holy Stratification. For all of you are brethren.

I would love to see a meme that said, Christianity—Life... Only More Alive.

Another guy looking for a father:

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine.

Nikolai Berdyaev, Freedom and the Spirit (New York, 1935), 265.