Spiritual Modesty
The genesis of this entry goes all the way back to some time around 1970, when a middle-aged priest of my acquaintance went off to make his annual retreat at some place far away and exotic, foreign and outré, somewhwere, as we used to say, “west of Dedham.” As soon as he came back it was clear to everyone who knew him that whatever had happened on that retreat had been a transformative experience. He took to wearing jeans and a cowboy hat and to pronouncing the name of Jesus as though it had three syllables: “Je-yeez-us.”
He had also developed the need to “testify,” as he called it, to all the wonderful things this Person whose name had just picked up an extra syllable was doing in his life. He punctuated this stream of highly personal testimony with hearty “thank you’s.” This was a man who had been celebrating Mass, the great “thank you” of the Church, every day for at least twenty years. But somehow that was no longer quite adequate. His personal gratitude and the gratitude of the Church had parted company and could no longer be expressed in the same act, unaccompanied by the intimate details of the reasons for his gratitude. I could hardly bear to be in his company.
My adverse reaction to his enthusiasm (in the sense close to that of the word as used in Ronald Knox’s book title) led me to question why I was so uncomfortable with the novel turn in this man’s behavior. Was it simply that I had not experienced a similar “conversion’ — that I had somehow never welcomed Him-of-the-Three-Syllabled-Name into my life as my very own personal savior? Was it perhaps just a cultural thing, that I merely felt the typical north-easterner’s loathing for the “Country-and-Western” style? What I realized in the course of my self-examination was that a certain attitude toward openly and publicly manifesting the state of my soul and its relationship to God had been instilled in me by my mother, a Quebecoise with a slight tinge of Jansenism in her religiosity. This attitude she called “spiritual modesty.”
But this attitude was not just a peculiarity of hers or of the Grand Seminaire training of her spiritual mentors. My childhood pastor and confessor spoke of it, as did two of my later spiritual directors (both Irish-Americans and so perhaps also not unaffected by the same heresy). Indeed, the principle of “spiritual modesty” seemed very much in keeping with the spirit of the liturgy and the tone of the kind of piety nourished on it. Growing up Catholic, I had taken these qualities for granted. Challenged with the display of their opposites by my priest-friend in the cowboy hat, I began to reflect on them explicitly and to appreciate them anew, and in the course of this reflection, I reached some conclusions.
The first was that Jesus can be my personal savior only because he is the Christ, the Savior of the World. It is only the absolute objectivity of this truth which is able, so to speak, to guarantee the genuinity of my personal experience of a relationship with Him. The second conclusion follows: that although the details of this relationship are of immense importance to me and, I dare say, to Him as well, in some mysterious way that passes understanding and is accessible only to faith, it is of importance to others only in so far as it is the wellspring of my attitudes and actions toward them. Which leads me to my third conclusion, namely, that words are cheap, but actions, especially habitual actions, are not. They are a way of spending, and so of expending, our present finite lives. They cost us, in the end, everything, and this cost is woven as a thread into the objective order of the universe.
Our acts, once performed, are unalterable and make a permanent difference both to us and to the world. But the difference they make to us can only be expressed in a limited and imperfect way and is, ultimately, of little importance; it is the difference they make to the world that matters. The emotional restraint and objectivity of liturgical prayer seem to reinforce and affirm these truths in the midst of a culture in which every little individual is constantly being tempted to act as though he himself is of primary and ultimate importance. The liturgy reminds us that our individual significance, a reality whose greatness we ourselves cannot begin to estimate, is derived from our having been created and redeemed and sanctified by God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
It is in the light of this realization that “spiritual modesty,” a kind of habitual reticence about the details of one’s own personal relation to this mystery, seems a virtue indeed.
The genesis of this entry goes all the way back to some time around 1970, when a middle-aged priest of my acquaintance went off to make his annual retreat at some place far away and exotic, foreign and outré, somewhwere, as we used to say, “west of Dedham.” As soon as he came back it was clear to everyone who knew him that whatever had happened on that retreat had been a transformative experience. He took to wearing jeans and a cowboy hat and to pronouncing the name of Jesus as though it had three syllables: “Je-yeez-us.”
He had also developed the need to “testify,” as he called it, to all the wonderful things this Person whose name had just picked up an extra syllable was doing in his life. He punctuated this stream of highly personal testimony with hearty “thank you’s.” This was a man who had been celebrating Mass, the great “thank you” of the Church, every day for at least twenty years. But somehow that was no longer quite adequate. His personal gratitude and the gratitude of the Church had parted company and could no longer be expressed in the same act, unaccompanied by the intimate details of the reasons for his gratitude. I could hardly bear to be in his company.
My adverse reaction to his enthusiasm (in the sense close to that of the word as used in Ronald Knox’s book title) led me to question why I was so uncomfortable with the novel turn in this man’s behavior. Was it simply that I had not experienced a similar “conversion’ — that I had somehow never welcomed Him-of-the-Three-Syllabled-Name into my life as my very own personal savior? Was it perhaps just a cultural thing, that I merely felt the typical north-easterner’s loathing for the “Country-and-Western” style? What I realized in the course of my self-examination was that a certain attitude toward openly and publicly manifesting the state of my soul and its relationship to God had been instilled in me by my mother, a Quebecoise with a slight tinge of Jansenism in her religiosity. This attitude she called “spiritual modesty.”
But this attitude was not just a peculiarity of hers or of the Grand Seminaire training of her spiritual mentors. My childhood pastor and confessor spoke of it, as did two of my later spiritual directors (both Irish-Americans and so perhaps also not unaffected by the same heresy). Indeed, the principle of “spiritual modesty” seemed very much in keeping with the spirit of the liturgy and the tone of the kind of piety nourished on it. Growing up Catholic, I had taken these qualities for granted. Challenged with the display of their opposites by my priest-friend in the cowboy hat, I began to reflect on them explicitly and to appreciate them anew, and in the course of this reflection, I reached some conclusions.
The first was that Jesus can be my personal savior only because he is the Christ, the Savior of the World. It is only the absolute objectivity of this truth which is able, so to speak, to guarantee the genuinity of my personal experience of a relationship with Him. The second conclusion follows: that although the details of this relationship are of immense importance to me and, I dare say, to Him as well, in some mysterious way that passes understanding and is accessible only to faith, it is of importance to others only in so far as it is the wellspring of my attitudes and actions toward them. Which leads me to my third conclusion, namely, that words are cheap, but actions, especially habitual actions, are not. They are a way of spending, and so of expending, our present finite lives. They cost us, in the end, everything, and this cost is woven as a thread into the objective order of the universe.
Our acts, once performed, are unalterable and make a permanent difference both to us and to the world. But the difference they make to us can only be expressed in a limited and imperfect way and is, ultimately, of little importance; it is the difference they make to the world that matters. The emotional restraint and objectivity of liturgical prayer seem to reinforce and affirm these truths in the midst of a culture in which every little individual is constantly being tempted to act as though he himself is of primary and ultimate importance. The liturgy reminds us that our individual significance, a reality whose greatness we ourselves cannot begin to estimate, is derived from our having been created and redeemed and sanctified by God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
It is in the light of this realization that “spiritual modesty,” a kind of habitual reticence about the details of one’s own personal relation to this mystery, seems a virtue indeed.
posted by The Old Eremite at 6:29 AM
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