“I think of this as similar to my yoga class, only much, much more satisfying,” business executive Gary Goldstein told the New York Times. He’s one of a number of Jewish New Yorkers considered to be “very significant people” who enjoys periodic visits from a rabbi during the work week to discuss issues ranging from truths of the Torah to “the big picture idea” of life.

Rabbi Brad Hirshfield commented on such programs, “I think there is no greater thing, as long as the participants don’t look at the rabbi as another sort of personal trainer.” Indeed. But while the Times piece highlighted the income of these individuals, as if scoffing their attempts to find spiritual direction while living with material wealth, there’s something about this practice of penciling in spiritual time–which they quite literally do–that all of us could learn from.

In the spirit of today’s feast, some words from Benedict XVI, in an Angelus address on March 13th, 2006:

When one has the grace to sense a strong experience of God, it is as though seeing something similar to what the disciples experienced during the Transfiguration: For a moment they experienced ahead of time something that will constitute the happiness of paradise. In general, it is brief experiences that God grants on occasions, especially in anticipation of harsh trials. However, no one lives “on Tabor” while on earth.

Human existence is a journey of faith and, as such, goes forward more in darkness than in full light, with moments of obscurity and even profound darkness. While we are here, our relationship with God develops more with listening than with seeing; and even contemplation takes place, so to speak, with closed eyes, thanks to the interior light lit in us by the word of God.

With a freshly printed diploma hanging on the wall, I find myself at a new job in a new city. Everything is original, unknown, exciting. But as much as these novel sights and sounds draw my mind to the present and to the future, I am also reminded of the past. A new chapter begins as another ends, and turning that page requires some reflection.

I’ve been thinking in particular about what it was I actually learned in college. It certainly wasn’t dates or facts. Ask me about the details of almost any historical event and I feel my pointer finger click instinctively for Wikipedia.

Instead, I think one of the most valuable lessons I learned in college was the integration of my academic career with my personal life. It didn’t take long for me to realize that what I believed in the classroom mattered for what I believed at home and in church. Initially this was quite a scary revelation. If I encountered something new in the classroom, it could present a serious challenge to my faith. Or so I thought.

Thankfully I discovered Flannery O’Connor’s writings (incidentally, a popular subject today) which sorted out the various conflicts I encountered in the classroom. Here’s an excerpt of a letter O’Connor wrote in 1962 to a young man named Alfred Corn, who was experiencing many of the same challenges I did as an undergraduate:

I don’t know how the kind of faith required of a Christian living in the 20th century can be at all if it is not grounded on this experience that you are having right now of unbelief. This may be the case always and not just in the 20th century. Peter said, “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.” It is the most natural and most human and most agonizing prayer in the gospels, and I think it is the foundation prayer of faith.

As a freshman in college you are bombarded with new ideas, or rather pieces of ideas, new frames or reference, an activation of the intellectual life which is only beginning, but which is already running ahead of your lived experience. After a year of this, you think you cannot believe. You are just beginning to realize how difficult it is to have faith and the measure of a commitment to it, but you are too young to decide you don’t have faith just because you feel you can’t believe. About the only way we know whether we believe or not is by what we do, and I think from your letter that you will not take the path of least resistance in this matter and simply decide that you have lost your faith and that there is nothing you can do about it.

One result of the stimulation of your intellectual life that takes place in college is usually a shrinking of the imaginative life. This sounds like a paradox, but I have often found it to be true. Students get so bound up with difficulties such as reconciling the clashing of so many different faiths such as Buddhism, Mohammedanism, etc., that they cease to look for God in other ways. Bridges once wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins and asked him to tell him how he, Bridges, could believe. He must have expected from Hopkins a long philosophical answer. Hopkins wrote back, “Give alms.” He was trying to say to Bridges that God is to be experienced in Charity (in the sense of love for the divine image in human beings). Don’t get so entangled with intellectual difficulties that you fail to look for God in this way.

The intellectual difficulties have to be met, however, and you will be meeting them for the rest of your life. When you get a reasonable hold on one, another will come to take its place. At one time, the clash of the different world religions was a difficulty for me. Where you have absolute solutions, however, you have no need of faith. Faith is what you have in the absence of knowledge. The reason this clash doesn’t bother me any longer is because I have got, over the years, a sense of the immense sweep of creation, of the evolutionary process in everything, of how incomprehensible God must necessarily be to be the God of heaven and earth. You can’t fit the Almighty into your intellectual categories. I might suggest that you look into some of the works of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenon of Man et al.). He was a paleontologist–helped to discover Peking man–and also a man of God. I don’t suggest that you go to him for answers but for different questions, for that stretching of the imagination that you need to make you a sceptic in the face of much that you are learning, much of which is new and shocking but which when boiled down becomes less so and takes place in the general scheme of things. What kept me a sceptic in college was precisely my Christian faith. It always said: wait, don’t bite on this, get a wider picture, continue to read.

Continue to read. Thank you Ms. O’Connor. I believe I will.

In the most recent issue of FT, Mary Eberstadt candidly traces the cultural consequences of the birth-control mentality, foreseen and forewarned by Paul VI. Writing for the Catholic News Agency, James Francis Cardinal Stafford illuminates a different dimension of the forty-year-old story: the theological underpinnings to the controversy, both roots and consequences.

What went wrong and why did it matter?, he begins by wondering:

In a 1955 letter to a friend, Flannery O’Connor describes the significance of the virtue of purity for many Catholics at that time. “To see Christ as God and man is probably no more difficult today than it has been. . . . For you it may be a matter of not being able to accept what you call a suspension of the law of the flesh and the physical, but for my part I think that when I know what the laws of the flesh and physical reality really are, then I will know what God is. We know them as we see them, not as God sees them. For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church places on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified. I have always thought that purity was the most mysterious of the virtues, but it occurs to me that it would never have entered human consciousness if we were not to look forward to a resurrection of the body, which will be flesh and spirit united in peace, in the way they were in Christ. The resurrection of Christ seems the high point in the law of nature.” O’Connor’s theology with its remarkably eschatological mark anticipates the teaching of the II Vatican Council, “The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light” (Gaudium et Spes 22).
. . .

I came across an idea which was elliptical: the gift of love should be allowed to be fruitful. These two fixed points are constant. This simple idea lit up everything like lightning in a storm. I wrote about it more formally to the Cardinal [Shehan]: the unitive and procreative meanings of marriage cannot be separated. Consequently, to deprive a conjugal act deliberately of its fertility is intrinsically wrong. To encourage or approve such an abuse would lead to the eclipse of fatherhood and to disrespect for women. Since then, Pope John Paul II has given us the complementary and superlative insight into the nuptial meaning of the human body. Decades afterwards, I came across an analogous reading from Meister Eckhart: “Gratitude for the gift is shown only by allowing it to make one fruitful.”

As Stafford goes on to narrate sorrowfully, the rejection of this Christian anthropology—divorcing body and soul, fertility and unity, man and God—did not only harm families and couples. It also proved to be a great peirasmòs, or trial, for the Church herself, a trial analogous to the physical violence of the 1968 riots: “Ecclesial dissent can become a kind of spiritual violence in its form and content. A new, unsettling insight emerged. Violence and truth don’t mix. When expressive violence of whatever sort is inflicted upon truth, the resulting irony is lethal.”

The fruit of the post-Humanae Vitae dissent (a dissent formulated before many bishops and priests had even read the encyclical) was bitter indeed, and it remains with us. But Stafford ends with a message of hope. “You desire proof that Christ is speaking in me,” St. Paul wrote to his Christian Corinthian dissenters. “He is not weak in dealing with you, but is powerful in you. For he was crucified in weakness, but lives by the power of God. For we are weak in him, but in dealing with you we shall live with him by the power of God. Examine yourselves, to see whether you are holding to your faith. Test yourselves” (2 Cor 13: 3–5).

The peirasmòs of the Christian’s obedient trust inseparable from moral imagination is often painful. But it bears good fruit, too–the fruit of the Cross. As Stafford concludes: “The rupture of the violent death of Jesus has changed our understanding of the nature of God. His Trinitarian life is essentially self-surrender and love. By Baptism, every disciple of Jesus is imprinted with that Trinitarian water-mark. The Incarnate Word came to do the will of him who sent him. Contemporary obedience of disciples to the Successor of Peter cannot be separated from the poverty of spirit and purity of heart modeled and won by the Word on the Cross.”

Earlier this week I reflected on the Class Day speech that Solzhenitsyn gave at Harvard in 1978. Over at Christianity Today, Chuck Colson offers some reflections of his own, namely comparing Solzhenitsyn to the prophet Jeremiah. Here’s a sample:

As it happened, this summer I was reading a tattered copy of Solzhenitsyn’s speech at the same time I was studying Jeremiah in my devotions. I was struck by the chilling parallels between the dissident’s words and Jeremiah’s warning to the Israelites.

For example, describing the Western worldview as “rationalistic humanism,” Solzhenitsyn decried the loss of “our concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.” Man has become “the master of this world … who bears no evil within himself,” he announced. “So all the defects of life” are attributed to “wrong social systems.”