Agápe: a reflection on Christian charity and the disinterestedness of communion
Job, oil on canvas painting by Léon Bonnat, 1880.
Last July, I had begun to suffer one of the greatest religious disappointments of my life. I was “formally discerning” religious life for a religious order in the Catholic Church for just over a year. The application process was in full swing, and I was officially a “candidate” for the novitiate, the first formative step of being officially a member of the order before any vows are pronounced.
As per an agreement, I would be spending my candidate year with one of the order’s communities, observing their life and getting involved with that community’s apostolates; this stage of candidacy may more aptly look like an observership for a monastic order. I was excited to begin this new journey in my life. I was on my way to being part of the order! The key here is that I was “on my way,” as I have consistently been reminded that I am not part of the order; I am not a brother, more like a close cousin visiting, and would not be part of the order until after the application process, a lengthy several hour screening interview, and having been admitted by the provincial superior. I had paid off all of the debts I needed to, and that cost nearly all of my savings, but it didn’t matter, because at least for the next three years, I would be living in vowed poverty. I had left my career at the end of July and was set to move – bags and boxes packed – in early August.
Unfortunately, for reasons known to myself and my superiors at the time, it was decided that I would not be moving, and that I would still be considered a candidate for the novitiate, but I would do my candidacy from home, under the watchful guidance of the vocations office. I otherwise would not have minded this, but I had left my career in the middle of what we now know is a hopeless job market, and I had emptied my savings. I now had to find a way to take care of my basic needs at home, with my retired parents’ generosity of providing me a place to stay, without a job and only a few dollars to my name.
I was unable to see through the seething pain of rejection as well as the obstinate frustration of not being able to find a job, only persisting off of a small income from unemployment insurance. I had no health insurance, so when I was sick I was just sick, and I was not eligible for food stamp assistance. I could not even imagine joining the order that I had felt abandoned me to my own devices, and left me grasping at strings. Only having just a few years prior suffered the financial impoverishment of the fallout many of us experienced from COVID job loss, I really felt that this was some divine joke, or a lesson being taught to me; punishment perhaps for my sins.
In any event, I found myself mired in anger; nearly eleven months without work and unemployment insurance having run dry by month nine. Regardless of my anger, though, I believe my faith survived somehow. As frustrated as I was with God, I was not angry. I know he has had my best in mind, but the decisions of men responsible for my care had left me in this predicament. We are all fallen, after all. I was angry at – and early on, spiteful towards – my superiors at the order, and had fallen out of touch with them, refusing general correspondence from the office, except some final words of anger and blame. No one from the vocations office had reached out to me to check on me. My anger was directed at those particular individuals, but not God.
I’ll spare all the details, but after some time of fighting with frustration and arguing with the God above, I, like Job in the ash heap, counted my sorrows. Slowly, the Holy Spirit moved in my heart.
Day by day, I learned to foster a certain disinterestedness in my own suffering. Whatever pain or disappointments I suffered, I learned to not see them as good or as bad, but just as is. I was jobless, sure, and this caused me to suffer, yes; but it was neither good nor bad, it was neither punishment nor reward. It simply was given to me, at hand, as is.
Just over a week ago (so nearly eleven months after the fact), I had the opportunity to take a walk with my “big brother” of sorts who was assigned to me when I was a candidate for the order. I will call him Stephen. Stephen to this day is someone I consider a good friend, a spiritual confidant, and a role model of holiness and Christian manhood. He was visiting from his first year of final studies before he would be (God willing) ordained to the Catholic priesthood.
Stephen and I walked through Prospect Park, and had an hour long conversation. (I always try to steer the conversation away from myself, but these religious brother types are always lending a generous and kind ear.) We spoke a lot about how the past year has been, and I always welcome these opportunities as moments to “talk through” what I have been experiencing and feeling.
Several people had raised the concern that I may be feeling like this was punishment, and Stephen did as well. I told him that no, I did not feel it was punishment. After much prayer, I had resigned myself to accepting that this moment of scarcity in my life was a time of penance, and that this comes with a level of resignation to divine will that requires a sort of disinterestedness in any benefit.
He had asked me what I meant by that, and I’ll share it here with you.
You see, despite everything that happened in the past year, and despite the fact that I found it difficult to make it to Sunday Mass these days (because of feelings of shame and grief), I had never stopped “talking” to Jesus the way I had learned to do while I was deepening my prayer life and discerning as an inquirer and candidate for the order.
Like I had mentioned earlier, I had already known my anger was not towards God, it was towards specific people, but my frustrations with understanding what was happening to me often early on led me to want to accuse God of punishment. Yet, like I had mentioned earlier, the Spirit I believe was moving in me, and the persistent conversations I had with Jesus – though I often heard nothing in return – helped me understand that resignation to divine will does not require that one be happy with it. In fact, I may wholeheartedly dislike what is happening to me, but if I had truly desired to enter the order to give my entire will to Christ in obedience to my superiors back then, then I should at the very least be willing to be molded and used in this way now.
My spiritual director had once reminded me that the God of Abraham is the God who sees and provides, but is also that same God who probed Job’s faithfulness, first and foremost because of His own faith in him. In prayer with this wisdom, I became resigned to the idea that this year of my life was one of penance, one of mortification, to learn in a visceral way that to turn to God and rely on him for direction in my life meant submission to his will. I now look back and perhaps think that this was another moment of passing me through the crucible of faith, teaching me that my desire to enter the order was not my own first, but His will for me.
Retrospectively, I now can see moments where my pride may have gotten in the way of my own formation, and I had seen entering the order as a task to be accomplished rather than a journey to be led through, slowly closing my heart on a goal than remaining open to any possibility that God may want from me like when the desire to enter first was planted in my heart. Perhaps, this is why this penance needed to be.
Penance serves two purposes: it reorients us towards God, and it reconfigures our sense of self as disposed towards others. And penance is never an act that originates in the will, but rather is a responsibility of obedience to the demand of another. In this particular case – in my case – penance was the demand to suffer scarcity and to experience a sense of directionless wandering so that I would both learn to trust in God’s will, because ultimately I have no control to change these circumstances, and to learn to love others in a similar way.
That latter point is important. What does it mean to love others in the same way we are asked to rely disinterestedly on God? If I can indulge myself in borrowing ideas from my go-to philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the responsibility that originates from an “immemorial past” in the face of the Other is analogous (or perhaps synonymous, if we take Jesus at his word in Matthew 25:40-45) to the relationship of responsibility towards the demands of God.
Christian charity is grounded in obedience to the law of love that emerges from the particular face-to-face relationship with another. For Levinas this otherness contains a trace of the divine; for the Christian, it is the face of God. Penance is reconciliation then, both turning a person back to God and likewise turning them back and reorienting them towards other individuals.
You see, I believe that to love God means something above “being happy with” his will. To love God, I think, means to stay in communion with him. To be willing to engage Him despite our many disappointments and misunderstandings.
To illustrate the point more clearly, my best friend and I had gotten into what may have been a friendship ending disagreement not long ago. To put it shortly, feelings were hurt and founded in disappointments about what each of us expected from each other. I haven’t spoken to this friend since, but if I could tell them anything, it would be this:
“My dear friend, I love you with all my heart. And though you have disappointed me, even profoundly, and have left me hurt and angry, my love for you is stronger than my words can describe. I want nothing but goodness for you, and I wish nothing more than for us to remain friends, because, if I can liken my love for you to any love at all, it is quite like the love I have for my Jesus; despite all the ways in which I have found myself upset and saddened by the choices He makes for my life, I am resigned to them if only because I want to still be able to speak with Him… to be close to Him. I feel this way with you, friend. I am resigned to suffer these pains and disappointments, because I want nothing more than to still call you friend, to still speak with you every day.”
This is Christian love; a willingness to suffer the demands of a relationship, with all of its pains and disappointments, for the good of another, and for the sake of friendship and communion. This, appears to me to be agápe, that Christian love we are called to undergo, to suffer for the sake of another. And this is a lesson that can only be learned through seeing the world and its shortcomings through a lens of penance and reconciliation; a lesson that is learned through obedience to Jesus, the God who is with us, face-to-face.