Philosophy
Reign
It is said that discipline is destiny, though it is one that few choose to pursue. Discipline is uncomfortable, difficult, and at times, unpleasant. Its fruit, however, is the sweetest of all. A man who fully commands himself is not subject to the agenda of another.
Life is a blank canvas, shaped by our daily choices. Everything about us flows from our choices, and the consequences that they bring into our world. At every daybreak, and even at every moment, we have the power to alter the course of our lives by our choices.
Self-control and discipline, the things Pope Benedict XVI talked about as self-mastery, is not easy. Though it may not be easy, we have sovereignty over our lives. Will we sell that sovereignty for a bowl of beans or a fleeting thrill, or will we reign as kings, and live like one?
These Better Things
The relationship between Creator and created bends the mind. For centuries, theologians and philosophy have plumbed the depths of the reality of God. A Creator who is both perfect in and of Himself, but still chooses to enter relationship with the broken created. Not because they will make Him better or more perfect, but because of the reality of love means that we do for others with no expectation of reciprocity. He engages because His love for us means He wills the best for us.
So many of our plans, designs, and ideas are about elevating ourselves and our lifestyle. It’s the height of responsibility and maturity to build a stable household in which our children can grow, thrive, and launch. But when we compare our plans to those of God’s, we are instantly put in our place. It’s not that we cannot conceive or perceive the good, it’s because our creative and imaginative capacity is dwarfed by the capacity of Love in wanting the very best for us.
There are difficult days in life, and though they could not possible compare to the hardships that Catholics face around the world, or that Jesus endured in His penultimate act of self-giving, they are a challenge to bear nonetheless. We yearn for stability, clarity, and certainty, but when the losses stack up day after day, week upon week, and year after year, it’s an act of moral courage to continue to choose hope and trust.
The wages for hope and trust, for working as if it all depends on us, but trusting because it all depends on God, is a glimpse into the perfection of His design. A series of broken experiences, bad relationships, and difficult employment, in hindsight, are the perfect sequence that unlocks the vocation you were made to live. Regret and pain suddenly are anestized, as they are seen for what they were: specific preparation for the grace and mission to which we are called.
God is at work at every place, and in every moment. Though we may not choose the uncomfortable and downright terrifying experiences that we must undergo, they each slot into place in God’s plan. Not a minute was wasted, not a moment of discomfort was for naught; He makes all things new.
Trust is an easy word to speak, but a daily challenge to endure. He offers us a shared yoke, a place of rest; but to offer our yes to His generosity and His plans, we have to be willing to let go of our own smaller plans. It is the grandest bargain any of us are offered, and the last stumbling block to overcome before we get a foretaste of the greatness for which we were made.
Some Noble Purpose
Earlier this week, I paused my workday to pray the Rosary. This is not a discipline that I’m consistent with, but I do think that it should be part of my daily routine. There is so much going on, taking a pause for fifteen minutes of calm meditation is a good antidote to the otherwise chaotic nature of my workday.
It was an ordinary work and school day, and frigid outside as winter ought to be. I settled onto the couch, facing the exterior window, and prayed on Hallow as a gentle snowfall could be seen through the window. It was a refreshing moment of peace, a connection to nature, to see the slowness and stillness of the entire scene.
On the other couches were my children, participating to varying degrees. This time is not for perfection, but encounter. That this rhythm of prayer, this island of peace in the middle of their day, is inscribed in their hearts. So even when they are older and out of the house, their heart will ache for these quiet moments.
As I considered all of this, the beauty of nature and the stillness of the children, I was reminded of my sense of purpose. Life is unpredictable and the future is totally unknowable. But I am here for a reason. God designed me into His plan for some noble purpose, if only I will offer my own fiat.
Believe
The heritage of our Catholic faith is deeply rooted in ancient peoples. From God’s first interaction with Abraham on the plains of Nineveh to today’s global Church, our history is collected in the stories, families, and prayers of billions of people throughout history.
A great struggle for the modernist mind is to accept truths that cannot be concretely verified. The Church has many treasures, relics, and traditions that add substance, character, and charism to its ministry. But in a digital age separated by thousands of years from the original events and primary sources, the question of belief is a stumbling block for many. How could all these things be true?
This doubt, when it extends beyond reasonable inquiry, is particularly rich given the context of our social media age. Fake news, state-actor misinformation, and AI hallucinations fuel tens of thousands of rumors and inaccuracies by the hour. Yet, we question unchanging messages that have been handed down for eighty-five generations across cultures and nations?
It’s important to remember that, as an institution, our history and the primary events of salvation history occurred in ancient times. Perhaps that is a blessing, as it was a cultural structure that was better prepared to adjudicate fact from fiction. Truth spread far and wide, like the four canonical Gospels through the early Christian communities, while the non-canonical Gospels and epistles fizzed out. Imagine Jesus had come for the first time in 2025, and how difficult it would be, with technology and bad actors, to sort out what was real and what was not.
These cultures, before mass literacy, were vitally dependent on accurate memorization of events and passing them on to generations. This treasury of history was central to the tribe and nation’s survival, and permitting the insertion of creative imaginings would have been deeply destructive. There were stories and fables in one category of oral storytelling, but historical events had to be jealously safeguarded.
There have no doubt been artistic liberties and embellishments added to certain events, like the ancillary details surrounding the birth of Jesus. Most of these are a sort of imaginative prayer, intended to add further narrative context and depth to the scant details two paragraphs in the Gospel give us. The important thing, however, is that these additions do not contradict the core truth, nor do they distract from the central mystery. Whether they actually happened or not, it does not really matter because the main tenets are not dependent on them.
Believing is a hard thing, but it’s also an act of trust. Test all things, as St. Paul instructed, but once they stand up to rigorous inquiry, hold fast and believe.
Stillness
For two days last week, all four children were away from home and at their grandparents’ house. The morning before they left, I rounded everyone up and we all cleaned the house. Tidied, dusted, and vacuumed, our home transformed into a fortress of quiet comfort. It was an order that is seldom seen in an active house. With everything done, I loaded them into the car and sent them off on their adventure.
Sometimes, especially on the busy days, I wonder what my life as an empty-nester will be like. Sure, quiet and cleanliness are two nice things to experience in stark contrast to the daily reality, but is that really a better phase than the one I’m in? Every age and every stage of life has its challenges, but it also holds treasures in its own ways. Small children are a handful, but they also fall asleep in your arms during Mass and express wonder at the tiniest of things. Middle schoolers are caught between their younger days and flexing their autonomy, but you can connect with them in new and mature ways. I’m confident that this phase will be enjoyable, and so will the next.
Stillness is the hallmark of the Christmas story. While many cultural interpretations and features have been added on over the years to the legend of Jesus’ birth, what hasn’t changed are the core elements. On a quiet night in the stillness of winter, the Creator of the Universe, our salvation, was born. In humble circumstances, there were miraculous events, but only experienced by a few people. This was a joyful moment to be marked and celebrated, but in a measured and calm way.
In a way, I think this sort of peace, a deeply refreshing and rejuvenating experience, is the promise of Heaven that we most forget about. When we do contemplate Heaven, it’s about the people or the activities. This makes sense, especially when we’re talking about a peace so foreign to us that our limited minds can’t stretch far enough to imagine a place of total calm. Like every theological truth, its grandeur is tucked away in simplicity and humility; it’s the kind of experience of being outside in the cold and darkness of a late December night and coming inside to the warmth of your home and the soft glow of your Christmas tree illuminating the room.
Jesus offers Himself as sacrifice at Easter and gift at Christmas. His arrival marks the pivot point in human history, when our story, stretching all the way back to Abraham, reaches its fulfillment. In the darkness of winter, search for that stillness, that small experience of peace that turns our minds and hearts toward the place He has prepared for us.
Simplify
It’s easy to accumulate clutter. A single dish on the counter soon has many friends; tasks partially finished attract more tasks. It doesn’t take long before you start to get the feeling that you’re overwhelmed and will never get caught up. It takes a declared reset, when you focus and get the clutter processed and completed, before you feel like you can breathe again.
Clutter comes with physical objects, but also in our digital and mental spaces. How good does it feel, in the day or two before vacation, when you clear the decks at work and get everything checked off the list? How amazing is it to come home from vacation to a clean house? It’s always a relief when that one project or task that’s been weighing on your mind gets crossed off and done.
Letting go of tasks, projects, and even physical objects is not only necessary, but cathartic. Interests change, priorities shift, and left in the wake of these things are hangers-on that we have to summon the courage to get rid of. Goals are set in the moment, but if they don’t align with what you really want or need, they’re just a waste of time and resources. Collections of things are meant to be curated; you don’t have to keep them forever.
Spring cleaning is a thing because when the weather changes and the newness of nature springs up around us, we want to turn over a new leaf, too. Things that we used to think we could never live without now bring us a sense of dread. They crowd out space for the items that spark joy.
Advent is an invitation to simplify everything; it’s a challenge to match our interior and exterior lives to the simple model of the Holy Family. It’s permission to let go of the things that we’ve wanted to be free from but can’t seem to get it done. Life is beautiful and hard, made only harder by complexity and clutter. Clean out your inbox, get that project done, curate your collections, sell or donate what’s no longer useful. Spend your time, attention, and resources on those things that are truly exciting and joyful, and let others experience the same thing with those items no longer doing the same for you.
End of Days
As the liturgical year winds down, the readings at the Sunday Mass focus on the end times, something called eschatology. The early Catholic Church believed that Jesus was coming back relatively immediately. All these years later, we’re still waiting. There are many times throughout the year that the liturgical flow reminds us of our pilgrimage on earth and its conclusion. It focuses our minds, and then we drift.
Imagination is one of our most powerful human creative functions. The ability to conjure and construct things in our mind, without seeing it in the physical world, is deeply beneficial. But with all of our distractions, once we are no longer children, it doesn’t get used as much.
The end times are not meant to be a scary event, but a hopeful fulfillment of all that God has promised. If we truly accept His love, and live within the bounds of the law, we should start each day with a sense of hope that today will finally be the day that all promises will be kept. After all, we were not made for earth, but for heaven.
We fear the end of our life, rightfully for the people we’ll leave behind and the things left undone. At that moment, we will have to truly let go of those we hold closest. Will our estates be a burden to our family? But we also fear it because we are not prepared. Death comes for us all, but catches most unaware.
Fulton Sheen, in his book Remade for Happiness, flips the script and reorients our attention. It is not just that we are hopeful for the return of Christ or our reunion with Him, but that in being prepared, we sneak up on death and catch it by surprise. He likened it to the homeowner who knew the thief was coming, laid in wait, and pounced.
It is challenging to choose the things of God rather than the things of man, and these weeks are a helpful cue for us of the importance of doing so. More than that, it’s a nudge to use our imagination to think about the depth, intricacy, and beauty of God’s promises, and live our life in alignment with those promises. What is more appealing: a sharp quip to take your coworker down a few notches, or a perpetual existence in a place of true peace where there are no tears?
The Church doesn’t exist as a stick to force into submission the unwilling, but the tender shepherds crook guiding us to the safety of our true home.
Re-form
The process of preparing a man for priestly ordination is more than just educational. It’s true that seminaries are themselves, or affiliated with, degree granting institutions that result in graduate degrees. But it’s not simply enough to do the book work and pass the tests. Priesthood is not the result of a credential; it’s the result of a radical transformation.
Priestly formation takes many years; there’s the establishment of a firm foundation of philosophy before building up theological knowledge. The men live in community, participating in regular and structured prayer. Although not as intensive as military training, the rigors of life as a seminarian have a similar strictness. Men are challenged to conform in such a way that they are prepared to stand in the place of Christ. It’s uncomfortable, hard, and arduous.
It’s sad that we’ve allowed our understanding of vocation to bifurcate. In a caste-like system, we separate priestly and religious life from the married life. The overwhelming majority of the Church is called to the married and single life. It mirrors the nation of Israel: only one of the twelve tribes, Levi, occupied a priestly role. The life of the Church is dependent on religious vocations, but it is equally dependent on sacramental marriages. It’s the type of symbiosis that we see in the family. Husband and wife offer different, but complimentary, gifts.
A consequence of the bifurcation is that we separate, too, the roles and responsibilities. We think it is the seminarians who must be radically re-formed and undergo the rigors of intensive formation. But the same is true for us. Every person is made in God’s image and likeness, and we are all made to reflect Him and His Love. We have inherited our fallen nature concurrent with our heritage as God’s sons and daughters. To become mirror images, we have to set down our desires and priorities that take us further from love and re-form ourselves into the perfection that we were intended to be.
Holiness is not the prerogative of the Saints, or reserved to those consecrated with the Chrism of Holy Orders. The correction to this misconception is coming into focus as the Church declares more and more of the laity saints. Individuals whose pictures we see, whose voices we hear, in whose lives we see ourselves. Sainthood is not an impossibility, even with the challenges we face, but rather our intended destination. To achieve it, however, we must humble ourselves to be reformed, and made into the creation God intended us to be.
Delay
It’s easy, when we are young, to assume that we have time. Life is a long journey whose minutes are slow and years are fast. With 30 or 40 years left in our life expectancy, putting off the difficult and important things is preferable to encountering challenges. Actuarial tables concur with our assessment, until the flood waters come.
The early Christians, right after the Resurrection, believed that the second coming of Christ was imminent. The general thinking was that it would happen in their lifetimes. Now, more than 50 generations later, we are still waiting. There have been horrific events in these last millennia, but none of them have culminated in the second coming.
Complacency is a dangerous thing, because it gets us to turn off our brains. In a false sense of security, we engage in moral hazard. We make decisions that we otherwise would not make. If we knew the date and time of our death, we would order our lives very differently.
In his famous satire, The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis articulates many of the strategies that ensnare Christians seeking to achieve the greatness they were made to live. One of them is that evil doesn’t exist but, perhaps more insidious, is the idea that we have more time.
A wave of canonizations is upon us of young people who lived lives of heroic virtue, but didn’t make it to 25. It doesn’t have to take us a lifetime to embrace God’s great plan for our lives; we don’t have to spend decades wandering in the wilderness like Israel. The fullness of God’s revelation is in our pockets on our cell phones, and written on our hearts.
It’s never too late to do the right thing, and tomorrow is not assured. The response to this is not fear or dread, but gratitude. Gratitude for the blessings of today, and earnestness to pursue greatness now.
Verso L’alto
St. Irenaeus wrote in the second century that the glory of God is man fully alive. How can we aspire to that kind of living, when humanity is drowning in an ocean of mediocrity?
It’s a terrible waste of the gift of freedom to spend life on idle and self-centered pursuits. It’s not that comfort or taking it easy is wrong in and of itself; even God rested. It’s that idleness is the enemy of virtue. It destroys our potential, steals our time, and deprives our friends, family, and neighbors of the good things we could do for each other. It hollows out quality relationships, substituting at every turn authentic things for counterfeit ones.
The orthodoxy of self-centeredness is the existentialism of Sartre and the relativism of Nietzsche, a toxic cocktail all but assuring personal misery and restlessness. It’s the effete worldview that nothing matters except oneself and one’s own opinions. These two great philosophical losers condemned themselves to history as prosaic thinkers who, lacking in moral courage, dared not indulge any sense of curiosity as to what God, the author of life, had planned for them.
What Sartre and Nietzsche lacked in imagination, Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati made up for in spades. The calling card of the saint is heroic virtue, not just a generalized “goodness,” but a person activated in the original vision of life: man fully alive.
Pier Giorgio was an avid Italian mountaineer who used the phrase “verso l’alto” as his personal motto. “Toward the heights” is not only the objective of the mountain climber, but the authentic call of the Christian life to always aspire to greater things. In our prayer life, in our virtue, in our love, and in our relationships with others, we never accept things as they are, but pull them higher toward the way they ought to be.
The Christian life is difficult because we must give our fiat, no matter the social and personal cost, to participate in God’s plan for our lives. It’s not just a surrender, but a decision to open ourselves to the great things God can accomplish by our active participation. What darkness will be dispelled when we allow God’s blinding light to shine through us?
Mediocre is easy; verso l’alto.