St. Thomas Aquinas speaks of two basic movements of the will in his epic work, the “Summa Theologica”: to seek the absent good and to rest in the possessed good.
Our wills are naturally drawn to the good, and if we recognize a good we lack, it’s normal to desire it. If we recognize a good we already possess, it is right that we should enjoy and appreciate it. It’s fairly easy for us modern people to do the first. We’re very adept at busying ourselves in the pursuit of goods, real or perceived. The second part of Aquinas’ equation – resting in the good – seems much more elusive to us.
We spend much of our lives seeking after various goods, such as wealth, security, friendships, health, knowledge or holiness. Our work, our relationships and even our hobbies are often about reaching new levels, obtaining goals or otherwise acquiring something we lack. Even on vacation, we can be so focused on pursuing an experience that we forget to simply rest.
‘In our quest for the next best thing, do we fail to appreciate what we already have?’
There is clearly nothing wrong with having goals and working to better ourselves. This side of heaven, there will never be a shortage of absent goods for us to seek. I’ve mentioned many secular goods already; wealth, health and security. But the same holds true for spiritual goods. There will always be a virtue in which we can improve. We can always stand to increase our devotion and charity. We can always move a little closer to God on this pilgrimage of life.
But in all our efforts to acquire absent goods, do we ever take time to rest in the goods we already possess? Are we so concerned with earning new wealth that we don’t consider how to make the best use of what we already own? Are we so focused on optimizing our health to increase our lifespan that we forget to ask what our life is for? In our quest for the next best thing, do we fail to appreciate what we already have?
Learning to rest in the good we already possess is a necessary remedy to keep us from being overly ambitious and to foster gratitude for the many blessings God has bestowed upon us.
The power of sabbath
In his recent book, “The Great Story of Israel,” Bishop Robert Barron associates Aquinas’ “resting in the good” with the observance of the sabbath. Human beings “will indeed seek any number of absent goods,” he writes, “but the entire purpose of their existence is to taste and to savor the good, to rest in what they have.”
The sabbath rest is modeled after God’s own rest. “So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that He had done in creation” (Gen 2:3). This divine rest is not the rest of the weary. God is never fatigued. It is a rest that creates space to appreciate the good. “God looked at everything He had made, and found it very good” (Gen 1:31).
For this reason, a major part of Israel’s sabbath observance included the public reading of Scripture, a re-telling of all the good God had done for them. Remembering the blessings they had already received from God was as much a part of Israel’s identity as the hope for a future messiah.
The climax of this regular remembering and resting in the good came each year at Passover, when Israel ritually recalled how God led them from slavery in Egypt to the freedom of the Promised Land. That is a story that the Church also retells every year in the liturgical readings for the Lenten season.
Allow time to rest in Lent
During Lent, we do many things to help us prepare to celebrate the New Passover of Easter, when Christ led us out of slavery to sin into the freedom of God’s kingdom. We fast, we pray, we give alms. These each represent some form of seeking the good – fasting seeks the good of detachment, prayer seeks the good of union with God, while almsgiving seeks the good of serving others.
As important as it is to seek these necessary goods, Lent should also be a time for us to rest in the good we have already received – namely, the great good of Jesus Christ.
Looking forward to celebrating Christ’s resurrection at Easter ought to lead us to look forward in hope to our own resurrection. But consider the goods that we enjoy in Christ even right now: the good of forgiveness of sins, the good of knowing God’s love demonstrated by His sacrifice on the cross, the good of salvation won through Christ’s passion. We have been redeemed from Satan. We have received the unimaginable good of being God’s children, citizens of His kingdom. We have access to God’s holy wisdom to guide our lives.
All these goods and many others besides are already ours. We only lose them by forgetting them.
For catechumens preparing to enter the Church this Easter, Lent is very much a time for seeking an absent good: the sacraments. But for those of us already baptized into Christ, Lent is a time to rest in the good already possessed, to remember our baptismal promises, the grace of being reborn a child of God, sealed in the Holy Spirit and nourished by Christ’s Presence in the Eucharist.
This Lent, as we rightly strive to advance in the spiritual life, let us not fail to remember the great good we have here and now in Christ. Let us remember our story – the story of salvation – and make time each day to rest in that good.
Deacon Matthew Newsome, Catholic campus minister at Western Carolina University and regional faith formation coordinator for the Smoky Mountain Vicariate, is the author of “The Devout Life: A Modern Guide to Practical Holiness with St. Francis de Sales,” available from Sophia Institute Press.
March 25 marks the birthday of the late Flannery O’Connor
Flannery O’Connor is seen in this undated photo. (CNS | courtesy 11th Street Lot)Reading Flannery O’Connor requires a stout heart and a strong stomach.
In her short life before she died of lupus, she wrote two novels and roughly two dozen short stories that continue to shock and unsettle us. With a wicked pen, she gleefully maims and kills off her characters in a million disturbing ways: They get drowned, hanged, run over by cars (twice in a row), wrapped in barbed wire and beaten to death. Her characters are prostitutes, pedophiles, arsonists, murderers, nihilists, and (worst of all for O’Connor), salesmen. But if you read her biography, she’s practically the patron saint of Catholic fiction: a devout, daily Mass Catholic who read St. Thomas Aquinas in her spare time and made a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes.
As readers, we wonder, “Is there something I’m missing?” How should we read O’Connor’s writing, and where is her faith in the pages of such brutal fiction?
Readers of O’Connor will notice that most of her stories follow one basic biblical narrative: St. Paul on the road to Damascus. Again and again, she depicts an event of searing violence in which divine grace shocks a hard-hearted, wicked or selfish person into a moment of recognition. In this terrible moment O’Connor offers her characters a choice, a flash of self-knowledge and an encounter with God that utterly burns away their illusions.
O’Connor does this best in one of my favorite tales, “Good Country People,” where she tells the story of Hulga, a nihilist with a Ph.D. in philosophy and a wooden leg. Convinced of the meaninglessness of life and that morality means nothing, the atheist Hulga lives consumed by pride and anger until she meets a traveling
Bible salesman who seduces her and steals her wooden leg, leaving her stranded and legless in the loft of a barn.
On his way down the ladder, the salesman sneers, “You ain’t so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!” Horrified to find a man who actually lives out the philosophy she claims to believe, Hulga now faces a pivotal choice as the story ends. And indeed the choice is ours as well: Do we accept this painful revelation of the truth, or do we return to a life of emptiness and sin? O’Connor’s tales do not always reveal what her characters decide: sometimes she leaves it to us to choose.
What O’Connor does in “Good Country People” is to reveal to Hulga (and to us) the true face of evil. O’Connor knew as she wrote her fiction that in an age of relativism we have lost a proper sense of right and wrong. Dulled by our own sins and by the de-Christianization of Western culture, we have lost the will and the ability to distinguish between good and evil. As she once wrote in an essay:
“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”
In a Western culture that accepts sin as personal preference and dismisses moral truth-claims as ideology or bigotry, modern man needs an arresting, visceral depiction of evil that can shock everyone into agreeing, “This is wrong.” For O’Connor, the logical extreme of godlessness is a pervert with a fetish for artificial body parts. As the Misfit, a serial killer in her story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” says: “It’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can – by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness….”
But we can see a deeper truth behind O’Connor’s terrific fictional violence: she wants to show us the way that Divine Providence can bring good even out of terrible evil. To many of us, the problem of evil remains perhaps the most compelling argument against the existence of a loving and all-powerful God. O’Connor answers this by showing how God incorporates the violent sins of men into His plan. In O’Connor’s novel “Wise Blood,” Hazel Motes, an atheist preacher of the “Church without Christ” runs over a rival prophet named Solace Layfield with his car. Although Layfield was only pretending to be a prophet to make money on street corners, he is forced to confront the ultimate things when he gets murdered by Motes. In his last moments, he confesses his sins and calls out the name of Jesus. Just minutes after working as a false prophet for three dollars a night, Layfield receives one of O’Connor’s famous wake-up calls and finally responds to grace. Little wonder, then, that she named him “Solace.”
In O’Connor’s fiction, God allows acts of violence to bring about spiritual healing in wounded and sinful characters because she believes that violent encounters strip away the nonessential and make us confront the Truth of things. “It is the extreme situation that best reveals what we are essentially,” O’Connor told an audience once. “The man in the violent situation reveals those qualities least dispensable to his personality, those qualities which are all he will have to take into eternity with him; and since the characters in this story are all on the verge of eternity, it is appropriate to think of what they take with them.”
There’s nothing like being about to die to help you reassess your priorities.
Finally, the events in O’Connor’s fiction should remind us that God brought about the redemption of all human beings precisely through permitting an act of unspeakable violence: the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. If God can bring cosmic victory out of the apparently senseless, spiteful torture and execution of His innocent Son, then He can, as St. Paul says in Romans 8:28, make “all things work together unto good.”
The truth is that the strange art of Flannery O’Connor will continue to puzzle and provoke us. As she once wrote, “We Catholics are very much given to the Instant Answer. Fiction doesn’t have any. It leaves us, like Job, with a renewed sense of mystery.” In her brief but fierce career as an American Catholic writer, O’Connor left us a vivid, challenging collection of works, her stark characters and plots standing out in sharp relief from the pages of her books. It’s a body of work not easy to encounter, but it’s one that is impossible to forget. So buckle up: If you read O’Connor’s stories of grace, the life you save may be your own.
Dr. Kelly Scott Franklin is a writer and associate professor of English at Hillsdale College. This article first appeared in Catholic World Report.