I've been lately interested in the concept of counsel, good, bad and neutral. Most of the times I engage in counsel I end up praying afterward: "Lord, undue the damage I probably did."
To find out more about counsel I could've gone to Aquinas as Tom of Disputations might, but that didn't immediately occur to me for reasons of time efficiency. Aquinas, like Tom, requires multiple re-readings.
But I did check the offered Summa link and it turns out that counsel - I now know from St. Thomas via Thomas K. - requires the Holy Spirit's help. I don't always ask for the Spirit's help, in fact mostly I just jump in and give my opinions. And given the particularites of every particular person, the research required in order to know all the repercussions (sort of like Just War theory) would require omniscience, hence St. Thomas says: "Hence in the research of counsel, man requires to be directed by God who comprehends all things." Hence indeed.
My initial foray was to try to find biographies about saints (or near saints) who counseled modern people. I was thinking Mother Teresa, but she dealt mainly with just the very poor and her fellow sisters. I also thought of that Fr. Solanus, but I think he was in a monastery and perhaps didn't come into contact with "ordinary joes". I ruled out Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton (as I type this I recall Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen).
My project is to try to figure out if modern saints are speaking to us in "tough love" terms as Padre Pio mostly did --(see excerpts from book about him yesterday; St. Pio even refused some people who wanted to be his spiritual children for reasons unstated in the book) -- or in a "kindler/gentler" tenderness. Or both.
In other words, I'm wondering if Padre Pio is an anomaly or the modern ideal.
St. Pio's tough love can be exhilarating, in that it tends to increase awe and decrease pride. (The decrease in pride allows one to be satisfied with less, including warm fuzzies from God...being okay with less is the pessimist's contentment.) The natural tendency would be to avoid provoking Padre Pio and yet when Madame Tangari, who is being considered for sainthood herself, neglected to ask him for advice concerning business matters because she didn't want to bother him he said, "But you should have the courage to bother me!" It would seem that courage is not the modernity's strong suit and yet there's obviously no avoiding it.
I'm not sure it's helpful to read saints of other ages or even cultures since times & cultures change. St. Alphonsus Liguori was kind and tender in reaction to rampant Jansenism. St. John Chrysostom was so tough that he recommended foregoing Communion even if you haven't sinned lately; he said you should receive when you are full of the Holy Spirit and good deeds because those qualities are as important as a lack of sin. Doesn't that make you want to recoil in despair?
But one could say that Jansenism is not really our problem today. And of course each individual is very different too, which should cast great suspicion on the whole project, though certainly it can't hurt to be well-versed in what very modern saints are saying, since they speak to us with the voice of God more clearly than those of us whose vision is clouded with sin.
I emailed Steven Riddle about it all and he replied:
My unsubstantiated guess here is that it has less to do with the times and more to do with the personalities of the people, even personalities formed by a stricter faith. I look through time and see about equal numbers of tough-love and tender-love saints. For every John of the Cross/Teresa of Avila (tender love) there is a Catherine of Siena (tough love). So it seems. God calls us to serve through who we are and so that would entail our expression of that reality.
No comments:
Post a Comment