Why is renunciation important?

From Issue 73, Summer 2023

In our daily lives we are buried beneath mountains of obligations, desires, ambitions. We are buried beneath other people’s ideas, emotions, beliefs. Who we are is lost in the vortex of forces; we are unable to take control of our lives, we are drowned in stress and anxiety, we are unable to know ourselves.

We are covered in the layers of the external world and become so habituated to these layers that they become indistinguishable from us. We believe them to be part of reality, a necessary facet of our lives. This is not to say that these layers are ‘false’ or ‘deceitful’ or ‘wrong’. They are just part of the experiential world. Nor is it to say there is some ‘true self’ which can only be discovered by renunciation – this is just a cliche. I do not see renunciation as some black and white path to ‘truth over falsehood’. Instead I see it as yin to yang; an opposite of participation, which makes up part of our totality. In other words, it is precisely over-participation that makes renunciation so relevant.

Renunciation is a state of cleansing, a stripping away of external layers to reveal to what is left when those layers are not dominant. That part of us that is buried can once more be revealed.

Once you have renunciated the experiential world you can remain in that state or follow the instinct to rebuild your life. But this time you can choose what layers you add with more care. Once you return to nothing, it is much easier to mindfully build back up to something.

Once you recognize that the layers are just layers, they lose their dominance over you; they become contingent, changeable. When you stop identifying so strongly with all of the things you are carrying, you are able to drop them and then only pick up what is actually good for you.

Renunciation can be a daunting process – shaving off the hair which gave you identity, leaving the job that gave you security, cutting off the friendships that you thought were forever, turning away from the promise of romance and love, reducing your power to consume goods, focusing less on pleasures of the world, abandoning the causes that you held to heart, giving up the path to ‘progress’. But is it more daunting than being devoured by externalities, without ever experiencing what you are at your most basic foundation?

Not everyone will follow the instinct to renunciate – not even for a short period of time. These people will find unhealthy ways to resume their destructive course, harming themselves and others. They might try to use therapy or medication to keep themselves ‘stable’ – this is like building a house in a swamp and spending your energy trying to keep it standing. Sometimes the house has to be left to collapse to the ground.

We only need to look at the sick capitalist society we are living in to see how far we have taken this fear of change. The ‘developed world’ drowns in its own meaninglessness, grows ever more unequal and corporate, pits everyone against everyone else, poisons and destroys the living world, burns people out in the workplace, turns spirituality into another commodity.

The path of renunciation is needed now more than ever. Not in the form of some corporate yoga session or ‘guaranteed-results, lifecoaching’ marketed at white professionals, but a real rebellion against that unsustainable life in the first place. This renunciation is a revolutionary act, but only as a side-effect. Striving for political change is, after all, nothing more than an external layer.

The aim of renunciation is to find yourself, in the domain of yourself. It is a place necessarily beyond the good and evil of common morality, beyond ‘progress’, beyond obligation, beyond everything but you. How could it be anything else?

A Reflection on the Elbit Protests

from Issue 73, Summer 2023

A few months ago, an old friend, Tom, messaged me complaining about the lack of good books at the police station. He’d been arrested. I asked what happened, and with characteristic understatement, he replied that he’d been ‘involved in the Elbit stuff.’

Elbit Systems are Israel’s largest private weapons manufacturer – and one with multiple factories in the UK and close relationship to the British state. Its UK factories, despite repeated denials by their spokespeople, manufacture drones that are then deployed by Israeli military. In May, their factory in Leicestershire became subject to a siege by Palestine Action activists – aiming to shut it down. Through targeting production and supply chains, Palestine Action hit Elbit where it hurts – in their stock prices. It comes at a cost: around fifty activists were arrested.

I asked Tom why he thought it was worthwhile braving arrest to take a stand against the arms industry. He said: ‘We have more power than we think, to stand up to the arms industry in our backyard. They are making obscene profits out of death, and resisting that just feels so urgent. But it’s a highly sensitive industry, and every disruption we cause cuts into those profit margins. And I think everyone who was there would say that the response from Elbit Systems showed that these companies are terrified of direct action like this.’

I have to wonder why I failed to be there. To make peace, as the Gospel calls us to do, is to strike out against the manufacture of death. It means making a serious attempt to stop the use of arms. In our society, if we seriously believe in peace, we need to resist the arms industry, an industry which reaps nearly $600 billion in sales from a global culture of war. To target Elbit Systems is the start of that.

My friend’s arrest reminded me that there is no belief outside of action. I might say all manner of very worthy things about the plight of Palestinians, the evils of war, and the British state’s complicity in the massacre of innocents. But if I am not willing to put my skin in the game, to suffer for the end of suffering, the words mean nothing.

It is easy, all too easy, to make excuses for ourselves – of course I have a busy white-collar job and of course I don’t want to lose it. But God did not call us to self-preservation; he called us to lay down our lives for each other and ultimately for Him. Rosa Luxemburg, a revolutionary socialist, was put on trial in February 1914, as she insisted that German workers must refuse to fight in a war against their French brothers. Someone asked her why she didn’t run away; she said: ‘I assure you that I would not flee even if I were threatened with the gallows… I consider it absolutely necessary to accustom our party to the idea that sacrifices are part of a socialist’s work in life.’

If sacrifice is desirable for socialists, it’s unavoidable for Christians. The Lord tells us to ‘take up your cross and follow me’ – and the early Christians knew this was no metaphor. Every time I fail to turn up, to bear witness to injustice and attempt to stop it, I am rejecting the Cross. The actions of those surrounding Elbit day after day reveal to me that an easy life is not a good one. May the Lord deliver me from my continued moral cowardice.

Prefer nothing to the Love of Christ

It was a dream that I was dead and I was watching myself. I saw myself going to the foot of a mountain and climbing up, though I didn’t really have to climb, I was lifted up. I knew I was going to my judgment. I was going up the mountain and I was afraid. I was thinking. “This is it. I am going to be judged. They’re all going to be there and they’re going to see everything that I’ve done…” But when I arrived there was just Jesus. I couldn’t see his face but he was definitely there and he looked rather traditional, like a monk with a cowl over his face. There was light behind him so I couldn’t see his face. And all he did was give me a huge hug. And it said volumes – I am still reading stuff into it. The first thing he said was, “You silly man. Why are you so worried? Did you think I didn’t love you? I do love you. Nothing matters, you’ll do as you are. — Gerard Hughes, SJ (1924-2014)

‘Prefer nothing to the love of Christ’ is probably the best-known sentence in the Rule of Saint Benedict, following closely after the first opening word of the Rule: “Listen”. Benedict teaches us that faith is connected to the inclination of the heart and our active listening. “Listen, with the ear of your heart”; not just with your ears or brain, but with the deepest part of your being, “the ear of your heart”. The first word of Benedict's ‘Rule for Monks’ is a verb, a command, situated in the human heart. Listen to what God and the people God speaks through are saying to you; faith needs to be heard not just by the brain.

“Our real journey in life is interior.” —Thomas Merton

The Good News, the Gospel, is an invitation to an eternal relationship with God. Monastic wisdom reveals the difference between living faith and a moralistic code, law, or set of directives. An inward-oriented faith seeks to transform the person (conversion) towards a loving relationship with God, others, and creation. An interior faith seeks healing and redemption. Monastic men and women often feel directly called by God to conversion. When a monk is tonsured, he declares himself “dead to the world” and focuses on a new life in Christ. The monastic seeks to live out his baptismal vows radically. But this is only the beginning. By living a life of conversion and seeking healing, the monk or nun tries to open themselves. It is God who works inside the person, and this is a long process. Few have been granted a “fast-track” through the grace of God. For most of us, it takes our whole life. And when you think you have finally achieved it, you can start again; you have fallen. In the Benedictine way, we call this “conversatio morum”, a vow the Benedictine monastic makes at the beginning of monastic life.

“The vow of conversatio morum expresses our hope that, after a lifetime of learning to die to ourselves so as to live for God, we will be truly ‘converted’, transformed into the image of Christ, so that we too may dwell in the presence of God, in the company of all the Saints. Our vow of conversatio morum is really a commitment to pursue holiness.” — Nuns of Conception Abbey.

The journey of conversion, redemption, and growth is for all Christians, laypeople as well as religious; we are all invited into a relationship with God through Christ. The word 'conversion' is too often used to indicate the need for the conversion of others, as if conversion is a one-off event. You do it once, and then go off converting others. How absurd!

“The older I get, the more I meet people, the more convinced I am that we must only work on ourselves, to grow in grace. The only thing we can do about people is to love them.”—All the Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day, one of the founders of the Catholic Worker movement and a Benedictine oblate, emphasises that it is in meeting others—the homeless person, the poor man or woman, or the stranger—that we ourselves can be changed or converted. “The closer we are to the poor, the closer to Christ’s love,” she wrote in 1942. Later, she wrote, “The mystery of the poor is this: That they are Jesus, and what you do for them you do for Him. It is the only way we have of knowing and believing in our love. The mystery of poverty is that by sharing in it, making ourselves poor in giving to others, we increase our knowledge of and belief in love.”

I don't think faith can be achieved through a handbook or even Bible studies. While these might satisfy our appetite and need for knowledge, faith has a deeply mystical side to it. Foremost, faith needs to be relational. The heart needs to be open to receive the Word of God, which reveals itself through the Holy Spirit. If faith remains on the level of knowledge, it doesn’t take root! A set of laws does not bring anyone closer to the truth in Christ (which is always love!). The Word, the seed, needs to grow in fertile soil—the human heart. That is where the passions are, where suffering happens, and where the battle occurs between choosing God or the self (anxiety). A person might feel attracted to the clear and structured life of a monastery, a strict moral rule book, or a simplistic ‘Biblical’ ideology, but let us not confuse that with faith in Christ.

Mary of Egypt

Another, albeit different, great example is St Mary of Egypt. A woman called by God to faith and redemption even though she hardly had any knowledge of the Bible or Church teachings. She met Christ through an image, the icon of his mother at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, where she was during the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. However, she felt blocked from entering the church, which made her understand her own brokenness in the face of God and eternity. Her willingness to love Christ led her to a full life in Christ. She chose the life of a desert mother, understanding that this is where she would find inner peace. The way of Mary of Egypt became one of penitence and finding inner peace in solitude. Mary of Egypt was so imperfect that she would be scorned by many Christians today; some would even be tempted by the devil to stone her, yet she was a woman clearly loved and cherished by God.

‘Biblical’ Ideology

The problem with faith as a moral system or ideology in Christianity finds some origins in Augustine’s concept of “original sin,” which led Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) to his satisfaction theory of atonement in Cur Deus Homo. Much later, in the 16th century, the German Augustinian friar Martin Luther (1483-1546) and the French lawyer Jean Calvin (1509-1564) framed salvation in a rigid ‘legal’ framework. Someone sins, does something wrong, thus breaks the law, and so punishment is needed, or someone has to pay this debt. In theology, we call this ‘penal substitution atonement’. But where is God’s grace in this? This is mostly a wrathful God.

The retired Canadian Orthodox Archbishop and Monk Vladika Lazar recently said, “What the doctrine has done to Western Christianity has been to reduce the Christian faith to a legal code of correct behaviour which is void of the element of internal struggle (askesis; podvig) for inner transformation and the transfiguration of the heart and mind of the believer. This legal code is expressed not in genuine morality but in a selfrighteous and arrogant system of dead moralism when Christianity is reduced to an ideologically based programme of ‘correct behaviour.’ It is rendered lifeless and meaningless.” At least for some, evangelical theology has moved on in the last century. Orthodox theology never agreed with penal substitution atonement, and within Catholic theology, alternative visions have always existed. Examples are found in the writings of John Eriugena (815-877), later in the writings of the Franciscan Duns Scotus (1265-1308), in the “Christus Victor,” or in the pre-Augustinian views on atonement of the early church.

To return to Dorothy Day, it was not an ideology or moral system that brought her back to faith in God (she already had a great sense of morality), but rather love and beauty: “As she described it, the beauty of the created world convinced her that there must be a Creator. The joy of human love helped her to realise the beauty of divine love… She came to see that her life – and all our lives – are a search for love, a search for a love that is Supreme, for God.” — U.S. R.C. Archbishop J.H. Gomez

The purpose of the Christian life is to grow closer to God, and let there be no doubt about this: God loves the sinner. It is God’s will for all humankind to be saved (there is no predestination!). For Benedict, Christian life, and the monk's life, is a school of serving the Lord. In other words, it is a school in learning to love, which we do by learning to become humble. To prefer nothing to the love of Christ implies that we open ourselves up to learning to know Christ. The love of Christ that comes before all else keeps us from judging others.

My personal relationship with God becomes clearer as I struggle in life with myself and in my response to who God calls me to be. First, I needed to learn to see and know my true self before understanding my relationship with God. God loves my true self, not my false self. And learning about myself often happened in relationship with other people. I have made many mistakes throughout my journey and one needs to ask for forgiveness. We will fail at times, if not all the time.

“We need to fall, and we need to be aware of it; for if we did not fall, we should not know how weak and wretched we are of ourselves, nor should we know our Maker's marvellous love so fully.” — Julian of Norwich

To love God, to love neighbour, stranger, and enemy demands the presence of the Holy Spirit in the heart, a deep sense of humility, and a relationship with God. How do we find God? It all begins with listening with the ear of your heart.