Have the right measure
Editor’s note: In May, Fr. Kevin Belgrave visited Madonna House and gave us an informal presentation of seven “rules for life” he has developed over the years. Fr. Kevin is a priest of the Archdiocese of Toronto. He’s a formator at St. Augustine’s Seminary and a professor of moral theology. He’s also a director of an institute of theology and lay spiritual formation in Toronto. Here are some of his thoughts.
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Perhaps this would be better called a fireside chat because the title is Seven Rules for Life.
I’m not going to talk about the Mass, confession, or prayer, even though they are the most important rules for life. They are the sources of life. But this talk is about other helpful “rules” I have learned over the years.
I have spent 18 years as a priest and 12 years in the seminary. That’s a lot of spiritual direction, a lot of formation advising, a lot of conversations with men who are trying to grow in the spiritual life, who are trying to overcome sin and grow in virtue, who are trying to maintain encouragement, commitment, and perseverance.
These rules are things I have noticed over those years, just seven things that you might forget, but which I really believe are important. There are probably things in your own life that you have never thought to call a rule, things that have emerged for you as a defining way of thinking about some challenge or area of growth
And these seven rules are not exhaustive in any way because they’ve just grown out of my own experiences, which means there would be others that grow out of your own experiences.
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The first rule is Have the right measure.
Where does this come from?
After I returned from studies and started my ministry at the seminary, I spent six years as the chaplain of the Courage Apostolate in Toronto, Courage being a ministry of the Church for men and women who are navigating same sex attraction while trying to live their faith fully.
The chaplain is a very close part of the group. There were a lot of conversations, a lot of getting to know the lives and struggles of the members.
What I noticed over time, in doing that ministry, is that there was this pernicious, enduring source of discouragement in the lives of some of the members of Courage. These were men and women who had committed to the Church’s teaching on human love and sexuality. They wanted to follow it; they were committed to it. They understood all the strategies of trying to live chastity.
We would talk — among many other things — about overcoming pornography and living chastity, all the things you would discuss in the ministry of Courage (or in any group of human beings trying to grow in holiness!)
And yet, there was this discouragement, and I came to see that it’s source, in part, was that they had a wrong measure for what constituted a successful life.
Some of the members would not be able to overcome some of their wounds very quickly. Those wounds were deep. So, you’d have a situation where someone might think, “Okay, I’m committed to the Church’s teaching but my life is still terrible. I have trouble holding down friendships. I hate my job. I don’t get along with my coworkers.”
I noticed that they were measuring their life by the wrong measure. You have a certain kind of job, you make a certain amount, your weekends look a certain way, your family life is a certain way, etc.
In some respects, they had internalized the world’s measures of what made for a successful life, and this way of measuring was just serving as an enduring and pernicious source of discouragement for them, despite their efforts to live the Christian life fully.
So, what is the right measure? Meaning, what is a good Christian?
Is it the one who can stand up and give a talk, and people like to hear him talk, and he’s really involved in his parish, and he reads well? If so, a good Christian is a person who has qualities that you’ve just brought over from the world’s definition of a successful life.
If this measure is true, then God has literally set some people up for success in life, and he has set other people up for failure. Every now and again throws them a bone: “Well, don’t worry. In heaven, everything will be okay. Your life will be miserable on earth, but I’ll throw you this bone of consolation every now and again.”
If you have inherited the world’s view of what makes for a successful life, then you can only see God as deeply unjust.
So, the point of this first rule, having the right measure, is to remind ourselves from time to time about the correct measure of a Christian life.
The measure of a successful life, in our Lord’s view, concerns a very deeply personal work that he is doing in each person, a mystery that we’re living within the Church. The Church provides the structure and home for this work, but at the end of the day, it is a deeply personal work that our Lord is doing.
And the only thing required to live this work of our Lord is to use as much of the interior freedom you have in any given moment to take the most truthful next step you can, however small it may be. You keep pressing your freedom into this shape of truth — as much as you can in each moment, however much it seems like you are failing in the “big picture.”
So, if you can’t seem to hold down the job you want, or have the role that you want in the parish, do you somehow grit your teeth and just endure? No. Because every day, even though you don’t look like the people who are able to work a room and make small talk and shake hands and do whatever, you still have the power to do the thing that matters most: to give our Lord as much of a “yes” as you can to the most truthful next thing you can do.
I want to smile at this person more. I want to talk with this person. Most of the time it may fail, but you have a little bit of freedom, and you still try to do that thing.
Well, that little bit of freedom that you have access to — even if it looks like it’s nothing — the fact that you have tried to push it into something that is truthful, that’s the measure.
There is no work that we need to be doing other than the next most truthful thing we can do with as much freedom as we have access to in that moment. And although that might not look like success, I am convinced that this is what equalizes our experiences, because everyone has a given amount of interior freedom, even if it looks very different from one person to another.
The meaning of success in the Christian life is not a series of externally visible things. Success in the Christian life is how our Lord sees you using the freedom you have available to you, in all your woundedness, to do the next most truthful thing you can do in that day, in that moment.
Another aspect of success in life is the element of interdependence, the element of communion. There are people who may seem to have less access to freedom or very little freedom.
There might be some disability, some injury, some circumstance that creates a situation where there’s very little possibility of free action. We don’t know the mystery of anyone’s interior life, let alone of those who are seriously ill in any way. But part of what makes for success in life is, in fact, the relationship of communion that we extend to others whose freedom is lacking.
When you are in relationship with someone who is elderly or disabled in some way, the fact that you are present to them, and they to you, is a source of success, of life, because life is communion. It is interdependent, it is Trinitarian. It creates an image of God, which creates life, which creates healing, which creates success.
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The second rule is Your vocation in life is only partly chosen.
This rule also came out of my ministry with Courage because, as a priest it is definitely unhelpful for me to say to someone who is navigating same sex attraction, “Well, I’m celibate; therefore, you can live celibacy.”
The fact that I chose celibacy makes it totally different than what this man or woman may be experiencing.
I read an article in First Things, where the author was quoting a talk that Pope Pius XII gave shortly after the Second World War. He seems to have been addressing a group of young unmarried Christian women.
The war had just devastated Europe and, in a particular way, it had devastated marriageable men, so there were a lot of women who, perhaps all of a sudden, saw a life ahead without the possibility of getting married.
Pius XII basically says that the young Christian woman who remains unmarried in spite of her own desires may, firmly believing in the providence of the Heavenly Father, recognize in life’s challenges the voice of God calling her. In the impossibility of matrimony, she discerns her vocation.
Sometimes the sacrifice you want to make is not the sacrifice God asks you to make. And the important question is what God is choosing for us.
This remains very important for men and women who are navigating same sex attraction, but it is important for all of us because we all have our own woundedness and our own inheritance of original sin — the patterns, behaviors, vices, weakness, or limitations that are our own.
It could be, a family situation, the way you relate to your parents, the state of your family, something that never happened to you when you were young. It could be some education you never had, or something else.
I’m sure we all could name things in our life that we would not have chosen if we had been given a choice, that we perhaps sometimes fight against with resentment and bitterness and “what-ifs” and wishing things were different. It’s in these moments and thoughts that this second rule becomes important.
“Your vocation in life is only partly chosen.” Sometimes God chooses a path for you that you would not have chosen for yourself. And maybe that’s why he has to choose it for you, because he knows you wouldn’t have chosen it. And then our vocation becomes a response to what God has chosen, rather than us choosing a vocation and then giving it to God.
This is a hard rule. It’s hard to give a free and wholehearted response to something we wouldn’t have chosen, because nothing in our culture prepares people to accept unchosen obligations. Our culture is very much about self-expression and self-creation and autonomy and freedom and independence.
What creates meaning in our lives for things you didn’t choose, that seem to be only unwanted impositions? It is hard for us who have grown up in this culture to recognize that those impositions and areas of dependence where we must accept unchosen obligations are actually a defining feature of life in God’s plan.
It’s a defining feature because your number one unchosen obligation is that from the very beginning when you come into the world, you’re obliged to your family, to your siblings, to your parents. Those are completely unchosen obligations. They raised you, they fed you, they protected you. You did nothing to earn any of that. You were a little baby. We are completely beholden to unchosen obligations in life.
That’s why your vocation is only partly chosen. In the impossibility of whatever wound, whatever limitation, whatever you’re experiencing, you’ve discerned, at least in part, your vocation. Because, of course, you must then choose what God has chosen for you, knowing with the certainty of faith that he is with you in it, for your good, every moment. To be continued.
