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Biography
[Transcribed from tape and edited for clarity.] |
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"It’s So Hard When It Doesn’t Come Easy" Yeah, we've all heard the hackneyed expressions. I think my mother used all three of them! Maybe it all began back with Paul's letter to the Romans when he tells them to remain strong in the face of persecution. He writes: “Affliction produces endurance, and endurance, proven character, and proven character, hope.” Who can argue with that? And yet, while there's truth to these words, they've also been used to promote a less than healthy “hard is better” sort of spirituality. In my own Catholic tradition, “offer it up” often meant “stop complaining and be glad you have the chance to suffer for Jesus. You might actually help some poor soul in Purgatory, too.” I remember one Holy Saturday night when I tried to endure more than perhaps I was ready for. I was a young priest, new to a parish, and decided that I wanted to keep the vigil the whole night long until Easter morning. No small dose of spiritual pride was operative. After all, I reasoned, that was the real intent of the Holy Saturday vigil, right? To watch in joyous expectation for the one who emerges from the tomb of death on Easter morning. Now, while our extended Holy Saturday night liturgy can be its own endurance test, with nine Scripture readings, a lighting of the Easter fire, renewal of Baptismal vows, and the sprinkling of freshly blessed water, I wanted to do even more than that. I wanted to return to that ancient tradition and keep vigil all night. I was sure it would be spiritually enriching. After all, just the day before on Good Friday, we'd all heard of Jesus' disappointment with the disciples when they couldn't stay awake for even one hour with him in Gethsemane. I could do better than that. So, once everyone had left the church that night, with fragrant Easter lilies punctuating the sanctuary, and white cloths streaming down a previously bare cross, I decided to wait there and to stay awake. To pray about the mystery of death and life that we were commemorating. To endure the night until the radiant light of Easter morning. Well, there's sometimes a long distance between what you want and what you get. I couldn't have stayed awake very long. I remember hardly anything about that night. I awoke Easter morning lying down in the church pew with the first hints of dawn bleeding through the stained glass windows. And I laughed. Just like the disciples, I thought. Asleep. Some endurance! I was about to get up and go the rectory to shower, when a stream of pure sunlight shone through a broken part of the stained glass window. It seemed to come through that pane alone, and it flooded the pew on which I was lying. Not the pew in front of me, not the one in back of me, only my pew. It started on my legs and crept slowly up my body until my face was fully illumined by the new sun. It felt warm, caressing, forgiving. Yes, I had failed the endurance test, but somehow it was okay. Easter came anyway. I had the sense—call it grace—that maybe God didn't really feel that “hard is always better.” Fully awake, I celebrated Easter with the glow of a sun that I carried around with me throughout that day and for days afterward. Now, that's not to imply that I don't believe what Paul says, because I do. Affliction can produce endurance. And it often does. Most of the good and important things in my life, I've had to work hard for. And I do think that character is shaped by endurance and by withstanding trial with dignity and with grace. After all, the civil rights movement in this country is built on the shoulders of people who have modeled such endurance. But I also know that there's something called fortuitous grace that is like being unexpectedly kissed. And it, too, is real. The capacity to be surprised by a God who loves lavishly even though we've done nothing to warrant it. It's free gift. Not a pay back for anything. No endurance necessary. So, yes, it is so hard when it doesn't come easy. But it's also so wonderful when it does. And I think God is like that. Kissing us unexpectedly. Caressing us warmly in ways we don't always anticipate. So, I'm grateful for the memory of a church pew on Easter morning when unmistakable sunlight banished the darkness of the night for me. And now, in times when I do have to endure, the memory of that morning, it helps me. Perhaps God knows that subtlety doesn't always work well with me. Lillian Daniel: I was so interested in what you said about the way sometimes people misinterpret that scripture and they think that suffering produces endurance or affliction produces endurance, and perhaps even get stuck in a situation of suffering or affliction because they think they're doing something good for God. Can you say more about that? That seems important. Edward Beck: Well, I do think that suffering can produce affliction or affliction can help us somehow get stronger or endure more. I think the problem is when we look for it as if it's a good thing. I think there's going to be plenty of suffering in our lives and we are going to have to endure, but I don't think we have to look for it. Sometimes certain strains of spirituality would lead us to almost believe that it's good for us or we should almost seek it out because hard is always better. You know, that very Jansenistic kind of spirituality. I think that even sophisticated theologians can fall into that because, somehow, it taps into negative self-images that we have and we don't feel we're really good enough or worthy enough sometimes. So when we're punished somehow it feels better. I think it's just a warped sense of spirituality. Lillian Daniel: Or haven't there also been abuses in all of our religions where people have been told to stay in a terrible situation or a situation of oppression, and have thought that they were doing something noble in that? Edward Beck: Yeah. As if somehow you need to just be strong and get through it and you'll be a better person because of it. And maybe you can be a better person when you endure, but I think sometimes the best option is to get out of the situation and to take care of yourself and to make sure that you're not beat up any more. It's a fine line. I'm not saying endurance doesn't produce character, I think it can, but I don't think we have to look for it! Daniel Pawlus: Our spirituality is a constant growing process within us. I want to talk a little bit about your book, “Soul Provider.” I enjoyed it a great deal, Edward. Could you tell us a little bit about the inspiration for this because it's based on a very famous piece, an original book itself. Edward Beck: Yeah. I was actually studying in Israel and had the chance to go to Egypt. While in Egypt I took this trek through the Sinai Desert and we found ourselves at the oldest monastery in the world, St. Catherine's. It was fascinating place. I had never been there before. They had all these icons and one of the icons was the Ladder of Divine Ascent. You have probably seen it. It's this ladder and monks are climbing up it and some of them on the lower rungs are getting picked off by demons and some of them are making it to the top. You have Jesus at the top kind of beckoning people forward, these monks. It was this intriguing, very vertical notion of spirituality, but I thought it was beautifully rendered. One of the old monks there said, “Well, you know of course that's based on our Father John's Ladder of Divine Ascent.” I had vaguely remembered in graduate school reading the Ladder of Divine Ascent, but I didn't remember much about it. But it inspired me to back and read it. And, of course, ht wrote it in the seventh century. I thought, well, what can I possibly learn from this? While the language was very antiquated and some of the ways in which he put forth his thoughts would never be ways in which we would do it today—what we were just talking about, hard is better. He certainly would have promoted that. But what I found was he had these thirty steps. He said to the monks that if you live by these, if you do these, then you will reach spiritual fulfillment and perfection. You will be happy if you do this. And so in reading them, I began to see that these were kind of the perennial virtues and vices, that they were all still relevant. I thought, wouldn't it be interesting all of these centuries later to go back to them. If they have endured this long, probably there's something true about them. There's something still there. Lillian Daniel: Give us an example of some of these steps. Edward Beck: Renunciation, detachment, pride, jealousy. All of the seven deadly sins are in there. And then the virtues are in there. You get to the top of the ladder and it's how do you accumulate the virtues and how do you start to live them out? I just thought they are all ways in which we still have to seek and ways by which we can seek. So I just wanted to write about them. Daniel Pawlus: You've used this on different retreats as exercises throughout the retreat. You yourself actually spent a thirty day period of reflecting on each of these steps, didn't you? A powerful spiritual experience for you. Edward Beck: I did. I decided to take one step a day. Now I wouldn't recommend that because I think it's takes longer than thirty days to go through them all! So I don't know if I would suggest that. But I think maybe a step a week would be a good way to do it. Take thirty weeks. Kind of the Ignatian model, maybe, of a retreat. But I did it that way because I only had the thirty days. It was very formative for me. The steps call you to reflect upon what do these say to your own life. How do you live these out or not live them out? I just found it very formative to be able to take that process. I'm someone who likes a certain structure to something, so when I thought I just have to climb this ladder and I'm going to get to the end of something, it was good for me. Lillian Daniel: What would have been different about doing these steps in the seventh century in Egypt for you? Edward Beck: Well, for me I don't know. But for them, I think, it was very monastic centered. It was how this all spins out in a monastery. Lillian Daniel: How long did it take them to get through the steps on average? Edward Beck: I think what he did with them is they would do it during Lent. They would read it and then they would practice it and then try to bring it throughout the rest of the year into their lives. But I don't think there was a set pattern like he wanted them to go through it in a certain period. But I know they did do it as a Lenten exercise. And still today Eastern Orthodox Christians read it every Lent. It's their spiritual reading still. Daniel Pawlus: I was going to ask you, you're a very busy person in terms of media in general. You write books, you give retreats, you're working on a new television show. We'd love to hear a little bit about that. How does all that work for you as a Passionist priest? How do you schedule all of these activities and be able to utilize your skills and your talents in all these different areas? Edward Beck: I sleep less! I will say that. I am sleeping less these days. And the ABC thing is something new and it's been a wonderful opportunity to host a weekly show for a major network and be able to have my input as far as guests and topics and write some of the script. They've been really, really good with it. I'm very excited to have the opportunity. I think for me it's just one more avenue. The Passionists are centered on communication as a ministry. We're always had that. We have a mass on television. I've always done preaching work. I think media and books are a part of that. So the extension to me into television is simply another kind of arm of that media calling really. So I'm really happy to be able to do it. But I think it's just a matter of balancing. I have to pick certain days when I don't do anything and then I realize the next four are going to be chock full. But it's all good stuff so I can get excited about it and it's not drudgery for me. But it is finding a balance to do it. Lillian Daniel: Going back to your remarks here, you had that wonderful description of yourself as a young priest and you were trying to stay up all night. You mentioned that you were probably working under some sort of spiritual arrogance. Say more about that? What did that look like? Edward Beck: Well, I won't speak for anybody else but in my life, especially when I was younger and beginning the priesthood and religious life, there was a spiritual arrogance that somehow I was called to do it better and I had to get it more perfect and that this vocation was meant to be harder. I think I just had a misperception, really. And I think it was betrayed by the fact of, well, they all went home to go to bed, I'll stay up all night and do it. I just think there is a certain spiritual arrogance that I had to be disabused of. Not only then, but still. There is a struggle when you do this for your life, and I think it's any kind of ministry, that can become almost another profession or it also can become an elitist kind of thing. I think you have to be really careful when that creeps in not to let it. Lillian Daniel: Not to let yourself be the professional Christian. Edward Beck: Yeah. It's about service. To lose touch with that call I think is to lose touch with why you're doing what you're do. Lillian Daniel: It's that sort of characteristic of the spiritual journey, though. When we first are on it we think almost that we've discovered it or are inventing it and our generation is going to perfect it. As you go on you find yourself, for example, looking back at texts from the seventh century and saying, “Ah! Here's the real wisdom.” Edward Beck: And we haven't invented anything new. It's been around for a very long time. Maybe we catch up and we go back to what has already been there, but it's kind of all been said and done before. We just find new ways in which to present it and to do it, I think. Daniel Pawlus: One of the things I love about your writing, too, Edward, is that you use a lot of personal stories to help us relate to these different topics and issues. You meet some fascinating people. You talk about in the book, literally kind of bumping into Henri Nouwen at a retreat, which is kind of fascinating. How do you select those to illustrate your point sometimes? Do they all accumulate and then as you're writing you infuse them into this? I think it's a unique approach that you bring to this. You show us the life behind the formal priesthood and how you interface with all of your friends and people in your life and you put in the book in a beautiful way. Edward Beck: Well, I'm a firm believer in narrative and story as a way to communicate spirituality and the Gospel. I think the lead comes there from Jesus with the parables. That's what he did. Certainly I think for me in writing, I use a lot of stories in the preaching that I do. I do these retreats all over the country and what I have found most effective is the use of story and the use of narrative. So, I think naturally when I sit down to write if I'm writing “spirituality” instinctually I go for story because I think that theory is hard to get across and hard to keep interesting if there is nothing to hang it on, if there's no peg. I find the story, an experiential story, can help people relate it to their own lives: I've been there, I've done that, or that's happened to me. I have found that in narrative, that's where it comes for me. I mean that's where I have seen and sensed the deepest spirituality, in the stories of my life. The first two books that I wrote were all stories. This one is a little different in that it's a little bit more spiritually focused with these steps, but I couldn't help but... Daniel Pawlus: Insert those personal pieces, which have great humor and humility to them and make it so accessible, really, because we feel like we're on the same page with you in the experience, and then how you've dovetailed into the theological aspects of this. It's beautifully done. Edward Beck: How many people have had Henri Nouwen walk in while you're in a bathtub? You better write about it! Lillian Daniel: That alone will make people buy the book! That's well worth it. I loved your description of the gift of grace and how often we don't expect it and then to hold on to those memories. How have those memories of that moment of the sun helped you when times were difficult? Edward Beck: I think always I tap into it. You know, you have the dark night of the soul which may not last fifty years but it may last three years. They can be tough times when you do not feel connected to God or connected spiritually. It feels kind of empty. For me, to remember the times when I was. I remember when I was in the novitiate. It was a very profound prayer year for me. I was really wooed by God. I could pray for hours uninterrupted and it would not seem like any time had passed. That practically hasn't happened since then. But I hold onto the memory of it and it was formative for me that to go back to it and reclaim it and that it really did happen, it helps me in the drier times now. It helps me to remember it. Lillian Daniel: Thank you for remembering it with us today. Thank you very much. Edward Beck: You're welcome. |
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