Arkiv, Høytlesning
Desert Fathers 14
Below is the text of the fourteenth episode in the series Desert Fathers in a Year. You can find it in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts. On YouTube, the full range of episodes can be found here.
Abba Isaiah said: ‘Woe is me, for your name is all around me, yet I serve your enemies! Woe, indeed woe is me for I do that which God abhors; and for that reason he does not heal me.’
After the section on hesychia comes one about compunction. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines compunction as ‘anxiety arising from awareness of guilt’ or ‘distress of mind over an anticipated action or result’. It admits as a secondary sense, ‘a twinge of misgiving’, that is, ‘a scruple’.
Here we see a further example of a trend already noted: the tendency, over time, to reduce terms developed to render nuanced states of soul to banal, purely emotional categories. In addition to the advice they offer, the apophthegmata enrich our conceptual vocabulary. Thus they make us better able to deal with complex experience, less inclined to yield to hopelessness. For despair tends to issue from ambivalence, situations in which we feel overwhelmed by confused pain, unable to enact a response. What we can articulate, we can learn to deal with.
That is why we find the Fathers determined to name the thoughts that trouble them or the demons that hold them hostage, even as Christ, confronting the madman of the Gerasene, that poor fellow who lived among tombs and practised self-harm, cut through distracting chitchat and addressed the malign occupant with sternness, asking, ‘What is your name?’, in order, then, to order the evil one out.
So what did the Fathers have in mind when they spoke of compunction? Their Greek word for it, katanuxis, has the same literal sense as the Latin compunctio, which English cavalierly adopted. Both nouns are drawn from verbs of action that mean ‘to gouge’ or ‘to prick’. Think of a bull gouging a matador, causing bloodshed; or of a child pricking a balloon, causing it to emit a brief ‘ptssh’ before it spirals sadly to the ground. The basic reality is one of puncture. In fact, if you pronounce ‘compunction’ carefully, your ear will tell you that the words are related.
At risk of puncture are puffed-up people seduced by vanity to have exorbitant ideas about themselves, conducting their lives on the basis of illusions or of claims to power born of fame, status, or wealth. Compunction results when the air goes out of the balloon; when we have to confront our real rather than our projected self. What remains of me when self-aggrandisement is no longer fuelled? That is the question this section addresses.
Scripture gives us examples of instants of compunction: the woman at the well when Jesus told her all she had ever done; Peter at cock-crow, conscious of his thrice-repeated betrayal; Paul falling from his high horse. Most of us can painfully recall such moments from our own history. We significantly speak of our conscience being pricked, precisely, when we realise we have acted unworthily or spoken untruth. Such rude awakenings are precious. They are, however, merely the beginning of a drawn-out process which we may or may not wish to face.
It is one thing to realise a specific manifestation of ill-will or resistance to grace; it is another to own up to patterns in my life that are unsound or broken in order to embark on the arduous work of conversion. The Fathers’ commitment to compunction was about such probing. It led them to acknowledge the estrangement from God that results from transgression, and to grieve over it. By giving into sin, veering off the straight path into the wilderness, we not only grieve God; we sabotage our own happiness.
I have cited two woes ascribed to Abba Isaiah, a monk with the courage to confront his poverty. His words spoken centuries ago touch us in the present. ‘Woe is me, for your name is all around me, yet I serve your enemies!’ How can it be that I read the Bible, frequent the sacraments, recite my prayers, yet keep giving in to temptations that put to death the life of grace in me? How can I say ‘Amen!’ to the Body of Christ one moment, then the next make a cynical remark or lose myself in waterless places on the internet? ‘Woe, indeed woe is me for I do that which God abhors; and for that reason he does not heal me.’ God wants, intends to heal me; but he does not impose his saving power against my will.
This is a great mystery: God’s reverence for our sovereign freedom. When I call out in distress, ‘Lord, heal me!’, do I adopt the measures that will serve my return to health or do I stay, despite myself, attached to my sickness? Jesus’s question to the paralytic prostrate at the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem, ‘Do you want to be healed?’, regards each of us. It may be the needle we require for compunction. There is hardly a more urgent cause for pride’s pricking than my choice to stay mired in sickness when health is within reach. Compunction is the human response to God’s light shining in our darkness.
It is a mistake to think that such exposure to the light is instantly delightful. That depends on what the light reveals. The sorrow of compunction is a healthy pain, though. It springs from my certainty that what I am now does not determine what I may become. Compunction is grievous, but there is a flicker of joy in it, and energy for change, for new life.
Proud as a peacock! There is a lesson in this display.
Photo from Wikipedia.