part the waters

This was the big fact about Christian ethics; the discovery of the new balance. Paganism had been like a pillar of marble, upright because proportioned with symmetry. Christianity was like a huge and ragged and romantic rock, which, though it sways on its pedestal at a touch, yet, because it exaggerated excrescences exactly balance each other, is enthroned there for a thousand years.
{Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton}

It can be downright embarrassing to read the church histories. To go from Western Civ class and the peculiar wrestling match of Arian Christianity versus Roman Christianity to a book on the monastery at Cluny with its gracious giant, Peter the Venerable, as he set himself ideologically against the Cistercian man of the hour, Bernard of Clairvaux... It seems like a tragedy in the guise of a comedy. How do I share of love and grace when the past 2,000 years would seem to declaim that charitas was never much of a Christian virtue?

The struggle between Peter and Bernard is a particularly intriguing one to me because I find it microscopically paralleled within myself. One man was a scholar who cherished the belief that reason was sufficient to convert Muslims, and who loved the classics and truth wherever it could be found. He did not deny himself or his monks simple comforts like warmth and a full stomach, believing perhaps, as Mullins would have it, that extreme asceticism was a far greater distraction from meditation on the holy. Bernard, on the other hand, was the desert mystic reborn. He was a high nobleman whose charisma drew several other family members to enter a Cistercian order. Life among the Cistercians meant complete self-denial, days dedicated to manual labor rather than liturgical chants, and the elevation of the mind through the denigration of the body. For such a man, the greater threat lay in the ideas propagated by an untransformed mind, and he preferred to set aside all such lofty pursuits in favor of a humble mind and righteous life.

Maybe there are some people who fall to such distinct polarities as Peter and Bernard. But it is far more appealing (and difficult) to stand in the balance of what Chesterton would probably have identified as a paradox of Christianity. St. Augustine spoke of the human heart that it was restless until it found its rest in God. Inside of me (and perhaps you also), there is an almost mournful desire to leave everything aside: plans, loans, work, even family and friends, whatever the cares of this world are, and dedicate oneself to the one thing that is desirable. Not that other things have no appeal, but that this one thing makes them all pale in comparison.

"Mournful," I say, because it cannot be gratified. The separatism of the Desert Fathers was a shift: lovesick ones choosing the wilderness because it is from there that she comes up, leaning upon her beloved (Song of Solomon 8:5). And for their time, that was an appropriate expression. Still, to be other than the world cannot mean simply to be isolated from it. What purpose does that serve when our lives are testimonies of the work of God? A man alone is himself, neither short nor tall nor fat nor skinny, for these are descriptive terms based on comparison with something. A man in a crowd, now, he may be a point of contrast. The fire in his eyes is not the fire in everyone's eyes, but it could be, if he will only get close enough.

I guess Bernard and Peter were both right: somehow, we stand on the knife's edge and don't get cut. To live with an austerity born of singleminded desire for one thing above all else, but also to live with an awareness of the things of this world and a compassionate heart for the hurt and the broken.

Lord, my heart is not haughty,
    Nor my eyes lofty.
    Neither do I concern myself with great matters,
    Nor with things too profound for me.
Surely I have calmed and quieted my soul...
{Psalm 131:1-2a}