Excerpt: By Way of Grace

(Excerpted from By Way of Grace: Moving From Faithfulness to Holiness, chapter 2, Temperance, the Art of Holding a Balance)

Erotic energy requires restraint if it is not to destroy us. Says Father Ronald Rolheiser, “All energy is imperialistic, especially erotic and creative energy. Energy is not friendly, it wants all of us, it can beat us up like the playground bully.” Worse, it can lay us open to spiritual forces we can’t resist.

As British Romantic Mary Shelly so brilliantly demonstrates in her famous story of Victor Frankenstein, creative mania can lead to madness, mayhem, and even death.

Though the nine different colors of paint I’d slapped on the house and the acre and a half of sweet peas we’d planted for the wedding seemed pretty benign in comparison to the horror that emerged from Frankenstein’s laboratory, it was true that we were being tyrannized by our own creative energy and were wearing out in the process. Everything else was being shoved to the side, including my usual spiritual routine of early morning reading, prayer, walking, meditation, and Mass. The hoped-for results of our hard labor, visualized over and over again, were far too compelling. There had to be a way—a virtue perhaps?—that would allow us to manage and appropriately channel our beauty-loving eros.

I took a day off and went to the hermitage. There, the familiar routine of the bells, of monks heading into church from wherever they’d been working, of liturgy and prayer somehow broke the spell. For the first time in months, I was able to step out of the surging flood tide that had been bouncing me along on its crest. To my surprise, the world hadn’t changed much in my absence. Some of it—the flickering white candles, the midmorning sun streaming through the eastern windows, the clarity of Father Isaiah’s soaring tenor during the Benedictus—was utterly beautiful.

And some of it wasn’t. One brother’s allergies, for example, had not let up a whit. Another monk, looking more depressed than usual, was yawning sourly into his cupped hand. When Eucharist was over and I headed back outside, I found two baby swallows lying dead beside the door; alone in the mud nest above them, their overgrown sibling triumphantly puffed his sparse down. It was clear that there was no overcoming the ugliness of illness, sin, or the brutal side of nature—at least not through the making of beauty. Seen in that light, my manic efforts to transform the bit of world under my purview were laughable. Worse, they smacked of egoistic fantasy.

Sobered by the thought, I wandered into the bookstore in search of help. Pinned on the wall was an announcement for a meeting of the local chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous the following Tuesday evening. I stared, thinking about addiction, about my inability to get a handle on creative mania, and about my grandmother, who used to sneak out to meetings of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

I began to smile. That was it, the name of the virtue I’d been looking for, the virtue that could restrain and channel erotic energy. It was called temperance, and despite the spiritual disciplines I’d practiced over the years—solitude, fasting, silence—which were all intended to reveal the places in me over which desire held sway, I had developed very little of it indeed.

(used by permission of Loyola Press, copyright 2006)

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1. Prudence, the Art of Seeing Clearly
2. Temperance, the Art of Holding a Balance
3. Fortitude, the Art of Courageous Continuing
4. Justice, the Art of Forgiving
5. Humility, the Art of Honest Self-Appraisal
6. Faith, the Art of Believing in Things Unseen
7. Hope, the Art of Patient Waiting
8. Charity, the Art of Loving the Enemy

EPILOGUE

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY