I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,

to front only the essential facts of life,

and see if I could not learn what it had to teach,

and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

[Dear Reader: This is the second in a series. You can read part one here.]

My wife and I recently bought our 17-year-old son a t-shirt that includes the phrase carpe diem (Latin for “seize the day”) as part of the design. That led naturally to he and I watching Robin Williams’s best movie, the 1989 classic Dead Poets Society (the first time he’d seen it, and the first time for me since Williams’s suicide). It has long been one of my favorite films, but now I am able to consider it in more depth and with better insight than when I was younger. Maybe I am just now old enough to understand what this movie can teach me.

For the unfamiliar, the story of Dead Poet’s Society is that of a group of friends who come to idolize their quirky English teacher, Mr. Keating, whose teaching methods break the traditional mold expected of their staid 1950s boys preparatory school. From their very first lesson Keating challenges them to “seize the day,” encourages them to think independently, and invites them to chart their own course in life in keeping with their passions. To varying degrees the boys buy what Keating is selling, tasting greater freedom and happiness, at least temporarily, than they had previously known. But one by one they carpe the diem with an immaturity and recklessness that leads each to conflict and then all of them to a shared tragedy.

Watching DPS now as a teacher and a father, I see aspects of each character’s journey that I never fully considered or understood before. Charlie is never able to exercise the wisdom needed to be truly free, so he rebels for the sake of rebelling. Cameron is never able to exercise the discretion to recognize when rules are unjust or harmful, so he obeys only for the sake of obedience. Charlie rebels to no purpose, and Cameron obeys to no useful end.

Neil is never able to exercise the courage necessary to do the hard things freedom requires. So, in contravention of Mr. Keating’s advice, he first gives up truth. Then he gives up hope, and finally he gives up his life. Though it is easy to view him as the tragic hero of the movie, his failure is the most heartbreaking for its irretrievable finality. Neil’s suicide shows that even Mr. Keating seems unable to fully grasp, much less confront, the quiet desperation that lies underneath his own cheerful nihilism (which echoes hauntingly across Williams’s own life).

Only Todd, who spends much of the movie quietly in the background, breaks through, and only at the end. He rebels, but not for the perverse pleasure of rebellion as Charlie would have done. He recognizes the injustice in what those in authority over him had done, something that would never have occurred to Cameron to even consider. And so the frightened, stammering Todd shakes off the bullying of his headmaster and takes a stand–literally, on his desk–which is the step Neil could never quite take.

I think anyone can see themselves in DPS and draw any number of analogies from it. But what strikes me now is how close many of the central characters came to the breakthrough only Todd achieved, only to fall short because what they aspired to required more of them that they understood or were ready to accept. So close…and yet so far.

 

Of Dead Poets and Dead Monks

For the longest time, my mental image of the most serious monks looked a lot like the friars in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, punctuating their Gregorian chants by smacking wooden boards against their foreheads. It didn’t help that I was educated in the post-Enlightenment, Protestant tradition, so I was taught (sometimes inadvertently, sometimes not) to sneer at the monks rather than understand them. Stories like that of Simeon Stylites, sitting on top of his pillar in Syria and letting bugs and the elements ravish his body, didn’t help either. Twenty years ago I read The Desert Fathers, a classic introduction to Egyptian monasticism by Helen Waddell, and came away firmly convinced the early monks were, at best, insane.

It has only been in the last three years that I have given them a second look, with more maturity and understanding, and learned just how badly I had misjudged the monks before. What I’ve come to understand is that goal of the monks was not to earn their salvation by their own works (though the language they often used could easily lead to that misunderstanding). What the monks were after was to become so attuned to the will and character of God that their life in heaven would be an uninterrupted continuation of their life on earth. “Renunciation,” the fifth-century monk John Cassian wrote, “is nothing else than a manifestation of the cross and of a dying…to the world and its desires and its deeds” (emphasis mine). They didn’t just want to do what Jesus did; they wanted to want what Jesus wants. They embraced a life of self-discipline not because they wanted to earn heaven; what they wanted was to be ready for it when it came.

By way of example (one inspired by the fact that I am on vacay in Alaska as I write this), imagine you’ve been invited to dine with the richest man in town at his home every evening for the rest of your life. Quite an honor, right? Now imagine that you learn that this man loves salmon far above anything else, his favorite dishes are all salmon, and he eats salmon for dinner every single night. If you don’t like salmon yourself, that’s going to make your evenings a lot less enjoyable. But if you love salmon as much as he does, life is grand. Good food with good company and common interests will make each dinner something to look forward to and to savor.

The monks were about learning to love salmon, so to speak. In renouncing the things of this world that could be good, they were free to pursue what was most excellent instead. They sought to fully love what God loves with every thought and desire and choice in their being. They weren’t trying to earn their salvation through works and self-denial, as I had thought for so long. They were trying to participate with God, through his grace, in their own sanctification.

In a sense the Desert Fathers sought to be free, but they didn’t understand freedom as you or I might. They believed that freedom is found not merely in salvation, but in becoming everything the Father offers to make us, by his Spirit and his grace, into the likeness of his Son.

 

Virtue and Vice

The key to this pursuit of sanctification, which the Desert Fathers called “gospel perfection,” is humility. All the activities I had mistaken for self-loathing flagellation were actually, if properly understood and exercised, intended to facilitate growth in humility over the course of a lifetime.

The notion of virtues and vices is not a concept unique to Christianity; Aristotle had much to say on the subject in his Nicomachean Ethics, much of it good. But virtue and vice has a central place in early Christian monasticism. According to John Cassian, who preserved much of the wisdom of the Desert Fathers in his Institutes and Conferences, the Egyptian monks recognized eight principle vices: Gluttony, Lust, Avarice, Anger, Sadness, Acedia, Vainglory, and Pride.

All of them have destructive potency, though in our current generation I think two in particular (lust and avarice) have unique power to bend the trajectory of my life and warp my perspective on God. In many ways all the vices have their source code in vainglory and pride (which are so closely related it is hard for the modern American mind to differentiate them). But the really scary part is how pride can grow stronger in the heart of the person who experiences victory over the other, lesser vices (Cassian ranked them in order of ascending strength), tempting him or her to take credit for what happened in part due to their own efforts and self-discipline but could never have been achieved without God’s grace.

 

I Am Not a Monk

All of this stuff has had a profound effect on my thinking, enough so that my wife now jokes that she’s married to a monk. The reality is that I have no desire to become a monk, and it’s too late for much of that anyway. My renunciation as a family man is necessarily different, and the wisdom I’m learning from the Desert has to be translated across time and space to the life of a married-with-kids man who reads his Bible and writes his journals on an iPhone.

Contextualizing the wisdom of the Desert has been about discerning the principles that animated the monks and applying those to my life, rather than getting caught up in the exact forms their practices took. And I don’t claim to be an expert on any of this. But studying in the Desert has given me a different, more ancient perspective on Scripture and spirituality, not all of which I fully accept, but I think I am better for having reclaimed it as part of my heritage as a Christian.

One of the most valuable lessons that I’ve learned, or more accurately had reinforced, is how much my struggle with sin takes place in my mind long before it manifests in what I say or do. Simply put, thought precedes actions. I’ve been reminded of the ready help available to me by God’s grace to “set my mind on things above, not on earthly things.”

But what has become more clear to me recently is that while it is easy to make vices and their eradication a focus, that is not the right instinct. Make no mistake: The vices are destructive and damaging to my relationship with God, and the diminishment of their influence in my life is essential for my spiritual growth and maturity. So a casual attitude about them isn’t OK. But neither is an undue emphasis on them by way of overreaction. The vices should never be my focus. God alone must ever, always be my focus; if he is, that which competes with him for my attention will necessarily weaken.

The healthy response to the discovery of a vice’s presence is not guilt, shame, and self-loathing. The healthy response is recognition of whatever things I have come to love in place of God. That recognition should lead me to repentance and renewed dependence on God’s grace, not the false humility of a destructive self-hatred which leads straight back to the vices I want to escape.

Friends, while I’m sure that isn’t a revelation to some of you, that has been absolutely transformational for me. It has been the kind of breakthrough that has helped to move me a little farther from being “so-close-and-yet-so-far.” It is easy to get the cart before the horse, but impossible to go very far in that configuration.

Over the next several weeks I want to explore what this kind of thinking looks like in relation to each of the vices. Thank you for reading, and check back often.

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