Confessions of a spiritual couch potato

Catholic New Times, July 3, 2005 by Jim Loney

It's true: I've become something of a spiritual couch potato in the last few years. The only time I can muster a mustard seed of discipline is during Lent. Then it's right back to the couch.

I avoid prayer like the plague--the kind where you stop, sit or kneel, do nothing but be, even if for only ten minutes. R's agony-in-the-garden every time; the easiest thing is to let the cup pass. The thought of fasting nauseates me, and as for Sunday Mass--that weekly spiritual re-boot and virus check--well, let's just say I've accumulated a significant inventory of mortal sins.

I must sheepishly admit that my life is currently void of any and all routine, much less spiritual discipline. The things that normally define the contours of daily life--waking up in the morning, going to work, meal times--vary each day according to the ebb and flow of necessity, circumstance and whim-the consequence and privilege of a flexible, half-time job. Perhaps the only regular discipline I've maintained is brushing my teeth.

This has not always been so. In my twenties, I was a fervent disciple of the spiritual life. I read Spiritual books, fasted once a week, went to daily Mass, prayed in the morning, went on retreats. While inconsistent in these pursuits, I went about them in fits and starts ; the struggle to engage and live the spiritual life was urgent and constant.

I use the word "pursuits" deliberately for that indeed is what they were--athletic, body-building exertions to become somebody worthy of being loved, valued and accepted--in the eyes of God and everyone else. I secretly despaired that I was not.

To escape social censure for being incorrigibly unattracted to women, I entered formation with the Basilian Fathers. By living a common life of spiritual heroics consisting of service to the poor and the evangelic counsels of poverty, chastity and obedience, I could transcend my intrinsically corrupt desires and finally belong somewhere. But as I learned more about the Basilians, I came to the twenty-something conclusion that they did not measure up to the spiritual standard, their life being defined more by upper middle-class ease than hard-body vigour.

So I left the Basilians and discovered the Catholic Worker. Now, talk about a hard-body movement! Nonviolence; voluntary poverty; sharing the lives of the homeless in broken-down houses of hospitality; building a new society in the shell of the old where it is easier for people to be good; a radical program for living the radical gospel that would lift me out of the existential trash can.

Dan and William and I moved to Toronto and started a Catholic Worker community.

As the years passed, the daily grind of living in a house of hospitality forced me to admit to myself that I was playing a game of upward spiritual mobility, seeking recognition as a spiritual somebody because inside I felt like a nobody. And then a funny thing started happening. As it started to sink in, little by little, that I'm okay, loved and accepted right now--just as I am--my appetite for spiritual striving and self-discipline has diminished in corresponding measure. It has now diminished to the point where I must officially declare it: I'm a spiritual couch potato.

Call it spiritual rebellion or old-fashioned sloth, the call to prayer does not go away. It is always rising in me-when I'm waiting for my turn in the No Frill's line; biking to work through sun-lovely 8 a.m. streets; washing the dishes--stop, come, just be, the voice says. It never relents. And these days, each morning when I wake, I say no. It's too hard, too much, too painful to get off the go-round and face my poverty before God, to enter the chasm that opens when I stop.

My soul knows the truth. I cannot escape the chasm. The day will come, regardless of what I do or don't do, when I will have to face my terrors, my ineradicable poverty, and make the crossing. Perhaps that's what all this spiritual discipline stuff is about: practice in stopping, so that when the crossing comes, it can be embraced fully, gladly, joyfully.