Ascetical training

What of the layman's asceticism? Should he have hair shirts and the rest of it? Ascetical training is exercises whose function is to get our attention off ourselves and our own importance; and while at certain times and for certain people hair shirts and little whips may have helped (and I suppose can help for a given layman now), something should be devised that would help the lay saint get out of his preoccupation with himself.

I would suppose that this would mainly consist in helping others: the other members of the group, and those in the college--and the poor of the area, and those needing to be helped. The point, I would think, is to get over the annoyance at being asked favors and at having to drop what you are doing to do something that someone else wants done. That is the main ascetical training we need. Why are our own interests that vital? What difference does what I am doing make?

In my view, sufficient ascetical training for the layman has two main phases. The first consists of willingly and cheerfully doing the disagreeable chores that need to be done. God knows, there will be enough opportunities later in marriage and with a family and in the workplace to continue this sort of thing; what is necessary during training is to take the right attitude toward it, so that the tasks are not seen as disagreeable (because we would rather be doing something else that to us is important) but something that is just as significant as what we would otherwise be doing.

The other phase of lay asceticism would consist in not simply putting up with other people and their quirks, but in being with them in situations in which they are accepted as what they are, without any value judgments made upon them at all. That is, their "disagreeable traits" are not really to be tolerated, but to be recognized as not disagreeable. They are only disagreeable, after all, for one who is inconvenienced by them: for one who resents the tone of voice, or considers that the demands made cut into the "importance" of his time, or whose standards of beauty make the other person upleasant to look at--or to smell. You can only be put off by another person if you consider yourself and your own ways more important.

I don't know how you would go about inculcating this attitude, which I think, nonetheless, is vital not only for a Christian, but for any human being who wants to interact with others. It is, of course, the spiritual equivalent of turning the other cheek when slapped and giving the shirt when the other rudely demands your coat. Who are you to resent the other person?

I suspect that once a trainee has caught what the basic idea is, that the other's disagreeableness is actually a reflection of one's own idea of self-importance, there will be five hundred occasions every day to practice this virtue, which is, of course, humility. Unfortunately, the basic idea is not very often understood, and we have countless examples of those horrible "Christians" who "put up" with everything and "tolerate" others and so on: who make a virtue of "not noticing" evils in others--when it is quite evident that they see the evils, and see them as evil, and so have missed the whole point.

...Well, I have said about a tenth of what I set out to say, and perhaps a hundredth of what I would like to have said if I had the knowledge and skill to say it; and a ten-thousandth of what ought to be said. But this is a preface, no more; the book has yet to be written. But the book of which this is a preface is the book written in the "fleshy tablets of the heart," and I hope it will take hundreds of years to complete. May this preface provide a start to its writing.