Pray, with ceasing
The news reports of pastors and various others gathering together in defiance of calls to practice social distancing is rooted in a basic theological and philosophical problem. It is a scandal that overzealous people of faith are passing on the coronavirus out of a misguided piety.
The philosophical problem: Aristotle nailed it when he observed that virtue is a mean between two extremes. In this case, the extremes are zealous piety and complete indifference. The virtue is finding the right way to worship in ways that respect social distance.
The theological problem: some people think that worship always means going to a church building and meeting other people to do certain things together. But that’s just not true. Remember that Jesus himself instructed his disciples to pray in secret:
“When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may see them. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you. (Mt 6:5-6)
Sometimes, authentic worship sometimes means going into what Teresa of Ávila called an “interior castle.” This period of social distancing offers all of us to explore the beauty of this interior castle and to discover the profundity of our inner life, where God waits patiently for us to draw near.
Saint Ignatius of Loyola once wrote to a group of young Jesuits, criticizing their zealousness in prayer. Get outside and work, he effectively tells them — sometimes the desire for prayer is selfish and misdirected. Let me quote him at some length.
Spiritual infirmities such as tepidity are caused, not only by chills but also by fevers, that is, by excessive zeal. Saint Paul says, let your service be a reasonable service [Rom. 12:1], because he knew the truth of the words of the Psalmist, the king in his might loves justice [99:4], that is, discretion…. In the same vein does Saint Bernard speak: the enemy has no more successful ruse for depriving the heart of real charity than to get her to act rashly and not in keeping with spiritual reasonableness. “Nothing in excess” said the philosopher. … If one fails to observe this moderation, he will find that good is turned into evil and virtue into vice.
Pope Francis famously described the Church as a “field hospital.” At the time, it was just a colorful metaphor. But today that image is profoundly important. The Church must be in triage mode. There is simply too much work to do.
Paradoxically, today the Church (all of us) are called to do everything we can to support hospitals, including staying home from churches. Now is the time to worship in secret (as it were), mindful that a rightly ordered zeal to worship God in one’s interior castle is no less a commitment to build the Kingdom of God more profoundly within our own hearts.
