“I shall also give a white amulet upon which is inscribed a new name, which no one knows except the one who receives it.”’
Revelation 2:17
A few months ago, I was struck by a line about loneliness in a children’s story. A powerful and successful artist was said to be in control of every detail of his life—from when he slept to what he ate—except for his own loneliness. To be with other people requires surrendering our control of the minutia of our days. Companionship necessitates flexibility in our hours and habits. For some, the pangs of loneliness are not enough to compel a change.
Why is that? Even introverted people long for human connection. Conditions like anxiety and depression are so obviously exacerbated by isolation. The antidote to isolation is being with other people. How has our society become so blind to this basic fact?
Reading the insightful blog at LifeCraft by Professor John Cuddeback offers some helpful insight. LifeCraft, formerly known as Bacon from Acorns, a blog documenting the fledgling homesteading efforts of Cuddeback and his wife and children, LifeCraft offers reflections on making a home and establishing family culture. Cuddeback is a seasoned professor of philosophy, so I trust his analysis of St. Thomas Aquinas where I would not venture on my own.
As an aside, it’s quite hard to prove St. Thomas wrong. People like to nitpick on the antiquated notions that led him astray on some minor details, but on philosophical principles, the man’s work is unshakeable. So much so, in fact, that a high school teacher recalled his own teacher, an atheist, turning frequently to the Summa, announcing that he would look into what “the source” had to say about a particular subject.
Back to LifeCraft. In a post from earlier this year, Cuddeback promises “Ten Words to Transform Our Home Life.” The ten words, quoting from Aquinas, read: “A spiritual thing is not known unless it is possessed.” This is followed with the line from Revelation, “No one knows but he who receives it.”
Cuddeback rightly notes, “It [the nature of spiritual goods] explains so much of human unhappiness—especially today—while also pointing to a remedy, starting right in our homes.” How so? In order to recognize a lack of spiritual goods, we have to first receive what is missing. Like Pygmalion, afflicted by loneliness but uncertain about what is missing, we can become stuck in a materialistic, hedonistic treadmill, failing continually to realize what we should desire because we do not yet possess it.
Cuddeback explains further, “By spiritual goods, we should think broadly in this context.” He adds, “Generally, spiritual goods are in specific ways that we act, especially with others.” So much of human life has been set up to facilitate companionship, sharing the hours of our days with others, and adding a spiritual dimension to the necessary tasks of eating, sleeping, cleaning up, and getting on with life.
Cuddeback elaborates on the nature of “spiritual things,” writing, “Examples are many and right at hand. Done well, sitting by the fire and reading aloud can be a profoundly ‘spiritual’ experience. Deep personal relationships; real personal presence; rich conversation; shared good work: these things enacted in countless ways can constitute the heart of human life and so also the deepest of human formation—precisely because in them people can ‘receive’ goods that far transcend the material conditions of their enactment.”
If our society is increasingly estranged from human closeness, the spiritual warmth of communal meals, singing songs together with others, the joy of shared prayer, individuals will not see the value in these activities. It can be easy to think that given all the time in the world, people will gravitate to studying physics and listening to opera, but absent the human relationships that give those subjects meaning, people will generally fritter away their time on physical comforts that are fleeting and fail to fully satisfy.
This truth about spiritual things also explains, in part, why societies with a plummeting birth rate cannot be easily brought back from the brink. As fewer people experience the benefits of children, there are fewer people who can even recognize the inherent good of children for society.
There is loads more to say about what it means to receive spiritual things, but one practical lesson is to make our spiritually-rich exercises habitual. So often, we fall off the wagon. Our music playing ceases for weeks or months at a time. The family read-alouds disappear. Time outside is curtailed or nonexistent. The first time back, that first glorious evening around the piano, a thrilling new story read aloud, an unbounded afternoon in fresh air, can be so bewilderingly satisfying. Why did we go so long without it? Simply because when we neglect these richest parts of our lives, we no longer desire them.
Our home life, then, should revolve around the continual practice of activities that matter. Every time there is a lively dinner conversation with guests, oodles of children running in and out of the house in happy play, we can think confidently, “We should do this more!” If there is not a set time such a meal will happen again, however, it is unlikely.
What if, instead, we regularly schedule such events? Once a month, a guest. Every afternoon, a teatime with musical accompaniment. Every Wednesday morning, a long walk in the woods. All is an undeserved gift. Most are available at any time. But we have to train ourselves to be receptive to these great goods, because the world is such that we will not remember to miss them when we do not have them.
