Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

In our Office Gospel today, Jesus warns his disciples, warns us (!) “of practicing [our] piety before others in order to be seen by them.”  It’s a really important warning!  And it can often be misconstrued or misunderstood as warning us against practicing our piety in general.

So…one of the first things we ought to talk about is what appears to be a critique of performance or performativity in Jesus’ warnings here.  Jesus seems to be warning us against a performative piety and urging us towards a personal kind of religion or religious expression (or spirituality) that is thought of as more authentic for being less public and more personal.  The difficulty here, though, is twofold, the first being: if we’re to understand the performativity of something as indicative of its inauthenticity, then how are we to understand the various aspects of our identities that are socially performed…and that are far from inauthentic for being so?  Identity, in all its facets and complexities, has a social dimension that necessarily includes a degree of performance.  The second difficulty in labelling all public performance of identity (religious or otherwise) as inauthentic, but private performance of the same as more true or real, is that such a position tends to forget that even in private, even when left alone with our thoughts, we perform ourselves to and for ourselves.  That something is “personal” doesn’t guarantee that it’s authentic or “real.”  That something is “public” doesn’t guarantee that it’s inauthentic or “fake.”

In fact, spirituality is never a purely private or personal affair.  Beloved, if you can show me someone whose faith is so purely personal that it has no discernible impact (however small) on the good of the people or communities in which they’re situated, I’ll show you someone whose faith is solipsistic and self-oriented…because that’s what their lives are revealing about their faith!  Part of what it means to pray without ceasing is living into the realization that our lives and our prayer are one and the same…and that includes every aspect of our lives, public and private.  If the practice of the Christian religion has no discernible impact in us and those around us with respect to growing and flourishing in faith, hope, and love, then we might wish to consider practicing in a new way or getting honest about what sort of religion we’ve actually been practicing!

The point here, then, is less about being seen to perform or practice one’s faith, and more about who is watching and how the regard of who is watching is subsequently shaping our faith.  To practice in order to be seen by other people (or even only ourselves), is to invite our practice to conform itself to a merely human regard.  Our practice, in this case, becomes less about being an instrument of transformative grace, and more about currying favor or fashion or fame, shutting the door to the wellbeing of others to focus on an image of the self.  We’ll ultimately find ourselves practicing a way-of-being-faithful only to ourselves, to an image of ourselves, an idol of ourselves, and that will burn us out and exhaust us if it doesn’t occasion a full-on spiritual crisis of one sort or another eventually…and it will burn out and exhaust the people around us, too, because whatever our faith is in this case, it will resist turning us outward toward looking after the good of our neighbor.  It will just be the surpassing emptiness of a self completely absorbed in its own surpassing emptiness.

But to enter our little room—which is to say, to enter into the silence of our hearts—to pray and to practice from that humble place within us that yearns most deeply for God and in which God desires to fully dwell from the depths of God’s own heart—this is to allow ourselves to be seen by God, and to have our faith, our life, our practice, our prayer shaped by the loving regard of the Holy Other who desires us and loves us and delights in us and seeks to transform us into a people of love.

Dear and Beloved Friend!  If we can practice from this other-oriented un-self-conscious place in the ground of our soul, the center of hearts…then whether in public or in private, in prayer, in almsgiving, or in fasting, in work or play, in rest or in activity, the focus of our practice will not be on us, nor on our self-regard, nor on the regard of others, but on God.  And the reward we receive will not be mortal favor, fashion, or fame, but an increase in us of faith, hope and love: our reward will be becoming more fully human as our lives become more transparent to and illuminated by God.

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+