Tag: prudence

All right, then, let’s talk about Catholics doing yoga

War? Schism? Genocide? Fraud, pestilence, global conspiracies? These are all child’s play. Back in my day, Catholics used to spend our days on the internet arguing about really important things, like yoga.

Oh yes. It’s finally summer, the streams are flowing, and I’d dearly like to start a fight about the spiritual dangers of banana pose.

I’ve been doing yoga, off and on, for four years now, and it has changed my life. It’s been great for my joints and my digestion, it builds muscle and helps me sleep, it’s brought my blood pressure back to normal, and I really enjoy showing fealty to false deities and demons. All while wearing revealing pants!

I kid, I kid. What is true is that I love yoga and it has changed my life, but whenever I talk about it in Catholic circles, someone freaks out and says I’m gonna catch a demon.

Believe it or not, I take that warning seriously. I think the world is full of things we can’t see, and it’s entirely possible to slide into a state that welcomes in malignant spirits, and we shouldn’t mess around with spiritual practices that are not our own.

I also believe the body has meaning. When I make the sign of the cross, I believe that it has an inherent meaning. It means something when an actor in a movie does it without any understanding of what it signifies. It meant something even when my mother, far gone in dementia, made the sign of the cross on herself out of sheer habit. When I have sex, THAT has inherent meaning, even if my thoughts at the time are not necessarily fully engaged with passages from Theology of the Body. What we do with our bodies matters.

So even if I don’t MEAN to honor Shiva when I manage to pull off a wobbly natarajasana, isn’t there something wrong with a Catholic doing the thing that was designed in ancient times to honor Shiva?

These questions bothered me. So I did what any good Catholic would do: I looked it up.

It turns out the thing that springs to mind when we say “yoga” — yes, even the kind with gongs and incense and statues of elephants — is about 60 years old. There is an ancient practice that was once called “yoga” but it was mainly concerned with interior, spiritual concepts and practices, and barely even mentions the body. Yoga as we know it, and as most modern people practice it, is physical exercise that happens to have originated in India; and some people — some eastern, some western — have done their best to grandfather in some spiritual practices.

But historically, the only common denominator between ancient yoga and modern yoga is India. The spiritual elements of modern yoga are about as rooted in ancient pagan spirituality as Totino’s Orange Chicken Pizza Rolls (WHICH ARE A REAL THING) are rooted in old Napoli. There is a connection, sort of? But not a meaningfully historical one.

However! In this essay, I will not claim that, because of this lack of seamless historicity, there is therefore no possible spiritual danger that can come from getting into yoga.

Read the rest of my latest column for The Pillar (subscriber content).

Photo by Mohamed Hassan form PxHere

Be ye patient, as God is patient

When people start to really hit their stride at adults, they will often laugh at themselves for what gets them excited. “You know you’re really grown up when you’re thrilled to get a new toaster,” they might say, or: “A clear sign of maturity: I can’t wait to tell my friends about these amazing new dryer sheets I discovered.”

Spiritual adulthood is kind of like that, too. The things that you once passed over barely noticing, much less valuing, now rock your world. I remember discovering, for instance, that prudence was actually kind of a big deal.

I had once considered it sort of a loser’s virtue, something that you practice if you don’t have the imagination to excel at anything more interesting. But then my circumstances changed, my life got rearranged, and I realized that not only was prudence really hard, but the steady practice of it could yield beautiful things. And that’s why it’s one of the cardinal virtues! Turns out the church knows what it’s talking about; how about that.

This year’s revelation: Patience. Patience is technically a secular virtue, and not one of the three theological virtues (faith, hope, and love) or one of the cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude), or even one of the gifts of the holy spirit (wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord). But when you imbue a secular virtue with faith, then it becomes something sacred.

Patience, like prudence, maybe doesn’t sound very impressive. It sounds like not doing something, and since when is that something to get excited about? Patience also gets a bad rap because there are all kinds of harmful or thoughtless or cowardly ways to be patient.

You could patiently wait for someone to stop hurting you or your family, even as they give no indication they are trying to change. This is bad for your family, bad for you, and bad for the perpetrator, as it just gives them more opportunities to sin.

Or you could be endlessly patient with yourself while you do the exact same stupid or harmful things over and over and over again, without ever jamming a wedge in those spinning wheels and taking a closer look at what is making them keep turning.

Or you could be patient with a bad situation because you think, consciously or unconsciously, that it’s exactly the crappy kind of thing that a crappy person like you deserves, and why would you even dare to hope for something better, like decent people get?

Or you could be outwardly patient, “keeping sweet” and putting on a mask of unperturbed tranquillity, while under the surface you’re plotting how to get even in subtle ways; or maybe telling yourself that you just need to sit tight until God swoops down and avenges you, humiliating and crushing your enemies, which is something you will enjoy heartily.

You could certainly call these things patience, because you’re quietly waiting without fussing or fighting while something undesirable continues. That is secular patience. But sacred patience is something very different.

Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

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