Tracks #2

The Oxford English Dictionary at the verb “to track” - I.1.a. - 1565 – transitive. To follow up the track or footsteps of; to trace the course or movements of; to pursue by or as by the track left; with down, out, up, to follow up or trace until found or caught.

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The accomplishment of our national Election last week compelled me to think deeper about what had happened. We eventually learn that rarely do we understand something consequential happening while it is happening. It is only afterwards that we may begin to understand – ³² Then they said to each other, ‘Did not our hearts burn within us as he talked to us on the road and explained the scriptures to us?’¹  -  if we have trained ourselves in the discipline of recollection.

But what is recollection? What does the dictionary say?  


Notice “the action of calling something to memory”.  When one is in the thick of a significant event, we are invaded by images and feelings, taken possession of by our reactions to it. In short: we lose our composure, we lose our “calmness of mind, self-possession.”  A deliberate, dispassionate “calling into memory” is not possible.  The impact of a particularly difficult circumstance renders us, at least for the moment, intemperate.  We are dominated by our feelings.  Consider this that Josef Pieper wrote:

When a circumstance has knocked us off our foundation, we must insist that we regain our composure, forcing ourselves to quit reacting.


It is for just such moments that the cardinal virtue of Temperance comes into play, helping us get our disordered affections back into right relation to our intellect.  

Reacting to something is not the same as thinking about it.  

How are we to stop reacting, so that we can with composure begin to think?  

Well, I have found it helpful to have ready at hand certain words to repeat to myself. Some of my favorites are these. (1) I say to myself, ‘Steady, Rick” - a command to myself; or (2) I repeat to myself, saying it in a non-cynical or bitter way, “Rick, it just is”,  or as my longtime friend, Gary, likes to repeat, “It is what it is”.  This reminds me that reality is filled with help if we accept it, “taking a long, loving look at the real”; or (3) I recall how Jesus, awakened by His terrified disciples shouting at Him in their sinking fishing boat, stood up and rebuked the storm.

I ask Jesus, serene and fierce, to stand up inside my inner tumult and rebuke my reactive state of alarm or anger or confusion, asking Him to restore my composure.  Only when calmness returns – we call it self-mastery - I regain my capacity to reconstitute the whole calamitous experience in my memory and to begin to think about it, asking Christ to help me understand what (actually) happened.


In these days after the national and State elections, what has my recollection begun to reveal to me?

Well, first off, in the proper theological understanding of discernment, which is a gift of the Holy Spirit, we are never given by God the ability to know what someone else is supposed to do, or even what we are supposed to do (i.e., inside of some group of belonging). I am only given by the Spirit the ability to know what I must do given the concrete circumstances into which I have been thrown.  

Again, what has my recollection begun to reveal to me?  

The political waves of discontent, of vengeance, of settling scores, of being offended will wash over us, threatening at times to drown us, sometimes tempting us to despair or to indulge a self-satisfied cynicism, encouraging us to indulge in name-calling rather than honoring the only Name that matters. Yes, all of this.

But my recollection reminds me that there is nothing, in all of this chaos, that directly affects my ability, my responsibility, to do what I am capable of doing for others, doing that with all the love in my heart, exercising every power of mind and heart on behalf of the common good.  Remember how our world began with the words, “Let there be light” ...and there was light?  Well now that light is me, each one of us, a “temple of the Holy Spirit” as I was taught who I am, and to Whom I belong, when I was a Catholic youth being prepared to receive the Sacrament of Confirmation.


I love this word from Paul’s most “fiery” letter:  


Let us together pray for our composure, for a strengthening in each of us the habit of recollection, and above all, that we each may be made worthy to be of real help to God.

¹ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Lk 24:32.

² In Josef Pieper: An Anthology, selection #29. At this current cultural moment in America, we could hardly do better than to read the works of this learned and wise scholar of the virtues. That is, reading his works in close relation to the Scriptures, to the Gospels in particular, because in Jesus we can see what these virtues look like when fully possessed by and activated in a person.

³ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Mk 4:39.

⁴ New American Bible, Revised Edition. (Washington, DC: The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2011), Lk 18:40–42.

⁵ New American Bible, Revised Edition. (Washington,DC: The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2011), Jn 16:33.

⁶ The New Jerusalem Bible (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Mt 5:14–16.

⁷ The New Jerusalem Bible  (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Auckland: Doubleday, 1990), Ga 5:13–17.