Where Two or Three are Gathered in My Name

On my night table sits a copy of the Dialogue of St. Catherine of Siena and I peruse it on a semi-regular basis as the problem it deals with, the alignment of our faculties of memory, knowledge and love is my problem and everyone else's problem too. Do I love as I know? No I do not and the section I read last night brought this home to me with unique force. Matthew 18:20 takes on a typically medieval allegorical twist in her treatment for the two, or more properly three, who are gathered in the presence of the Word, are the familiar Augustinian faculties of remembering, knowing and willing (or loving). The Word gathers the manifold into the unity of co-inherence in which the faculties mutually support rather than inhibit each other. This is true externally, in the community, but also true in the inwardness of the mind. With the shrewdness of true mystics though, St. Catherine continues by pointing out that the Word is not present in any gathering of ONE. The word is not present to solitude but only to two or three or more. One is not a gathering of any kind and if there is no gathering there is no mediation by the Word. There is a tension and relaxation in the interchange of solitude and engagement whereby each reinforces the other: interior life enriching social engagement and vice versa.

One reads saints and mystics to be convicted of sin or, if this language sounds too harsh to modern ears, to see where one’s greatest temptation lies. I was indeed somewhat floored by this passage for a gathering of one is just what I, all too often am. I can be ‘alone’ or alone in a room full of company. I have figured out there are reasons for this grounded in the usual banal stew of trauma, anxiety and depression. That does not alter the fact that everything from calling my siblings to stepping out of the house is an effort and sometimes an impossible effort. It is a ghastly fact about me that covid-19 has hardly affected me at all and indeed is reinforcing my worst tendencies to seclusion and self-isolation. Yet St. Catherine is irrefutable on this point: you cannot be a Christian by yourself and even if you are an eremite it is because you are praying so intensely for the world that you cannot be bothered by any external distraction.

Of course one limitation of mystics is that they are always telling us how to develop an interior life and perhaps this is because the atomized standpoint of us late-capitalist weirdoes is something they knew little of. St. Catherine, after all, had a dozen siblings. They lived in conditions that encouraged a desperate search for privacy! In an age of cocooning and isolation how does one develop an exterior life and consequently a healthier and less obsessive interior one? How do you translate your convictions about justice into effective worldly action when you are a frogman or Martian much of the time or, to use the term coined by Christopher Lasch, a minimal self?