From Outside In

This morning I was reading a homily by St. Gregory the Great (d. 406) on Matthew 12:46, 50, the story of Jesus' family's vain attempt to visit him while he was preaching. Jesus' reply to those who were no doubt nudging and whispering and waving to get his attention to tell him that his mother and kinsmen were waiting outside was, "Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?....Whoever does the will of my father who is in heaven, he is my brother and sister and mother." A bit hard on his mother, but surely she of all people understood.

Gregory turns this story into a really regrettable bit of anti-Semitism, as was, sadly, the custom of many Christian preachers of his time. Equating Jesus' Jewish relatives with "the synagogue," he says, "[Jesus] does not acknowledge the synagogue because when it clung to the observance of the Law it did away with its spiritual understanding and established itself outside, guarding the letter." I was about to close the book in disappointed disgust--I hold Gregory in high esteem and had expected better--a little sliver of light shot out from between the pages and stung me in the eyes. Suppose for "the synagogue" I substituted "Genevieve?" I thought about how easy it is for me to shut out the words of Scripture as we sing them in our seven daily services (the Divine Office or Liturgy of the Hours) while I brood about something else, like my ever-present and ever-unfinished To Do list. Am I not establishing myself outside the words, guarding their letter by chanting them, but abandoning any claim to spiritual understanding? And what about the days when I run madly across the surface of things, keeping our customs, observing the Rule of Benedict, doing what I'm supposed to be doing--but skating along the thin skin of superficiality that stands between me and all the depth and richness of this contemplative monastic way of life? In fact, I realized, I'm very good at establishing myself outside of genuine life altogether, guarding its surface and refusing to plunge into its depths.

Three other famous "outsiders" crossed my mind. The first two also appear in the Scriptures, each one quite well known in his way. Neither has a name, belonging as they do to a parable (Luke 15). The younger of the two has a nickname: we call him "the prodigal son." His older brother has nothing at all to distinguish him. Both of them also chose to station themselves outside. The younger brother packed up all his worldly goods and left home to spend them on wine, woman and song. No doubt visions not of sugar plums but of happy pleasures danced in his head: he would have the best to eat and drink, he would have a host of friends around his table, he would have company in the night, or anytime he wanted it. Visionary sugar plums don't feed real hungers, but he didn't know that. When the visions evaporated, and he found himself cold, lonely and hungry, he finally recognized that he had mistaken "outside" as the place where all the good things of life were stored. Instead, he discovered to his chagrin, "inside," back in the home he had left, was the place where the truly good things were kept, above all the astonishing love of his forgiving father. At least he was smart enough to go back in.

His older brother was not so bright. He had kept his feet rooted at the old homestead, but he had in reality shut himself out of his home all along. He had wrapped himself up in a cloak of jealousy and resentment. He had not even requested, never mind claimed, all the good that might have come his way because, had he received it, as he surely would, he would have had to leave the nasty feelings outside and go in by the fire with his father. Resentment is oddly self-justifying and so, in a peculiarly twisted way, satisfying. To the very end of the story, we never learn whether he was ever able to make the decision to go in, though his father urged and urged him. We leave him, as the parable concludes, still standing outside.

I thought about how easy it is to shut oneself out in the cold, out of the real home of the spirit God has opened to us, even when God stands there in the door begging us to come on in. Like the prodigal, we can let ourselves be dazzled by far mirages: that forbidden relationship, that dishonest job, that money--well, it's the company's, but no one will ever know, will they?--that sugar plum over there always looks better than what we really treasure when we're in our right minds. And we sell out the treasure for such tawdry goods, sometimes--another TV show instead of a few minutes of prayer, a glamorous friend instead of Suzy who has been our best friend since kindergarten, even though she's now a little the worse for the wear of the years on the outside, a new opportunity instead of the steady job we could hold for a lifetime if we would. Any kind of excitement instead of the only kind of fidelity: God's, to us. I often wonder after the fact why I thought x or y or z was such a good idea at the time when I knew perfectly well from a long life's worth of experience that it would go flat in the end.

Or take the older brother. Like him, we can so easily refuse joy for the thin pleasure of ugly feelings, like resentment. We can stand outside shivering and sulking because the brother or sister got a feast, never seeing that we were also invited. Again, it's so easy to trade in the real happiness we have--the pleasure of a beautiful morning, the touch of a child's hand, the look of love in the eyes of someone we care about--for the chance to revel in our envy of the happiness we imagine someone else has. I'm reminded of Edgar Arlington Robinson's "Richard Cory":

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean-favoured and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good Morning!" and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich, yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine -- we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked and waited for the light,
And went without the meat and cursed the bread,
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet in his head.

So, who is the third outsider, you ask? (Or had you forgotten there was one?) Ah, the third is another prodigal who recorded famously his discovery that he was standing on the wrong side of the door of home:

"Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would not have been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace."

St. Augustine of Hippo (died 430).

His story ended happily. In fact, happily ever after, as far as we know. If he were here, and if he saw you or me standing outside, he'd be the first to say: "You don't have to stay out there. Come on in."

©2009 Abbey of St. Walburga

The Yen for Order

Summer undoes my careful allotment of time parcels to this and that--this day, this hour for administration, that other day, that other hour for writing my blog, and so on. Actually, life, aka God, undoes my careful allotment of time parcels all the time. And I realized this morning that I spend far too much time trying to tie them up again.

According to Genesis 1, "making order" is a quick way of describing God's creative work. God spends five days out of seven ordering time, space, and the first pragmatic interactions of created beings in a life-sustaining food chain. Only then does God set human beings down into an ordered cosmos, suggesting that a certain amount of order is essential to human survival. However, if you read carefully, you begin to notice that God is not particularly tied down to the kind of linear order laid out in your typical planner. (I wonder if the proliferation of calendars, planners, time management seminars, how-to-organize-your closet-your-desk-and- your-life books, and other gems of the human gift for parting one another from our money reflects a love of order or a frantic but fruitless scramble to impose it.) God creates light and darkness quite awhile before coming up with sun, moon and stars, for example. God makes provision for seed-bearing plants both to feed animal life and to proliferate into an undefined future to feed future generations of animal life but offers very little for the sustenance of marine life (in Genesis 1, not in the actual cosmos. This may be one more sign of the Israelites' utter disinterest in having anything to do with the seas and their denizens.) And there is the forever unanswered question about how Evil, the force that runs around undoing all order, got into the picture at all.

God's work of ordering has two facets that tend to elude me when I sit down to plan the tying up of my careful time parcels into nice, neat, diagrammable pages in my various calendars, planners, and notebooks, which, of course, I can never find when it comes time to put the diagrams into practice because my desk is such a jumble. The first is that God's creative energy all goes into orders that sustain the always-untidy business of life and living on a very grand scale. If we don't understand where cockroaches and mosquitoes fit (God's gonna have a lot of 'splainin to do in heaven), why mountains sometimes fall into the sea as the psalmist notes, what good hurricanes are, and above all why human beings, charged with the task of continuing the divine work of creating, make such an all-fired mess out of it without calling down on our heads another cosmic flood (see Genesis 6!), perhaps it's because we don't really understand what life in all its richness is.

The second facet of God's creative work that eludes me when I'm "planning," is that it always starts with chaos: the rather terrifying primal chaos of Genesis 1:1-2, or the degenerate human chaos with which the biblical new creation begins in the prophets' promises of a new promised land after the return from exile in Babylon or in the gospels' testimony to Christ, the restorer of all that has gone awry. In both cases, chaos is the essential preliminary to the work of creation. The primal chaos is what I've often called "a seething cauldron of possibilities" out of which God draws everything.

I am a creative person. We all are, whether our creativity makes Michelangelo's David or Bach's Magnificat or a birthday cake to delight the hearts of a roomful of four-year-olds or simply that unappreciated gift, a clean, uncluttered space in which we can live, move and have our being. We must be. At the end of Genesis 1, when we know very little yet about God except that God is an incredibly imaginative Creator, God says "let us make humankind in our image." Christian reflected has heaped all sorts of things into that basket, "the image of God," but that image begins with creativity. As a creative person, I need to start where God started: with chaos, with "the seething cauldron of possibilities" as yet unnamed, unsorted, apparently purposeless. If we try to explain Genesis 1 from the belief that God created ex nihilo (out of nothing), then we have to believe that God first made the chaotic mess from the Divine Word then drew all of created reality. Contemporary thinkers who have given us the chaos theory propose that God never actually reduced all that primal chaos into order: it is still among us and around us, still seething with possibilities, still giving birth to beings.

I wonder, then, if "chaos" is really an enemy to be confronted with the chair and whip of my various planners and licked into submission so that I can get on with life. I wonder if chaos isn't rather the perpetual treasure chest from which spill out all the possibilities that spurn creative work in all its forms. Human beings do need order, especially the truly primal order of purpose, to survive. But I wonder what would happen if I were finally to succeed in wrestling every breath of time, every corner of space, every piece of paper and dust bunny in my own small universe into the kind of careful order for which I seem to hanker. I wonder if I would find that not chaos but excessive order, neatly packaged in linear rows, is sterile.

©2009 Abbey of St. Walburga

The Widow's Mite

He looked up and saw rich people putting their gifts into the treasury; he also saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins. He said, "Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them; for all of them have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in all she had to live on."

Luke 21:1-4

She was a widow. And she was poor. In the scriptures, the two are often synonymous. Widows were bereft not only of their husbands but also of their primary means of support, unless they had children or other relatives able to care for them. There were rich widows, but they were rare. Poverty was the common lot of the woman left alone. Prudence would suggest that she conserve her resources. Neighbors would praise her for watching her pennies; relatives responsible for her would thank her; wisdom and custom would commend her. Yet here she is, bringing her last small coin to the Temple and casting it, unasked, among the offerings. Who would commend her for that bit of pious foolishness?

Jesus did. He saw something most bystanders would not: he saw that she saw something most bystanders could not. Ordinary folk, ruled by ordinary common sense, would look at the coin and see that it would not go far to feed and clothe her and keep a roof over her head. She looked at the coin and saw that God had given it to her to use for someone else’s good. Ordinary folk would look at her and see that she was in peril of perishing in her poverty. She looked at God and saw that divine providence would not abandon her. Ordinary folk would see that she had nothing. She saw that she had God. Ordinary folk would call her short-sighted. In terms of the reflection on short-sightedness in the previous posting, we might think of her as very far-sighted indeed.

Or so we might read her story. The gospel, in its usual maddening way, draws us into this tiny event by baiting it with unanswered questions: was she truly alone or did she have family? Why did she choose to give away her last coin? Did she know where the next one would come from? And why on God’s green earth did Jesus praise her? Surely he does not mean we should imitate her?

We can only wonder. Jesus left the scene without any explanation.

©2009, Abbey of St. Walburga

The Fog

My usual summer apology for the infrequency of postings!

This morning I woke up to thick fog. From my window, all I can see is a hint of rock, a ghost of tree, and fog. My world has grown very small. My range of vision is constricted by cataracts of gray wet mist. I know the water-rounded, lichen clad boulders rise up in a high cliff to meet the deep blue Colorado sky. I know the Ponderosa pines and junipers spring up out of sheer rock, or so it seems, across the cliff face. I know there are black pockets that hide the possibility of mountain lions. But no matter how hard a squint, I can’t see any of it. All I can see is hints, shadows, ghosts—and the relentless fog.

The scene has set me to thinking about shortsightedness. It seems to me that all of us carry around our own personal fog, settled around the hidden recesses of the ever-probing mind and hiding from us a great deal of what we know or guess or hope to be there. We suspect the existence of a larger world than we can see, but all we see of it is hints, shadows, ghosts—and the relentless fog that shuts us in. The fog is thicker for some of us than others, at some times than others, in some places than others. But it never lifts entirely, this side of the grave.

In fact, so used to it can we become that we cease to believe or guess or even hope that there is more behind it. We then hunker down within our blinding circle of mist and grow comfortable in a deepening certainty that what we see is all we’ll ever get.

It’s an old story. I think of the Israelites, not too far into the desert, screaming at God (or telling Moses to scream at God for them because they sometimes recognize that God might be a dangerous Someone to scream at). They scream because they’re hungry and thirsty and afraid. They’re town dwellers, farmers and laborers, used to a world run by Egyptians, though they carry a dim memory of times when it was not so, of places far away, of heroic ancestors and their God. But so dim is the memory that it has lost most of its reality and all of its power to animate them. It’s mostly, now, a matter of a good story to tell around the fire at night, with the events and names getting scrambled over time until no one knows anymore what really happened or to whom, or if anything really happened at all. Suddenly, they find themselves thrust out of Egypt into the alien, hostile desert as nomadic herders who must live from oasis to oasis because there are no wells, no town squares, no homes to go to at night. All they can see is wasteland and more wasteland and more wasteland beyond that, as far as the eye can reach. And so, quite reasonably, they scream to go home. They might have been slaves—they were slaves—but when they got up in the morning they could see the food in their larders, the water in the water jars, the vegetables and fruits growing in vibrant orchards, the flocks and herds safely penned or tethered or guarded for meat, milk, wool, and skins. Here, all they see is a dry, sandy circle of death closing in on them.

They grew shortsighted. They saw here and now. They saw their children hungry, their animals thirsty, their breadbaskets empty. They saw, in other words, their need. They lost sight of the grand promise of a land running with milk and honey, of a God who could part water and drown armies and restore to them the homeland they had lost so long ago they had nothing left of it but their vague stories.

You can’t really blame them. Hunger, thirst, and the threat of death lurking behind them are very tangible realities. Survival is an overwhelming drive. Let Moses, Aaron, Miriam and God get out of their way to the life they craved. Not long ago I read a novel called Black Monday by R. Scott Reiss. The premise of the novel was that bad guys had created a microbe that ate oil. The villains disseminated it through most of the oil fields of the world. The results were catastrophic: airplanes suddenly fell out of the sky as their oil vanished, cars slid to a silent halt on freeways during rush hour causing multiple vehicle disasters, and all kinds of machinery began mysteriously to break down. (The author paints all this devastation in such gripping colors that one is distracted from asking why the planes even got off the ground or the cars out of the garage if the bacteria multiplied and consumed oil at the rate later tracked by scientists.) The by-product of these mechanical horrors is the rather swift disintegration of the social fabric as families are faced with starvation as food distribution, then food production, grind to a terrifying halt, and homes are threatened with hypothermia as fuel oil ceases to generate heat. Normally law-abiding parents turn into looters, hoarders, hard-hearted guardians of a dwindling food supply for their children. Marginally law-abiding men and women become thieves, raiders and murderers for the sake of the illusory wealth and power available to the “haves” in a rising sea of “have-nots.” Jobs disappear, police can no longer patrol in useless vehicles, soldiers commandeer horse carts to get from one place to the other. The law of the jungle—kill or be killed—becomes the norm of a desperate world. There are heroic exceptions, or near-exceptions, but they are very few and powerless. The picture was dreadfully credible. It made a few complaining Israelites look like small potatoes indeed. (And even a small potato is a very risky thing to be in a world defined by “eat or be eaten.”)

The book made me realize, though, that the short-sightedness that afflicted those Israelites can become lethal. If we cannot see beyond the small circle of the self and its survival, we become dangerous protectors and predators of “us” vs. “them” or, eventually, “me” against “you.” I suspect that this dynamic of short-sightedness may be one way of thinking about what St. Paul means when he writes about the “law of the flesh” vs. “the law of the spirit” (e.g. Galatians 5:16-18). We heirs of a Greek philosophical worldview have often confused this common biblical distinction with “body” vs. “soul,” but the biblical world didn’t operate by those categories. The human being is the clay into which God had breathed the breath of life on the banks of a river in Eden (cf. Genesis 2:4b-7): every human being, good bad or indifferent, is “enspirited matter,” so to speak. In the New Testament, particularly in Paul’s work, “flesh” usually means the world untouched and untransformed by the life-giving Spirit of God let loose by the death and resurrection of Jesus, whereas “spirit” means humanity seized, possessed and made new by that Spirit. “Flesh” is radically self-centered. It is therefore, by definition, very short-sighted indeed: it can see no farther than the feeble circle of light cast by “me” and “mine.” Paul lists a series of nasty behaviors that result from the radical assertion of “me” over “you,” but they are not merely sins of our bodily being (Galatians 5:19-20). They are, as Jesus suggests in the gospel, sins of the “heart” (Matthew 15:17-20). The “heart” in the bible is that center where we take in the random bombardment of experience that assaults us second by second and organize it into a worldview out of which we can understand, think, believe, decide and act. Sins of the heart are actions produced by the way we look at the world and everything in it (and beyond it), including ourselves. If all I can see in the surrounding fog is what I need to survive, then I can readily believe myself entitled to go after it, no matter what that might cost anyone else.

The Israelites did not remain slaves imprisoned in a hostile Egypt. In spite of themselves, they were delivered and sent on their way toward the land promised to their ancestors long before. Even their desert shortsightedness could not, in the end, keep their children from the Land, though it caused most of the Exodus generation to perish in the desert they had chosen (cf. Numbers 13-14). Neither are we condemned to spend time and eternity in the fog. Fog does eventually burn off in the sun. We can look forward to that moment long before it comes, because even the worst fog is permeable to the light while it still hides the landscape from view. St. Gregory the Great describes us in our fogbound existence as people of the dawn:

While we do some things which already belong to the light, we are not free from the remnants of darkness…. When he writes, the night is passed, Paul does not add, the day is come, but rather, the day is at hand. Since he argues that after the night has passed, the day as yet is not come but is rather at hand, he shows that the period before full daylight and after darkness is without doubt the dawn, and that he himself is living in that period. It will be fully day for the Church of the elect when she is no longer darkened by the shadow of sin. It will be fully day for her when she shines with the perfect brilliance of interior light. This dawn is aptly shown to be an ongoing process when Scripture says: And you showed the dawn its place [Job 38:12].

So, in the midst of our self-focusing fog, Paul encourages us to look beyond its dark circle toward the larger world lit up for us even now by Jesus Christ, “the light of the world” (John 9:5): “the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” We may not be able to see very clearly yet, but we have a lamp to guide us through the fog toward the arriving day: “Your word is a lamp to my feet

and a light to my path” (Psalm 119:105). The Word maps out the basic route pretty succinctly: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37-39).

It takes courage to step out into the fog, but Christ reassures us, out of the light we can barely see, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid” (Matthew 14:27).

©2009, Abbey of St. Walburga

A Little While

"A little while, and you will no longer see me, and again a little while, and you will see me" (John 16:16).  So says Jesus to the baffled disciples gathered around him at the Last Supper.  This game of holy peek-a-boo caught my attention recently as I reflected on the event we call “the Ascension,” celebrated in our archdiocese last Sunday.  What was Jesus talking about?  What is Jesus talking about?

Obviously, Jesus was warning his disciples about his impending death.  In the most literal sense possible, he would disappear into the hidden realm of death on the cross and then disappear bodily into a sealed tomb.  Then, after his resurrection from the dead, he would reappear to them.  Seems simple enough.

But you never play peek-a-boo just once.  You hide your face behind your laced fingers the first time to whet the child’s interest; then you pop out to one side, saying “peek-a-boo!”  The child starts laughing.  So you do it again.  And again.  And again.  (This is how we stupid adults learn that once is not enough for a child, so don’t start something you don’t want to do over and over and over again.)

Jesus in fact did something similar with the disciples.  Over a period of forty days, according to the chronology of Luke’s gospel, he would appear to them and then disappear again.  Sometimes he appeared to an individual, as to Mary Magdalene in the garden (John 20:11-18) or to Simon Peter, an event of which we are told after the fact but do not witness (Luke 24:34).  Sometimes he appeared to small groups, as to the women on the road from the tomb (Matthew 28:9-10) or the two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35).  Sometimes he appeared to the whole gathering, as in the upper room (John 20:19-23).  They didn’t laugh.  They had never played this game before.  They greeted Jesus’ appearances with a mixture of surprise, fear, awe, and, as they began to realize he was really there in their midst, their beloved Teacher, with joy.  They grappled with confusion:  he was the same Jesus whom they had followed around Palestine for three years—he bore the wounds of the nails—but he was different.  He wasn’t a ghost.  What was he?  How did he get into a locked room?  Where did he come from?  Where did he go?  And just as they got used to the idea that he was genuinely around somewhere and might appear at any moment, he took off in a cloud and was seen no more (Acts 1:6-11).  That is what we call “the Ascension.”  But even then, messengers from heaven told the gaping disciples to shut their mouths and go on home.  They would see him again, coming as he had left them, on a cloud.  (The cloud is God’s favorite disguise in the scriptures.)  The game was not over.  It would pick up later.  Children are always disappointed but consoled by that promise.

However, Jesus was not really playing a  game, except insofar as we play games with children to teach them skills they will need to live in our rough old world.  Through his various appearances, Jesus was teaching the disciples how to see him differently.  They had been used to looking at him sleeping by the campfire like anyone else, or teaching on the hillside, or walking the dusty roads of their homeland.   When they got up every morning, they had only to look over, and there he was (unless he was off on the mountain alone praying, but they usually seem to have known where to find him when they needed him even then.)  Now, he began to instruct them on how to see him anew, not with their bodily eyes but with what St. Benedict might have called the “eyes of the heart,” had he thought of it.  (Benedict speaks of opening the “ears of your heart.”) Jesus would, he said, be with them always (Matthew 28:20).   If they looked and listened, they would find him in the familiar scriptures of their childhood, hidden but revealed in texts they had heard a million times but understood too literally to recognize him there (Luke 24:25-27).  They would find him in the practical, familiar act of breaking bread with them at table (Luke 24:30-31), but the act would become the heart of a sacramental ritual through which he would always make himself present to them.  They would even find him in the work they had always done, work that now took on a new meaning and a new shape, as John suggests in the highly symbolic episode of night fishing on the Sea of Galilee (John 21:7-14). 

One reason biblical stories have held their power over the human heart for centuries is that they always look like they are “then”—a long ago, far away, alien “then,” with its own customs, its own geography, its own vocabulary—but they are really “now.”  They pretend to be the story of the  ancient people of God and the first disciples, but they are our story also.  The game of peek-a-boo goes on.  The annual retelling of Jesus’ stories spread out over the course of the Church’s year is in part an act of memory, but it is also the script for a rehearsal.  As we commemorate the unfolding events of Jesus’ birth, ministry, suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension to glory at the Father’s right hand, we are learning how to read the true story of our own lives. 

The period of time between Jesus’ resurrection and ascension is part of this narrative lens through which we can read something about the rhythms of our own experience.  It is a time between seeing and seeing, between one kind of seeing and another.  All of us reach a moment—usually more than once—when the old ways of “seeing” or imagining Jesus or God fail us.  Familiar religious language, visual and verbal, sounds artificial, unrelated to our own very real struggles:

 —The pictures that moved us dissatisfy.  I remember when I became disenchanted with what I came to call “the Breck Shampoo Jesus” (no insult intended to a fine shampoo) who decorated the pictures in my Sunday school classroom or the holy cards the Sisters gave us to put in our prayer books.  He was too perfect, too neat and clean and well coifed, too remote from my world, to get me through hard days and bitter lessons in other people’s frailties and my own.

 —The biblical stories sound too much like “then,” too little like “now.”  Jesuit Father Thomas H. King notes the comic effect of Don Quixote’s insistence on using (and living) the language of the golden age of chivalry from times long ago and far away.  The language of the golden age may be beautiful, and often is, but, says King, we long sometimes for more of the language of our own iron age.   It means something to us because it is born of our own world’s experiences.  One of the demands of the prayer form known as lectio divina (prayerful reading of scripture) is that we work at bridging the gap between the world of the Bible and our own, with the ever-read help of the Holy Spirit.  “Listening” as a way of prayer requires a willingness to work to hear. 

 —The rituals of worship seem archaic, removed, inaccessible.  We have taken part in them so often that we know their surface well but have lost the key to the inner world they make present.  Especially in a culture that prizes passive entertainment over the labor of active participation, we surrender to the role of spectator at a spectacle that no longer touches us. 

 What do we do in this “dark night” between seeing and seeing?  My suggestion is that we look to the disciples and their experience between resurrection and ascension, ascension and Pentecost.  After the resurrection, they were often as much at a loss as we are; they took off for elsewhere (Emmaus)  or a past that comforts by its familiarity (the fishing expedition in John 21);  but it seems that they never quite turned their back on the possibility of Jesus.  When he appeared, they were glad, even when they remained frightened and confused.  After the ascension, they put all their hope in the promise that the Spirit would come.  They gathered and prayed—though for what, they likely did not know, because they had not yet experienced Pentecost.  They trusted, they hoped, they prayed—and they waited.  Above all, they waited. 

And sometimes, so must we.  The key to the waiting is the genuine expectation that we are waiting for someone who is really coming, no matter how unlikely it seems to our impatience, our desire for comfort, our temptations to look elsewhere for any easier way to fill our longing. Expectation is a vigorous hope that refuses the possibility of disappointment. Memory helps:  we have seen Christ before, however imperfect we now find the modes of our seeing, so we know we could see him again.  Trust, blinded but not suffocated by the cloud, matters.  He did say, "I am with you always"--even in the dark.  Expectation, memory and trust keep us looking in the places he showed his first disciples:  scriptures, worship, and the ordinary activities of our daily lives.  And we have been told that he will reappear out of the cloud that hides him. Then, once again, perhaps he will take our silly hands away from our eyes — his own were never covered— and say, “Peek-a-boo.”  

Of course I find this much easier to write than to live, but the promise haunts me:   “Again a little while, and you will see me….your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you” (John 16:16, 22).

 Note:  See Thomas M. King, Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (Sheed & Ward, 1989). 

©2009, Abbey of St. Walburga

 

Beyon Emmaus: A Poem

Today, the Third Sunday of Easter, we read the story of Jesus' appearance to the disciples after his meeting with the two unnamed disciples on the road to Emmaus.  Like all the stories of Easter appearances, and like the Acts of the Apostles as it recounts the life of the early post-Easter Christian community, this one reminds us that Easter was and is a life-changing event not only for Jesus but for every life he touched and touches.  We see the first disciples and the early Christians struggling to make sense out of what they have witnessed, to pick up the pieces of lives whose basic assumptions had been blown to bits, to forge a future out of hints and guesses (with lots of help from the Holy Spirit) in order to be faithful to their call.  Any conversion that brings new life presents us with these same tasks.  They may be exciting, life-giving, joyful--but they are always also confusing, sometimes frightening, even paralyzing as we fight to get our bearings in a whole new world we had not expected.  This poem seeks to express Easter's effect.  

On Easter’s road we meet the Mystery,

half seen, half hidden from unwilling eyes

that know the invitation but resist

lest we be burst asunder by surprise

and find ourselves made new before we take

farewell of what we were, before it dies.

The taste of daily bread seems passing sweet,

though yesterday we found it hard and thin.

New leaven makes a wilder loaf that breaks

in fragments we can barely gather in,

for all our baskets now have grown too small

to hold the feast we hardly dare begin.

 

The wine is heady as it spills from cups

that careful craft cut shallow by intent

to mete out life by sips too cautious now

to hold in check the vintage that has rent

our wineskins with a stone-displacing force

erupting from a fountain never spent.

 

We thought we knew you when you spoke to us

the word that seized our lives and turned them round

to face a different sun than we had seen

along the roads we tramped, eyes on the ground

to measure steps with care lest pebbles trip

or unsuspected crossroads, met, confound.

What fools we were—we never knew you then,

who hardly know you now by voice or face,

but only in the breaking of the bread

catch sight of what you are and were.  The grace

spills through your wounded hands and floods the room

with fragrance from some strange, familiar place.

©2008,  Abbey of St. Walburga

Reprinted from Beside the Streams of Babylon (Virginia Dale, CO: St. Walburga Press, 2008). All rights reserved. 

Lazarus Among the Dead: A Poem for Holy Saturday

This poem was written during the fifth week of Lent, when the gospel of the raising of Lazarus is read either on Sunday or, as this year, on an alternative weekday. It was not written for Holy Saturday, but it seems appropriate as a reflection on one connection between the story of Lazarus of Bethany and the story of Jesus as we recall the line from the creed: "He descended into Hell."

Today I took the book in hand and read
the tale of Lazarus among the dead.

***
The darkness, gray, is tinted by the stench
of rotting souls. Their faces, white, drift in
and out of sight.

“Here we exist between
the day and night, our twilight timeless. Why?
Oh yes, we know. We are the ruin. Here
the garden stood, and we its trees. You have
heard tell the fruits that we were born to bear:
love, joy, and patience, peace and gentleness,
staunch faithfulness and generosity
and kindness, luminous upon the stem
of self-restraint.

Behold us now: the worm
found invitation in our discontent
with what we were but did not know we were.
We drank the wormwood and the gall, and lo!
the beauty blackened on the branch,
the sweet fruit poisoned to the core, the roots
sunk deep in streams polluted by our choice.
And we are legion. Look: our children’s seed
and theirs, down generations wasted by
our sin.

The tree of life is barred to us,
but we await in this gray world the spill of light
to flow from its pierced fruit.”

The Voice breaks through
their whispers. “Lazarus, come out.” Unbound,
he sees the sun. The Eyes are dark. They know
what Lazarus has seen. The others think
him pale from four long days of silence in
the dark of death. He wishes it were so.

***
I laid aside the book in cold and dread;
for I had seen my face—among the dead.


Genevieve Glen, OSB; ©2009, Abbey of St. Walburga, Virginia Dale CO. Once again the technical limitations of Blogger make it impossible to place the broken lines correctly. Here I have chosen to insert a blank line before each of the lines that should be indented to complete the previous line.