Proper 12 B - Jul 26, 2015

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Joseph Wallace-Williams, n/OHC
Proper 12 B – Sunday, July 26, 2015

2 Kings 4:42-44
Ephesians 3:14-21
John 6:1-21 (Track 2)

A circus elephant

It was now dark . . . The sea became rough because a strong wind was blowing . . . Then they saw Him walking on the sea and coming near the boat, and they were terrified. But he said to them, "It is I; do not be afraid." John 6: 17b-20

As a young boy I loved the circus.  I loved seeing the lions, the tigers, the bears and the flying trapeze artist and, the jugglers . . . it was just so exotic! 

Now I must admit when I was younger I always got nervous with the elephant act. Think about it; the lions and tigers are in a cage but the elephants are such massive animals and there was no barrier between them and us. I was always worried that there was going to be some type of elephant coup d’etat and as a result pure pandemonium would break out! But I was never one for an overactive imagination.

Now as I reflect back on my anxiety and then think about why is it that the elephants were able to do all of those tricks and obey their tiny human trainers.

I realized that the elephants have become comfortable with their captivity,
• Literally, their leash has been the limitation on their ability to grow because of fear.
• The politics of fear have been introduced into the spirit of the animal. 
• And as a result they will always stay in place, never moving outside of where it has been dictated that they should operate.

I have come to believe that the most dangerous type of domesticated animal is one that has nothing to lose. Fear, in the words of Howard Thurman:
• “Is the one thing that dogs the footsteps of the oppressed by pressing their backs against the wall.
• It is when the spirit of fear operates within us that we become locked into patterns of behavior and ways of thinking and being that serve only to hold us back from the abundant life that Christ gives us.”

Now, the dictionary tells us that: “Fear is a normal human emotional reaction, a built-in survival mechanism signaling us of danger and preparing us to deal with it.”

The Writers of Scripture too have taken note of anxiety and fear: 
• "Do not be afraid," 
• "Fear not," or 
• "Do not fear" 
Occur in the Bible 107 times, and the word "fear" appears 314 times. 

In each and every one of those times they are mentioned as two specific types of fear. The first type is beneficial and is to be encouraged: fear of the Lord. This type of fear is a reverential awe of God; a reverence for God’s power and glory. 

The second type is a detriment and is to be not only discouraged, but overcome. That fear, as one writer puts it: 
“Is a dark room where negatives are developed.”

The problem with fear is that it can lead us to turn in on ourselves. In the Scriptures Jesus doesn't condemn fear. No, he doesn't want us to be crippled by it. So when Jesus said to his disciples, “Do not be afraid," in each case he used a verb tense that suggests continuance. In other words, he told them: "Don't keep on fearing."

But the sad fact is fear plays a major role in our lives. All of us have fears and some would say we have good reason to be afraid. But when we are honest with ourselves we know that most if not all of the fears we carry around aren't big societal fears. They are the personal fears that have to do with individual problems that we each face: 
• What will happen to me as I grow older? 
• Will this community last? 
• Will I ever meet that one special person?
• What will happen to me when I get out of my head and into my heart? 
• What will happen to me if I risk giving love and receiving it in return? 
• What will come of me if I let go of my anger and resentment and risk forgiveness? 

God invites us to exercise our faith in the face of every fear-filled circumstance of our life. By evaluating every situation from the mind-set that God is Lord over all things in heaven and on Earth.  No, I can't recommend that headline hyped that caters to the part of the brain that controls fear. 

What I CAN DO is testify of a divine promise for the heart, mind and life. 
A promise that says in Isaiah 41:10 “Fear not, I am with You; be not dismayed, for I am Your God; I will strengthen You, I will help you, I will uphold You with the right hand of My righteousness.” And to that Divine promise I respond like the Psalmist in Psalm 56:11, 
“I’m proud to praise God. 
Fearless now,
I trust in God; 
What can mere mortals do to me?”- The Message version

What the psalmist is saying is that regardless of what happens, she will trust in God. I think this is the key to facing fear, total and complete trust in God turning to God even in the darkest times. It is this type of trust that delivers us from the fear that:
• Freezes 
• Panics  
• And paralyzes us. 

I believe it was Rabbi Hillel, one of the great heroes and scholars of Judaism from the 1st century: who said,  

"Every morning we wake up, the scales are equally balanced between good and evil. What we do during the day will determine where the scales fall.”

And that is the question for us: what are we going to do this day? 
• Will We be paralyzed by fear? 
• Will We live in the comfort of our captivity? 
Or will We move from the place of our comfort and into a new place where we can meet God face to face?  

There is a story a dear friend and mentor told me once. It’s a story of a gentleman that has his first opportunity to preach at a small country church. The young seminarian stood before the people, had all of his notes put together so beautifully, and was ready to preach. But, of course, back then they did not have any type of AC, so all of the windows were open. 

A nice, beautiful breeze came in and blew away all of his notes! He did not know where he was in his sermon. He did not know exactly what to say. I think that the only thing he could say was:
"Ain't God all right? 
Ain't God Good ? 
Ain't God all right?" 

And, of course, everybody was bowing their heads just praying for this young man. Everybody in the church knew that he was not saying much of anything. But there was an elder saint who kept on saying, 
• Go ahead! Preach it! 
• Thats right! 
• Say it!"

Immediately following the service, after everybody left, he decided to find this elder saint and go up to her and speak to her and says:
"Now, you know that my notes went everywhere."She said, Yes, baby, I saw that!" "You know that I wasn't making any sense." She said, "That was absolutely true that you were not making any sense!" So the young man said, "Then why were you encouraging? Why were you shouting the entire time as if I had an incredible sermon?"And she smiled and looked back at him and simply said this,:
"Just because you didn't do your job, 
doesn't mean I'm not going to do mine!"

All of us have a job to do. We cannot be paralyzed by fear. 

It is our duty with God’s help to transform and change our condition and The condition of other people. An Asian wisdom saying puts it this way: “If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to, nothing to fear. If you aren't afraid of dying, there is nothing you can't achieve." Beloved you have nothing to lose!

Proper 10 B - Jul 12, 2015

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Will Owen, n/OHC
Proper 10 B – Sunday, July 12, 2015

Amos 7:7-15
Ephesians 1:3-14
Mark 6:14-29

Christ seduces us and then draws us on to martyrdom

Christ seduces us and then draws us on to martyrdom.

Martyrdom often confounds us, even repulses us. Or we may look at martyrs—like Oscar Romero, for instance—as deified persons who possess a kind of holiness we ordinary people lack. And, of course, there are the ridiculous examples of martyrs. Take, for instance, the group that Brother Bede likes to refer to who claims to have as a relic the head of John the Baptist as an infant. But however we do so, we dismiss martyrdom to our own detriment. It is at the very heart of the Christian story of redemption and new life. Before Jesus is raised from the dead, he is martyred on a Cross. And he makes it perfectly clear that if we are to follow him, we must share that fate.

Christ seduces us and then draws us on to martyrdom.

Martyrdom rests on our obedience to the Word speaking in our hearts, and it is by the light of Christ that we walk the road that leads to our own death. Obedience has as its root the Latin word that means more simply to listen, and the kind of obedience that Christ asks of us is at its heart a deep listening to the Beloved speaking within us, calling us forward, whispering our name. The Beloved’s voice is often seductive. It claims us, names us, strips us like a lover. In his chapter on Obedience, Saint Benedict points out this dynamic:

It is love, therefore, that impels [obedient persons] to pursue everlasting life; therefore, they are eager to take the narrow road of which the Lord says: Narrow is the road that leads to life (Matt 7:14). They no longer live by their own judgment, giving in to their own whims and appetites; rather, they walk according to another’s decisions and directions, choosing to live in monasteries and to have an abbot over them. […] Almost at the same moment as the master gives the instruction, the disciple quickly puts it into practice […]; and both actions together are swiftly completed as one. (RB 1980, 5:10-12, 9)

As Benedict points out, the impetus for obedience and martyrdom is love, and its aim is union with the Beloved. As we listen to the voice of the Beloved, we fall in love more and more with Christ. And with that love as our foundation, we find ourselves eager to follow. We begin to find freedom in giving ourselves—our bodies and our wills—to Christ, in joyful obedience. That foundation of love is absolutely essential if we are to progress in the Christian life, but it is only the beginning, and it’s the easy part.

Christ seduces us, and then draws us on to martyrdom.

With our love for Christ as our focus, and conversion to Christ our one aim, we start down that narrow road that leads to life. And we find that it is, first of all, the road that leads to death, the death of the false, ego-driven self. The death of all our resistance to God’s in-pouring of grace. The death of our exporting of evil and hatred. If we follow Christ long enough and faithfully enough, we must eventually encounter the darkest parts of ourselves. We must face our own hatred, jealousy, and willfulness, our own lust, idolatry, and desire to kill the Other. Most of all we have to confront the ways we have lied to ourselves, the ways we continue, daily, to lie to ourselves.

The recent killings in Charleston have put flesh on this road to martyrdom for me. It would be so easy, especially if, like me, you’re a liberal white person, to condemn the killings as acts of hate, and to see their source as the evil of white supremacy taken root in a lost young man. Even as we might acknowledge and repudiate the racist history of America and the systems of white privilege and black disenfranchisement that history has produced, and even as we might rightly name and mourn our part in perpetuating those systems, we miss something essential, and essentially Christian. 

As long as we can point outside of ourselves to the source of evil, be it Dylann Roof, white supremacy, slavery, white privilege, easy access to guns, or any number of other horrors in this world, we excuse ourselves from the difficult and painful process of confronting our own hatred, our own violence, our own disgust. I don’t mean that there are not important lessons to learn about racial hatred in America from the Charleston killings. There absolutely are. And the killings also provide us with another opportunity to follow the voice of the Beloved beckoning us down the road toward martyrdom.

Most of us—I hope all of us—will never enter a church and kill people out of racial hatred. But we share more in common with Dylann Roof and other white supremacists than we want to own up to. We all have hatred within us. I mean real, hot, burning, bubbling hatred. We all have the impulse to kill, maim, and annihilate. Probably that hatred doesn’t come out as wanting to do violence to black people. But maybe it comes out as wanting those we live with to disappear utterly, entirely and violently when who they are seems anathema to who we are, maybe it comes out as a venomous clinging to our own will in the face of those who are different from us, maybe it comes out as seething rage at our impotence in the face of the world’s or our own intractable shortcomings.

Sometimes those forces are turned inward, too. Sometimes rather than wanting to kill or maim someone else, we crave our own annihilation. We seek to merge with another to the point that we disappear. Or we loathe and abuse ourselves. As surely as there are forces of light within us—and there are—there are depths of violence and hatred as well.

Deep listening to the voice of the Beloved eventually takes us to these places. With the light of Christ shining in our darkness, we are given the opportunity to see ourselves. I mean really, truly see ourselves. See the wounds and the pain, the hatred, the resistance, and the love, too. And when we do see in this way, something shatters. Our images of ourselves break apart. We break apart. It’s well known that we cannot look on the face of God and live. But neither can we look on our own truest face and live, at least not the way we’ve been living.

The encounter with self in its fullness, at this level, is its own martyrdom. In meeting the depths of our darkness, we join Christ on the Cross. The 20th-century mystic Simone Weil calls this encounter with the self “affliction,” and sees in it the gateway to union with God:

It is in affliction itself that the splendor of God’s mercy shines, from its depths, in the heart of inconsolable bitterness. If still persevering in our love, we fall to the point where the soul cannot keep back the cry “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” If we remain at this point without ceasing to love, we end by touching something that is not affliction, not joy, something that is the central essence, necessary and pure […]: the very love of God. (Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd, p. 44)

When we are crucified on the Cross of our own hypocrisy, hatred, and violence, the life born in us is Christ’s life, the very love of God. Weil goes on to describe this love. It fills the whole universe, she says, and becomes the bird with golden wings that pierces an opening in the egg of the world. After that, such a soul loves the universe, not from within, but from without; from the dwelling place of the Wisdom of God, our first-born brother. Such a love does not love beings and things in God, but from the abode of God. Being close to God it views all beings and things from there, and its gaze is merged in the gaze of God. (Weil, p. 50)

When we are crucified and reborn with Christ in this way, our life, Christ’s life, is the life of and in all things, and that means that we are in all things and all things are in us. Then we see that there truly is no way to hate another without hating ourselves, or to kill another without killing ourselves. And having already died and been born into Christ, physical death holds little fear.

Finally, we see, that the way of martyrdom, the way of the Cross, is the way of seduction. Drawn on by the caress of the Beloved’s voice, we obey, we die, and we are made one body with Christ and with all the world.

Feast of St Benedict - Jul 11, 2015

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC
Feast of St Benedict - Saturday, July 11, 2015

Proverbs 2:1-9
Luke 14:27-33

St Benedict of Nursia

In one of the sessions I attended of the House of Deputies at General Convention the debate centered on our calendar of commemorations. What is a saint? What are the criteria for sainthood in our Church? Who should be recognized? Why should they be recognized?  Today we observe the feast of Benedict. Unfortunately, after 1500 years of lived Benedictine tradition and legend, many think of Benedict, as they do of Jesus, as beginning life as fully a formed and integrated individual.

It seems like the higher we esteem someone, the greater the need to see perfection. We forget that we don’t come to God by doing it right. We come to God by doing it wrong. If we came to God by being perfect, no one would come to God. Our failures open our hearts and move our rigid minds toward truth, understanding, and compassion. It is in doing it wrong, feeling rejection, and experiencing pain, that we are lead to total reliance on God. Remember, the central symbol of transformation in Christianity is a naked, bleeding human… the picture of failing and loss, which is really winning, according to the paradox revealed to those who follow Christ. If there’s one thing we have in common as human beings it’s our weakness and powerlessness. There is a broken, wounded part inside each of us. Benedict was no different.

Historically, Benedict is a shadowy figure. The account of his life given by Gregory the Great in The Dialogues bears all the marks of early medieval hagiography. It was written about 40 years after Benedict’s death. That Gregory actually knew him is highly unlikely. Benedict remains a man of mystery except for the clear glimpses we get of him in his Rule. Much of the Rule comes from an earlier 6th century Italian rule called the Rule of the Master. What Benedict takes, omits, rearranges, and revises tells us more about him than any legends surrounding his life.

His Rule evolves as his life did in the process of coming to a deeper knowledge and truth of himself and his desire for union with God. It was written over the period of his lifetime and grounded in his lived experience. As we chart his geographic moves from Nursia, Rome, Affide, Subiaco, Villa Neronis, Vicovaro, and finally, Monte Cassino, we see his growth as a person as well as his change in perspective, which is reflected in his Rule. Even though we like to think of Benedict and his twin sister, Scholastica, as springing from the womb with halos, I suspect that the young man studying in Rome was more than a little self-righteous, priggish, rigid, and judgmental, to say nothing of self-centered. His flight from Roman society and, more importantly, from himself, to Affide, with his childhood nanny, probably did little to lessen his self-importance.  In Affide he became a bigger fish in a smaller pond.

The legend of the monks who sought him out as their abbot and later tried to murder him, tells us less about their evil ways than it does about how difficult a person he may have been to live with at that time, and how limited his capacity may have been for relationships that were not based on his terms. Who of us in community has not at least entertained a fantasy about what community life might be like without a particular brother!

I suspect that it was not until he actually stopped running away from himself, when he entered the cave, in Sacra Speco, that he truly began to know himself and God’s love for him. He becomes free as he lets go of the need for power and control, for safety and security, and for affection and esteem. It is then that he begins to attract others and is able to receive them as other.

Community is not only the context and setting of his Rule, but the very vehicle that brings us to knowledge of self and union with God and others. Even his discipline code, which takes into consideration the uniqueness of each monk, is never meant as a punishment or exclusion, but as a means of restoring the brother back to community. It’s designed as a means of conversion and transformation.

It’s crucial to appreciate Benedict’s emphasis on humility. He lived this experience. It was not theoretical for him. It’s the subject of the longest chapter of the RB (7) -- about 8% of the entire Rule. He came to know that the humble could always find God in their lives. They have nothing to prove, protect, or promote. They are conscious of their need for mercy daily. The usual claims that appeal to our egos are of no use whatever and are actually revealed as much of the problem.

He stressed humility because he understood that it is essential if an individual or a community is to flourish.  Humility requires radical self-honesty — which presupposes radical self-knowledge. It’s grounded in a realistic acceptance of who we are — our unchangeable past, our inherited DNA, our innate gifts and aptitudes, our failures and successes, our weaknesses and strengths, and our relationships with others and God.

If a person possesses a realistic assessment of who she is, where she’s come from, and where her place is in the scheme of things, she has a good chance of accepting others and allowing them their place. Humility opens us up and places us in the right posture to receive grace. As the sense of God’s acceptance and compassion for us grows, so we embrace the other with the same grace we receive. Humility breaks down our egotistical fantasies and our need to be in control — our need to be the exception.

The awareness of our own frailty always exceeds what we can know of another’s. The one we consider our enemy always carries the dark side of ourselves, the things we cannot or will not own about ourselves. We can only face our dark side by embracing those who threaten us. The prideful alternative is a life based on radical untruth, which destroys the individual and, as a result, the community.

Benedict’s chapter on humility follows the chapters on obedience and restraint of speech. They all involve the eradication of self-will and self-centeredness. It requires that we acknowledge our enslavement to narcissism. Empowered by the intensity of God’s unconditional love, we find it possible to demolish our defenses and to admit the truth of who we are. Like obedience, humility involves trust in God and in those with whom God has chosen to place us. Only those who have a realistic assessment of their worth can truly trust God.

When Jesus speaks of the builder who must calculate the whole cost of the tower before breaking ground, of the ruler who assesses the enemy’s strength before sending troops to battle, or of a disciples inevitable encounter with the cross, he is simply reminding us that participation in the life of God means anticipation and acceptance of its full cost. As Benedict reminds us in the Rule, the cost of conversion stretches over our lifetime.

The invitation that he addresses to us in his Rule and life is for us to be renewed in the image of the One who made us in the first place. Like Benedict, we come to God not by being strong or right, but through our mistakes, not by self-admiration but by self-forgetfulness. Our surrender is a willingness to trust that we are loved. We are who we are in the eyes of God, nothing more, and nothing less.   

+Amen.