Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Randy Greve, OHC
“The Buried Life” by Matthew Arnold:
“But often, in the world’s most crowded streetsBut often, in the din of strifeThere rises an unspeakable desireAfter the knowledge of our buried life:A thirst to spend our fire and restless forceIn tracking out our true, original course;A longing to inquireInto a mystery of this heart which beatsSo wild, so deep in us – to knowWhence our lives come and where they go.”
The poet intimates that there is something more, beneath the noisy, crowded streets – it remains unspeakable and buried, yet it calls. He is touching on the big questions of meaning, of purpose, of love – of the big “whys” of why me, why now, why here. Jesus has something to say in reply – not in formulas, dogmas, rituals, moral absolutes or easy steps to happiness. Jesus speaks in reply and unburies life, frees life, deepens mystery. This is strange and indecipherable language about what we most desire, yet it lures us with its opacity, haunts with its confidence: from the gospel reading: “Eternal life; Bread of life; Living bread; Live forever; Life of the world; Living Father; I live; Live because of me; Live forever”. I sense perhaps the beginnings of a theme. The Greek word for life contains a sense of movement which is impossible to bring over into English without lots more words.
The English for “life” would be something like “the meaning-bearing energy of spirit beyond mere physical existence that is continuously being given and being received without loss or beginning or end”. Jesus speaks in the declarative and definitive. His life, most graphically put in language as his very flesh and blood, received and consumed, is and brings eternal life. The image could not be any clearer – he repeats it in several different ways. It is almost as if he is straining to express what to him is obvious, what to him is his own abiding in the Father – the life without which he would not be, not know who he was or what he was to do. He describes himself and then us in relation to his being. The intimacy is startling and offensive. It is all so achingly beautiful, so purely mystical, and so absolutely beyond us. Jesus is addressing the soul, the quality of human existence in perfect union with the love of God, the divine within that because it is held in the embrace of God lives in the eternal satisfaction and fulfillment of hunger and thirst. The mystics talk often about how we get an inkling of the presence and grace of God in our souls when the consolation of feeding on the body and blood of Jesus, abiding in him, leads to a deeper desire, which consoles us more, which creates desire all the more, and so on. The nourishment of God brings peace and a restless longing for more. The life of which Jesus speaks is an end of the journey, the filling of desire, only to send us at the same moment onward to new searching and hollows our spiritual bellies to create anew the very appetite he himself feeds.
Insofar as language can apprehend the mystery of Jesus’ identity as Bread of Life, the nourishment that satiates and leads to hunger is a theme woven through the contemplative tradition of the faith. Truth claims held with care and humility, knowing their power is beyond our comprehension. It is, however, a lousy evangelism program. While our souls abide in this mystery, our self-will recoils from this mystery. Rather than dwell in it, savor it, my ego wants to fix the mystery, solve it, escape it, above all to know, understand. When I do not attend to the soul, when I give in to fear and react from control, the mystery at the heart of love sounds like so much nonsense. What fills the void is what Daniel Taylor calls the myth of certainty - a set of immutable, rationalized, precisely defined and defendable beliefs.
These beliefs make sense and predictability out of an often senseless and chaotic world. The beliefs may in themselves be true, but when used to avoid transcendence and reduce God to my understandable and controllable categories, certainty is idolatry. And as I look at American Christianity, certainty sells! The commentaries on this gospel are full of it – full of language that seeks to explain with the mind language addressed to the soul. One streams says, We know from the Bible that salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, so eating and drinking Jesus must refer to our faith in him as he gave his life for us on the cross. Another stream of the Church would say; clearly the language points to Holy Communion and proves that within the first century Christians believed that Jesus was present, infused in the elements of bread and wine; that this food and drink is more than mere memorial, but the living Christ himself. The text itself does not contain the words salvation, faith, sacrament, eucharist, or church. This is, perhaps most dramatically in the Gospels, language that confounds and unsettles any attempt to easily and neatly fit it into an existing box. It is fine to seek to understand scripture through other voices in scripture. It is more problematic to leap to a conclusion that conveniently fits my theological lens.
Certainty, while tempting and marketable, is not what we most deeply desire. The poet is right to name the nature of our souls – longing for life, real life, but often settling for the safe and comfortable. The buried life that calls through the noise is meaning – something far more valuable than mere certainty. Meaning derives from an abiding, eating and drinking relationship with God, based on risk and commitment. It infuses theology with wonder and knows when mind must give way to mystery. What God in Christ offers is not certainty, but a person, a relationship; not rules and a formula, but security through risking all; not safety, but unity and community.
Our response, in the end, is to come back to the essence of the human response to the divine lover; to receive the gift offered, in the myriad of ways it is offered, open to ways that gifts gets digested from grace into love.
The Holy Eucharist of which we will partake today is a gift of life - the meaning-bearing energy of spirit beyond mere physical existence that is continuously being given and being received without loss or beginning or end. It is the most powerful enactment of the eating and drinking of which Jesus speaks. Eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ points to the deepest meaning and mystery in the sacrament, not so that we may reduce the presence of Christ to the certainty of our hands, but so that we may become in all of life that which we eat and drink. Amen.
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