Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owern, OHC
The way of sanctity is a hidden way. It lies in plain sight, but only revealed to the eyes of faith. With the eyes of the heart opened through the surrender of our whole self to God, we begin to see the logic of the universe: a logic in which power is fulfilled in weakness, love is made perfect in seeming loss, and life flows from the heart of death.
Jean-Pierre de Caussade, in a collection of talks we’ve come to call Self-Abandonment to Divine Providence, assures us that “[Sanctity] does not require miracles; [miralces] are only for the benefit of those who need such testimonies and signs. Faithful souls do not rely on them. Content in their unknowing, they leave them to be a light for others, and accept for themselves what is most ordinary: God’s order, God’s way which tests their faith by concealing, not revealing himself.”
There are, of course, many holy souls whose examples draw us closer to God. But “hidden in the Church, too, are countless saints who are made only to shine in heaven, who shed no light in this life and who live and die in complete obscurity.”
Today we remember and give thanks for all of God’s saints—those known to us by their wonderful deeds and testimony. But also, and perhaps especially, for that band of silent witnesses known only to God, whose lives of submission and surrender uphold and sustain our pilgrimage without our ever knowing it.
This hidden way of sanctity is a way of undoing and unknowing.
In the daily confrontation with ourselves we have the opportunity to loosen our hold on our own righteousness, our own strength, and our own assured judgment of good and evil. In so doing, we learn to rely solely on God’s goodness and God’s mercy. After a lifetime of surrender to what Caussade poetically calls “the sacrament of the present moment,” we begin to cultivate the saintly virtue of “holy indifference,” which is the conviction that, whatever the outward appearance of things, in the silence of God’s heart, God is bringing all things to their perfection.
This task is difficult, to put it mildly. The world around us looks so dark and so frightening. And often, the world within looks just as fearsome.
It is no exaggeration to say that we are in the midst of an apocalypse and at the precipice of a holocaust. I don’t think most of us could have imagined how bad the last four years would get. And in the midst of such chaos, we might agree with Caussade that God often seems to be concealing, not revealing, herself.
John’s apocalyptic vision warns us from too easily judging God’s purpose by what we see around us. Like Paul, he knew that “our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” (Eph. 6:12) John’s community, like ours, was surrounded with political and religious hypocrisy. They, too, saw the wicked triumph. They, too, stared into the bloody maw of an evil born of the marriage of power and religion and fed by bigotry and violence.
But to John God unveiled—apocalpysed—God’s hidden work of salvation. God assured John, and assures us now, that however deep this present darkness, God is, even here and even now, making all things new.
Facing similar persecution in the late second century, Tertullian reminded his community that “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” Where the blood of the martyrs is spilled, a new creation is born. Golgotha is unmasked as the new Eden and the Cross of Jesus as the Tree of Life.
All sanctity, which is to say all sainthood, flows from the blood of martyrdom, from the seed of a defeat that is the truest kind of victory. All those we revere for their holy lives were and are martyrs, which is to say both that their whole lives read as a living testimony to the self-sacrificing love of God and that they each, in their particular way, surrendered the entirety of themselves to God’s purpose, holding nothing back, clinging to nothing, becoming nothing so that, in them and through them, God could become everything.
Not every saint, of course, was or is called to a bloody and violent end. Many, perhaps, most of them poured out their lives in quieter quarters—feeding the poor, forming and teaching souls, proclaiming God’s favor to those on the margins, or leading lives of contemplation, quietly suffering death day after day in their cells so that, crucified with Christ, Christ might live in them.
And yet, when we start down the road to the Cross, we must accept, and even come to celebrate the fact that we may be called quite literally to lay down our lives in witness to God’s loving mercy. The time in which we live may demand such witness, not made hastily in the spirit of self-assertion but made humbly in gratitude for the enormous gift of God’s tender mercy and in service to all God’s children. Such lives, surrendered and returned to the one from whom they sprang, shine like the morning star calling us all home to God.
A little later in John’s revelation, we read that those robed in white “have conquered [the evil one] by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they did not cling to life in the face of death.” The Greek translated ‘the word of their testimony,’ is […] literally ‘the logic of their martyrdom.’
Our brother Roy, himself a great and often hidden witness to God’s mercy, commented on this verse that “Jesus’ death and resurrection reveal a logic inextricably woven into the fabric of the universe. In that divine logic unjust and uncompassionate powers have reached their limits when crosses and shotguns have done their worst. They can go no further than death. But the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection is that God can.
“When a servant of God does not cling to life in the face of a cross or a shotgun, the logic of oppressive empires and racist cultures has run its course; their powers and its weapons have done all they can do. But God’s logic persists; God’s powerless weakness—whose weapons are justice and compassionate solidarity and love—continues its patient, persistent, non-violent subversion of oppressive empires and racist cultures. Jesus does not conquer Rome, but Jesus outlasts Rome.”
We must not hang our hope on defeating the political and religious darkness of this present age. No matter the results of Tuesday’s election, the world will still be plagued by racism and the rape of the earth and its peoples. Power and violence will still have their say. That is not to say that our political reality is inconsequential, or that we Christians being formed for sanctity should withdraw from political engagement. No, our faith impels us to witness in every area of our lives.
But we must not put our trust in rulers nor in any child of earth. Our salvation belongs to God alone. It is for that very reason that we must never despair of God’s mercy, whatever the outward appearance of our time and place or of our own lives.
“I have learned by experience,” wrote Thomas Cranmer to Peter Martyr “[...] that God never shines forth more brightly, and pours out the beams of his mercy and consolation, or of strength and firmness of spirit, more clearly or impressively upon the minds of his people, than when they are under the most extreme pain and distress, both of mind and body, that he may then more especially show himself to be the God of his people, when he seems to have altogether forsaken them; then raising them up when they think he is bringing them low; then glorifying them when he is thought to be confounding them; then quickening them when he is thought to be destroying them.”
No, Jesus does not conquer Rome, and nor will we conquer the racist and oppressive empires that threaten our world today. But encouraged by the martyrdom of the whole host of the sanctified that surround us, God can make us into a living apocalypse a doorway to the kingdom of heaven, hidden in plain sight, through which God may enter the world to be with her people.
May it be so. Amen.
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