Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
Third Sunday after Epiphany - Sunday, January 24, 2021
My earliest memory of God comes from the Good Friday liturgy at St. Thomas the Apostle, where I grew up. I was about eight. The sanctuary was cool and dark, the light filtered gently through the stained-glass windows. I heard a shuffle at the back, as the doors to the sanctuary opened to admit the altar party. Four men processed in, carrying a wooden crucifix. To my child’s eyes, that cross seemed enormous, more than life-sized.
The cross and the body nailed to it were solid wood, a warm, rich brown. It must have been heavy, perhaps even heavier than a real human body. But the four men carrying it held it gently. There was something tender in their grasp. They walked with the cross to the front of the sanctuary, their eyes cast down. When they reached the step up to the dais where the altar stood, they slowly lowered the cross to the floor, the horizontal bar of the arms laid parallel to the step to support the weight of body and cross.
I watched, rapt, while the other congregants made their way forward as we did for communion on Sundays. There were no ushers guiding them, but everyone seemed to know what to do. My heart beat more quickly in my chest. I could see that as the other parishioners made their way forward to the cross, they bent down and kissed or touched it. Some pressed their foreheads against Jesus’ forehead; some kissed his feet; some barely grazed the wood of his cross with their fingertips.
Desire flushed my skin as fear tightened my stomach. I both wanted to touch Jesus’ carved and crucified body and was scared of what might happen when I did.
My turn came to walk toward the cross. As I moved down the center aisle of the church, the velvet quiet of the room bore down on me, pushing me forward. I reached out and touched Jesus’ feet, surprised by the smoothness of the wood and also its hardness. I knelt down, the stone floor cold beneath my knees. For the briefest moment my lips brushed the hard smooth wood of Jesus’ feet. As I rose to return to my seat, I could still feel the sharp angularity of the nail against my lower lip.
Kneeling on the pillowed kneeler at my seat, I closed my eyes, breathing hard, blood flushing my warm skin. I was aware, even then, that something fundamental about the world had changed. An intuition of the unity of pain and beauty, death and salvation had wedged its way into my heart like the nail in Jesus’ feet. It was as if some great force of love, something so much bigger than I and, at the same time so much closer than I could imagine, was gazing on me, saw me fully. I wanted to relax into that presence. I also wanted to flee. My body knew so many years before my mind caught up that God had got hold of me and wasn’t going to let me go.
Over the years that memory faded into the background. Despite how vividly I recall it today, for years the memory of my first recognition that I was God’s and God was mine was like a haze in the background, more forgotten than remembered. Or, to use another metaphor, it was the mortar in the bricks of my life, unseen and unsung, but essential to the structure, holding everything up and giving it shape.
When we focus on God’s call to us, it’s so easy to get caught up in the flash and bang of revelatory moments when suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, we know who and whose we are. Some stranger walking by the roadside calls out to us, and immediately we know that we must leave everything behind and follow. But these moments don’t arise in a vacuum. As clear as the dawning light may be, it was the night beforehand, peppered with stars of smaller and more elemental revelations that often pave the way for whatever grand epiphanies we may experience.
And while many of us have those moments of radiant revelation, even they fade in the dailiness and, yes, the tedium of making a life with God. And, thank God that they do.
Christian Wiman captures this experience when he writes that:
“What you must realize, what you must even come to praise, is the fact that there is no right way that is going to become apparent to you once and for all. The most blinding illumination that strikes and perhaps radically changes your life will become so attenuated and obscured by doubts and dailiness that you may one day come to suspect the truth of that moment at all. The calling that seemed so clear will be lost in echoes of questionings and indecision; the church that seemed to save you will fester with egos, complacencies, banalities; the deepest love of your life will work itself like a thorn in your heart until all you can think of is plucking it out. Wisdom is accepting the truth of this. Courage is persisting with life in spite of it. And faith is finding yourself, in the deepest part of your soul, in the very heart of who you are, moved to praise it.”
Falling in love is a moment of insanity, or so my novice master told us. It’s a necessary step in moving more deeply into relationship with God or with another person or the world, but it doesn’t last. And for that we should be grateful. The blinding revelation is important. It may give us the energy or motivation we need to say yes to life or no to death, or simply to get ourselves out the door and onto the road we know has been calling us. But it is not the end—it is merely the beginning.
Like the culture that surrounds us, we Christians, too can become obsessed with the feeling of falling in love. While we may dress up this fixation with language of vocation and discernment, we sometimes fall into habits of constant vigilance in the search for what God is calling me to now. That’s not to say that God is not always at work within and around us, always bringing life from death in novel ways. But it is to say that at a certain point we have discerned our vocation. Full stop. And rather than continuing to discern, we need to get on with the often dull and unsexy work of living out that vocation.
A life with God is, I’m sorry to tell you, rather an ordinary one, taken step by step, day by day, moment by moment. The revelations fade into the background. The burning ardor of those first moments of the relationship cool. And one day we finally have to confront the fact that God is not who we thought God was. And perhaps neither are we. Our choices and our best efforts have not saved us or made us good or holy or free. We are not perfect or perfectly consummated beings yet, and we may never be.
As Wiman points out, the moment when we realize and then come to accept that there is no right way that will become apparent to us once and for all, there is no calling that will soothe every hurt in our life, there is no spiritual practice or vocation or relationship that will eradicate the humanness of it all—that moment is the real beginning. It’s not exciting enough to make the cover of Discernment Weekly. But it is this very ordinary and very human dailiness with God that makes a life.
When I look back at the moments of contact with God that have sustained and formed me, they are mostly like that first memory—quiet, hidden, embodied, and sweet. That Good Friday is the first time I remember feeling the curious mixture of fear and desire that I have come to recognize as my body’s sign of proximity to the holy. It is, for me, one of the ways the knowledge of its origin soaks into my consciousness. And when the dailiness of it all does work itself into my heart like a thorn, it is the feel of the wood on my lips, or the warmth of my friend Tom’s eyes, or the lilt of Andrew’s Scottish accent, or Roy’s quiet solidity, or the gentle breeze through the meadow that steady my faltering step and remind me that, yes, I chose my life, even as God chose me, and yes, I choose to keep choosing it. That yes, it’s easy to fall in and out of the insanity of love again and again and hard to stay put in the boredom and the seeming sameness of it all, and that, yes, God is still here and so I choose to still be here, too.
I trust that, in God’s time and in God’s way, I will become the person God has made me to be. Because, whatever else, God is good, and that is everything.
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