Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
Epiphany 4 C - Sunday, January 30, 2022
I recently discovered something disturbing about myself. I think I have a life.
I’ll be sitting there, reading a novel, when the bell rings for Matins, and I think “All right, in a half hour I can get back to my life.” Or ten minutes into the reading at dinner, I’ve finished eating, and I sit impatiently waiting for the last word so that I can bolt up from my seat and get on with my day.
The trouble is, there’s no such thing as my life. My life is idolatry. There is only God’s life, and I—and you—get to participate in that life, get to hold it and embody it for a time, until we dissolve fully into it again.
This problem may sound like a small psychological issue that, through prayer and spiritual direction and self-transcendence I could eventually overcome. But the attitude of me and mine plagues contemporary Christian spirituality as much as it does the wider culture. I often hear—and have written and preached about—the goal of Christian spirituality as transformation of the self. Sometimes we gussy it up by calling self-transformation “conversion.” But, really, the goal of Christian spirituality is self-immolation: the offering of the entire person—body, mind, and spirit—to God through Jesus Christ.
Buried in the midst of what we often read as Paul’s great paean to love we find a profound meditation on mortality and maturity in Christ and a vision of an oblationary spirituality.
Everything is passing away, Paul warns us—everything we have will leave us. All the gifts we so treasure in ourselves, the little prizes we pile up in the storeroom of the self—prophecy, tongues, knowledge (I’m sure we could add to this list)—all will vanish like mist in the valley when the sun crests the peaks. For we know only in part, and we prophecy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end, Paul tells us. And a few lines later he repeats himself and elaborates, Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.
When we read that love is patient and kind, Paul is not goading us into trying harder to be “perfect” loving people. His is not the “nice” version of Christianity so many of us have ingested. Rather, he is trying to inspire us to a more mature understanding of and abiding in Christ. He has no interest in our shoring ourselves up with greater and greater signs of love. Exactly the opposite. We may have prophetic powers. We may have the tongues of angels. It’s all rubbish in the face of the surpassing wonder of finding ourselves in Christ, emptied, abandoned, bereft—and yet fully alive in God.
It helps to read this passage in conjunction with Paul’s last and most poignant letter. Imprisoned in Rome, awaiting his martyrdom, he writes these words to the church at Philippi:
Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him. (Phil 3:7-9)
For his sake, I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him.
That’s the whole gospel right there. To gain Christ and to be found in him.
And the way is simple, if not at all easy. The voluntary offering of all that we think we have and all that we think we are—the total and free gift of ourselves to God to do with us and to be with us however God wishes.
The interplay of losing and finding in these two passages is subtle but telling. In Paul’s language, I lose myself and everything with which I fill the self in order that I may be found in Christ. I do the losing. Christ does the finding. It really is that simple.
The poet Kaveh Akbar puts its this way:
It wasn’t until Gabriel squeezed away what was empty in him that the Prophet could be filled with miracle. Imagine the emptiness in you, the vast cavities you have spent your life trying to fill—with fathers, mothers, lovers, language, drugs, money, art, praise—and imagine them gone. What’s left? Whatever you aren’t, which is what makes you—a house useful not because its floorboards or ceilings or walls, but because the empty space between them.(1)
A few years ago, I came across a wonderful and short documentary called Godspeed: The Pace of Being Known. The documentary follows an American priest who arrives in a small Scottish town to begin his ministry. He has great dreams to change the lives of his parishioners. For the first month or two he sits around his office waiting for these yearning souls to make themselves known to him. No one comes by. He soon learns that he has to get out and walk about the parish to get to know his people, and so begins a time of transformation in his life and ministry.
Spoiler alert: the central lesson that he distills from his years walking the bounds of his parish—which, after all, is a geographical rather than an architectural term—is that we think we’re running faster and faster toward God, but really we’ve left God far behind us. We need to slow down so that God can catch up and find us.
It’s perhaps a cliché lesson, but no more so than Paul’s soaring language of the heights of love. We move too fast, we talk too much, we stuff ourselves too full. Yes, even here. If we can’t slow down and quiet down in a monastery, what hope has the world?
God doesn’t seem so interested in my busyness or my importance or my life. God seeks my Self (capital S) emptied of selves, so that, in my emptiness and my slowness and my poverty God can find me. When we allow that understanding—gradually and then finally—to penetrate our defenses, then we can glimpse the truth in Paul’s words: I have come to regard all things as rubbish in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him.
That, finally, is what God’s love really looks like. God is patiently, ploddingly, slowly searching for us, always waiting for us to slow down enough for God to lay a hand on our cheek, look us in the eye, and know us fully as his own.
God’s love is patient, and it is kind. It does not insist on its own way, but it waits for us to unwind ourselves enough that we are free to lay down our lives on the altar of this world—to give ourselves a perfect offering and oblation to God. What God will do with that offering is God’s business, not ours. But we can trust that God will use it for the healing and redemption of the world. For God is good, and that is everything.
(1) Kaveh Akbar, “The Miracle,” in Pilgrim Bell: Poems.
No comments:
Post a Comment