Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
Nativity of St. John the Baptist - June 24, 2022
In the name of the One God, who is Lover, Beloved, and Love Overflowing. Amen.
In the middle of June every year, we get a little Advent. This year, the weather has even been cooperating. Today’s feast is a timely reminder that, whatever the season, God is constantly preparing the way of our return.
This year, in particular, I’m struck by the resonance of Isaiah’s poetry: “Comfort, O Comfort, my people. […] Speak tenderly to [them.]” Oh, how we need that tenderness! How we need that comfort! I would say after Uvalde. But I could also say, after Covid, or Ukraine, or George Floyd, or or or. The ors never stop these days. One piles on top of another shutting out all the air. In the midst of so many and great temptations to despair and fatigue the comfort of God’s promise of faithfulness and return beckons all the more strongly.
Comfort my people. Tell them that their return to me is imminent. Prepare the way of their salvation, their wholeness, their new life in me, says the Lord.
John the Baptist, whose birth we celebrate today, and Isaiah both knew darkness and exile. Both lived in times of great chaos and upheaval, in which the very life and existence of their communities was anything but assured. Isaiah, for instance, comes proclaiming this good news of the elevation of Mount Zion precisely at one of the moments of Israel’s greatest darkness. When the Assyrian empire has decimated Jerusalem, when all that the Israelites hold dear has been ravaged and the world seems irreparably fragmented, the voice of hope sounds its clear bell. This home that has been destroyed will not only be rebuilt, but it will become a center of welcome, peace, and love for all the world.
John comes as the morning star, the great forerunner of the morn, as that wonderful hymn puts it. He is the sign that the life that really is life is coming into the world as Jesus, our brother, our friend, and our God. And like the morning star, he comes at the darkest hour of the night as a promise that the sun will rise again.
Before I entered the Monastery, echoing Isaiah, Br. Andrew told me, “there are no sharp edges here. Everything in the Monastery has been worn smooth through years of prayer.” It was a lovely sentiment, and just what I wanted to hear in that moment of romantic infatuation. Having lived in this community for a little while now, I can tell you that there are actually plenty of sharp edges remaining. I’ve even introduced a few myself. Not all has been worn smooth, at least not yet.
But nor was Andrew’s comment mere sentimentality. The common life—whether in a monastery, a family, a parish, or a nation—is one of great friction. Our sharp edges are only worn down by rubbing against those of our brothers, our coreligionists, or our neighbors. Much the same can be said for the life of prayer, in which, whatever consolations may come our way, we will eventually find ourselves facing into dryness, desolation, and the fracturing of our optimism that the spiritual life will finally make us into shining examples of perfect, ordered human life.
The great Anthony Bloom connects this stripping down to the work of prayer:
“There is a degree of despair that is linked with total, perfect hope. This is the point at which, having gone inward, we will be able to pray; and then ‘Lord, have mercy’ is quite enough. We do not need to make any of the elaborate discourses we find in manuals of prayer. It is enough simply to shout out of despair ‘Help!’ and you will be heard.”
He continues, “Very often we do not find sufficient intensity in our prayer, sufficient conviction, sufficient faith, because our despair is not deep enough. We want God in addition to so many other things we have, we want His help, but simultaneously we are trying to get help wherever we can, and we keep God in store for our last push. […] If our despair comes from sufficient depth, if what we ask for, cry for, is so essential that it sums up all the needs of our life, then we find words of prayer and we will be able to reach the core of the prayer, the meeting with God.”1
The encounter with the realities of his own dark time of empire, domination, and the potential extinction of his religion and his people led John into the wilderness to fast and to pray. In the purification of his own desire, in the distilling of that desire down to its essential element—Lord, have mercy!—he became, as the eucharistic preface puts it, a burning and a shining light, drawing others away from the city toward the boundaries of their becoming. There he invited them to turn back to the Lord and to be washed clean in the waters of baptism,
It's no accident that the movement of return and remembrance that John proclaims originates in the wilderness. It is there that the Israelites wandered after their slavery. It is there that they encountered God and that, through their trials, murmurings, and cursing God forged them into a community. It is into the wilderness that the Spirit drives Jesus after his baptism, there to be tempted, yes, but also there to be formed. For it is through his temptation that Jesus touches his deepest desire, which is for God alone.
It is in this place of wild wandering that we come to know God and, in that encounter, to be known as God’s beloved.
And so, it is to the wilderness that John calls—or we might say recalls—the people when they have strayed from God’s ways. And it is in the wilderness of this historical moment that we, too, must face down temptation and despair. It is in this wilderness of death and anxiety and fear that we may allow God to strip down our desire, until all we want is God. And it is from this wilderness of darkness and wandering that our hope will emerge.
On the eve of the Velvet Revolution in what was then Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel wrote about what it means to hope:
“Hope is a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us, or we don’t. […] Hope is definitely not the same as optimism. It’s not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. It is hope, above all, that gives strength to live and to continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now. In the face of this absurdity, life is too precious a thing to permit its devaluation by living pointlessly, emptily, without meaning, without love, and, finally, without hope.”
Real hope, as writer and activist Rebecca Solnit points out, is always dark, because the future is forever dim. And while the darkness may frighten us, in her words, it is always the dark, not just of the grave, but of the womb. For out of the dark wilderness emerge possibilities we could never have imagined in the clear light of day.
If the emergence of hope from the dark is true in the secular world, how much truer it is for the Christian, who bears not only Christ’s life within her, but first bears Christ’s death on the Cross. We who profess the faith of Jesus, profess, not that he died and made everything okay in the world, but that having died and risen, he now lives in us, right here and now, still working to stitch back together this fractured world.
I think that what the Israelites and the early Christian community discovered in the darkness of wilderness and exile is that, although they could no longer see the way forward, they could be seen, seen in the depths of their being, known and loved in the very foundation of their soul, in that darkest point within that is reserved for God alone. And in that foundational place, too deep even really to call it love, for it is so much more than that, from that deepest place hope is born.
John, the great forerunner of the morn, the morning star and herald of the dawn, continues to shine like a beacon of hope in the darkness of our time, just as he did in his own. His voice calls out today that though we are like the flower of the field that springs up today and tomorrow is gone, the word of the Lord—the word that is Jesus within and around us—endures forever. There is always cause to hope, because God is good, and that is everything.
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