Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Lord, help us to know with assured confidence that even in the midst of our fearful lives, your are here with us...where you have always been. Amen.
According to an open letter signed by some of the leading AI specialists, artificial intelligence could pose a "risk of extinction" to humanity on the scale of nuclear war or pandemics, and mitigating that risk, they say, should be a "global priority.” The one-sentence open letter is both brief and ominous. But AI is only the latest ominous reality of a century of rapid technological development that has seen the radical transformation of societies. And while much of this transformation has been good, much, I would admit, has not served human life well and has resulted in technology’s domination over it. If you doubt this, go watch “Oppenheimer,” now in theaters. Change is a necessary and vital part of progress, but not all change is progress.
And whether change has been for the betterment or the detriment of our societies, the rapid change we’ve been experiencing in this past century has had an undeniable destabilizing effect and unleashes a host of questions about life...it’s meaning, it’s direction, and it’s end. And beyond this, we are now faced, perhaps more than ever before, with our own fragility. Human life has never been more vulnerable to the elements of nature or to the nature of our own selfish egos.
What has resulted is a growing malaise and dread about being alive. Is there ground upon which we can now stand with any assurance or hope? Is the only option now the uncertainty and insecurity of shifting sand? All the more now, then, is the church and the gospel entrusted to her necessary and vital. But perhaps our gospel message needs to be re-contextualized to speak effectively to the needs of the people of our time and to our precarious circumstances.
Christianity is about a lot of things, and we can sometimes get lost on the periphery and lose sight of the core. The heart of Christianity is the gospel: that God has not left us alone to face a world ready to destroy itself but has come near to us in Christ and has revealed to us that indeed everything IS NOT shifting sand...if we just believe, we’ll come to know that there is a reality more solid, more stable, and more assured than our minds could ever imagine. We come to know that the chaos of the world is nothing to fear because our feet now stand on the Rock that is Christ. And we come to know a God who is not afraid of chaos. On the contrary, God seems to relish chaos and specializes in using it to create wonder.
Many years ago when I was going through my own personal existential crisis, plagued by chaotic thoughts of self-loathing, self-doubt, and shame, questioning my own value, largely ignorant about who God really is or who I really am, I found myself drawn to study St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. During the weeks of this study back in the mid-nineties, my world was radically transformed. And no other piece of writing has changed me to such an extent since. In it a whole new image of God was unveiled to me...and in light of this image, a whole new image of myself began to make its assured appearance.
To put it succinctly, Paul, in Romans, is attempting to articulate the utterly unique gift and the transformative power that has been given to us in Christ. After demonstrating that everyone, Gentile as well as Jew, lives under the power of sin... and, thus, that everyone needs God to save them from sin’s domination...he then goes on to speak about this gift of salvation coming to us in the person of God’s own Son, Jesus Christ. It is pure gift. There is nothing that we can do to convince God to give it to us, for it is given solely out of God’s generous initiative. “God chose us while we were yet sinners,” as Paul puts it. Into the human heart that has been afflicted with the sickness and darkness that sin brings is imputed the grace of God that comes to us in Christ, that we receive simply by saying “yes” to this gift in an act of faith. In our baptism we die with Christ and are raised into his resurrected life and become newly created, “the old has passed away, behold all has become new.” Paul instructs us to now live according to this new created self by nurturing it and admonishes us to stop nurturing the old self. The battle between these two selves will continue but our truth is not the old self, the surface self tossed to and fro by the chaos of life...and it never really was...our truth is the deeper self, the beloved child of God, called, justified, and now glorified in God’s all-consuming presence.
Who can, now, separate us from the love of Christ? Paul is unequivocal... there is nothing... absolutely nothing... that can separate us from the all-consuming love of God’s presence. For the person in Christ, we have penetrated through the multiple layers of sand and hit ground zero... the point of pure Love... unconditioned and absolute... and the ground of our own true self, hidden with Christ in God.
This truth would inspire the 1966 poem of Thomas Merton entitled “All the Way Down,”
I went down
Into the cavern
All the way down
To the bottom of the sea.
I went down lower
Than Jonas and the whale
No one ever got so far down
As me.
I went down lower
Than any diamond mine
Deeper than the lowest hole In Kimberly
All the way down
I thought I was the devil
He was no deeper down
Than me.
And when they thought
That I was gone forever
That I was all the way
In hell
I got right back into my body
And came back out
And rang my bell.
No matter how
They try to harm me now
No matter where
They lay me in the grave
No matter what injustices they do
I've seen the root
Of all that believe.
I've seen the room
Where life and death are made
And I have known
The secret forge of war
I even saw the womb
That all things come from
For I got down so far!
But when they thought
That I was gone forever
That I was all the way
In hell
I got right back into my body
And came back out
And rang my bell.
Merton's description of the journey into his depths borders on the terrible and horrific, but only in these depths and in confronting these horrors does the image of God within us begin to shine. James Finley writes of this poem:
“Merton leads us along the journey to God in which the self that begins the journey is not the self that arrives. The self that begins is the self that we thought ourselves to be. It is this self that dies along the way until in the end 'no one' is left. This 'no one' is our true self. It is the self that stands prior to all that is this or that. It is the self in God, the self bigger than death yet born of death. It is the self the Father
forever loves.”
This transformed self is the result of seeing the pearl of great price and selling everything for the one thing necessary. It’s the result of seeing through the lies of a fabricated, illusory existence... through the shifting sand of one’s life... and catching a glimpse, however faintly, of the dazzling rock that is Christ... and making a choice to live anchored in the eternal even while we continue to live amidst the crashing waves of the temporal. To be mature in Christ is to learn how to unlock the hidden potential of this hidden self, to plant oneself firmly in the hidden Ground of Love and to enjoy the gift of the gospel...the peace which passes understanding and the love that knows no bounds.
Then, with fearless and daring confidence, we can stand up boldly in the face of the barrage of threats to human life with which our modern world confronts us and declare with prophetic certitude: “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor power, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus my Lord.” Amen.
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