Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
Easter 3 B - Sunday, April 18, 2021
In the name of the One God, who is Lover, Beloved, and Love Overflowing. Amen.
Two or three times a year, often at the changing of the seasons, I look around me and begin to feel suffocated. The need to clean and clean out my space begins in my gut and my throat. I take almost everything out of my cell—furniture, clothes, books, even the pictures on the walls. I clean, and then I add things back in, though fewer things than had once filled the space.
I do realize that I’m acting out an internal process. But that’s at least part of what liturgy does, too. As I repopulate my cell or my office, I try to pay careful attention to the hair-fine intuition that tells me when I have just enough but no more. I sometimes imagine that I’ll reach a point where I don’t need pictures on the wall anymore, where I can bask in the spaciousness of the expanse of white wall. I’m not there yet, and I’m mostly okay with that.
This impulse to strip down to just enough is hard-wired in me and therefore part of the weird makeup of the strange person that I am. But it’s also an essential impulse to the spiritual life. John Cassian asserts that the entirety of the spiritual quest lies in purity of heart, which we often translate as singleness of heart. For us Benedictines, that is what conversion looks like. To purify ourselves—or, really, to allow God to purify us—until God can see her reflection in our eyes. That doesn’t mean we need to get rid of all the dirty bits. Really, it means that we need to drop the weights and the preoccupations of our lives so that we can breathe more freely, so that we can stop and really see Jesus standing before us.
We see some of this experience in the Gospel accounts of the last few weeks. The disciples are all huddled together, in fear or grief or agitation. Then Jesus appears to them. Despite his walking through walls, he doesn’t do anything extraordinary. He doesn’t show off his superpowers, as if to say, “Hey, I’ve actually been God all along.” No, after telling them not to be afraid, he simply shows them his hands and his feet. He says, “it is I myself.” Then, as if to emphasize his humanity and his enduring relationship with his friends and disciples, he does what he has always done with them—he eats.
It is all so simple. Just Jesus, holding out his still human hands, revealing himself yet again, and inviting his friends to a meal.
When I was working in the hospital, I got a call that a woman in one of my units wanted to see the chaplain. As soon as I’d introduced myself to her, she said, “I want to convert to Christianity.” I was a little taken aback with the abruptness of her statement, so I asked her for some background. She was raised Jewish and had identified as a Jew, at least culturally, for most of her life. About a decade before, Jesus began appearing to her on the street and in her home—it turns out he still has little respect for walls. Eventually this woman found her way to an Episcopal church where she was going to Sunday Eucharist and participating in the education events.
She repeated her question to me: “How do I convert to Christianity?” I paused for a moment before telling her that she had already converted. Jesus had come to her and called her. That was the conversion. I encouraged her to talk to her priest about baptism, but the conversion was already done.
Like this woman, and like the disciples huddled in their room, whatever our past experiences it is the appearance of Jesus in the midst of our ordinary, worrying, harried lives that calls us deeper into the heart of God. We may have been raised within the Church, but I guarantee that we are monks or committed Christians today, not because of the way we were raised—though that may have helped—but because one day or over and over again Jesus appeared to us, held out his hands, said “touch me, know me,” and invited us to sit down and eat.
It really is that simple.
This Easter, I find myself called or recalled to that simplicity. I find I long for Jesus in a way that I haven’t since I was a child. My heart keeps whispering his name. The Cosmic Christ, Sophia, and the Lord of Creation are all lovely and beautiful. They all have their place. But deep within me, I want Jesus. That is why I am a Christian, and that is why I am a monk. It’s really that simple.
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.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.
Bloom speaks of despair, and that word might fit. But we might just as easily say “need” or “longing” or “desire.” Eventually, we find that even good things clutter up our lives and distract us from our need of God. To hold out our hands in supplication, to take Jesus’ offered hand in ours, those hands must be empty. They must be free. Another way of putting it is that we have to quiet our lives to such a degree that we can hear the whisper of Jesus’ name reverberating in our hearts.
The promise of Easter is that he will come to us. He does come to us. Walls will not keep him out. He can push the clutter aside. He will hold out his hands to us, look us in the eyes, and say, “see, it is I myself, the source and the end of all your longing. Reach out, touch me.”
It really is that simple.
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