Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Before I came to the Monastery I used to go to an Al-Anon
meeting on Friday evenings. It was quite an eclectic group of people, the kind
you can get in a 12-step meeting in New York City, and I loved it. At the end
of the meeting, we’d all gather in a circle in this cramped church basement
room, hold hands, and say the serenity prayer. Then we’d boisterously shout
“keep coming back. It works if you work it, so work it—you’re worth it!” The
last cheer is meant to end the meeting on a high note, an energetic
encouragement against despair and a reminder that the program is the solution.
But there was one old-timer who didn’t like this tradition. After the serenity prayer, still holding our hands, she would chant along, “keep coming back.” Then she would say, “it works fine,” and rather forcefully drop the hands of those on either side of her. Curious, I asked her why she ended the meeting that way. She said, “we all work hard enough.”
As I prayed throughout the week with this Sunday’s gospel reading, that woman kept coming into my prayer. “It works fine,” she kept telling me, as she dropped my hand. “What works fine?” I pleaded in my prayer. What does that even mean?
We all know this story very well. It appears in all three synoptic gospels. With a few variations it follows the same pattern. Jesus asks the disciples who people say that he is, and they tell him one of the prophets. Then he asks who they say that he is. Peter confesses that Jesus is the Messiah. Then Jesus goes on to tell them what being the Messiah actually means: he will be betrayed, tortured, and killed, and on the third day he will rise again. In all three accounts Peter rebukes Jesus and is then rebuked in turn.
There are, of course, so many layers to this story. We must all ask ourselves throughout our lives, who Jesus is for us. If we’re really wacky and creative, we might turn the question back on Jesus and ask him, “who do you say that I am?” We might meditate on what it means to take up our cross and follow. But the simplest layer of the story may be its most profound.
We watch Peter, in real time, face into the fracturing of his illusions, and in that witnessing we are invited to do the same. Peter is perhaps the best example of this process in the scriptures. He follows Jesus zealously from the beginning. In the synoptic gospels he is the first to call Jesus the Messiah (Thomas gets that honor in John). The text makes clear that Peter has a definite idea of what being the Messiah is all about—an idea that certainly does not look like betrayal, torture, and death, even if that passion leads to resurrection. Even as Jesus rebukes and corrects Peter, Peter will have to deny and betray Jesus himself, to watch his friend and teacher die on a cross, and to see him raised to life again before he can finally relinquish his fixed ideas of who God is to and for him and the world.
Like Peter, we are all invited, throughout our lives, to a process of disillusionment. We live, most of us, with fixed ideas of who God is and how God works. We are blinded by our obsessions and illusions, many of which appear to us as good and holy.
I once had a spiritual director who pointed out that we are afraid to pray dangerously. To pray dangerously, he said, was to pray for God to rid us of our obsessions and illusions. Most of us stick with very nice prayers—prayers for people’s health and wellbeing that are, in themselves good prayers, but that fall far short of praying for our own transformation in whatever ways God wants us to be transformed.
One of the great gifts of monastic life is the opportunity to be freed from the tyranny of desire. Most of the time we talk about desire as a positive force in the spiritual life, and our heart’s deepest desire for wholeness in God is a very good thing indeed. But we are all plagued with much smaller and pettier desires—wants, if you will. We want to feel comfortable. We want things to stay the way they’ve always been. We want to be certain about who we are, who God is, how the world functions. We want, we want, we want—and we allow all these little wants to guide how and who we are in and for the world. And so we make our decisions and evaluations based, not on a discernment of God’s will for us, but on what we want in any given situation. In other words, like Peter, we set our mind on human things.
Monastic life will teach you that you can get on perfectly well without having things the way you want them. Indeed, any mature Christian life will be dictated by higher ideals than what we want in any particular moment. That isn’t to say that our wants and desires are bad. Unless we allow them to dictate our lives they are rather neutral. I would love for God to be the kind of God who gave me everything I want, but that isn’t reality. Fortunately, reality is so much richer than what we want. Fortunately, God promises us transformation, freedom, wholeness, and the life that really is life—whether we want that or not.
In his book My Bright Abyss, the poet Christian Wiman warns 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.” (29-30)
I think this is the deeper meaning that that old-timer was trying to convey in her cranky way. The spiritual life works fine. Our images of God, our methods of prayer, our beliefs and practices, and our wants and desires—they’re all just fine, but they’re also all a beginning, not an end. Peter had to undergo a painful process of disillusionment in order fully to give himself to God for whatever God willed. I’m sorry to say that the process is no less painful and no shorter for the rest of us. In order to become the mature, surrendering, loving people that God wills us to be, we must let go of anything at all that is not God.
There will be grief in this process. Hopefully there will also be moments of laughter, when we can see the absurdity of our self-will. It may, at times, feel like we have loaded our backpack with stones. We will certainly hear the groan of the cross as we drag it along. But if we persevere, we will find ourselves living a life freer than we could ever have imagined possible. We will find ourselves filled with the life that really is life, the life of Christ welling up within us. So keep coming back. It works fine!
