Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Back in September I walked St. Cuthbert’s Way, a 63-mile pilgrimage route that starts at the ruins of Melrose Abbey and ends at Lindisfarne, a tidal island off the east coast of England where St. Aidan founded his monastery in the 7th century. Near the start of the trip, one of my brothers who had also walked St. Cuthbert’s Way texted me “You’ll have moments of intense feelings of aloneness that are hard and sweet at the same time. A lot of important stuff will come to you from those. Embrace them, and remember that when you’re done, you’re coming back to your community that loves you and will be very happy of your return.”
The first few days of the trip, I really didn’t understand what he was talking about. The walking had been pretty moderate. Being the UK, the weather was grey and cool, but that wasn’t so bad. I met kind and generous walkers along the way, and I enjoyed my time alone. There really were no difficult feelings—only gratitude and awe for the beauty that surrounded me.
Midway through the walk I had my mountaintop experience. I climbed to the highest point of the route with 360 degree views of rolling hills and the sea in the distance. It was the most perfectly stunning day you could imagine. Clear skies, warm sunshine, and miles of visibility. I was literally singing “The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Music.” This is called foreshadowing, by the way.
The next day couldn’t have been more different. I set out in the driving rain. I could literally see sheets of rain blowing in front of me. Within fifteen minutes my waterproof boots were soaked through, not to mention my pants. As I wound my way through the Cheviots, I kept worrying that I’d miss a signpost because I was staring straight down at the path to keep the wind out of my face. It was a far cry from the mountaintop! Even as I was enduring the rain and the wind, I started to call that day my Day of Affliction.
I found myself yelling at God, literally screaming at the top of my lungs. There’s not much opportunity for that kind of prayer in a monastery, so I took advantage of my solitude to let it all out—all the frustration and the resentment and the fear and the anger and the disappointment that I wasn’t aware I had inside me. At my lowest point that day, my brother’s words came back to me: “You’ll have moments of intense feelings of aloneness that are hard and sweet at the same time. A lot of important stuff will come to you from those. Embrace them, and remember that when you’re done, you’re coming back to your community that loves you and will be very happy of your return.”
Now I understood what he meant. I did feel alone and afraid. I did feel resentful of the circumstances of my day and some of the circumstances of my life—some of which I had freely chosen, and some of which I had not. I was miserably and wonderfully alive, perhaps more alive in that moment than I had been in a long time. I hated every minute of that walk that day, and I was also surrounded by God’s love and the abundant beauty of God’s creation. I was held in my affliction—given the gift of the full experience of my life. I was also held in love by this beautiful community 3,500 miles away.
Advent always begins with a Day of Affliction. Each year we hear about the signs of the apocalypse when “People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world. The powers of the heavens will be shaken.” Nations and temples will fall down around us. There will be wars and earthquakes, and we will be afraid.
This is the context in which hope is born. This is the darkness into which the Light of the World comes to us to save us and free us from our self-destruction. We don’t need hope on the mountaintop. We don’t need light when the sun is shining all around us and the hills glow with the golden beauty of God’s abundance.
Jesus comes to us in the moment of our greatest need, when the light seems to be failing and the world is crashing down around us. That isn’t to say that God is not present in the sunshine. But our need for God draws God to us in a way that contentment and wellbeing often do not.
Writing of the Crucifixion in a powerful essay on affliction, Simone Weil writes that “This tearing apart, over which supreme love places the bond of supreme union, echoes perpetually across the universe in the midst of the silence, like two notes, separate yet melting into one, like pure and heart-rending harmony. This is the Word of God. The whole creation is nothing but its vibration. […] Those who persevere in love hear this note from the very lowest depths into which affliction has thrust them. From that moment they can no longer have any doubt.”[1]
The stance of hope to which Advent—and this historical moment—invite us is first of all perseverance in love. If we can manage not to run from our fear and our anger and our dismay, if we can manage to shout them out into the driving rain and the threatening darkness, we will hear the pure and heart-rending harmony of God’s love echoing back to us, assuring us that we are not alone. Then we can no longer have any doubt that God holds us tight and will never—can never—let us go.
The key is to love ourselves enough to remain awake to our experience, not to dull our inner senses with our drug of choice. We can be numb, or we can be alive. The choice is ours.
Rebecca Solnit writes that “the world often seems divided between false hope and gratuitous despair. Despair demands less of us, it’s more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity—seeing the troubles in this world—and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable.”[2]
Despair is its own kind of drug, numbing us both to the pain we are experiencing and to the possibilities of new life with which God is constantly seeding the world. Our salvation will not look like whatever we imagine in our limited desire for perfection. Into the darkness of Advent comes, not a mighty warrior to vanquish the violent overlords of the world, but a small and defenseless baby. Salvation comes to us as new life—a life that must be guarded, tended, fed, encouraged—and most of all, loved. This kind of salvation is a far cry from a lottery ticket we can clutch to our chest, sure that our worries are over. But it is so much better for that—for the salvation to which God invites us is the renewal of our own lives in hope and love.
We cannot persevere in love on our own. We need one another to remind us of the light and the love that await us on the other side of the storm. We need to be signposts for each other of the love of God that never lets us go. We need to sing a counterpoint to one another’s songs of affliction—not to overwhelm them but to accompany them on the way, to create together a truer and deeper harmony of the love and affliction that give birth to authentic hope. We need to be that love and that hope for one another.
“The final thing,” Rilke wrote a friend in 1920, giving just this kind of encouragement, “is not self-subjugation but silent loving from such centeredness we feel round even rage and desolation the finally enfolding tenderness.”
My brothers and sisters, in this life, you will have moments of intense feelings of aloneness that are hard and sweet at the same time. A lot of important stuff will come to you from those. Embrace them, and remember that when you’re done, you’re coming back to your community and your God that loves you and will be very happy of your return.
Come, Lord Jesus, and show us the way home to you.
[2] Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark, p. 19.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.
