Great Silence

My old cuckoo clock’s weights reached the floor a few days ago, leaving the house silent. I don’t know how long it took me to notice the absence of the familiar ”tic-tock-tic-tock” and the ”cuckoo! cuckoo!” on the half-hour. It alerted me, when at last I did take note, to more than the need to hoist up the weights that keep the pendulum moving:  I re-set these weights daily as a habit, and I had forgotten. Something is amiss. I am thankful Lenten season is almost here, for with it comes rhythms of life that are fitting for a season in the Desert.

I pulled the weights back into position and paused, staring at the bronze-painted “pine cone” weights and leaf-shaped, motionless pendulum. I reached up to give the pendulum a swing… and stopped short.  Instead, I left it silent, weights poised, and walked away. “It was as if time had stopped,” we often say. This silent clock, it seemed, was my metaphor. Everything feels frozen, and without momentum.

Dis-ease when time stands still is  toxic.  Anxiety fills in all the spaces with the white-noise of one’s own self. Avarice leaves no room for Providence. Gossip destroys trust.  Self-pity rejects God’s mercy. No, these protracted days are best weathered in the security and stability of the One who dwells in great silence. The eternal is not time “standing still” but rather, it is time without beginning or end. Its going to be a good Lenten season, I can already tell.

Have some Fish

Great Lent was engaged, in part,  in the pages of St. John of the Ladder’s Divine Ascent. I was confronted with, in the beginning, a weight that would increase over the weeks to a level unanticipated. I was not just tired – I was irritable, despondent, and defeated. In fact, I felt I’d not at all become more prepared for Resurrection Sunday in the way I’d heard people talk about it before.  All my sin seemed to rise to the surface and collect around my heart like a mocking, mob of accusers. By Good Friday, I found it almost laughable that I should be asked to write “that one sin” down on a tiny yellow square of flash paper to nail to a wooden cross at the front of the sanctuary. Had I written down my sins, they would have gone up in a flash so large it would have burned the church down.

Maundy Thursday began a total fast. I put myself in the story. I played it out in my mind and watched my reactions to Jesus, to my fellow disciples. I thought about the group dynamics in my own circles of relationship. Knowing who you are in the Story sheds light on a lot of things.

3am Sunday I wake up and I am hungry, and aching all over my body. I had worked as hard as I could from sun-up to late afternoon Saturday in the yard. I would have been that disciple: immersing myself in some kind of work as the confusion and disillusionment set in. In that early hour I realized how perfectly “natural” a fast was from Maundy Thursday to Resurrection Sunday, since anyone who has ever been through something intense like the sudden illness and death of a family member knows that you can go days without eating and then suddenly, in the wee hours of the morning, be awakened by intense hunger and the realization that you haven’t eaten in days.

I rose and made my way to the refrigerator. The whole thing seemed anti-climatic. Should I wait to eat and have the first food I take in be the Eucharist? That seemed too “romantic.” I imagined instead being that disciple, rising to the call of an empty stomach and an exhausted body, scrounging around in the darkness of the place where I’d slept for a bit of bread and realizing, as I ate, the gravity of what had transpired in the past three days. I am only able to eat a small morsel, and I go back to bed.

After what seemed like only minutes my alarm is waking me up from deep sleep and I have to hurry to get to the church! As I enter the sanctuary they are about to stand and sing “Christ the Lord is Risen Today!”  It is the greatest Day of the church year. The biggest party. The loudest celebration. Death has been swallowed up in Victory.  Alleluia! Christ is Risen, He is Risen indeed!

All that crap that “rose to the surface,” the sin that could have burned the church down, the weight of a tombstone… it all feels like a dream. In fact, nothing seems real anymore. I question this place. Christ is Risen – but where is He?

I get an email from Peggy, from my home fellowship. She says her husband made a big pot of Gumbo for group tonight – a ton of it.  We gather, we break bread together, we share our lives. . . and my eyes are opened: He is here, among us.

But I knew that.

Didn’t I?

Can we Hear God yet?

“The sea is the source of the fountain,” writes St. J of the L, ” and humility is the source of discernment.”

John likes to connect outcome with the source and in so doing his book instills in the reader an appreciation for telos. It would be easy for some, particularly Protestants, to dismiss this book because of its title. The misunderstanding is that God is “up there” somewhere and that people move “up” a Ladder, becoming more and more like God the more they do righteous things. Western imagery associates “up” with a hierarchy in which whatever is on “top” is the best, the most important, the most valued and so on. We do the same thing with numbering, where the number “1″ is associated with whatever is of primary importance.

But this kind of thinking will not work when reading the works of the likes of St. John of the Ladder. One quickly runs into problems, because the way “up” looks very much like a way “down.” Here, one step 25 of 30, one finds humility. And this is no humility as an achievement –it is a humility that cannot even be described by the one who is humble. And St. J rightly identifies its pre-requisite nature in relation to discernment.

If humility is a pre-requisite to discernment…what does that mean for discernment activities in the Church?

Long Lent

I once endeavored to climbed a “14-er” with a group of friends and was all too glad to turn back before the summit when it started to rain and the threat of lightning was imminent… because I was exhausted.

But there is no turning back during Lent. The sun rises and sets and rises again and the season marches on though  sins are looming large and everything feels heavy and sick and sore. But I wont retreat– for there is no ultimate danger. Resurrection is as imminent as lightning in a thunder storm and it is this Hope, this inevitable Hope, that keeps me looking toward the summit…even if I have to camp here for a long, cold, string of nights.

Humility and Mission

“Our neighbor is moved by nothing so much as by a sincere and humble way of talking and of behaving. It is an example and a spur to others never to turn proud. And there is nothing to equal the benefit of this,” writes St. J of the L.  And so it is that those virtues born in the disciple of Christ are for the sake of others. Christianity, much to the contrary of what is widely advertised (pardon the pun) is not a self-improvement product or program–in fact, it isn’t a product or program at all.

On Poverty

“There was no trace of avarice in Job,” writes St. J of the L, “and so he remained tranquil when he lost everything.”

When I read that sentence my mind lept immediately to Japan, and I wondered…

I cannot imagine that “tranquility” would be the attitude of Westerners in the face of losing everything. I might be wrong, but I seem to recall some violence, looting, and attitudes of entitlement coming out of the most recent event that flattened an entire city in the United States.

Consumerism, as a religion (which it is), shapes the human heart to want one thing: More.  A heart that always wants more is offended by the thought of “less,” and all the more-so offended by the idea of “nothing.”

Despondency strikes

St. J of the L  has a timely word today.  One of my young grand-children, tiny Keiran, had abdominal surgery yesterday. A tense and tiring day for the whole family in so many ways. It is amazing to me that when exhaustion sets in, lying in wait is the temptation — the demon, as St. John refers to it — of despondency. At a time when the most prayer, the most attentiveness, the most engagement is needed, …so is the nudge to relax, to feed one’s own soul, to listen to and even desire the voices of others who express pity on you (though you are not the one suffering and in need of prayer), to find little things to do that “look” busy and spiritual but are in fact distractions from true devotion so that you can “rest.”

Stuck on a Rung

Step 8 on St. John’s Ladder is “On Placidity and Meekness”   He writes, “As the gradual pouring of water on a fire puts out the flame completely, so the tears of genuine mourning can extinguish every flame of anger and irascibility.”  It would be fitting, I think, to stop on this rung and weep for a while…a long while.

The juxtaposition of anger and humility, like darkness and light, is helpful. Yet John adds a twist: sometimes, he says, an outburst of anger is the occasion for reconciliation. It’s tricky, he admits.  And so it is. With one foot on the 8th rung it might be a good idea to hang on tight and stay put until it is Meekness, rather than Anger, that puts the body in motion. It’s a long way down, and I don’t so much like the look of that dragon…

On Voluntary Suffering

If you are at all aware of the depths of your own depravity, and you believe life on earth affords you a place of penance for sin lest you be sent to the fires of hell, no torture or suffering is ever going to be enough to offset the prospect of that inferno — not even Jesus’ suffering on your behalf it would seem.  That it took 7 centuries to produce a Martin Luther is utterly amazing to me.

And yet…

Those who, upon realizing the gravity of their sin, beg the Abbot to send them to the monastery prison…are they any different from the criminal who “turns himself in?”    Their willful submission to penance (who knows their crime? Was it murder? Rape? How serious we are not told) is quite different from the man or woman who commits a crime and is never caught, never prosecuted, and never punished. That one who evades penance for a crime may smile at the ‘grace’ he or she enjoys… but this is not grace (though it may be a kind of mercy).  This willful submission to penance is also different from the man or woman who is caught, but tries to evade sentence. The former has truly repented and willfully accepts their lot. The latter imagines sin inconsequential and penance of no value.

A Monastery without Walls

With guidance, all Christians would see the “monastery” that is already in the world. It is not necessary to create, artificially, scenarios for spiritual development. It is all right there in our circumstances if only we have the perception, and more importantly the response to it. The Abbots in life are many, if we only recognized them for what they are.

Yet, I think I understand the ancient desire to “speed up” and/or perfect the process. The the life of a monk (where the Rule is harsh) reminds me of the life of a body-builder. Any person who is active and loves the outdoors will, over time, develop muscles and endurance. The body-builder, however, devises a strict plan of development that takes him or her outside the normal boundaries of exercise, and dangles dangerously close to abuse, rather than care, for the body. Most body-builders have a trainer, who pushes them beyond what their own limits.

So it is with the Abbot. So it is with the spiritual director. A Companion on the journey who is able to see your context for what it is (a place of formation), who has the wisdom to challenge you to greater devotion and assist you in making the formative adjustments called for — this is the difference between skating through life unchanged, or engaging life as a monastery without walls.