Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Listen, I will tell you a mystery!

Christians speak of the "paschal mystery," the process of loss and renewal that was lived and personified in the death and raising up of Jesus. We can affirm that belief in ritual and song, as we do in the Eucharist, but until people have lost their foundation and ground, and then experienced God upholding them so that they come out even more alive on the other side, the expression "paschal mystery" is little understood and not essentially transformative.

Paschal mystery is a doctrine that Christians would probably intellectually assent to, but it is not yet the very cornerstone of one's life philosophy. That is the difference between belief systems and living faith. We move from one to the other only through encounter, surrender, trust and an inner experience of presence and power.

(Richard Rohr, from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality)

Rohr's language is beautiful, but slightly too abstract for what I have been feeling as we move into Holy Week. Henri Nouwen said,

When we dismiss people out of hand because of their apparent woundedness, we stunt their lives by ignoring their gifts, which are often buried in their wounds.

We all are bruised reeds, whether our bruises are visible or not. The compassionate life is the life in which we believe that strength is hidden in weakness and that true community is a fellowship of the weak.

We only know Christ for who he is when we know ourselves as bruised like him: when we know that only in defeat can we find victory; only in loss can we be restored. The Cross is the place where this transformation can happen, and only the Cross. In absorbing the fallenness of Creation, the death that holds it captive, Jesus made possible the transformation of all things (Romans 8.21), the death of death itself. If we follow him into this mystery, if we trust him this far, then "we have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer we who live, but it is Christ who lives in us: for we have died, and our life is hidden with Christ in God." (Galatians 2.19-20, Colossians 3.3)

3 comments:

Sue said...

Amen, dude of dudeness

Fran said...

Oh my- my heart is so moved by this. Those words from Nouwen.

I am reading this in my reader so I will not exit and "rename" myself, it is Fran from St Edward's.

This is like a gift of Easter, Mike. Thank you.

God bless you.

June Butler said...

Mike, when folks ask me, "Are you saved?" I want to tell them that I need salvation every single day of my life for my survival as a functional (more or less) human being. The once-and-for all being saved is foreign to my own experience. Kathleen Norris says something similar in one of her books about the need for daily rescue by God.