Without separation...

Still thinking about the Cross, I had a very strange night, full of dreams I cannot remember, but which have left me tired and shaken this morning. Appropriately, the weather is very rough here; the sky is dark and troubled, with flecks of bright blue showing through and shedding beautiful patches of bright sunlight on the wet ground.

Richard Rohr wrote, in Things Hidden, "Jesus does not define holiness as separation from evil as much as absorption and transformation of it, wherein I pay the price instead of always asking others to pay the price."

This seems to be key to what God is saying to me this Lent, and I don't care for it one little bit. The fact that it fits right in with what I've been coming to think over a number of years doesn't help.

You see, if we are to follow our Lord, we have, as he himself pointed out (Luke 9.23-24), to take up our cross and follow him, not seeking to preserve our lives, but being willing to lose them. As I see it, this "taking up [one's] cross" is all about the "absorption and transformation" of evil. I wrote elsewhere about the strange solidarity of prayer, whereby "what I am doing is somehow making the crucified Christ present in creation, through my own ontological status within, and my own conscious openness to, the whole community of createdness." What if this works the other way? What if our own "conscious openness to" our fellow creatures involves us inextricably in their pain, and in their seeming inability to live without inflicting pain? What if our sensitivity, our defencelessness, in the presence of the brokenness of all that lives, is the way that we can ourselves be little reflections of Christ's utter, appalling vulnerability on the Cross, where all that we are (and hence all that we are open to...) is "crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me" (Galatians 2.19,20)?

This radical skinlessness is what it seems to be about: being prepared to live entirely without defences, unshielded from the radiation of anguish in which we live as created beings. This is the flip-side, somehow, of what Rohr says elsewhere in Things Hidden,

After all, our task is to separate from evil, isn't it? That is the lie! Any exclusionary process of thinking, any exclusively dualistic thinking, will always create violent people on some level.

That I state as an absolute, and precisely because the cross revealed it to me. The crucifixion scene is our standing icon stating both the problem and the solution for all of history.

Our refusal to separate, by so much as the thickness of our skin, from the pain, and the sin, of this made and fallen life, is what lies at the heart of prayer for me, at the moment. Gazing up at the Cross, as the three Marys, and John, did that first Easter, is the only way to become, and to survive becoming, a little shadow of that great "absorption and transformation". But what is the price? That's what I find so scary.