Things are as they are

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place I rejoice that things are as they are...

(TS Eliot, Ash Wednesday)

Lent is a strange period in many ways. We are very used to the idea of Lent, and in or out of a church context we rather superficially associate it with the giving up of all those treats we enjoyed on Shrove Tuesday; but if we miss the sense of its strangeness I think we may have missed the point.

I like Mark's stark account of Jesus' time in the desert: "[T]he Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him." (Mark 1:12-13 NRSV) That's all. No stories of conversations with the tempter, no Scriptural rapiers from our Lord, just the plain facts.

The wilderness is an odd place in itself. There is that very physical wilderness, of course, and no one who has travelled across the Judean Desert will forget its strangeness; at dusk and dawn one could imagine anything, and one's perceptions are stretched thin across the terraced escarpments and the pale dust. Only the ravens seem truly at home there. But the wilderness of the heart is as real a place, and stranger. Hopkins' terrible sonnet, "O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed" gives the sense of it. The years of the pandemic gave many of us to spend time there. 

But God's angels patrol the wilderness of the mind as they patrolled the Judean wilderness following Jesus' baptism. We may not see them, but they are there in the pain itself. The words of Psalm 119, "Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey your word... It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees" (Psalm 119:67;71 NIV) are not pious platitudes but unvarnished truth.

Frederica Mathewes-Green, writing on the practice of the Jesus Prayer, has this to say: 

At first the Prayer is just a string of words repeated, perhaps mechanically, in your mind. But with time it may "descend into the heart," and those who experience this will be attentive to maintain it, continually "bringing the mind" (the nous, that is) "into the heart."

There is no place within us, however desolate, that the Prayer will not touch, and its patient reach will hold us firm, even when we think we have lost it altogether. Things are as they are only in the endless ground of God's isness. There is nothing else. The mind descending into the heart encounters not the cold of the interstellar wastes but God's own light, love and endless healing mercy. At the end of Lent there is Easter Day.

Angels in Desolation

I was brought up to be a perfectionist: to get it right, preferably first time, or just not to bother. I carried the attitude through into adult life, where it made me unhappy, driven and, at least when it came to farming, effective. But spiritually it was disastrous. Sin crippled me. Not that I was that much more (or less) of a sinner than the next person, nor that my sins were any worse (or any less bad) than theirs, but that the fact of their having been done at all made me incapable of living with myself, incapable of believing I was livable with by anyone, including God. My perfectionism had made me, spiritually speaking, stinking rich in self-regard. Not self esteem, you understand, but self-regard; not self-satisfaction, but self-attention. I could not reach God for the mounds of my own self analysis, my continual self appraisal, just as the rich young man in Mark 10.17-27 couldn't see over his bank balance, and his land, and his possessions.

The maturing contemplative is too poor to be concerned with spiritual progress. If there is a measure of spiritual progress, it will be found in the rib cage of failure: in our debilitating faults, our defeats, our wounds, our solidarity with those who are marginalised from every circle of meaning they belong to. This seems to be the way divine love works, to seek out and indwell where we hurt most. This is the obscure realisation of receptive mind. 

Martin Laird, An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation and Liberation

Two things rescued me, right in line with Martin Laird's words here. Firstly, the continued practice of contemplation, which I somehow managed - more or less - to stick to through thick and thin; and secondly, a series of disasters and let-downs, beginning with a farm accident that put an end to my farming career, and eventually to my ability to work full-time at all, and ending only when I was able to move away. The confluence of those things led to a remarkable discovery: God was closer to me than ever. Not just that he hadn't abandoned me when things came unglued, but that he seemed closer than ever. He wasn't of course. He'd been there all along; but my heart, being shattered, was somehow opened, not only to God but to all creation in its brokenness, its pain (Romans 8.22-25).

I have come to recognise, from these periods in my own life of desolation and functional solitude (being alone in the sense not necessarily of physical isolation, but of being cut off from understanding and comfort: "You have taken from me friend and neighbour - darkness is my closest friend." (Psalm 88.18)) the truth of what Laird is trying to say in the passage I quoted above.

But there is another strand in the Psalms which is found in its fullest form only in Psalm 119; and that is the recognition of suffering itself as somehow a route to the mercy of God in Christ. It was during these darkest times that I first came to notice these passages clearly, though I must have read them in passing often enough, and to cling to them as to a bit of floating wood in a shipwreck. The three passages occur close together in this longest of Psalms, between v. 67 and v. 75:

67 Before I was afflicted I went astray,
    but now I obey your word.
68 You are good, and what you do is good;
    teach me your decrees...
71 It was good for me to be afflicted
    so that I might learn your decrees...
75 I know, Lord, that your laws are righteous,
    and that in faithfulness you have afflicted me.
76 May your unfailing love be my comfort,
    according to your promise to your servant.

This was for me the key to the whole thing: the way that my loneliness, defeat and distress made sense, how it did in fact connect with the Gospel - which is after all to be translated "Good News" - and how through some deep mystery it connected intimately with the Cross, and with the utter stripping of the Cross. It is only in that condition that we can dare to know nothing, because there is nothing else but Christ, and him crucified. (1 Corinthians 2.2)

Desolation is a place that seems somehow dear to God, oddly enough. It was in the wilderness that God revealed himself to Abraham and to Jacob, to Moses and to Elijah; and it was into the wilderness that he called his Son - drove him, according to Mark - to face his own temptation to self-reliance, and in the wilderness that the angels ministered to him. It is only in the wilderness, it seems to me, that we have little enough to cling to that we can see what has been before us since long before we were conceived: that God is nearer to us than our own breathing, than the earth beneath our blistered feet.