Faith alone...

Faith alone can give us the light to see that God's will is to be found in our everyday life. Without this light, we cannot see to make the right decisions.

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999, p. 38

We are all bound to seek not only our own good, but the good of others. Divine providence brings us in contact, whether directly or indirectly, with those in whose lives we are to play a part as instruments of salvation.

Thomas Merton, Life and Holiness, Image Books, 1963, p. 40

I'm sorry to have been so out of touch recently. Difficult personal circumstances, involving among other things regular visits to a friend in hospital, have conspired to keep me distracted and unable to focus on writing on the scattered occasions when I have been able to sit down at the keyboard. But I haven't forgotten this blog, nor have I forgotten that this Lent is drawing down through Passiontide towards Good Friday.

Meanwhile, I thought I'd just post these snippets from Thomas Merton, which seem to sum up the things God has been showing me this last week or so...

Something Different…

an unedited repost from inward/outward

How are you doing at this point in your Lenten journey?

I don’t mean, have you successfully stayed away from candy or caffeine or cigarettes, or whatever you “gave up for Jesus” this year. I don’t mean, have you prayed, rested, or helped others more; or worried, complained, or bought stuff less.  I just mean, I wonder how you’re doing, feeling, being as we turn the corner to the week that leads up to the week that leads up to Easter.

Is excitement or dread becoming more predominant? Is there increasingly space in you for “a song every day, a song every day” (to quote Abraham Joshua Heschel from yesterday’s entry)? Are you feeling bold and proud to be among Jesus’ friends, eager to see what happens, or are you already shrinking away into the crowd a bit? Are you glad to be taken again on this adventure of faith or ready to have a different adventure? There are no right answers; I’m just wondering how it is for you.

At this point on the path that is inevitably winding its way to a cross, I find myself wishing that something different might (please, please, please) happen this year. I don’t want to watch him go through it all again. I don’t want to try to go through it with him.

I’m so bad at it, this part of the story. All these slow hours leading up to the hours that lead up to his death. Another execution, like that isn’t our answer for everything we don’t know what else to do with. And do any of us know what to do with Jesus, really?

What do we do with undeserved, lavish, scandalous love? Generally, we condemn it. We refuse it entry. Or we turn it into a revered treasure that gets hung on the walls of our inner and outer sanctuaries, but isn’t allowed to change our lives. In some immature way or another, we kill it.

The days now grow stumbly and slow ... and yet go all too fast. Will my failures and disappointments and good-intentions-but-ultimately-refusals to love go to my grave with me? If I could really let them die this time, might they become catalysts of resurrection?

Will anything be different this year, Jesus? Will I?

Kayla McClurg facilitates inward/outward and other points of connection for The Church of the Saviour.

Heroically faithful?

What matters in the contemplative life is not for you or your Director to be always infallibly right, but for you to be heroically faithful to grace and to love. If God calls you to Him, then He implicitly promises you all the graces you need to reach Him. You must be blindly faithful to this promise.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, New Directions, 1961, p. 244

This seems very close to the lesson God is trying to teach me this Lent. Nothing else, it seems, will do. What we have here seems to be very close to Jesus’ own journey to the Cross. Only his faithfulness, only his preparedness to go, despite the dreadful awareness of the consequences he showed in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matthew 6.36ff; Luke 22.39ff) as far as his Father called him to, trusting only in the bare knowledge of his Father’s love, allowed the Cross to bring to us, to all creation, the healing grace that will make all things new. Merton is right: it is a heroic faithfulness to which we are called if we are to take up our own cross and follow him. God grant us the courage to trust that the grace is there, will always be there, to bring us through…

Crucial…

O Lord, this holy season of Lent is passing quickly. I entered into it with fear, but also with great expectations. I hoped for a great breakthrough, a powerful conversion, a real change of heart; I wanted Easter to be a day so full of light that not even a trace of darkness would be left in my soul. But I know that you do not come to your people with thunder and lightning. Even St. Paul and St. Francis journeyed through much darkness before they could see your light. Let me be thankful for your gentle way. I know you are at work. I know you will not leave me alone. I know you are quickening me for Easter—but in a way fitting to my own history and my own temperament.

I pray that these last three weeks, in which you invite me to enter more fully into the mystery of your passion, will bring me a greater desire to follow you on the way that you create for me and to accept the cross that you give to me. Let me die to the desire to choose my own way and select my own desire. You do not want to make me a hero but a servant who loves you.

Be with me tomorrow and in the days to come, and let me experience your gentle presence. Amen.

Henri J.M. Nouwen, A Cry for Mercy: Prayers from the Genesee, Doubleday

I don’t know that I had as beautiful a purpose as Nouwen had in mind for this Lent, but certainly I had a purpose. I felt that this Lent would be somehow crucial, yet I misunderstood, partly at least, that word “crucial”. Like most people of my time, I had thought of crucial as “important or essential as resolving a crisis” (Merriam-Webster) first, and, even as a Franciscan with some shreds of school Latin left, only secondly as relating to the way of the Cross.

I was wrong. God has chosen this Lent to show me even more clearly my own poverty, my own powerlessness—my own desperate need for hiddenness and silence—by taking me a way that is a million miles from the clarity and decisiveness of that dictionary definition. This is a way of darkness very like, in some ways, Paul’s and Francis’. It most certainly involves dying “to the desire to choose my own way and select my own desire.” It even involves dying to the desire to select my own terms of surrender.

A couple of years ago I wrote a post entitled Of God and Cows, which might be worth clicking over and re-reading. In it, I pointed out that the only way effectively and kindly to care for cows was to earn their trust. The only way through times like this is to trust God, to trust blindly, in fact—something which goes against everything a Western man (or woman, but perhaps especially man) has been brought up to believe, and against which every fibre of my being wants to scream. But it is the only way. As CS Lewis once wrote:

If human life is in fact ordered by a beneficent being whose knowledge of our real needs and of the way in which they can be satisfied infinitely exceeds our own, we must expect a priori that His operations will often appear to us far from being beneficent and far from wise...

You are no longer faced with an argument which demands your assent, but with a Person who demands your confidence... the assent, of necessity, moves us from the logic of speculative thought into what might perhaps be called the logic of personal relations.

CS Lewis, The World's Last Night and Other Essays, Mariner Books

The Use of Prayer…

What is the use of prayer if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999, p. 24

Listening in the spiritual life is much more than a psychological strategy to help others discover themselves. In the spiritual life the listener is not the ego, which would like to speak but is trained to restrain itself, but the Spirit of God within us. When we are baptised in the Spirit—that is, when we have received the Spirit of Jesus as the breath of God breathing within us—that Spirit creates in us a sacred space where the other can be received and listened to. The Spirit of Jesus prays in us and listens in us to all who come to us with their sufferings and pains.

When we dare to fully trust in the power of God’s Spirit listening in us, we will see true healing occur.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. (Romans 8.24b-27)

The hole in our soul…

Do you realize with what difficulty surrender will come to a fixing, managing mentality?  There’s nothing in that psyche prepared to understand the spiritual wisdom of surrender.  All of the great world religions teach surrender.  Yet most of us, until we go through “the hole in our soul” don't think surrender is really necessary.  At least that’s how it is for those of us in First World countries.  The poor, on the other hand, seem to understand limitation at a very early age. They cannot avoid or deny the hole in their soul.

The developing world faces its limitation through a breakdown in the social-economic system.  But we, in the so-called developed world, have to face our limitations, it seems, on the inside.  That’s our liberation theology.  We must recognize our own poor man, our own abused woman, the oppressed part of ourselves that we hate, that we deny, that we’re afraid of.  That’s the hole in our soul.  It’s the way through, maybe the only way, says the crucified Jesus.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 66, day 71

Oh, this is hard. It’s the hardest thing I know to face my own broken, beaten self, the part that actually has followed his Lord this far on the via Crucis, and has the wounds to show for it. But I know that for me at least it is the only way, and all my attempts to evade it, and everyone else’s well-meaning efforts to help me evade it, are no use at all.

Why is it so hard for us simply to accept what our dear brother Paul has long since taught us, that “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me…” (Galatians 4.19b-20) and “you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” (Colossians 3.3) These are not pious platitudes—they are Christ’s absolute truth, bloody, broken, glorious. Only in that death will we live forever; only in that defeat will we triumph…

The Beginning of Blessedness…

The dark night is not an abstract notion on some list of spiritual experiences every seeker is supposed to have. The dark night descends on a soul only when everything else has failed. When you are no longer the best meditator in the class because your meditation produces absolutely nothing. When prayer evaporates on your tongue and you have nothing left to say to God. When you are not even tempted to return to a life of worldly pleasure because the world has proven empty and yet taking another step through the void of the spiritual life feels futile because you are no good at it and it seems that God has given up on you, anyway.

This, says John, is the beginning of blessedness. This is the choiceless choice when the soul can do nothing but surrender.

(Source: Dark Night of the Soul: St. John of the Cross)

Mirabai Starr, with thanks to inward/outward

This fits closely, it seems to me, with my post on Monday. There is so much we do not understand, cannot understand, of God’s ways with man and time. We simply do not have the senses required to perceive it—we might as well try and see ELF radiation with the naked eye. All we can perceive are the effects God has on the heart of man—ultimately I think, what we know as the fruits of the Spirit (Galatians 5.22-23).

All our prayer is to be prayed in the dark, then; all the light we know is the light of Christ, and that the patch directly before our feet, the next step (Psalm 119.105)

Don’t think, though, that all this is something esoteric, reserved for the special people, the chosen ones. All it is is love. David had it right:

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,
   my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
   too great and too marvellous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
   like a weaned child with its mother;
   my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.

(Psalm 131)

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner…

Trust the Stream

“There is a river, whose streams gladden the city of God...” (Psalm 46:4).

The stream flowing through our lives is from eternity to eternity. It is artesian. It is totally adequate. Everything we need is borne by that stream. Its origin is the realm beyond, and it carries infinite resources. In this space-time realm, conditioned as we are, the stream can seem to be a trickle. It seems puny against the drugs we’re battling, against the divisions among us or the power of greed that fuels our economy.

When we’re up against all the world’s needs and lacks—the way we perceive life—the stream seems inadequate. But in fact, it is a powerful, surging, cleansing tide that purifies all it touches. It is a grace torrent. It flows irrespective of merit. It carries everything that a human being has ever needed—and could ever want. Whatever we need will flow by at just the opportune moment. Our problem is that we’re not attuned to the stream. We don’t see it. We’re not even looking in the river’s direction.

But when we wait in expectancy, looking at the stream and then recognizing what we need as it floats by, we simply reach out and take the gift. It’s an effortless way of living. Usually we’re not attuned to effortlessness. We’re too busy striving. We’re holding forth and carrying on and trying to reach our goals. The wisdom of the stream is the opposite of this. What I’m talking about is moving from a conceptual awareness of God’s care—the idea of God’s providence—to trusting the flow of that stream that carries everything we need and will bring it at just the opportune moment…

Jesus found it difficult to understand his disciples’ anxiety. He was so in the river, he was so aware that the stream carried everything that was needed, that he couldn’t understand why others were having so much trouble with the idea. What he says is to set our minds on God’s realm, God’s justice, before everything else. Everything else will be given by the stream. This is different from achievement and different from making things happen. Do not be anxious about tomorrow, Jesus says. You’ll have plenty to think about when tomorrow comes. Now the stream is flowing.

Once we get accustomed to noticing the stream, and we spend more time near the stream, taking from it what is being given, there comes another step: actually getting into the water and resting in its flow. Even when the flow is a torrent, we know we are safe. We trust the flow. We become non-resistant. We become receptive. We trust the power of the divine presence, which longs to take our one little life to its divine destination. Even if we’re in deep water, we trust the flow and are not afraid. We simply wait in expectancy to round the next bend, looking in wonder at the view. Always a new view. Effortlessness, expectancy and wonder are how we live, rather than striving.

Faith, in the biblical sense, is trusting the flow and revelling in the view and being carried beyond all existing boundaries. Faith is being excited about the final destination, even when the destination is mystery. When Jesus says, “Believe in God, believe also in me,” he is saying, “Get into the stream with us. It’s a stream of pure grace and mercy. Go into its depths and find us there.”

(N. Gordon Cosby, reposted complete from inward/outward)

Just like the Cross…

When I was young, I wanted to suffer for God. I pictured myself being the great and glorious martyr. There's something so romantic about laying down your life. I guess every young person might see themselves that way, but now I know it is mostly ego.  There is nothing glorious about any actual moment of suffering—when you're in the middle of it. You swear it's meaningless. You swear it has nothing to do with goodness or holiness or God.

The very essence of any experience of trial is that you want to get out. A lack of purpose, of meaning—is the precise suffering of suffering! When you find a pattern in your suffering, a direction, you can accept it and go with it. The great suffering, the suffering of Jesus, is when that pattern is not immediately given.  The soul can live without success, but it cannot live without meaning.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 86, day 94

I can so witness to the truth of Rohr’s words here. The experience of meaninglessness, the sense that almost any circumstances than the present ones would be more godly, more formative, more obviously holy to oneself and to the world, is overwhelming. Nothing, it seems, could be farther from the tragic dignity of suffering for the sake of one’s faith. The present circumstances are just a mess, bloody and tangled and degrading, “nothing to do with goodness or holiness or God.” Just like the Cross, really, when you think about it…

Odd metrics…

Well, that’s sort of comforting, I suppose…

(Hat-tip to Sue, who scored 33.3%…)

Stop counting…

The most important, the most real, and lasting work of the Christian is accomplished in the depths of his own soul. It cannot be seen by anyone, even by himself. It is known only to God. The work is not so much a matter of fidelity to visible and general standards, as of faith: the interior, anguished, almost desperately solitary act by which we affirm our total subjection to God by grasping his word...

Thomas Merton, Life and Holiness, Image Books, 1963, p. 56.

It’s as if what is unbreakable—the very pulse of life—waits for everything else to be torn away, and then in the bareness that only silence and suffering and great love can expose, it dares to speak through us and to us. It seems to say, if you want to last, hold on to nothing. If you want to know love, let in everything. If you want to feel the presence of everything, stop counting the things that break along the way.

Mark Nepo, with thanks to Inward/Outward—source: www.marknepo.com

Hiddenness, even from oneself. Is that what it comes down to? The Spirit’s work in the depths beyond the reach of self-knowledge, analysis. “And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.” (Romans 8.27) To lose everything, even one’s own sense of what is going on in one’s own heart, to consciously allow the tearing away of all that is not God—surely that is the furthest reach of faith, beyond which is no-thing but God.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner…

Grace upon grace…

We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. (Romans 8.28)

St. Paul says here that God both initiates and cooperates in all human growth.  All we can offer is the good will of love.  God “works together with” us, which means both our workings are crucial.  We are real partners. Every moment, God is trying to expand our freedom to love.  Can you imagine that?

God is forever trying to make our choices more alive, more vital, more clear, more true. So much so, that God even uses our mistakes and our sins in that one providential direction. Nothing at all is wasted, nothing!  If that’s not the providence of God, what else would be “providential”?

God seems to be working for our wholeness, for our liberation, for our integrity probably more than we are.  At least that is what the saints always say.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 187, day 200

For more than 20 years now I’ve found this passage to be one of the most comforting, most heart-warming verses in the entire Bible. I don’t know that I can really add much to Rohr's words here, except that reading them in the CAC Daily Meditation has made my day!

How much God loves us…

God made a covenant with us. The word covenant means “coming together.” God wants to come together with us. In many of the stories in the Hebrew Bible, we see that God appears as a God who defends us against our enemies, protects us against dangers, and guides us to freedom. God is God-for-us. When Jesus comes a new dimension of the covenant is revealed. In Jesus, God is born, grows to maturity, lives, suffers, and dies as we do. God is God-with-us. Finally, when Jesus leaves he promises the Holy Spirit. In the Holy Spirit, God reveals the full depth of the covenant. God wants to be as close to us as our breath. God wants to breathe in us, so that all we say, think and do is completely inspired by God. God is God-within-us. Thus God’s covenant reveals to us to how much God loves us.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

I’ve been thinking about God’s love for us this Lent. I remember my disappointment when I first discovered that the word “Lent” comes merely from the Middle English lenten, lengthen. I wanted it to have some meaning that conveyed more of the sense I had of Lent as a time between, a waiting time. A time when the usual preoccupations are placed in abeyance—for that is what fasting is—in order that we can see clearly the way of the Cross, the way we all must walk if we follow our Saviour.

Nouwen’s words here, the movement from God-for-us, through God-with-us to God-within-us, describe somehow our own journey on the path of faith. Well, mine at least. It is not till we realise that, in some way we cannot yet understand, the universe is in the hand of one whose love for us, whose will to our good, is beyond any love we have ever known, that we can understand why Christ would be born, fragile flesh out of fragile flesh, to walk among us, Emmanuel, God-with-us, touchable, woundable, able to be killed. It is not till we have seen his love, known his smile, the warmth of his hand lifting us, his voice saying, “Do not be afraid…” that we can begin to understand the Cross. And it is only as we stand with his mother beneath that cross that we can see what resurrection means, how far he had to rise that blessed morning that he met the other Mary in the half-light and asked the reason for her tears. Unless they are our tears too, we cannot know what Jesus meant when he said that we will know his Spirit, because he will be in us. (John 14.15-17) Only as we weep now for all the world’s loss and pain can the risen Christ dwell in us (John 17.23), for his hands are wounded still, and his side pierced. His glory, his victory, carry his woundedness beyond death to everlasting life—and so shall we be ourselves (John 17.22,24)—for he is forever the Lamb who was slain, yet lives, and his death has brought us life that will outlast the stars (Romans 5.10).

The gift of faith…

Faith reaches the intellect not simply through the senses but in a light directly infused by God. Since this light does not pass through the eye or the imagination or reason, its certitude becomes our own without any vesture of created appearance, without any likeness that can be visualized or described.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, New Directions, 1961, p. 132

God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.

Ephesians 2.4-10

I am so grateful for these words. I know it might sound a bit much to some people, but truly I keep finding that the only way I can live is by faith, through the hope that is mine, being saved; and through the love I have for my sisters and brothers in Christ, as well as the ones who don’t know who he even is. Yet if you asked me to explain in concrete terms why I have faith, I who grew up so far from the Lord, I couldn’t tell you. All I know is that I didn’t have faith then, and I do now; I wasn’t saved then, now I am; I had love for no one but myself, and now my heart is full. I have nothing whatever for which I can take the credit. Like Paul, I want to say, “May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” (Galatians 6.14)

On not becoming evil...

So we will pose the great spiritual problem in this way, "How do I stand against hate without becoming hate myself?"

We would all agree that evil is to be rejected and overcome; the only question is, how? How can we stand against evil without becoming a mirror - but denied - image of the same? That is often the heart of the matter, and in my experience is resolved successfully by a very small portion of people, even though it is quite clearly resolved in the life, death and teaching of Jesus.

Jesus gives us a totally different way of dealing with evil - absorbing it in God (which is the real meaning of the suffering body of Jesus) instead of attacking it outside and in others. It is undoubtedly the most counter-intuitive theme of the entire Bible.  It demands real enlightenment and conversion for almost all of us.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, pp. 143, 145

Our default understanding seems to be more like that of the Star Wars universe than Christ's. I can only assume that this has to do with the Fall, described in Genesis 3 as Eve's and Adam's eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We can see this in operation in every war fought across the earth at any point in history, especially in the so-called "just wars". I am not meaning necessarily to criticise here the theory of jus ad bellum: I am merely pointing out that however good the reasons for going to war, however noble and necessary the aims, jus in bello never works. As we saw tragically in the second Gulf War, those on the side of good become evil in order to combat evil, just as Rohr describes.

The Cross is both the symbol and the means of the final defeat of evil. Only on the Cross can we see evil for what it truly is, on the Cross of Christ and on the countless crosses carried, knowingly or unknowingly, by all mortal life. It is only through the Cross that all suffering finally is redeemed (Romans 5 passim; 8.18ff) and it is only in Christ that the dark side is finally overcome (John 1.1-5) Easter is not a festival with bunnies; it is not even just a Christian festival. It is a cosmic event on a par with creation itself - the healing of all that is broken (Revelation 21.1-5) and wrong, the making of all things new again, the Kingdom come, shalom at last...  

Only in silence…

Only in silence and solitude, in the quiet of worship, the reverent peace of prayer, the adoration in which the entire ego-self silences and abases itself in the presence of the Invisible God to receive His one Word of Love; only in these “activities” which are “non-actions” does the spirit truly wake from the dream of multifarious, confused, and agitated existence.

Merton, Thomas. Love & Living. Naomi Burton Stone and Br. Patrick Heart, Editors. Harcourt, 1979. p. 20-21

I wish I could express somehow how these words awaken my heart’s longing. They come like some rumour from a distant shore, like the scent of green places across a salt and barren sea at the end of a long voyage.

These are not words of escape, though. Peace yes, but no escape, no final rest until “creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” (Romans 8.21) Until then, our silence and our solitude are the risk of radical openness, the love that “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (1 Corinthians 13.7)

Prayer cannot finally rest in itself as long as there are tears shed, blood spilt, among even the least in God’s creation—for “we know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.” (Romans 8.22-23)

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner…

A Lenten Prayer

The Lenten season begins. It is a time to be with you, Lord, in a special way, a time to pray, to fast, and thus to follow you on your way to Jerusalem, to Golgotha, and to the final victory over death.

I am still so divided. I truly want to follow you, but I also want to follow my own desires and lend an ear to the voices that speak about prestige, success, pleasure, power, and influence. Help me to become deaf to these voices and more attentive to your voice, which calls me to choose the narrow road to life.

I know that Lent is going to be a very hard time for me. The choice for your way has to be made every moment of my life.  I have to choose thoughts that are your thoughts, words that are your words, and actions that are your actions. There are not times or places without choices. And I know how deeply I resist choosing you.

Please, Lord, be with me at every moment and in every place. Give me the strength and the courage to live this season faithfully, so that, when Easter comes, I will be able to taste with joy the new life that you have prepared for me.

Amen.

(from The Road to Daybreak, Henri J. M. Nouwen)

Treasures of darkness...

[W]e have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you. (2 Corinthians 4.7-12 NRSV)

I've not been able to get this passage out of my head since our Assistant Priest Judy mentioned it in her powerful sermon yesterday morning. Later in the same letter Paul says (12.7b-10) that he will gladly boast of his weaknesses, that the power of Christ may dwell in him.

I feel somewhat the same as Paul. Although I have never been one to make my private life public, and this blog was never intended as any sort of reality show, I cannot escape the feeling that I am supposed somehow to share what God is doing in all of this. Like my illustrious predecessor, I am daily finding treasures of darkness, and riches hidden in secret places, and I can't quite keep quiet about it, and it's necessary to include just a little personal detail so as to make what I say comprehensible. My present situation, still unresolved, still neither married not single, is one that is a daily hurt. Jan had to return from the USA earlier this year, and circumstances beyond the control of either of us keep us living here in the same house. It's a situation that, although I did nothing to bring it about, I cannot help but be ashamed of. It stands in the way of all I try to do.

And yet... As a Franciscan, I am predisposed in some deep way to a longing for poverty. (Francis himself, after all, fell in love with "Lady Poverty", a bride he once described as "a wife of surpassing fairness.") There is economic poverty, of course, but for me the crucial thing is the poverty of action, the poverty of self-determination. In this, which really is for me a most painful thing, I am discovering not only a capacity in myself for surrender to God that I never knew I had, but God's goodness, his mercy and his grace. I am getting to know Christ in ways that I never could have done left to myself, that I never could have dreamed of discovering however closely I had attempted, of my own strength, to follow him.

And that's the point. We are called to take up our own crosses and follow Jesus, but we don't usually - well, I didn't - realise just what this means. Jesus' way of the Cross was a way of surrender. From the garden in Gethsemane to the tomb where he was laid, Jesus surrendered himself first of all to his Father, then to his enemies, and finally to his friends. We can only follow him by our own act of surrender - more properly, like Jesus himself, by successive acts of surrender.

For me, it has turned out as Leonard Cohen described, "Love is not a victory march / It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah." Yet God is good. Only through the most radical surrender can we find out how good. Only by letting go of all we possess can we really follow our Saviour who gave up everything for us. Only in being emptied can we be filled. Only in loss can we finally be found.

There is such hope in this, such utter and unquenchable hope. On the far side of the worst than can happen, Christ waits for us, his pierced hand stretched out to draw us into perfect joy.

I assume death will be like this. Certainly it seems to have been so for those who have been able to tell us something of the way of their own passing. As Paul said in his letter to the Romans, "neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." (8.38-39)

The odd thing is that it is only in these strange conditions of radical poverty that we can actually know these things as true. These are the "treasures of darkness" themselves. We seem to find, like the man who sold everything to buy the pearl of great price, that it is more than worth it. The love of Christ is greater, and stranger, and he himself is closer, than we had ever suspected. All we need is the faith of the Psalmist who wrote, in Psalm 119, "It is good for me that I was humbled, so that I might learn your statutes... Let your steadfast love become my comfort according to your promise to your servant. Let your mercy come to me, that I may live; for your law is my delight."

Nothing we could ever hope to own...

In the Franciscan Third Order we are called to a life of simplicity (see The Principles, Days 10-12), even poverty. In our Western, 21st century life this is an odd thing to understand. I am only just beginning to get a handle on what it might mean, and this only by means of God's showing me its implications in ways that don't allow me to take credit for anything, still less act the hero as I might otherwise be inclined to do.

I am coming to believe that my 20-odd year obsession with Romans 8:28 is actually central to our understanding of the Franciscan way in these odd and troubled times. God does truly work in all things for the good of those who love him, and who are called according to his purpose. In many ways our poverty lies in this, our giving up of our own ambitions to self-determination, self-actualisation, and our abandoning of ourselves to God's grace, his sheer unconditioned gift. Our hopes and dreams are not ours really, not our own to bargain with, to lay plans for, as though we had our future at our own disposal.

I watched an extraordinarily moving film clip today (thanks Dria) of Market Street in San Francisco just days before the earthquake of 1906. The street was full of people, horses, traffic going about their own lives, following their own plans - so full of life and hope. I dare say Port-au-Prince looked much that way on the morning of January 12th.

We cannot know our lifetime. Our next breath is a gift we cannot deserve, and the one after that. We have this moment in which to love God, to love our sister, our brother, the cat who lies against the keyboard, the birds we feed in the garden. In all these things God works for good beyond our imagining, even when they seem so frail, so tragically able to be hurt. Like Jesus in the garden, we are called to an unthinkable trust. That is our poverty, all our riches, nothing we could ever hope to own.

Well...?

Hat-tip to Christine Sine.

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