On Some of the Purposes of Lent (Reprise)

I really love Sunday's Gospel, especially at the beginning of Lent. The thing that strikes me most about it is that Jesus' 40 days in the desert are days spent coming to terms with and consolidating the identity which has just been announced and brought to be in him. (When God speaks, the things he says become events, things that really happen in space and time, and so too with the announcement that Jesus is his beloved Son in whom he is well-pleased.) Subsequently, Jesus is driven into the desert by the Spirit of love, the Spirit of Sonship, to explore that identity, to allow it to define him in space and time more and more exhaustively, to allow it to become the whole of who he is. One of the purposes of Lent is to allow us to do the same.

A sister friend I go to coffee with on Sundays remarked on the way from Mass that she had had a conversation with her spiritual director this last week where he noted that perhaps Jesus' post-baptismal time in the desert was a time for him to savor the experience he had had at his baptism. It was a wonderful comment that took my own sense of this passage in a new and deeper direction. Because of the struggle involved in the passage I had never thought to use the word savor in the same context, but as my friend rightly pointed out, the two often go together in our spiritual lives. They certainly do so in hermitages! My own director had asked me to do something similar when we met this last week by suggesting I consider going back to all those pivotal moments of my life which have brought me to the silence of solitude as the vocation and gift of my life. Essentially she was asking me not only to consider these intellectually (though she was doing that too) but to savor them anew and in this savoring to come to an even greater consolidation of my identity in God and as diocesan hermit.

Hermitages are places which reprise the same experience of consolidation and integration of our identity in God. They are deserts in which we come not only to learn who we are in terms of God alone, but to allow that to define our entire existence really and concretely -- in what we value, how we behave, in the choices we make, and those with whom we identify, etc. In last year's "In Good Faith" podcast for A Nun's Life, I noted that for me the choice which is fundamental to all of Lent and all of the spiritual life, "Choose Life, not death" is the choice between accepting and living my life according to the way God defines me or according to the way the "world" defines me. It means that no matter how poor, inadequate, ill, and so forth I also am, I choose to make God's announcement that in Christ  I am his beloved daughter in whom he is well-pleased the central truth of my life which colors and grounds everything else. Learning to live from that definition (and so, from the one who announces it) is the task of the hermit; the hermitage is the place to which the Spirit of love and Sonship drive us so that we can savor the truth of this incomprehensible mystery even as we struggle to allow it to become the whole of who we are.

But hermitages are, of course, not the only places which reprise these dynamics. Each of us has been baptized, and in each of our baptisms what was announced to us was the fact that we were now God's adopted beloved daughters and sons. Lent gives us the space and time where we can focus on the truth of this, claim that truth more whole-heartedly, and, as Thomas Merton once said, "get rid of any impersonation that has followed us" to the [desert]. We need to take time to identify and struggle with the falseness within us, but also to accept and appreciate the more profound truth of who we are and who we are called to become in savoring our experiences of God's love. As we fast in various ways, we must be sure to also taste and smell as completely as we can the nourishing Word of God's love for us. After all, the act of savoring is the truest counterpart of fasting for the Christian. The word we are called to savor is the word which defines us as valued and valuable in ways the world cannot imagine and nourishes us where the things of the world cannot. It is this Word we are called both to grapple with and to savor during these 40 days, just as Jesus himself did.

Thus, as I fast this Lent (in whatever ways that means), I am going to remember to allow myself not only to get in touch with my own deepest hungers and the hungers I share with all others (another very good reason to fast), but also to get in touch anew with the ways I have been fed and nourished throughout my life --- the experiences I need to savor as well. Perhaps then when Lent comes to an end I will be better able to claim and celebrate the one I am in God. My prayer is that each of us is able to do something similar with our own time in the desert.

Merton quotation taken from Contemplation in a World of Action, "Christian Solitude," p 244.

How Do I Deal With Enforced Solitude During this Time?

[[Dear Sister, I am one of those people who hates to stay in! I am an extravert and love to spend time with friends. But  now I am having to stay in and it is causing anxiety --- though I am sure part of that is being scared because of the Corona Virus. I wondered if you ever feel these kinds of things when you are alone? Do you have any suggestions on ways to lessen anxiety or spend my time in this enforced solitude?]]

Great questions. Thanks. What is striking to me, and has been striking to those I am in touch with, is what this Lenten season has plunged us into. We begin Lent with stories of Jesus being driven into the desert (wilderness) by the Spirit, and of the fundamental choice we are each called to make again and again, not only during this season -- choose life not death! And we are still in Lent -- a Lent which is being deepened and will be extended beyond what we ever expected. I say this because my first suggestion is to stay in touch with this season; it will help contextualize the situation in which we find ourselves and even normalize it to some extent. Above all it will provide a perspective which is more familiar and can make some sense of the novel and unfamiliar circumstances we are now experiencing. Allow the things we talk about all during Lent to be the categories through which you view what is being asked of you by this pandemic: fasting, prayer, and almsgiving.

Fasting will take many forms as your normal routine and the normal ways of making sense of your life are taken away from you. If you are used to thinking of fasting in terms of food, that may still work, but it will be extended to time with friends, social activities, the availability of necessary items, etc. Prayer will also be extended and deepened for many people in light of the circumstances. I would certainly encourage this in your own daily life. It may be difficult to spend time in quiet prayer if you are not used to it (though I encourage you to try this by starting with limited periods (15 minutes) of simply being quiet with God), but you can sit and consider those people you most love, those you would be spending time with, family, etc and simply allow yourself to be with them as a supportive presence. Let whatever feelings you have for these people come up, let yourself love them, feel grateful for them and all they are for you, and ask God to be with them as they also are suffering in various ways. Almsgiving is certainly something we can deepen and extend during this Lenten period (and beyond it). One way is by refusing to become greedy or engage in hoarding or gouging behavior. Another is by doing errands for those who cannot get out or don't have transportation. Another is by giving what we can to those without housing, adequate heat, food, or hygiene. In suggesting these kinds of things I am aware I am really suggesting nothing more than the Church asks from us every Lent. The Pandemic is not the will of God, but at the same time it can be used as an opportunity for the Spirit to work in our lives.

Yes, sometimes I feel anxiety in solitude, though not usually because of the solitude itself. I expect a lot of people are going to be experiencing cabin fever. I would urge you to find indoor activities you can get truly engrossed in. If you are a reader then do more of that, if you like puzzles, set a table aside for this and begin a large puzzle you've been waiting on. If you keep a journal (or if it is time to start one!) consider doing that and write about your experience. How about coloring or painting or some other thing you've been wanting to try? What about an online class in something that interests you? There are many of these available including languages, Scripture, history, DIY projects, etc. And, speaking of DIY projects, I should definitely mention those big time cleaning and culling projects we all put off! Most of us have activities we complain we don't have time for. Well, now is the time. Please don't expect to ease all of your anxiety; if you can allow yourself to feel this is normal, uncomfortable as it is, do that. If you need to distract yourself in some way (taking a solo drive* or walk, or a walk with a single friend, watching TV, etc) then do that. Add these things to the essential Lenten elements mentioned above. Some of these can easily become prayer: simply ask God into whatever activity you are undertaking. Do this in a conscious way and renew the invitation or your thanks to God for being with you in this occasionally throughout.

And of course, find ways to maintain contact with friends, Skype, Zoom, or Facetime conversations, phone calls and texting could be very helpful here. Schedule some of these so you have something to look forward to. Expectations are an important piece of dealing with solitude, especially when one is not used to it. (In prayer it is important not to have expectations re what kind of experience it will be, for instance, but at the same time it can help to build in things you really enjoy at specific times so you can look forward to them as you move through the tedium of the day.) I should add here that it is often mainly the tedium of days in solitude which really gets to folks**; we all experience this. Sometimes we forget that our need for novelty does not satisfy our need for genuine newness. What monastics/hermits know is that our lives with God are filled with genuine (qualitative) newness each day even when there is not a lot of novelty. That requires real patience and trust in God. I have written about this in the past so you might check for articles on this if you are interested. cf., Always Beginners as a start. Getting used to fasting from novelty and opening ourselves to qualitative newness is something this time might allow you (and others) to do -- something that is especially important given the fact that this situation is going to be longer-lasting than we have yet let ourselves realize. As time goes on I may suggest other things to assist with enforced solitude. For now I sincerely hope this is helpful.
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*Except for necessary trips such drives are not allowed in the SF Bay Area. (I admit I don't understand this limitation if one is alone.)

** Though I have not written about this before, I should mention that another issue in solitude is finding that one simply doesn't like oneself very much. I can't address that here of course, but it is something folks should be aware of since it raises all kinds of feelings, irritation, fear, anxiety, anger, etc. For those who simply don't trust themselves or their own inner resources in such a situation as this pandemic, solitude can also be quite difficult. Again, these folks can use this period as a Lenten period of growth and new experience calling for patience and trust. Whether we like ourselves well or not, we will need to trust that our own inner capacities and resources are greater than we might have imagined otherwise. Above all we trust in the love of a God who accompanies us in everything.

On Fasting: Attending to Our Deepest Needs and Hungers

Today's readings are all about fasting: proper fasting, improper fasting; fasting that pleases God, fasting that does not; fasting that causes fights and grumbling, fasting that is a genuine and fruitful sacrifice and leads to reconciliation with our deepest selves, our God, and others. When I was a student my major professor was quite emphatic that, "Fasting is not intrinsic to Christianity" or "Fasting is not essential to Christianity" or "There is nothing about fasting that is essentially Christian." At the time I didn't realize John intended to provoke reflection; my conclusion re fasting was instead something like, "Oh, well, in that case toss the practice out!" But of course the question and nature of fasting is much more nuanced than that and while it not essential to Christianity, it remains an important piece of spiritual growth.

Let's be clear though. Fasting does not make us holy; it makes us hungry.  It is what we do with our hunger that can lead to holiness. Specifically, fasting can help put us in touch with our deepest hungers, our most profound needs. Turning to God with these and then in gratitude to our hungry world is what can make us holy. But we need to pay attention! We need to approach fasting as a tool which can make us a bit more vulnerable and open to knowing ourselves, a bit more open to turning to God with and in that vulnerability, and a bit more committed to listening to the rumblings and murmurings of hunger that make themselves known not merely in our stomachs, but in our hearts and minds. Only after we have attended to these signals within us can we become better able to hear the murmurings and pain of others, the deep cries of their hungers and yearnings. Only then will our compassion be awakened and grow to allow us to sacrifice for these others in the ways Isaiah (and Jesus!)` calls for.

Fasting thus has two purposes: 1) to open us to our own deepest needs and to the God who meets them --- whether in prayer or through the mediation of others, and 2) to sensitize us to the needs of others and empower a compassionate solidarity with them which may help us meet their needs on many levels. It falls along a three point arc which defines Lenten praxis in Catholic parishes all over the world, viz., fasting, prayer, almsgiving. We begin with fasting to awaken our minds, hearts, and bodies to the needs that define us in part; we proceed by bringing all of ourselves, but especially our deepest needs for fulfillment and healing to God so that God may work within us and touch us wherever and in whatever way God wills (and especially we pray so God's own profound yearning to be God-for-and-with-us may also be met). We then act in gratitude to and compassion toward those whose lives are similarly fraught with the need to hear the Word and touch of the Merciful God who is Love-in-Act.

In today's Communion Service I passed on something my director brought for me when we met earlier this week, namely, a list Pope Francis put out a couple of years ago under the title, Do You Want to Fast this Lent? Here it is:

Fast from hurting words and say kind words.
Fast from sadness and be filled with gratitude.
Fast from anger and be filled with patience.
Fast from pessimism and be filled with hope.
Fast from worries and trust in God.
Fast from complaints and contemplate simplicity.
Fast from pressures and be prayerful.
Fast from bitterness and fill your heart with joy.
Fast from selfishness and be compassionate to others.
Fast from grudges and be reconciled.
Fast from words and be silent so you can listen.

But the move, for instance, from hurting words to kind words is not automatic. There is a reason (even numerous reasons!) for bitterness which needs to be addressed in some fashion. Thus, between the terms in each of Pope Francis' sentences something more than an act of will is required. I suggested folks take some time to get in touch with the feelings and needs underlying the hurting words, sadness, anger, pessimism,. . . bitterness, etc, take these to prayer and prepare themselves with the grace of God to move to the alternative: kind words, gratitude, patience, and so forth. I make the same suggestion here. In this we will find over time that fasting prepares for and gives way to feasting as God's love, in whatever way that comes to us, heals and empowers us to mediate that same Presence to others. All those years ago Prof Dwyer was correct: fasting is not essential to Christianity. But Dr Dwyer, I think, was not encouraging us to throw the practice out; he was provoking us to think and pray and find the proper place fasting does hold in our faith, viz it is a means toward growth in compassion that can nourish and heal our whole world.

All good wishes for a fruitful, nourishing, and healing Lent!

On Growing Towards Perfection: Journeying in the Direction we are Born For.

A number of times recently the commandment to "be ye perfect as your father in heaven is perfect" has come up for me. The first time was in an email to my director referring to the use of the term "total commitment" in something I was reading in relation to our work together. I wondered what "total" meant in the context involved; I couldn't understand it as even conceivable much less possible and that, it sounded like, could jeopardize everything. She wrote back pointing out the similarity of the word "perfect" in the NT and the difficulty of defining it. She then defined "total" contextually, in a less absolute (but no less personally demanding) way, a way which corresponded to the needs of the work being done and which, yet again, was a matter of "trusting the process" and the changes, healing, and growth it brings about. (This of course involves trusting the grace of God in all the ways it is mediated to me over time especially in this process!)

Other instances of meeting the word "perfection" had to do with Lent itself, with the God I was somehow supposed to come to  image more perfectly and who was defined in static Greek categories: (omnipotence, omnipresence, etc). Another had to do with consecrated life and the older usage regarding being called to "a state of perfection". Again, I thought, as I always do, that being called to perfection meant being fully human because I think being authentically and fully human is at least part of this call to perfection --- but somehow the word "perfection" continued to raise obstacles within and for me. It is a problem all by itself. I would bet I am not alone in this. In fact I know I am not; one of the reasons women Religious don't often refer to "states of perfection" is because to do so seems elitist and divisive. It can also lead to needless or unwarranted anxiety over hypocrisy and failure.

So, I went back to the original text --- not something I do often enough these days --- and was reminded that the word translated as perfection is τελειος (teleios) --- from the Greek telos (τελος) which refers to the goal, end, or fulfillment of something. (Jesus is the telos or end/goal/fulfillment of the Law, for instance.) That was suggestive of being goal-directed or of having reached a goal (some have defined this call to perfection in terms of "maturity") but it still left me little further along in my thoughts and prayer. Then, while in Tahoe I was reading a book by William O'Malley on Parables and not far into the book O'Malley begins to discuss the difficult word "perfection". (God does indeed work in surprising and delightful ways!) O'Malley also notes that the Greek is teleios (τελειος) but in light of that word, he went on to define the call to perfection as the call to be "heading in the direction [we] are born for". And that made "total" (!) sense to me. It is a refreshingly dynamic way of defining perfection (a way which is appropriate to the God who is verb, who is Love-in-Act) in an unfinished and evolving universe; it also reduces anxiety or concerns about hypocrisy and elitism and is able to free folks from any unhealthy perfectionism. Perfection, in the sense Jesus and the New Testament used the word is not about having reached, much less achieved a static state without flaws or frailties, but instead is about being true to the journey; it is about being on a pilgrimage to authenticity with, in, and towards life in God.

Last Sunday we celebrated the Feast of the Transfiguration. We often use the term transfiguration in the sense of change or transformation, but when we think about the transfiguration of Jesus the only thing that changed was the way Jesus appeared to others. Jesus was transfigured in their eyes but he himself remained who he was right along. The disciples saw him for who he really was, namely a truly human being living with, in, and towards life in God. They saw him as the glory of God, the revelation of the love and mercy which every human being is called and born to be. Whether they were aware of this or not, what James, Peter and John saw in Jesus was also an image of their own telos, the end or fulfillment of their own journeys to authenticity and maturity in, with, and through God. They saw an image of human perfection --- a man well on his way in his journey to fully reveal the glory of God in ordinary life situations. Jesus was heading towards Jerusalem with all that implied and involved; he was on his way to the Cross and the exhaustive revelation of a Divine power which would be perfected in weakness; he was on his way toward changing the very nature of reality by reconciling reality to God, destroying (Godless) death and by effectively giving creation a place in the very life of God. In other words, He was "perfect" (teleios) because he was "heading in the direction [he] was born for".

So many times Jesus could have turned aside or away. There were so many times he could have chosen a different path, one which was good, fruitful, respectable, admirably religious and apparently "law abiding" --- but which was not about heading in the direction he was born to head. But, as he did during his time in the desert, he chose to do what he was born (or baptized) to do. He entered the desert having heard from God that he was God's beloved Son who did indeed delight God. He grappled with what that meant both in personal and pastoral terms. And finally he chose to respond to the deep call of God to be that person and live that identity in the ordinary and extraordinary things of life. This choice was one he renewed again and again throughout the course of his public life with every act of compassion and self-emptying; in the process he renewed the course of his journey with, toward, and on behalf of God's sovereignty and the extension of that "Kingdom of God" to all God holds as precious. He affirmed and reaffirmed a commitment to the same perfection we are each called to, namely an authentic and God-centered humanity lived for others. And isn't this what Lent gives each of us the space and encouragement to do?

A few folks have emailed and suggested that by focusing on the work I have already been engaged in with my director I am failing to do what Lent really calls for. That, they believe, is inexcusable in a consecrated (canonical) hermit who lives this life in the Name of the Church! Apparently, they suggest, in outlining my plans for Lent I have not made a sufficient commitment to additional prayer, penance and almsgiving. But in (thus far) this 10 month-journey I have called "inner work" what my director and I have been engaged in is a profound desert-time where I grapple with 1) my identity and 2) with God's call to be myself as fully and freely as possible. This is the call to be perfect as God (Him)self is perfect --- nothing less.

We are each involved in a journey towards authenticity and (identically) communion with God. As with Jesus, it is a journey where we may have to renounce what is usually recognized as "respectability" in order to embrace genuine holiness --- just as we may need to embrace brokenness in order to be reconciled to God, self, and others to live the joy and freedom of life in and of God. The question Lent asks and gives us space and time to answer with our lives is, "are you headed in the way you were born to be headed?" Are you headed in the way your heart has been shaped throughout your whole life by the Love-in-Act we call God? If not, if you are impelled and even compelled by something else, how will you change course? What paths do you need to leave behind? What ways of being? What obstacles to freedom, personal deficits, woundedness, etc will you need to work through and let go of?  How, after all, will you embrace the call to be "perfect", the call to be "heading in the direction you were born to be heading"?

Driven into the Desert by the Spirit of Sonship (Reprise)

I really love today's Gospel, especially at the beginning of Lent. The thing that strikes me most about it is that Jesus' 40 days in the desert are days spent coming to terms with and consolidating the identity which has just been announced and brought to be in him. (When God speaks, the things he says become events, momentous things that really happen in space and time, and so too with the announcement that Jesus is his beloved Son in whom he is well-pleased.) Subsequently, Jesus is driven into the desert by the Spirit of love, the Spirit of Sonship, to explore that identity, to allow it to define him in space and time more and more exhaustively, to allow it to become the whole of who he is. One of the purposes of Lent is to provide the "space" and time  needed to  allow us to do the same.

A Sister friend I go to coffee with on Sundays remarked on the way from Mass that she had had a conversation with her spiritual director this last week where he noted that perhaps Jesus' post-baptismal time in the desert was a time for him to savor the experience he had had at his baptism. It was a wonderful comment that took my own sense of this passage in a new and deeper direction. Because of the struggle involved in the passage I had never thought to use the word savor in the same context, but as my friend rightly pointed out, the two often go together in our spiritual lives. They certainly do so in hermitages! My own director had asked me to do something similar when we met this last week by suggesting I consider going back to all those pivotal moments of my life which have brought me to the silence of solitude as the vocation and gift of my life. Essentially she was asking me not only to consider these intellectually (though she was doing that too) but to savor them anew and in this savoring to come to an even greater consolidation of my identity in God and as diocesan hermit.

Hermitages are places which reprise the same experience of consolidation and integration of our identity in God. They are deserts in which we come not only to learn who we are in terms of God alone, but to allow that to define our entire existence really and concretely -- in what we value, how we behave, in the choices we make, and those with whom we identify, etc. In the "In Good Faith" podcast I did a few years ago for A Nun's Life, I noted that for me the choice which is fundamental to all of Lent and all of the spiritual life, "Choose Life, not death" is the choice between accepting and living my life according to the way God defines me or according to the way the "world" defines me. It means that no matter how poor, inadequate, ill, and so forth I also am, I choose to make God's announcement that in Christ  I am his beloved daughter in whom he is well-pleased the central truth of my life which colors and grounds everything else. Learning to live from that definition (and so, from the one who announces it) is the task of the hermit; the hermitage is the place to which the Spirit of love and Sonship*** drive us so that we can savor the truth of this incomprehensible mystery even as we struggle to allow it to become the whole of who we are.

But hermitages are, of course, not the only places which reprise these dynamics. Each of us has been baptized, and in each of our baptisms what was announced to us was the fact that we were now God's adopted beloved daughters and sons. Lent gives us the space and time where we can focus on the truth of this, claim that truth more whole-heartedly, and, as Thomas Merton once said, "get rid of any impersonation that has followed us" to the [desert]. We need to take time to identify and struggle with the falsenesses within us, but also to accept and appreciate the more profound truth of who we are and who we are called to become in savoring our experiences of God's love. As we fast in various ways, we must be sure to also taste and smell as completely as we can the nourishing Word of God's love for us. After all, the act of savoring is the truest counterpart of fasting for the Christian. The Word we are called to savor is the Word which defines us as valued and valuable in ways the world cannot imagine and nourishes us where the things of the world cannot. It is this Word we are called both to struggle with and to savor during these 40 days, just as Jesus himself did.

Thus, as I fast this Lent (in whatever ways that means), I am going to remember to allow myself not only to get in touch with my own deepest hungers and the hungers I share with all others (another very good reason to fast), but also to get in touch anew with the ways I have been fed and nourished throughout my life --- the experiences I need to savor as well. Perhaps then when Lent comes to an end I will be better able to claim and celebrate the one I am in God. My prayer is that each of us is able to do something similar with our own time in the desert.

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Merton quotation taken from Contemplation in a World of Action, "Christian Solitude," p 244.

*** A reminder that whether we are daughters or sons of God, our adoption by God gives us a share in Jesus' Sonship. Our own daughterhood or sonship is derivative in nature; that is, it derives from  Jesus' Sonship. Thus I speak of the Spirit of Sonship, not because I am insensitive to the issues of patriarchy or inclusive language, but because my usage here is essentially and primarily Christological.

What Am I Doing for Lent?

[[Hi Sister, I wondered what you are doing for Lent. Thank you.]]

Hi and thanks for the question. I seem to get this question most years and I am never really happy with my answer. That's because my choice during Lent is to do something which impacts on the whole of my life in solitude rather than doing one extra thing here or there; when I try to explain this it sounds complicated when it is really not. So, I am going to try again and point to a few things I am doing during Lent. I hope it is helpful.

First, I am continuing the inner work I began on June 1st. We have reached a new stage in this I think and it will require more writing, journaling, drawing, and other work on my part. In particular I want to work on a timeline of the work we have done over the past nine months which is sort of a special project. It will allow me to revisit areas of healing and growth, deepen these if necessary (places requiring healing often need to be revisited, sometimes many times) and generally integrate more fully the work we have done during this time. This is an intensification of work I do anyway but some parts of it will be new and Lent seems like a good time to be sure I am fully on track with this; in this way I think in the following months we may move forward even more fruitfully. This work will impact all other parts of my life (work, rest, prayer, parish life, other lifestyle issues) so this is the most far-reaching thing I will do this Lent.

Second, I am rewriting my Rule in part. I did a more significant rewrite several years ago but parts of it need to be revised and one critical section needs to be added. This means I will be spending more time studying, reflecting on, and praying about a couple of sections of the Rule, especially stricter separation from the world and on the nature and praxis of the hiddenness of the solitary eremitical vocation. Some minor work needs to be done on the section on the diocesan delegate and probably on a few other sections but those will not require the same kind of preparation or attention. This is an evolving vocation and I am growing in it as well. Rewriting sections is something which is natural every few years (5-10) or so but attention to my own growth is what drives such a project.

Third, I am spending a week with a Sister friend at her congregation's house in Tahoe next week. We have done this before and the time, though part of my friend's Spring break (she teaches math at Dominican University) usually serves much like a retreat. While there will be time for recreation in the afternoons, mornings tend to be spent together doing our own work and praying as we each need. (I haven't decided which project I will work on here; besides my Rule I will bring materials for two other projects, one for something I hope to offer my parish and one for dioceses on canon 603 and formation of hermit candidates. I also have some violin parts to learn --- glad I have an effective practice mute!! The house is not a large one!)

We each "fend for ourselves" for breakfast and lunch and though we are usually together, mornings and afternoons tend to have a more solitary flavor. Evenings begin with shared prayer, daily readings, and Communion and then centers around dinner in front of the fire talking. We tend to continue this until we crash. (We ordinarily have wine for dinner and my own tolerance is slight so I am apt to crash first!) Since I am not much of a cook and my friend is a fantastic one (she has a genuine "rep" in this!) she will do all the dinners this time (I may make soup one night) but she will also make me her sous chef and teach me (a little of) what I don't know! That's exciting and a little scary. I got a lot of flak from readers the last time I wrote about going on a similar trip ("What do you mean you're a hermit going on vacation --- and during Lent???!!!" " How dare you call yourself a hermit???!!!") so I hope that is not repeated! For me this week tends to be both retreat and vacation; it is one of shared solitude and it is extremely life-giving; it should help set the tone for the rest of Lent.

Fourth, I am continuing reading in a couple of areas. The first is on the gift of tears. The second is Andre Louf's book Tuning into Grace which is on continuing conversion. (Both of these are focused on metanoia and tie into the work I am doing with my director as well. The reading is meant to support this work and help extend it where that is possible.) The third is something I always reflect on during Lent, namely the Theology of the Cross. I am reading NT Wright's  book, The Day the revolution Began --- something I began a couple of months ago and got away from. The way the cross works generally and the way it works in my life specifically effects every part of my life.

In my original interview regarding admission to perpetual eremitical profession with Archbishop Vigneron, he asked me about my favorite Saint in a kind of ice-breaker question. (We had only met briefly at my parish when he made sure I was on his calendar.) I said Saint Paul was my favorite and then explained the place of his theology of the cross in my life; I also found myself babbling a bit and saying, "If I could spend the rest of my life coming to understand his theology of the cross I would be a happy camper!" Well, that has not changed over the last ten years; it has only become a clearer need and stronger desire. This too ties into the inner work I have been doing and may lead to some writing or drawing which illustrates this period of my life.

Mainly though, in all of this I am doing what I always do while paying special attention to how the inner work changes things. It is all about continuing to become the person God calls me to be and living my life with greater fullness and integrity. Lent seems to me to be a period where we focus even more specifically on conversion  (the change of our minds and hearts in ways which allow them to reflect the mind and heart of Christ) and responding to our vocations (responding to Christ's call) with new and renewed vision; we do this, I think, so we can celebrate the victory over sin and death achieved in Jesus' death and resurrection in greater depth and joy. We do this so we can live (fully embody or incarnate) the Gospel of God in Christ. That has been the purpose and thrust of the work I have undertaken these past nine months too so in some ways this Lent is the period where I focus on consolidating what has occurred there so that I can approach Easter and, like the whole of God's creation post-resurrection, I can truly be "in a place" I have never been before.

Driven into the desert by the "Spirit of Sonship" (Reprise)

I really love today's Gospel, especially at the beginning of Lent. The thing that strikes me most about it is that Jesus' 40 days in the desert are days spent coming to terms with and consolidating the identity which has just been announced and brought to be in him. (When God speaks, the things he says become events, things that really happen in space and time, and so too with the announcement that Jesus is his beloved Son in whom he is well-pleased.) Subsequently, Jesus is driven into the desert by the Spirit of love, the Spirit of Sonship, to explore that identity, to allow it to define him in space and time more and more exhaustively, to allow it to become the whole of who he is. One of the purposes of Lent is to allow us to do the same.

A sister friend I go to coffee with on Sundays remarked on the way from Mass that she had had a conversation with her spiritual director this last week where he noted that perhaps Jesus' post-baptismal time in the desert was a time for him to savor the experience he had had at his baptism. It was a wonderful comment that took my own sense of this passage in a new and deeper direction. Because of the struggle involved in the passage I had never thought to use the word savor in the same context, but as my friend rightly pointed out, the two often go together in our spiritual lives. They certainly do so in hermitages! My own director had asked me to do something similar when we met this last week by suggesting I consider going back to all those pivotal moments of my life which have brought me to the silence of solitude as the vocation and gift of my life. Essentially she was asking me not only to consider these intellectually (though she was doing that too) but to savor them anew and in this savoring to come to an even greater consolidation of my identity in God and as diocesan hermit.

Hermitages are places which reprise the same experience of consolidation and integration of our identity in God. They are deserts in which we come not only to learn who we are in terms of God alone, but to allow that to define our entire existence really and concretely -- in what we value, how we behave, in the choices we make, and those with whom we identify, etc. In last year's "In Good Faith" podcast for A Nun's Life, I noted that for me the choice which is fundamental to all of Lent and all of the spiritual life, "Choose Life, not death" is the choice between accepting and living my life according to the way God defines me or according to the way the "world" defines me. It means that no matter how poor, inadequate, ill, and so forth I also am, I choose to make God's announcement that in Christ  I am his beloved daughter in whom he is well-pleased the central truth of my life which colors and grounds everything else. Learning to live from that definition (and so, from the one who announces it) is the task of the hermit; the hermitage is the place to which the Spirit of love and Sonship drive us so that we can savor the truth of this incomprehensible mystery even as we struggle to allow it to become the whole of who we are.

But hermitages are, of course, not the only places which reprise these dynamics. Each of us has been baptized, and in each of our baptisms what was announced to us was the fact that we were now God's adopted beloved daughters and sons. Lent gives us the space and time where we can focus on the truth of this, claim that truth more whole-heartedly, and, as Thomas Merton once said, "get rid of any impersonation that has followed us" to the [desert]. We need to take time to identify and struggle with the falsenesses within us, but also to accept and appreciate the more profound truth of who we are and who we are called to become in savoring our experiences of God's love. As we fast in various ways, we must be sure to also taste and smell as completely as we can the nourishing Word of God's love for us. After all, the act of savoring is the truest counterpart of fasting for the Christian. The word we are called to savor is the word which defines us as valued and valuable in ways the world cannot imagine and nourishes us where the things of the world cannot. It is this Word we are called both to struggle with and to savor during these 40 days, just as Jesus himself did.

Thus, as I fast this Lent (in whatever ways that means), I am going to remember to allow myself not only to get in touch with my own deepest hungers and the hungers I share with all others (another very good reason to fast), but also to get in touch anew with the ways I have been fed and nourished throughout my life --- the experiences I need to savor as well. Perhaps then when Lent comes to an end I will be better able to claim and celebrate the one I am in God. My prayer is that each of us is able to do something similar with our own time in the desert.

Merton quotation taken from Contemplation in a World of Action, "Christian Solitude," p 244.

What Do you Do for Lent?

[[Dear Sister Laurel, would it be okay if I asked you what you do for Lent? In my parish we focus on prayer, fasting, and almsgiving and I try to do something I don't usually do. Like this year I am spending time helping in a soup kitchen. Your life is already one of "[assiduous] prayer and penance" and I guess you can't help in a soup kitchen so what do you do?]]

Hi there and thanks for your question. It is actually one I get asked most every year but I don't think I have ever really answered here.

Each year is a bit different and that is true this year as well. Let me say first of all that whatever I choose to do for Lent usually fits in an organic way with the rest of my life. It is rarely the case that something of our lives cannot be improved upon or more attention given to this or that aspect of our Christian commitment. In my own life there is no doubt that I can improve my prayer life, my life in the hermitage more generally, the way I approach parish commitments, the way I structure my time, my commitment to the values which are central to eremitical life, etc. My own preference for Lent, therefore, is not to do one disparate or disconnected thing (like saying extra prayers, giving up some food item, etc) but instead, to look at the entire scope of my life and renew the basic commitments which are part and parcel of that. When I do that a number of things may change, whether permanently as the fruit of discernment, or temporarily and experimentally as a means to this discernment. So let me start by describing some of the things which changed for me this Lent and then I will describe the bottom line which made those changes necessary.

This Lent I am primarily working through a process of discern-ment which allows me to get in touch in a fresh way with the really basic things God has called me to and to which I have publicly committed myself. I am doing this in a more focused and intense way than I would ordinarily be able to do the rest vof the year, and thanks to the assistance of my director (and my own readiness), in a more effective way than I might have done in other Lents.

In order to do this specific changes have needed to be made in a number of areas: 1) I am more reclusive than ordinarily which means I don't get to Mass as frequently, 2) I am working through a book my director gave me to assist me in doing this work better than I may have in the past, 3) I have withdrawn until Easter from an activity I do once a week outside the hermitage, 4) I have changed my daily schedule to some extent so that I get rest more frequently, 5) I am doing a bit more journaling than I ordinarily do, 6) I am" fasting" in a way which allows my diet to change permanently in order to address several different things (health, commitment to poverty or simplicity, maintaining an attitude of celebration during  meals, different demands on my energy, etc.), 7) The first four hours of my day have changed some in the way I approach prayer or the practice of vigil, 8) I have changed (or am changing) the schedule on which I see clients so that I see them during fewer days during any week and also in a way which leaves  more weeks entirely free of appointments, and 9) I have gone through the hermitage to get rid of old files, papers, clothes, books, etc that accumulate through the year but are really no longer necessary. It may sound like a lot of stuff, but it all fits together into a single Lenten project and purpose.

The bottom line in all of this is that I am living Lent in a way which allows me to really pay special attention to making a prayer of everything I do and therefore, of making my ordinary, everyday life extraordinary in Christ. I have written about this in the past so it is not a new idea. (Besides, it is a key element in Benedictine spirituality.) Alone we live ordinary lives. When we live those with God in a conscious way everything is transformed into something extraordinary. (For the hermit this is a major piece of distinguishing between merely living alone and living in solitude.) This sense that even the most ordinary of lives (or parts of our lives) can be made extraordinary if only we allow God to share in every moment and mood is one of the real gifts which hermits bring to the Church and world. In fact it is part of the charism or gift quality which the vocation represents. Even so, while this is not a new idea for me, nor a new undertaking exactly, what tends to be true is that in a kind of spiral pattern I periodically come to it anew and with a fresh sense of awe and appreciation. At each turn of the spiral I return to this foundational truth with a deeper awareness of, appreciation for, and commitment to it, a commitment which engages me in progressively deeper and more extensive ways. The real newness in Lent, it seems to me, comes not from doing new things (though one may also need to do that just as I outlined above), but in doing things with a renewed commitment, with a heart which is broken open just a bit further than it was yesterday, in a more thoroughgoing way than one has done until now.

You see,as I understand it, the prayer, fasting, almsgiving triad refers not merely to three discrete activities we do, but to three dimensions of a faithful and authentically human life. Most fundamentally such a life is open to and rooted in the dynamic presence of God within and around us. It is lived in and with God in a way which provides hospitality to God both in one's home and in one's heart. A life which is prayerful is a life which is hospitable to God and lived with the sense of God as an everpresent guest. Because of this accent on hospitality to God, an accent on living in and with God, a prayerful life necessarily entails fasting since fasting (which means fasting from more than just food) involves  a commitment to the really essential things in life while it eschews the inessential. (Fasting is the flip side of feasting and hospitality to God calls for both.) We will find we eat differently, rest differently, use our time differently, and so forth when the accent is on hospitality to God. This must be so if everything we live is to be a prayer just as it is the result when everything IS a prayer.

Finally, such a life is a generous one which reaches out to others with the riches we have received; almsgiving is a symbol or expression of this. We live our lives first of all with and for God, but to the extent we really do this we will find ourselves both free and motivated to give ourselves generously to others. We will find ourselves commissioned to go out to others in some significant way. To my mind then, almsgiving is another way of describing the missionary impulse which is intrinsic to God-as-Trinity and to any Christian life lived with, in, and for God. It is the very essence of Church. Your own choice of helping in a soup kitchen is an expression of this dimension of your life. A huge part of my Lent this year is meant to assist me in determining the shape of this missionary impulse in my own life and the concrete forms it will continue to take when I am faithful to my call to be a diocesan hermit.

Lent is a time the Church gives us to allow this kind of reorientation (conversion) in all the dimensions of our life. In my own it has far reaching consequences for the rest of the year. It is not that I forget my commitments nor the central elements of the eremitical life during the rest of the year, nor that I am unfaithful to these, but several times a year (Advent, Lent, retreats, desert days, etc.)  just like anyone else, I need to tweak things and get in deeper touch with these and the God who empowers them; at these times it means getting back in touch with the surprise and awe I experience at being called in the way I am.  It means renewing the sense that everything done with, in, and for God transforms the ordinary into the really extraordinary and makes of the little I can give something of infinite worth. During the year a lot can happen to knock us out of our own spiritual centeredness or cause a bit of a wobble in the orbit of our lives. It is also the case that we each  grow incrementally (a little at a time) so that in time (say the space of a year or of several years) we may need to stop and take stock of what that period of time has brought in terms of growth; we do this in order that we may embrace that in a conscious way.  Though we never really know how Lent will go or what God will do with this time in our lives, this Lent seems to be one of those for me and in this it is a real gift.

"Choose Life, only that and always. . ." (Reprise)

When I was a very young sister, I pasted the following quotation into the front of my Bible. It was written by another sister, and has been an important point of reference for me since then:

Choose life, only that and always,
and at whatever risk. . .
to let life leak out, to let it wear away by the mere
passage of time,
to withhold giving it and spending it
is to choose
nothing. (Sister H Kelly)

The readings from the Thursday after Ash Wednesday both deal with this theme, and each reminds us in its own way just how serious human life is --- and how truly perilous!! Both of them present our situation as one of life and death choices. There is nothing in the middle, no golden mean of accomodation, no place of neutrality in which we might take refuge -- or from which we can watch dispassionately without committing ourselves, no room for mediocrity (a middle way!) of any kind. On one hand lies genuine "success", on the other true failure. Both readings ask us to commit our whole selves to God in complete dependence or die. Both are clear that it is our very Selves that are at risk at every moment, but certainly at the present moment. And especially, both of them are concerned with responsive commitment of heart, mind, and body --- the "hearkening" we are each called to, and which the Scriptures calls "obedience."

The language of the Deuteronomist's sermon (Deut 30:15-20) is dramatic and uncompromising: [[ This day I set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendents shall live,. . . for if you turn away your hearts and will not listen. . .you will surely perish. . .]] Luke (Lk 9:22-25) recounts Jesus' language as equally dramatic and uncompromising: [[If you would be my disciples, then take up your cross daily (that is, take up the task of creating yourselves in complete cooperation with and responsiveness to God at every moment). . .If you seek to preserve your life [that is, if you choose self-preservation, if you refuse to risk to listen or to choose an ongoing responsiveness] you will lose it, but if you lose your life for my sake, you will save it. For what does it profit a person to gain the whole world and then lose or forfeit the very self s/he was created to be?]]

I think these readings set out the clear agenda of Lent, but more than that they set before us the agenda of our entire lives. Our lives are both task and challenge. We do not come into this world fully formed or even fully human. The process of creating the self we are CALLED to be is what we are to be about, and it is a deadly serious business. What both readings try to convey, the OT with its emphasis on Law (God's Word) and keeping that Law, and the Gospel with its emphasis on following the obedient Christ by taking up our lives day by day in response to the will of God, is the fact that moment by moment our very selves are created ONLY in dialogue with God (and in him through others, etc). The Law of Moses is the outer symbol of the law written in our hearts, the dialogue and covenant with God that forms the very core of who we truly are as relational selves. The cross of Christ is the symbol of one who responded so exhaustively and definitively to the Word of God, that he can literally be said to have embodied or incarnated it in a unique way. It is this kind of incarnation or embodiment our very selves are meant to be. We accept this task, this challenge --- and this privilege, or we forfeit our very selves.

God is speaking us at every moment, if only we would chose to listen and accept this gift of self AS GIFT! At the same time, both readings know that the human person is what Thomas Keating calls, "A LISTENING". Our TOTAL BEING, he says, IS A LISTENING. (eyes, ears, mind, heart, and even body) Our entire self is meant to hear and respond to the Word of God as it comes to us through and in the whole of created reality. To the degree we fail in this, to the extent we avoid the choices of an attentive and committed life, an obedient life, we will fail to become the selves we are called to be.

The purpose of Lent and Lenten practices is to help us PARE DOWN all the extraneous noise that comes to us in so many ways, and become more sensitive and responsive to the Word of God spoken in our hearts, and mediated to us by the world around us through heart, mind, and body. We fast so that we might become aware of, and open to, what we truly hunger for --- and of course what genuinely nourishes us. We make prayers of lament and supplication not only so we can become aware of our own deepest pain and woundedness and the healing God's presence brings, but so we can become aware of the profound pain and woundedness of our world and those around us, and then reach out to help heal them. And we do penance so our hearts may be readied for prayer and made receptive to the selfhood God bestows there. In every case, Lenten practice is meant to help us listen carefully and deeply, to live deliberately and responsively, and to make conscious, compassionate choices for life.

It is clear that the Sister who wrote the quote I pasted into my Bible all those years ago had been meditating on today's readings (or at least the one from Deuteronomy)! I still resonate with that quote. It still belongs at the front of my Bible eventhough the ink has bled through the contact paper protecting it, and the letters are fuzzy with age. Still, in light of today's readings I would change it slightly: to let life leak out, to let it wear away by the mere passage of time, to refuse to receive it anew moment by moment as God's gift, to withhold giving it and spending it is to refuse authentic selfhood and to choose DEATH instead.

Let us pray then that we each might be motivated and empowered to chose life, always and everywhere --- and at whatever risk or cost. God offers this to us and to our world at every moment --- if only we will ready ourselves in him, listen, and respond as we are called to!

Tying up Loose Ends and Approaching Lent

The directions are appropriate!

Late last week in response to a question I posted on the meaning of Matthew 22:14: "All (composed of multitudes or the many) are called but few are chosen" within the context of the parable this saying concludes. In that post I also just added the translation Richard Rohr supplies in the book I began today: [[I am calling all of you, but so few allow yourselves to be chosen.]] The book is entitled, Immortal Diamond, The Search for our True Self, and I would recommend it for Lenten reading.

But as I read on from this first quotation, Rohr made an interesting assertion and observation which ties into the comments I made about chosenness and the call to see that everyone is chosen, everyone is special, everyone is called to a spousal relationship with God in Christ. Rohr is also very clear that elitism is contrary to true spirituality and the Christian Gospel. We are called on to believe a paradox; indeed we are ourselves a paradox, both completely unique and wholly the same as everyone else in terms of destiny and call. (Variations on this include the notions 1) that only some are called to exhaustive intimacy with God, and 2) that for this reason one can become truly holy only in a convent or monastery, but not in the secular world.) He writes: "Outer spiritual believing tends to say 'only here' or 'only there', while authentic inner knowing tends to say, 'Always and everywhere.' . . . Outer authority told us we were indeed special (that's the only way to get started), but maturing inner authority allows us to see everyone is special and unique, although it usually takes the maturity of the second half of life to see this. Young zealots still think it's all about them."

One Experience, Two Truths

In the prayer experience I described partially a couple of posts ago  (cf. Notes from Stillsong Hermitage: Once Again: On Infused Contemplation, Union With God, and Elitism) two impressions were especially unforgettable and seem to me today to be the bedrock of objective truth in my own life, and I suspect, the objective truth of the life of every human being.  In Rohr's work on the True Self, both of these elements figure largely in his analysis. The first truth turns on my sense that God was entirely delighted that I was "finally" there and that he had waited for SUCH a long time for this. Note well that I had not done anything much different than I always did in prayer;  there were no elaborate preparations and I certainly had not had to travel somewhere or do or learn something special to "get to" this place --- helpful as those things sometimes are. All of this happened as I sat quietly with my director, my hands resting in her own open hands, but in my own living room.

Similarly, I needed no post-grad courses in theology or special workshops in spirituality to teach me techniques to locate or travel to this place. The meeting with God was a matter of allowing myself to let go of fear and to move into my own heart; it was a matter of experiencing what was and is the essence of my True Self, namely, the profound communion with God I am most really and which I am called to let define everything I am and do. This communion occurring deep in my own heart helps make sense for me of an enigmatic story from the Desert Fathers and Mothers. You probably have heard it yourself. When one of the desert Fathers is asked what a disciple who is faithful to prayer and penance and the desert horarium needs still to do, he holds up his fingers, waves them back and forth, and says, "You can become all flame." We are not called merely to say prayers or to pray but to become prayer, to become all flame, to discover and become the communion with God we truly are.

Thus, I should also note that in this prayer experience I came home to myself, and I discovered that that was something I carried within myself all the time. This realization is part of the essence of Christian peace or Jewish shalom. It is what Jesus knew so well and what allowed him to live the poverty and marginality he did, to have no place to call his own, no place to lay his head and yet, be rich, centered, and completely at home wherever he went as well as compassionate and loving with whomever he dealt. Each of us is asked to recognize that "home" (what Rohr calls the true self) is a celebratory event within us where God and our selves cannot be teased apart; thus heaven exists proleptically within us in this way. Just as God is a trinitarian communion, so are we at our core a communion with God. This communion IS our true self and it is the essence of the human heart. If we are not feeling at home, if we are anxious and insecure, I think we must recognize that this ALWAYS happens to the extent we are separated from this core communion and live instead from our false selves. Quite often that means looking, often frantically and desperately for home apart from that core communion which constitutes us. The focus of Lent is on dealing with the separation from this communion that exists in our lives, but more about that later.

The second truth associated with the prayer experience I described, and part of the bedrock of personal truth I hold onto and try to live out more and more fully turns on my impression that while I had the WHOLE of God's attention, concern, love, etc, and while he was completely delighted in this communion we shared, every other person was loved as exhaustively, held God's attention in the same way, delighted God as completely and, in the core of their being WERE the very same all-consuming communion with God that I am in my deepest core. In my own life, especially in my youth, it was very easy to see myself as different from most others and, in fact, I was encouraged in that whether it was because of intelligence, academic achievement, an interest in classical music (not too common in my neck of the woods in kids my age!), musical talent, etc. Later other things supported and encouraged this way of seeing reality too: religious vocation and separation from that, chronic illness (and a unique or at least very rare form of that as well!),  an eremitical vocation, etc, etc. Our culture supports and nurtures this often merely-worldly way of seeing reality, this way of measuring and categorizing it which ignores the other side of the paradox. And in some ways, both legitimately and illegitimately, so do dimensions of our Church.

But prayer does not. God does not. A sound theology of the self does not. An inspired theology of vocation does not support or nurture this way of seeing reality or living our lives. Instead they call us to recognize our specialness while we recognize the same (and sameness!) in everyone else. More, they call us to recognize that God's love for us is what constitutes us as both special and the same as others. After all, God, as my prayer experience taught me, is great enough to hold these two parts of a profound paradox together without conflict. If that is so, then so must I and so must the Church, both as People of God, and the institution we identify with hierarchy --- or we cease to be true to ourselves and live from the false self rather than the true. Spirituality is about living and learning to live this foundational paradox.

The focus of Lent

The focus of Lent is therefore a perfect opportunity to take hold of this paradox. Penance, Prayer and almsgiving are all meant to allow us to embrace the deepest truth of ourselves and of others more fully. Penance demands we identify the areas of our lives which support the life of the false self. In terms of this post it is any discipline which helps us attend to what causes us to seek home (rest, peace, shalom, quies) apart from communion with God right where we are.  It is any discipline, or practice which helps strip away whatever prevents us from becoming all flame (true self, communion with God). It is any discipline or practice which assists us in overcoming the separation which exists between us and others because we cannot and will not see others as essentially the same as ourselves. It is any practice which helps us to pray our lives and become the living prayer God made us to be.

Prayer will both remind us of our separation from our true selves (the communion which exists at the heart of our being) and allow God to draw us more fully into that reality. It is the most fundamental way we become one with ourselves, with God, and with others. If it becomes a way of setting ourselves apart or distinguishing ourselves, then we have perverted it and should talk to someone who can assist us in this. Ideally, almsgiving is the opportunity to share our own specialness and gifts in a way which convinces others of their own specialness and gifts. We give not only because others have needs, but because we are convinced those others are every bit as special in this world, and certainly in God's Kingdom, as we are. It reminds us of our relation to others, and of the delight God experiences in loving them. If our almsgiving separates us from others, if it reinforces senses of our own superiority and  essential difference from others, then what was a near-occasion of grace has become instead at least a near-occasion of sin. (If we take on almsgiving to assert our difference and supposed superiority, it has crossed over into actual sin.)

The Call and Permission of Desert Spirituality

Like Jesus who was drawn into the desert by the Holy Spirit so that he could commune with God and consolidate his truest, deepest identity, Lent is given to us so we can, for just the space of 40 days, cut ourselves loose from the ways the world demands we see, establish, and identify ourselves and entertain a different truth, a more eternal identity, a more authentic self. The Church calls us to this, but more, her call gives us a freeing permission to do this while the world is clamoring that we embrace something else entirely. Lent is a chance for us to move from simply being called, remarkable as that is, to letting ourselves be God's chosen ones. It is an opportunity to make the paradox, "I am infinitely special and called to eternal communion with God; everyone is infinitely special and called to the same exhaustive and eternal communion with God" the bedrock upon which we live our lives. It is an opportunity to discover our truest at-homeness exists deep within us and is something we can live out even as we are profoundly marginalized in terms of the world. My prayer is we each find significant ways to let this Lenten opportunity grasp and transform us.

First Sunday of Lent: Driven into the Desert by the "Spirit of Sonship"

I really love today's Gospel, especially at the beginning of Lent. The thing that strikes me most about it is that Jesus' 40 days in the desert are days spent coming to terms with and consolidating the identity which has just been announced and brought to be in him. (When God speaks, the things he says become events, things that really happen in space and time, and so too with the announcement that Jesus is his beloved Son in whom he is well-pleased.) Subsequently, Jesus is driven into the desert by the Spirit of love, the Spirit of Sonship, to explore that identity, to allow it to define him in space and time more and more exhaustively, to allow it to become the whole of who he is. One of the purposes of Lent is to allow us to do the same.

A sister friend I go to coffee with on Sundays remarked on the way from Mass that she had had a conversation with her spiritual director this last week where he noted that perhaps Jesus' post-baptismal time in the desert was a time for him to savor the experience he had had at his baptism. It was a wonderful comment that took my own sense of this passage in a new and deeper direction. Because of the struggle involved in the passage I had never thought to use the word savor in the same context, but as my friend rightly pointed out, the two often go together in our spiritual lives. They certainly do so in hermitages! My own director had asked me to do something similar when we met this last week by suggesting I consider going back to all those pivotal moments of my life which have brought me to the silence of solitude as the vocation and gift of my life. Essentially she was asking me not only to consider these intellectually (though she was doing that too) but to savor them anew and in this savoring to come to an even greater consolidation of my identity in God and as diocesan hermit.

Hermitages are places which reprise the same experience of consolidation and integration of our identity in God. They are deserts in which we come not only to learn who we are in terms of God alone, but to allow that to define our entire existence really and concretely -- in what we value, how we behave, in the choices we make, and those with whom we identify, etc. In last year's "In Good Faith" podcast for A Nun's Life, I noted that for me the choice which is fundamental to all of Lent and all of the spiritual life, "Choose Life, not death" is the choice between accepting and living my life according to the way God defines me or according to the way the "world" defines me. It means that no matter how poor, inadequate, ill, and so forth I also am, I choose to make God's announcement that in Christ  I am his beloved daughter in whom he is well-pleased the central truth of my life which colors and grounds everything else. Learning to live from that definition (and so, from the one who announces it) is the task of the hermit; the hermitage is the place to which the Spirit of love and Sonship drive us so that we can savor the truth of this incomprehensible mystery even as we struggle to allow it to become the whole of who we are.


But hermitages are, of course, not the only places which reprise these dynamics. Each of us has been baptized, and in each of our baptisms what was announced to us was the fact that we were now God's adopted beloved daughters and sons. Lent gives us the space and time where we can focus on the truth of this, claim that truth more whole-heartedly, and, as Thomas Merton once said, "get rid of any impersonation that has followed us" to the [desert]. We need to take time to identify and struggle with the falsenesses within us, but also to accept and appreciate the more profound truth of who we are and who we are called to become in savoring our experiences of God's love. As we fast in various ways, we must be sure to also taste and smell as completely as we can the nourishing Word of God's love for us. After all, the act of savoring is the truest counterpart of fasting for the Christian. The word we are called to savor is the word which defines us as valued and valuable in ways the world cannot imagine and nourishes us where the things of the world cannot. It is this Word we are called both to struggle with and to savor during these 40 days, just as Jesus himself did.

Thus, as I fast this Lent (in whatever ways that means), I am going to remember to allow myself not only to get in touch with my own deepest hungers and the hungers I share with all others (another very good reason to fast), but also to get in touch anew with the ways I have been fed and nourished throughout my life --- the experiences I need to savor as well. Perhaps then when Lent comes to an end I will be better able to claim and celebrate the one I am in God. My prayer is that each of us is able to do something similar with our own time in the desert.

Merton quotation taken from Contemplation in a World of Action, "Christian Solitude," p 244.

A Theology of the Cross, Holy Week 2008

Ministering to the Dying and Bereaved: Proclaiming a God Whose Power is Made Perfect in Weakness. Initially published in Review For Religious, January 2001

Death, and God’s relation to death is an overarching theme in human life, and certainly in the life of the Church. During Lent, for instance, we spend an entire forty days preparing to celebrate Christ’s victory over “sin and death.” During this season and others, images of these hostile forces, references to chaos, meaninglessness, and our bondage to all of them surround us. And in light of this, if there is anything we understand, (or should understand!), it is that these things are “the enemy.” During this time, for instance, we read in the Old Testament again and again that our basic choice, the really fundamental option that faces us in all of life’s moments and moods, is “choose life, not death;” and we know that these alternatives are not equivalent. After all, one is “of God” and the other is not. One is a choice for being, integration, re-creation, and meaning, while the other is a choice for diminishment, disintegration, destruction, and senselessness. One is the choice to respond to and fulfill the profound vocation to authentic existence spoken by God deep within us, while the other represents the repudiation of this summons and the rejection of our truest selves. One is, ultimately, a choice for an eternity in communion with the God who authenticates and completes us, the God who is the ground and source of life and meaning, while the other is the act by which we embrace the powers and utter emptinesses of hell.

At this time of the year in particular, we examine our lives for signs that they are marked and marred by our own alliances with sin and death, and we participate in a more focused way than usual in activities which reject such alliances, and are geared towards breaking the bonds established between us and them. We make the concerted effort to acknowledge, “we are dust, and shall return to dust,” that death is something that threatens us not only from without, but that it is also something that we carry around within us. And of course, we affirm and celebrate that for our sakes, and in opposition to our misguided, misbegotten alliances, God’s own Son has dwelt amongst us, implicating the One he called “Abba” into the whole panorama of our fragile, flawed, finite, and mortal existences, ---- up to and including his altogether humanly contrived, and godforsaken death on a Roman cross.

We observe Holy Saturday as the day when sin and death have triumphed. On this day there is no Savior, no Church, no Sacrament, and no Gospel. There is nothing to celebrate or proclaim. There is neither hope, nor freedom, nor real future. Sin and death are the apparent victors, and the present is as empty and forlorn as the desolate plaint of the enfeebled and failed messiah, whom we heard cry out from the cross just the day before. On this day we recall the original disciples --- broken by disappointment, grief, guilt, and shame, and stunned to terrified silence when the powers of the world overcame the One they called “Christ.” Their shattered hope for the definitive coming of God’s reign, and the ignominious, apparently unvindicated death of the man Jesus, stands at the center of our vision as well on this day. And in the shadow of this recollection, the bleakness of a world dominated by a power that regularly opposes and subverts the work of the Author of Life is clear. On this day, our entire horizon is death and the victory it has achieved over God’s Son, over us, and over our world.

In light of all this then, how is it we still hear from those engaged in pastoral ministry to the dying and bereaved for instance, that God is either the “author of death,” or it’s agent, or that anyone’s death (with the single exception of Christ’s own) is “God’s will”? How is it, with all the scriptural and empirical evidence otherwise, our ministers and faithful continue to present death as something other than the implacable enemy of life and the God who authors life? How is it that death is conceived of as other than an entirely alien and antithetical element in our existence, which God works continually and indeed, suffered greatly, to defeat --- an element that remains only on sufferance until “(God) is all in all”? How is it possible to hear from faithful who have been told that “God is the Lord of life and death,” that this must mean that when death intervenes, it is “God who KILLS us”? Yet, blunt and apparently absurd as this last formulation may sound to us, it is merely the clear spelling out of the implications of a flawed theology which considers death the event WITH which God punishes sin and calls us to judgement, rather than the hostile power he conquers, and the event IN which he intervenes in Christ, to raise us to eternal life.

Whether we are ministers trying to assist others with their own deaths, pastors comforting the bereaved, or simply persons who are trying to make sense of the reality of our own mortality, all too often we are burdened with vague, ill-defined, and even erroneous notions of death and the relationship between God and death. The situation is complicated by misreadings and distortions of Paul’s theology of the cross, and by fundamentalist interpretations of the creation narratives of Genesis. It is likewise made more difficult by anachronistic conceptions of the human being which see him/ her in terms of a body-soul dualism, as well as by simplistic notions of the sovereignty of God. The result is quite simply an inadequate theology that makes genuinely Christian ministry to the dying and bereaved difficult or even impossible, and caricatures God as the author of tragedy and absurdity in the process.

It seems to me therefore, that we must make a serious effort to correct our misconceptions of death, its relation to sin, and especially the relation of God to death. After all, how in the world are we to adequately celebrate God’s own triumph OVER sin and death, if we misunderstand these realities and posit God as their author? How can we make sense of the fact that God willed the suffering and death of his only begotten Son if we understand these realities as something God had complete control over in the first place? Are we really stuck with Anselm’s satisfaction theory, for instance, and the parody of God and God’s justice it is based on? And are we left only with the option of telling the dying and bereaved to whom we minister that “this is the will of God” or do we really have better answers at our disposal? Obviously, I am convinced there are far better answers available to Christians, and it is my intention to explore some of them, and their theological foundation, in this essay.

Common Misunderstandings of the Nature of Death

There are two basic misunderstandings regarding death and God’s relation to death, which seem to me to burden most Christians. The first is the notion that God is in COMPLETE control of human existence, and that because death is a part of that reality, this must mean that he is in complete control of it as well. There are various versions of this notion: “(Death) is God’s will;” “ Death is the way God punishes us for our sin” (especially original sin); “Everything that happens has a purpose;” “God gives and God takes away;” etc. Most often we hear versions of this theology from homilists and ministers trying to encourage us that God is omnipotent, and that everything that occurs, no matter how apparently senseless, is meaningful. We also hear these interpretations from ministers who believe that by affirming death is in God’s hands, by affirming it as the event WITH which he calls us home, for instance, some of the fear and sting of either dying, or bereavement is removed. Clearly, we sense that death is easier to bear if it is not simply perceived as an alien and hostile element in human existence, particularly if we can hear that it really isn’t the entirely senseless event it so often seems to be. In the meantime, however, we repress the serious theological questions such affirmations raise: Is all death and dying sent by God? Is God really their author? Are we expected to attribute instances of chance and absurdity to him as well, or are we expected to simply deny the existence of these things? Are so-called ‘acts of God’ really the work of God? Does “sovereignty” imply total control, or is the situation more complex than this? And of course, if God IS the author and agent of death as well as of life, what kind of God would such a deity truly be?

The second misunderstanding is related to the first. It is the notion that death, and here we are speaking of human death, is something that threatens us entirely from without, and so, is something which God can overcome by mere fiat. It is sometimes combined with the secular view that death is a wholly natural and neutral reality. This notion of human death fails to understand it as a partly, and indeed profoundly personal reality which is not simply part and parcel of our temporality, but is a special aspect of sinful existence. Because of this, it often goes unrecognized, much less acknowledged that God cannot force his way into this realm, nor overcome it from without. As in all else that is personal in our lives, God must be allowed or implicated into this realm if he is to bring it under subjection to himself and transform it. The logical consequences of this misunderstanding are also generally repressed, for such a misunderstanding of the relation of God to death generally raises the question: why did the Word have to become incarnate and God’s own Son suffer a torturous death by crucifixion, if God could have simply overcome sin and death by fiat?

Another Look at the Relation of Death to Sin and God

God created the world of time and space. He created it out of nothing (nihil), and it retains the ability to cease existing, to sink once again into nothingness. The created world continues to be conditioned by non-being. It is ambiguous and threatened. Non-being is an aspect of temporal-spatial existence. While created reality depends upon God for its existence, it is not simply from and of God. It is not, for instance, an emanation of God, and it does not possess its own being. It is finite and must be continually summoned and held in existence against the power of non-being also at work within and around it. Beyond this, and in part because of the presence of non-being as a conditioning element, this world also possesses potential. It has the capacity to grow and change. Non-being conditions this world as threat and as promise. It is both a condition of possibility and the condition of non-possibility.

When we consider human existence the situation becomes even more complex, because human beings are created with the capacity to reject God, and to ally themselves with that which is other than the One from whom life and meaning come, even looking to this as a source of life and meaning. Not only is human existence ambiguous in all the ways historical existence is ambiguous, but human beings can refuse to simply receive meaningful life as a gift from God. They can, as the OT puts the matter, “choose to know good and evil,” (in the very intimate way the OT uses the term knowledge), or “choose to be as Gods,” or again, they can “choose death.” Human beings can ally themselves with life and the author of life in total dependence, or (and there is no other option), they can ally themselves with the powers of non-being, the meaningless, anti-life, anti-truth, literally godless powers that are also part of spatial-temporal existence. And of course, they do. In fact they do so inevitably in one way and another. Without exception human beings embrace the powers and principalities of this world in a mistaken bid for autonomy and completion. They “live (and die) from” these powers, and in doing so give them greater standing, status, power, menace, and malignancy in the world than they would have without human complicity.

But where does non-being and the power of non-being come from in the first place? Is God its author? Is non-being a “something,” a form of matter as Manichaeism once suggested, and where else could it come from than the God who is the source of all that “is”? One of the better explanations comes from JÜrgen Moltmann in his, God in Creation. Building on a Jewish kabalistic notion , Moltmann explains:

<< God makes room for his creation by withdrawing his presence. What comes into being is a nihil which does not contain the negation of creaturely being (since creation is not yet existent), but which represents the partial negation of the divine being, inasmuch as God is not yet creator. The space which comes into being and is set free by God’s self-limitation is literally God-forsaken space. The nihil in which God creates his creation is god-forsakenness, hell, absolute death; and it is against the threat of this that he maintains his creation in life. Admittedly, the nihil only acquires this menacing character through the self-isolation of created beings to which we give the name of sin and godlessness. . . . This points to a necessary correction in the interpretation of creation: God does not create merely by calling something into being, or by setting something afoot. In a more profound sense he “creates” by letting-be, by making room and by withdrawing himself. >> (Emphasis added)

And what then of sin or estrangement from God? If non-being is a “natural” part of finite existence, then isn’t sin, which is primarily estrangement from God, also simply something natural, a part of historical existence? The answer is no. Sin, which begins as a natural separation or distinction from the God who dwells in eternity, occurs when human beings (who dwell instead in time and space) choose not to be entirely dependent upon God to save them from the threat of non-being. It occurs when human beings mistake actual independence from God for freedom, and when independence from God is pushed the further disastrous misstep, and mistaken for equality with God. It occurs whenever human beings decide that a humble response to God’s summons alone is not to be the only determinant of their lives, and align themselves with that which is not from or of God. It occurs when we make common cause with death and non-being rather than with the One who is the source of life and meaning. It occurs whenever human beings turn away from their creator toward that which is antithetical to him in acts of rebellion and apostasy, and transform a more natural separation-yet-communion into actual estrangement, alienation, and sometimes-outright antipathy. It happens whenever the “we” of our “original” state is rejected and/or betrayed, and thus transformed into the self-conscious, self-concerned, relatively isolated “I” attested to in the Genesis narratives.

Similarly then, death has also been transformed from something natural into something entirely unnatural. The death that we recognize as an integral part of human existence is something wholly unnatural. Just as human distinction and separateness was transformed into actual estrangement and alienation from God, from self, and from others, so too has normal finitude, ordinary mortality, taken on monstrous proportions in light of human sin. Human death is not simply a natural or neutral event. It is not simply the moment when non-being overcomes being, although it is certainly that as well. Human death is menacing; it is associated with human complicity and collusion with the anti-divine powers of nothingness, meaninglessness, and chaos. And of course, for this reason human death is “the wages of sin,” and implies the triumph of godlessness ---- a triumph which human beings have assisted, colluded, and become complicit in, in every possible way. Human death, apart from Christ, is a death of godforsakenness.

It is also, therefore, a death marked by the wrath of God, but wrath in the genuinely Pauline sense of the word. After all, God has created us with the capacity to choose something other than himself, or to be something other than we are created to be. And choose we do. And when we do, God leaves us to our choices. This is precisely what living under the wrath of God means. It does not mean that God is angry. It certainly does not mean that he punishes us in any way. It means simply that we are left to the choices we have made and the alliances we have forged throughout our lives. It means that, in fact, God respects (that is, he will not and cannot interfere with) these choices or alliances. It also means that those who are born into the world after us are touched by the same powers and principalities which we ourselves have elevated and magnified with our choices. Paul describes this in the first chapter of his epistle to the Romans. The wrath of God implies being “given up” to the alien powers with which we have aligned and allied ourselves, and therefore, to the gradually worsening decadence and disintegration that afflict us, our society, and our world because we have made common cause with chaos and nothingness. It implies an inhuman death marked by the embrace of godforsakenness, one in which absolute godlessness triumphs. Whatever death is or would be apart from Sin, it is not this. Instead it is the enemy of sinful humankind and of God, and it is this situation which the Cross of Christ is meant to address.

The Cross of Christ and the Death of Death

There are times and situations in human life and history which demand we look again at everything we believe, every definition and presupposition we hold, every scrap of knowledge we think we possess, and every perspective which seems intelligent, or natural, or logical. The picture of reality gained from the perspective of Holy Saturday surely suggests that the cross of Christ is, at the very least, one of these events. From this perspective alone we have a picture of a failed and possibly delusional “Messiah.” After all, God’s Son had not climbed down from his cross. He had not saved himself as he had saved others, and in the process he died a completely degrading and entirely ignoble death. The one he called Abba with an unprecedented intimacy had not established his reign with a mighty and outstretched arm. The angel of death had not passed over, nor had the powers of Rome been routed in any way reminiscent of the Egyptians at the Exodus. Instead, sin and death were the apparent victors on this day, and a God whose power is, even today, mainly understood by believers and unbelievers alike in abstract, impersonal terms of omnipotence, had proved unable to deal with the consequences of human freedom and its abuses, much less with the destructive powers of the world. And yet, the Christian Gospel affirms that this evident failure was the ground of a far more awesome victory, the victory of a hitherto unknown God whose “foolishness is wiser than the wisdom of men.”

So then, how is it the Cross of Christ “works”? This question is often posed “Why did Jesus have to die this kind of death?” And implicit in this query are a number of others: “why couldn’t Jesus simply have died of old age?” or, “why would his Father allow such a thing, much less will it?” or, “what kind of God would demand that his Son suffer betrayal, torture, abandonment, and even godforsakenness or hell?” and, “if God asks that of his Son, how can I believe he will have mercy on me?” These are important questions, and they are variations on the questions raised whenever God is made the author or agent of death. They are also the questions which are at least implicitly raised by notions of the cross which make it the place where an infinitely offended God is appeased or placated. And the answer to them is as simple as it is almost incomprehensible in its wondrousness. For God’s sake and the sake of a divine justice which is defined solely in terms of mercy and which seeks the reconciliation and completion of all of reality WITH God, God must overcome everything which separates him from us. For this reason, in order to implicate God into the realm from which he is by definition absent and from which he has actually been further excluded by human sin, someone sinless and therefore still entirely open and responsive to God, must die such a death.

On the one hand, this death must represent the worst death a human being may die. It must be a death marked by failure, weakness, abandonment and isolation. It must be a genuinely “inhuman” (that is, sinful) fate, the death of one whose dignity has been stripped from him, and who is left completely powerless and alone, with nothing left to recommend him to God. It, above all, must be a death where this one is given over entirely to nothingness, to the emptinesses of hell. It must be the death we each deserve --- the death that, without Christ, we each will die because of the alliances we have forged, and the choices we have inevitably made and ratified. It must be the death we each merit for ourselves, and often visit on others. And it must be that death in which the wrath of God is experienced without mitigation or diminution, precisely so that God can instead become inexhaustibly present here under the aspect of grace. At the same time, it must have been the most genuinely human death ever died. There could be nothing present in Christ which mitigated or compromised his openness to and dependence upon God, nothing which prevented the entire will of God being done in him, nothing which spoke of misguided autonomy, collusion with the powers of death and sin, disobedience, or pride. At the precise instant Jesus’ death is the most inhuman (godless) imaginable, it must also be the most human (open to God) precisely so that genuinely human existence which is defined in terms of obedience to and communion with God once again becomes a real possibility in our world. And the result is not only the possibility of genuinely human existence, but also necessarily, the simultaneous “death of (godforsaken) death.”

As we noted above, human death, the “wages of sin,” the result of our alliances with the “powers and principalities” of this world, cannot be destroyed from without, by fiat, without God also destroying his entire creation and abrogating the freedom of those who would and do ally themselves with these powers. So God chooses to become present even here in the realm of nothingness. God empties himself completely of his divine prerogatives in order to definitively reveal and assert a novel kind of divine sovereignty, an incredibly paradoxical power defined in terms of weakness. Sinful death is the ultimate enemy, and so, God chooses to be subject to it so that he might transform it entirely. Thus, Good Friday and Holy Saturday are followed and rendered permanently valid by Easter, the definitive and wholly new “Passover.” After Christ, death is no longer the godless place, and it no longer has the final word. Because of Christ, and because he chose to become subject to sin and the wages of sin out of love for his Father and us, God has become present “in the unexpected place,” and the power of death, which was the power to separate us from God forever, is definitively broken. The God Jesus reveals--- the One whose Name he makes known and real among us, is the formerly unseen, infinitely paradoxical God who, from creating to redeeming his creation, “calls into being the things that are not, and raises the dead to life.” Most significantly, he does so with a sovereignty which is worked out in self-emptying and self-limitation, a justice which is defined in terms of mercy, and a “power (which is) made perfect in weakness.”

Paul summarizes this whole theology in one statement: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their transgressions against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.” Note well that Paul does not say, “God was in Christ being reconciled to a world that offended him infinitely.” Note as well that neither is Paul concerned with a kind of justice which is either familiar or comfortable to us. This justice is neither distributive nor retributive. In no sense is this a God “who gives us what we deserve.” Instead Paul’s entire focus is on the fact that in the Christ Event, and most especially on the cross, God asserts his rights over creation, and defines justice with an exhaustively kenotic and sacrificial mercy which secures our freedom on the one hand, and which transforms the very things we choose when we abuse and misuse that freedom on the other. In this theology, God’s justice is actually expressed as his refusal to allow anything to separate us from him. Here grace and justice, are largely synonymous. If wrath means allowing us our choices out of love for us even in full recognition of our sin, grace means allowing us our choices, but, out of an unconditional love, transforming the very nature of that which we choose so that we are no longer separated from God, or broken and estranged as human beings. If wrath means allowing us to choose the godless and godforsaken, grace means the transformation of these things, and especially the transformation of sinful death into an actual sacrament of God’s presence. If sin means our separation from God and the self-assertion and ingratitude that prompts it, divine justice is God’s assertion that we belong to him no matter what, and what is ordinarily called “justification” is the reconciliation that results when God acts out this judgement in the Christ Event.

All of this, of course, is the climax of the Divine self-emptying that began at creation. It contrasts precisely with the pretensions to divinity assumed by human beings in sin --- the same pretensions that crucified Christ in a riot of religious righteousness and political expediency. This is indeed the victory of a God whose “foolishness is wiser than the wisdom of men.” It reminds us that ours is a God who is folly to “Greeks” and a scandal to “Jews,” and as it does so, it calls into question everything we once held as conventional wisdom about God, his sovereignty, wrath, justice, power, and dignity, and it offers us alternative and paradoxical definitions of all of these, as well as our own notions of what constitutes genuinely human existence. What was true at the time Paul wrote about the scandal and foolishness of the cross is no less true now. For this reason we can be very sure that if the Cross has not challenged our notions of all we experience and know, we have not really understood it. Even more seriously, so long as we refuse to accept the redefinitions achieved on the cross, we make it, and what was achieved there, void. There is, I think, no place our success or failure in this has more serious consequences than in our theology of death, and our ministry to the dying and bereaved.


Implications for Our Ministry to the Dying and Bereaved

This brings to our ministry then, an alternative way of looking at death, tragedy, senselessness, and their relation to God. I believe this alternative perspective results in an altogether more extensively and intensively comforting pastoral approach, but there is no doubt that it is tremendously challenging as well. After all, it requires that both we and those we minister to, give up the facile answers and simplistic platitudes that have so long mistakenly passed for Christian faith and truth. This perspective demands then that we adopt a grammar of salvation built on the paradoxes embodied in a theology God worked out in creation and on the cross in terms of kenosis and asthenia. In this theology, the God who renounces his own prerogatives out of love for us is not in total control, but ultimately, he is the God who asserts his rights over all of creation and mercifully brings all things to fulfillment in himself. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer once rightly reminded us, “Not everything that happens is the will of God, but inevitably nothing that happens occurs outside his will.” In this theology God has willed the sinful death of only one person, his own Son, but he has done so only in order that he might defeat godless death entirely. In this theology, God gives, sin distorts, desecrates and destroys, and death takes away, but God intervenes in death and robs it of any ultimate victory. And in this grammar of salvation, not everything that happens in our world makes sense or has meaning, but at the same time it can all be the basis for celebrating a God who will bring order out of chaos, life out of death, and meaning out of absurdity if we only give him the chance, and perhaps even when we do not.

In concrete terms this means that when dying or grieving persons ask us if this human death is the will of God, we must answer no, but what God will make of it in Christ is another matter. Death is the enemy, and it is both God’s and ours, but in Christ it is also the vanquished enemy whose power, for all its awfulness, is a merely a hollow shell of what it once was. If we are asked why God does not intervene to save a dying child, for instance, we must be clear that God has intervened, but he has intervened in death to transform its very nature, and make sure it does not have the final word. And when those we minister to rightly affirm that they have sinned, and are frightened of God’s justice, or that they feel guilty as death approaches, we have to be able to remind them that God’s justice has determined they will not be separated from him. No. God has asserted his rights over all of creation, and has promised to love us with an everlasting love. Perhaps it is the case that God’s mercy assumes an awful aspect for those unprepared to be nothing but forgiven, but for those who are prepared to accept this gift, God’s justice is a source of unending joy, and its promise is still ultimately comforting. So, while we cannot minimize or trivialize the sin and guilt anyone experiences, neither can we allow it to be perceived as greater or more powerful than God’s own solution for it. The wages of sin is godforsaken death. But an innocent Christ has died our own deserved godless death, and the wages of this death is eternal life in communion with a God who refuses to allow sin and death to remain godless.

Many Christians are scandalized or frightened by the suggestion that God is not in complete control of his creation. They believe it offends against a God who is traditionally described in terms of omnipotence. But they have not been introduced to the paradoxical sovereignty of the God of Jesus Christ who defeats sin and death by participating in them. Here God’s sovereignty is exercised precisely where he dies for us. A God who is said to limit himself in creating and redeeming a free creation, is a real stumbling block to many Christians, and more than this, many are made nervous by the notion that there are things at work in the world which God neither foresees in detail, nor immediately controls. This too seems to offend against the theology of an omniscient, omnipotent God. Many will be downright angry at a notion of divine justice where people “don’t get what they deserve.” After all, a God whose judgement IS his mercy certainly is a stumbling block. But, again, God asserts his rights over us as he will and for all these people, the paradox of a crucified God whose foolishness is wiser than the wisdom of men, needs to be more convincingly proclaimed and taught. While some of us find the notion of God as the author and agent of death repugnant, many others are threatened by a notion of death where God is neither the agent nor the author. At the same time however, these folks may not have been taught that through Christ’s death and resurrection sinful death is miraculously transformed into a sacrament of God’s presence. And yet, it is certainly part of an adequate ministry to the dying and bereaved to make these central aspects of the Gospel of Jesus Christ effectively known. We will have failed badly if we are unable to recognize and adequately affirm either side of the God-death equation that is at the heart of Christian kerygma.

Every human life has its Good Fridays and Holy Saturdays. There is failure, absurdity, betrayal, collusion, isolation, injustice, cruelty, torment, and death. There are times when we are simply left helpless and mute in the face of our own and others’ inhumanity, and when we are bewildered by the tragic and inexplicable circumstances of our personal and collective histories, as well as by the silence and apparent inadequacy of God at these times. In the short term Sin often does triumph and the powers of this world are sometimes immediately victorious. After all, God is not yet “all in all,” and not all that happens is either from or of him. Ministers to the dying and bereaved have to be courageous enough to admit these things without mitigation or equivocation. And yet, there is another side to all of this that must be communicated clearly and persuasively.

Death and the apparent triumph of non-being are followed by resurrection, and as a result, we really can’t look at any of reality in quite the same way again. The negativities of life are real, but so is the God who chooses to enter into them and transform them with his own life and presence. After all, ours is the God of Jesus and Paul, the God who raises the dead to life, the God whose justice is defined in terms of mercy rather than wrath, and who refuses to allow anything to separate us from his love. Ours is the God who assumes a position of impotence in order that his sovereignty might be perfected and we might be saved when we are most helpless. And he is the God who does this so that even while we face squarely the greatest tragedies and senselessnesses life has to offer, we can exultantly cry with Paul, and help those to whom we minister to do the same, “Sin where is thy victory, death where is thy sting?”