Belief and disbelief

Words on the subject to chew on, from Richard Rodriguez’ essay “Atheism Is Wasted on the Nonbeliever,” found in The Best American Spiritual Writing 2008:

I believe in Jesus Christ, the Christ who was a loser in human history — destroyed by this world — whose life reveals in its generosity and tragedy the most complete and challenging version of theism I know. What the New Atheists do not comprehend is that the crucifix cannot be mocked. It is itself mockery.

…

And more: I believe the monotheistic religions would be healthier, less inclined to extremism and violence, if those of us who profess belief in God were able also to admit our disbelief.

An invitation and a resolution

I wrote a few days ago about my experience of the Spiritual Exercises in Everyday Life (SEEL). It has been nothing less than an experience of God’s invitation to transformation.

Now, speaking about transformation in a general sense is somewhat easy and non-threatening. I can say that God is changing me through the retreat. How wonderful! I can say that I began SEEL in September with the general intention of drawing closer to Jesus, of understanding – not just in my head but in my heart, in my gut – who he is for me, and that I have been met and engaged in that intention, that I am picking up more of a “taste” for who Jesus is, and that this taste says as much about who I am as it says about who he is. How exciting! I can say somewhat abstractly (though is it possible to speak about the Incarnate One and remain at the level of abstraction?) that I wanted to grow closer to Jesus and that, by God’s grace, I feel I have done so. How lovely!

But to speak about transformation in particulars, to name the specific ways I am being called out of myself – or deeper into my true being, if you prefer (and I think I do prefer) – towards radical spiritual change feels frightening and dangerous. Speaking and naming – and what is being spoken and named but aspects of my very self? – make it difficult to pretend the challenge is not there. I point to a specific path down which God is beckoning me, and by implication I see who I might be in the future and who I am now, and I feel the difference in the two, like the natural flow of air from high pressure to low or of water seeking its own level. I feel the inner push and pull; I feel both the desire to shorten the distance between where I am and where I might be, and the desire to settle down comfortably and timidly in where I am and what I know. But in speaking and naming, in responding, “Yes, I see the path. Yes, I hear your invitation,” I know I cannot go back to not-seeing and not-hearing.

Or rather, it’s like a light has shone on my true self, deep down there at the bottom of a well, and now, well, I can’t just pretend I haven’t seen him down there without a terrible act of self-betrayal; I guess I’ll have to do something to help him up. But, you know, life would be a hell of a lot easier if I could just stay the same, if I could just pretend I hadn’t caught a glimpse of who I might be or of who I really am. I feel the desire to become who God seems to believe I can be. But, oh, growth is hard and painful! And what if I fail? What if I fall short?

But with trust in the One who is calling me out, with trust that the One who has shown me a new way will not let me falter on it, I speak in particulars.

In addition to starting SEEL with the desire to have Jesus be a living flame in my gut, I decided to make writing a more integral part of my spiritual practice, to use it consciously as a way of wrestling with the question he put to his disciples: Who do you say that I am? So for the first four months of the retreat my daily prayer consisted of half an hour of lectio divina (prayerful reading of scripture) spilling over into half an hour of writing in my journal any thoughts, feelings, questions, etc. that resulted in my encounter with the Word.

This was working well for me, until the end of December when an idea came to me. Now, I should say two things briefly here. The first is – and I will put this boldly and bluntly, so as to look the lion straight in the eyes – I want to be a writer (which is also to say that I do not yet consider myself to be a writer). I won’t go into what I mean by “being a writer” just yet so as to keep this to the point; it is enough to say in the moment that I think about writing more than I actually write, and that I want that to change. Secondly, I don’t think I’ve ever made a New Year’s resolution in my life. I had no conscious thought of changing that when, at the very end of 2009, a resolution sprang, Athena-like, fully formed from my head: This coming year I want to work on and complete a written piece and submit it to a spiritual journal (or journals) for publication.

Though I’ve never sent any writing of mine off to be published anywhere – except for a letter assigned by my fifth grade teacher that the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle printed, oh, thirty years ago – when I consider my chronic dithering about giving myself over to writing, that I have two or three pieces written for classes on the road to my Masters degree in spirituality that I’ve often thought could be made publication-worthy will a little (or a lot of) polishing, and that I very deliberately took up writing as a conscious part of my spiritual practice when SEEL began, this seems like the natural next step. A challenge and an invitation that I hear as God’s response to my initiative (which surely was my own response to God’s initiating grace).

So for the past few weeks I’ve been spending an hour each morning (except Sundays; I decided to give myself a regular Sabbath rest) writing: reworking a piece I originally wrote for a class almost three years ago. I have a hard time categorizing the piece. I do not call it an article – that sounds too scholarly for what I’m doing. I hesitate to call it an essay, for that calls to mind thoughts from high school composition classes of a logical progression, a clear beginning, middle, and end, which don’t seem to fit what I’ve written so far. The piece is more meditative, poetic, even dream-like. It has its most intimate roots in an experience I had of hearing a particular Gospel passage proclaimed about twelve years ago, and it represents some of my attempts to grapple with Incarnation, with the mystery of the flesh and of matter, with Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am?”

It’s been an exciting and scary process so far, since I have no idea where this is leading me. My rational mind says, “Tosh!” (for my rational mind often speaks in archaisms), “You know of course that this is leading towards submission for publication!” And at one level I know that this is correct; that’s the goal, anyway. But I still view the writing primarily as part of my spiritual practice, as part of this pilgrimage I’m on during SEEL. And as such it feels like a walk into the unknown, but one on which I am accompanied by Christ. Every morning these past five weeks or so, I sit down to write, I light a candle, and I invite Jesus to meet me in the writing. I do my best to show up and I have every reason to believe that he is showing up; we are being faithful to each other.

I invite Jesus into the writing. God invites me to transformation. We call to one another through the darkness. I reach out and feel my hands grasped by Another’s. And we dance, and sometimes it’s hard to tell who is leading whom. Though I think I know.

At the mid-point

I am about half-way through the Spiritual Exercises in Everyday Life (SEEL). These are based on the 30-day retreat devised by St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), the founder of the Society of Jesus (or the Jesuits, as they are more commonly known). SEEL stretches the retreat over nine months, from September to May in this case. It is an accommodation allowed by Ignatius himself, who acknowledged that not everyone would be able to leave their daily responsibilities for a solid month of silence and prayerful consideration of the action of God in their lives.

The Exercises span four “weeks” or movements. In the 30-day form of the retreat the movements are easily matched to actual calendar weeks, but even so, each movement does not necessarily have to last seven days. In SEEL, of course there is even greater flexibility, as the four movements have to span nine months. In the first movement or week, the focus is on the creative love of God, source of all things. That focus shifts in the second week to the Incarnation and the life and ministry of Jesus. Retreatants’ attention follows Jesus into his passion and death during the third week. Finally, in the fourth week, we contemplate Jesus’ resurrection.

All through this four-stage journey the overarching concern of the retreat is how God is present and active in one’s life, and how one is responding to God, in keeping with the Jesuit principle of “finding God in all things.” Where does God’s unconditional, generative love manifest itself in the details of my life? How am I asked to follow Jesus in the circumstances of my days? In what ways do I turn away from God or my neighbor, do I reject or am unaware of the extravagant love that is held out to me? What could it mean that this love led Jesus all the way to death, conquered it, and raised him up, triumphant, to an unimaginable new life? What are the little deaths I must endure along the path of spiritual growth (a path that ultimately will lead me through my own biological death and into participation in Jesus’ own resurrection)?

There are three practical components of SEEL: monthly Saturday morning sessions for the entire group of retreatants, built around the different movements of the Exercises, with presentations, time for silent reflection, and group discussion; twice-monthly one-on-one meetings with a spiritual director; and the commitment to spend an hour in prayer each day of the retreat.

Now spiritual direction and daily prayer have been parts of my life for many years, so in some ways my experience of SEEL has been in continuity with what came before. At the same time, though, the retreat has introduced me into a new way of being, into a heightened sense of the presence of a loving, personal, relational God in my life. These past five months have felt like a time apart; there is an experimental quality to them, like Jesus himself has said to me, “Let’s try something different. Let’s take a different path. Follow me.” Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. I do not get the sense that I am following Jesus on this path. What feels truer to say is that he is walking with me, that neither he nor I am leading the way, but that we are going together, where I cannot say for certain, and at times I wonder if Jesus is even clear about where the path is going. And then I wonder, if he is with me and I can keep my eyes on him, does it even matter where the path is going?

When I try to tell people how SEEL is going I often feel at a loss. I say that it’s bringing me closer to God, closer to a real sense of the presence of Christ in my life. But then I try to explain how it’s doing that, and that’s when the experience slips through my hands like water. For when I consider the individual components of SEEL – the Saturday morning sessions, spiritual direction, daily prayer – they all seem to come up short. None of them, by itself, is making this experience possible. And even when put together there is some necessary spark that is hard to account for, that enters in from the outside. It is plainly a case of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. It’s as if I had paper, wood, and a match all lying side-by-side, but still no fire. I am dependent upon Another to light the fire, or to show me how to light it – Another to enter freely into the retreat and enliven and inspire its separate pieces.

This is what has happened and it is a wonderful mystery to me.

The mystery is not suffering, the mystery is love

Reflecting on the staggering suffering resulting from the earthquake in Haiti, Michael Sean Winters has written a good post at the blog In All Things. He criticizes the attempts by some to try to explain away suffering or to lay blame for it (and he points particularly to Pat Robertson’s outrageous claims about Haitians having made a pact with the devil). Remembering a Mass he attended some years ago, Winters writes:

The homilist was Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete and he spoke about the mystery of suffering. He warned us not to try and seek answers to our suffering lest we become like Job’s friends. They, too, tried to explain to Job why he suffered and, at the end of the story, God upbraids them for this. He told us that only those who love suffer, that only a heart that is open is capable of breaking, and so the mystery is not suffering, the mystery is love. In the end, we are not called to understand suffering nor to explain it, but to embrace it as the price of love.

And Winters concludes:

In a word, let us not be crippled by the suffering we see but let us find ways to love these Haitian neighbors in this dreadful hour. The mystery is not suffering. The mystery is love.

Please read Winters’ entire post here.

From the Baptism to Ordinary Time

The liturgical year offers us the opportunity to meditate upon the mysteries of Jesus’ life, ministry, death, and resurrection, and upon the work of the Spirit through the history of the Church. And more than meditation, the liturgical year invites us to participation in these mysteries. Through the cycle of seasons and feasts they are made present to us or, better yet, we are brought into their presence, to the birth of Jesus, say, or his crucifixion, or his resurrection; we are drawn into the intersection of eternity with time. This is but one of the beauties of the liturgical year.

Today the Church celebrates the Baptism of Jesus. We are reminded of the humility of Jesus, the humility of God, desiring to walk with us in our human journey and, even more precisely and scandalously, to stand with us in our sinfulness. The baptism that John performed was not only a baptism of repentance; it was also a baptism of preparation and waiting. John merely baptized with water. He acknowledged that one would come after him who would baptize with the Holy Spirit. John’s baptism formed a community of people who were waiting for the Holy Spirit. By receiving this baptism, Jesus was expressing solidarity with sinful humanity and he was also expressing his complete dependence upon and trust in the Father. Jesus knew that he could not exalt himself, otherwise he would not have been truly human; his exaltation could come only as the action of God. The divine response to this act of humility was a theophany of the Trinity: the Spirit descended upon Jesus in the form of a dove; the Father’s voice thundered from the sky; and Jesus was identified as God’s beloved Son.

This feast does more than remind us of Jesus’ own baptism. It reminds us of our own. In baptism our lives were conformed to the pattern of Jesus’ own life; just as he submitted in humility to the baptism of John and was then anointed with the Spirit, and just as this abasement and exaltation prefigured his death and resurrection, so, through baptism, our lives follow magnetic lines, as it were, through death to life. Similarly, just as his baptism revealed Jesus as God’s Son and in a sense marked his vocation, so our baptism marks us with our own vocation, confers on us our truest identity, our particular and unique place in the Body of Christ.

But on this feast, Jesus’ baptism and our own are not merely memories – they are not like faded photographs we pull out of a box in the closet once in a while and look at nostalgically and wistfully – they are living realities, present and renewed in the Spirit. The power of the Trinity, revealed in Christ, revealed in the world, is present and active today. The power of my baptism is alive in me here and now. The voice of God resonates within me today, calling me to listen to Christ, to follow him through humility, patient endurance, suffering and death, to new and unimaginable life, and naming me as a beloved child of God.

As the work of John the Baptist served as both an end and a beginning – the end of the time of preparation and waiting and the beginning of the time of fulfillment and presence – it is fitting that this feast of Jesus’ baptism serves as both the official end to the Christmas season and the first Sunday of Ordinary Time. We stand upon a threshold, passing out from the wonder and beauty of the Word becoming flesh, of God becoming human, and entering into the march of “ordinary” weeks in which we walk with Jesus through his ministry – following as called – listening to his teaching, experiencing his healing, all through the dramas and tedium of mundane lives. We then continue to walk with Jesus to the Cross, stand before the empty tomb, receive the Spirit, and then resume our walk through the centuries and millennia, rejoicing in Christ’s presence in the Spirit and waiting in joyful hope for the fullness of his coming.

So one last time (for this liturgical year), Merry Christmas! And Happy Ordinary Time!

A simple blessing for the new year

Today is many things. It is Friday, and that alone, for some, is cause enough for celebration. In the Roman Catholic calendar it is also the Octave of Christmas and the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God. It is the 43rd World Day of Peace, first proclaimed by the Vatican in 1967. And of course it is New Year’s Day, first day of 2010, first day of a new decade.

The most precious things in life are the simplest, and yet those simple things often surpass our understanding or elude our grasp. Who can fathom the becoming of the eternal Being? Or that a young woman gave birth to God? We greatly desire peace, but how to attain it? A year and a decade begin, and once again we return to simple hopes, for peace, health, happiness, life and love.

In that spirit, this blessing from the Book of Numbers (6:24-26), heard in the liturgy for January 1, falls upon us, fitting, simple, and profound:

The LORD bless you and keep you!
The LORD let his face shine upon you, and be gracious to you!
The LORD look upon you kindly and give you peace!

God so loved the world

In the second reading for today, the sixth day in the Christmas Octave, we hear this from the First Letter of John: “Do not love the world or the things of the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, sensual lust, enticement for the eyes, and a pretentious life, is not from the Father but is from the world. Yet the world and its enticement are passing away” (1 John 2:12-17). How to reconcile that with this statement from the Gospel of John (traditionally held to be written by the same author as the First Letter, but now believed to come from a different pen): “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son” (John 3:16)? Can we get by not loving what God loves? Are there two different senses of “world” at work here, two different senses of “love”?

Footnotes (in the New American Bible translation) to the First Letter of John suggest that by “world” the author is referring to all that is opposed to God. Specifics are given in the Letter: “sensual lust, enticement for the eyes, and a pretentious life.” Again according to the footnotes, by “sensual lust” is meant an “inordinate desire for physical gratification,” the operative word being, I think, inordinate, that is, turned in on itself, closed to self-transcendence and to God. By “enticement for the eyes” is meant “avarice or covetousness.” And “a pretentious life” is one marked by “arrogance or ostentation…that reflects a willful independence from God and others.” So it seems that the love of the world that the First Letter of John is talking about is really a pernicious form of self-love, a desperate attempt at self-preservation, and a failure to appreciate our relatedness to God and to one another. Fearful of the world’s “passing away,” we strive feverishly to grab some of it for ourselves, to hoard it, to make it ours and to make it last. But in so doing we forget our dependence upon one another for life and love and we forget the Living Source of that life and love. Without God all things – beautiful bodies, material possessions, our very selves – are empty and futile. Love of the world, in the First Letter of John, it seems to me, is all about taking.

On the other hand, the love of the world that the Gospel of John is talking about, God’s own love of the world, is all about giving, and not just giving some little thing, some little part of oneself, but giving what is most precious, one’s very life. God gives the Son. That is to say, God gives God’s own self to the world. And Jesus gave his life out of love for the world, a love that had its beginning and end in God. This type of love does not see the world as a means to self-gratification or as a tool with which to build up one’s life or as a mere object to call one’s own. Rather it sees the world and the things of the world as subjects that bear their own relationships to God and to one another, as open to giving and receiving – not taking and holding; it sees the world as a weave of interrelationships that thrives to the extent that we can let go of our desire to control it for our own benefit. Only through this letting go, this “dying to ourselves,” as the tradition calls it, do we find true life for ourselves and for the world.

The world is worthy of love. God sees the world, calls it good, and loves it. This is the wonder that is at the heart of the Incarnation, which is cause for rejoicing always but especially during this Christmas season.

A little pool of moonlight

I came in from a walk before dinner. The evening was cold, my room warm. I was about to turn on the light when I noticed a square of moonlight on the carpeted floor. An invitation. Knowing instantly and in an obscure way that there was nothing more important for me to do in the moment, I took my hand off the lamp, leaving the room in darkness, and sat on the floor in the moonlight. I say “there was nothing more important for me to do” not to mean “well, I’ve nothing better to do, so why not,” but rather to mean in all the world this was what I most needed to do right then. An invitation and – I felt it as soon as I slid into the moonlight – a gift. In the night, a little plot of sunlight reflected off our only moon, in which to sit still, legs crossed, palms upturned on bended knees, and to let go the burdens of the day, to let go another quantum of the emotional energy of a lifetime. To let go into the hands of the One who is always with me, and to receive the simple and clear blessing of light and love.

Why this humble little square of moonlight should serve as blessing, as invitation and gift, I do not know. Yet I knew it to be so; I felt it to be true. I had just come in from walking in the evening, from being completely bathed in moonlight as I walked. What should be so special about a parceled off section of this light? Maybe it is something about the light shining in my room, on my floor, being, in some sense, mine, for me.

(I fancy a parallel between the relationship of the uncircumscribed moonlight outdoors to the framed moonlight on my floor, on the one hand, and the relationship of the infinite, eternal God to divinity incarnate in the person of Jesus, on the other hand. Outside and inside it is the same light; in eternity and in Jesus it is the same divinity. Outside the moonlight is all around and falls on everything, while in my room the light shines through a window and is framed by the shadow of my wall; God is everywhere, holding together all things, even as God, in Christ, comes to each of us in human form, in particular and ordinary ways. But these are thoughts that came to me afterwards.)

In the moment I knew only this. Light radiated out in all directions from the sun. Some of it glanced off the surface of the moon, fell to Earth, passed through my window, and gathered in a pool on my floor. Precisely in that pool of moonlight I heard an invitation, subtle yet persuasive, quiet and intimate, nothing dramatic. I responded, and in the moonlight I did not sit alone.

“Christ in the Universe”

I don’t believe we can ever fathom the mystery and wonder of God’s coming among us as a human being; the earthly Incarnation in the person of Jesus of Nazareth two thousand years ago bears within it inexhaustible depths of meaning, awe, and love.

As if that wasn’t enough, however, and in case our finite minds and hearts ever weary of meditating on God’s sojourn with us here on Earth and hunger and thirst for a wider and different perspective on Incarnation, I offer this poem by Alice Meynell (1847-1922) entitled “Christ in the Universe”:

With this ambiguous earth
His dealings have been told us. These abide:
The signal to a maid, the human birth,
The lesson, and the young Man crucified.

But not a star of all
The innumerable host of stars has heard
How He administered this terrestrial ball.
Our race have kept their Lord’s entrusted Word.

Of His earth-visiting feet
None knows the secret, cherished, perilous,
The terrible, shamefast, frightened, whispered, sweet,
Heart-shattering secret of His way with us.

No planet knows that this
Our wayside planet, carrying land and wave,
Love and life multiplied, and pain and bliss,
Bears, as chief treasure, one forsaken grave.

Nor, in our little day,
May His devices with the heavens be guessed,
His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way
Or His bestowals there be manifest.

But in the eternities,
Doubtless we shall compare together, hear
A million alien Gospels, in what guise
He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.

O, be prepared, my soul!
To read the inconceivable, to scan
The myriad forms of God those stars unroll
When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.

Everything is illumined

As the sun illumines not only the heaven and the whole world, shining on both land and sea, but also sends rays through windows and small chinks into the furthest recesses of a house, so the Word, poured out everywhere, beholds the smallest actions of our life.

– Clement of Alexandria, d. 215 (quoted in An Advent Sourcebook, 138).

The God of the whole world, of nations and peoples, of beasts wild and tame, and indeed of the entire cosmos, is also the God of my little life. And not merely my life as a generalized whole, but all the particulars of my life, each and every rough and unpolished little detail. No gesture of mine, no word, no effort, no frustration, no embarrassment, no tear, no burst of laughter is lost or forgotten, but they all are seen, held, understood, and remembered in love by the Word of God, Light of the world.