It’s hard to believe that Advent has run its course and Christmas is finally here.
Looking back at your Advent from the midst of this Feast, how well did your preparations ready you and your family to celebrate Christ’s birth?
I had an interesting, or maybe I should say a unique, experience this Advent. I might say that Advent had a shade of Lent mixed into it. It is tinged with a bit of what I shared in regard to St. John on 12/15.
What I mean by that is that Lent’s characteristic introspective turn toward all-things-sinful crept into my Advent, and Christmas became an experience of redemption.
But not just an abstraction, the general notion of being saved from sin. Very specific; targeted; precision surgery in my life. A vivid sense that the birth of the Savior heralded the death of my sins; that the blazing Light coming into the world threatened to overthrow the shadows within.
To overthrow. Not just to 'pardon', if pardoning is seen as simply a kind of divine amnesia that kindly forgets the darkness deep within me. No, this grace seeks not to overlook but to overcome the springs of darkness that well up from places within I cannot get to by mere willful struggle.
Rather, this Lumen is something so deep, so primal that it is from the deepest core of who I am that I am being re-created; re-born. And though this creating/birthing event is wholly a work of grace, it requires, again and again, my free consent.
Not only do I believe this as a doctrine of faith, but it is how I have come to experience this primal grace. Indeed, the experience confirms to me again and again St. Teresa's pithy insight: "When you commit to the life of prayer, you will either succumb to the transformative work of grace within, or you will cease to pray." Often, it is when I begin to sense that God is probing too deeply that I find my finest excuses not to pray. But I digress into realms too personal.
We have Mary to thank for permitting this invasion of Light into the night.
During Advent the Light from Light gestated in Mary's womb; Mary, whom we confessed on 12/8 to be the most radical re-creation of God.
Now the Light has dawned, the Sun has shown its face above our horizon and the shadows take flight.
Alleluia!
Presently, the Light gestates in the heart of the Church, awaiting birth into a world enveloped by night’s cold and thick sway. Christ longs to come to birth that He might redeem and save what is wounded, lost and lifeless.
Let us now consent anew to His birth within. Truth born into my lies; compassion into my apathy; mercy into my unforgiveness; justice into my injustices; trust into my fears. And so on.
Every birth contains a risk. In this Feast if we consent to labor Christ into this world, we can be certain that He will deliver us from all evil; beginning with the evil that is within.
I consent, O Lord, as Mary once did: come and be born again in me.
I believe.
O my child,
child of sweetness,
How is it that I hold thee,
Almighty?
And how that I feed thee,
Who gives bread to all?
How is it that I swaddle thee,
Who with the clouds
encompasses the whole earth?
+ Orthodox Liturgy
Amen.
Merry Christmas. Christ is born! Glorify Him!
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
San Juan de la Cruz
Yesterday was the feast of St. John of the Cross.
I love St. John, but with a holy fear and a bit of trembling. For those who come to know him, he inspires awe. He was also my PhD dissertation subject of analysis.
Three years of chewing on his words.
I can say with gusty conviction that those three years I spent reading and re-reading his poems and commentaries, letters and aphorisms were years of unparalleled challenge in my life.
Why?
First and foremost, the task of mastering anything is an arduous one that brings out the worst and the best in you. Like academic boot camp. In addition, mastering texts of such depth, complexity and challenge was an arduous, even if ardent, journey.
But that was not the real challenge.
The real challenge was this: digesting St. John's words in mind and heart is like eating enriched uranium. It has the capacity to burn and wound, or to expose and break down your inner world, rearranging it in ways that can be both disorienting and frightening. If you have ever tasted the truth of the question, 'Have you been read by a good book lately?', you will get the gist of my point.
St. John is a master of self-knowledge, and especially of knowledge that exposes within the reader the profoundly ego-centric dynamics of our spiritual life. Original sin's primary effect, he says, is to make us curvatus in se – curved in on ourselves. As he pithily puts it, 'Most seek not God within the self, but rather seek the self in God.' In other words, so much of my own spiritual life is about 'me' and not about 'God.' Conversion is at root, for St. John, the dismantling of the elaborate machinery of this inward-curved, ego-centric inner-world, and the gradual re-construction of a self that is made in God's image: oriented fundamentally toward love of God and of neighbor.
For St John, it's nothing other than going down, in full-existential depth, into the watery font we once pledged to die and rise in.
Or
It's a call to Heliotropic life: wholly Sun-centered.
This dismantling process is indeed a painful, relentless and ruthless project of divine grace flowing from the life-giving Cross; one that draws us through what St John famously calls the 'dark nights'. But its end is joy. Many Christians, St John says, though they live in a state of grace still refuse to pass willingly through this purging process and instead hide in self-pity, worldly distractions and pleasures. Their final re-orientation and ego-dismantling will have to await Purgatory's refining fires when the choice to freely engage God's grace will be no more.
But the revolution is for here, not there. For St John, it is those Christians who freely consent to these dark nights, and to the graced revolution from ego-centrism to theo-centrism, who rock the world with a sanctity made of costly grace.
Why?
Because they have freely consented to allow God to unleash His radical redemption into the world through/with/in them. These revolutionaries unleash God's holiness, God's truth, God's reign, God's beauty into both Church and World.
The truest reformers are the reformed. They are radical because God's redeeming grace has redeemed them down into the deepest roots of their soul.
What might that revolutionary path look like in daily practice? Let me allow St John answer that question. I only ask that, as you read this selection, you to imagine John speaking these words into your state in life – if that is not a monastery, then marriage, single life, work, the sick bed...
To practice the second counsel, which concerns mortification, and profit by it, you should engrave this truth on your heart. And it is that you have not come to the monastery for any other reason than to be worked and tried in virtue; you are like the stone that must be chiseled and fashioned before being set in the building. Thus you should understand that those who are in the monastery are craftsmen placed there by God to mortify you by working and chiseling at you. Some will chisel with words, telling you what you would rather not hear; others by deed, doing against you what you would rather not endure; others by their temperament, being in their person and in their actions a bother and annoyance to you; and others by their thoughts, neither esteeming nor feeling love for you. You ought to suffer these mortifications and annoyances with inner patience, being silent for love of God and understanding that you did not enter the religious life for any other reason than for others to work you in this way, and so you become worthy of heaven. If this was not your reason for entering the religious state, you should not have done so, but should have remained in the world to seek your comfort, honor, reputation, and ease.
May this Advent prepare your life to receive a Savior who wants to save you in ways you cannot yet imagine....
Be not afraid.
I love St. John, but with a holy fear and a bit of trembling. For those who come to know him, he inspires awe. He was also my PhD dissertation subject of analysis.
Three years of chewing on his words.
I can say with gusty conviction that those three years I spent reading and re-reading his poems and commentaries, letters and aphorisms were years of unparalleled challenge in my life.
Why?
First and foremost, the task of mastering anything is an arduous one that brings out the worst and the best in you. Like academic boot camp. In addition, mastering texts of such depth, complexity and challenge was an arduous, even if ardent, journey.
But that was not the real challenge.
The real challenge was this: digesting St. John's words in mind and heart is like eating enriched uranium. It has the capacity to burn and wound, or to expose and break down your inner world, rearranging it in ways that can be both disorienting and frightening. If you have ever tasted the truth of the question, 'Have you been read by a good book lately?', you will get the gist of my point.
St. John is a master of self-knowledge, and especially of knowledge that exposes within the reader the profoundly ego-centric dynamics of our spiritual life. Original sin's primary effect, he says, is to make us curvatus in se – curved in on ourselves. As he pithily puts it, 'Most seek not God within the self, but rather seek the self in God.' In other words, so much of my own spiritual life is about 'me' and not about 'God.' Conversion is at root, for St. John, the dismantling of the elaborate machinery of this inward-curved, ego-centric inner-world, and the gradual re-construction of a self that is made in God's image: oriented fundamentally toward love of God and of neighbor.
For St John, it's nothing other than going down, in full-existential depth, into the watery font we once pledged to die and rise in.
Or
It's a call to Heliotropic life: wholly Sun-centered.
This dismantling process is indeed a painful, relentless and ruthless project of divine grace flowing from the life-giving Cross; one that draws us through what St John famously calls the 'dark nights'. But its end is joy. Many Christians, St John says, though they live in a state of grace still refuse to pass willingly through this purging process and instead hide in self-pity, worldly distractions and pleasures. Their final re-orientation and ego-dismantling will have to await Purgatory's refining fires when the choice to freely engage God's grace will be no more.
But the revolution is for here, not there. For St John, it is those Christians who freely consent to these dark nights, and to the graced revolution from ego-centrism to theo-centrism, who rock the world with a sanctity made of costly grace.
Why?
Because they have freely consented to allow God to unleash His radical redemption into the world through/with/in them. These revolutionaries unleash God's holiness, God's truth, God's reign, God's beauty into both Church and World.
The truest reformers are the reformed. They are radical because God's redeeming grace has redeemed them down into the deepest roots of their soul.
What might that revolutionary path look like in daily practice? Let me allow St John answer that question. I only ask that, as you read this selection, you to imagine John speaking these words into your state in life – if that is not a monastery, then marriage, single life, work, the sick bed...
To practice the second counsel, which concerns mortification, and profit by it, you should engrave this truth on your heart. And it is that you have not come to the monastery for any other reason than to be worked and tried in virtue; you are like the stone that must be chiseled and fashioned before being set in the building. Thus you should understand that those who are in the monastery are craftsmen placed there by God to mortify you by working and chiseling at you. Some will chisel with words, telling you what you would rather not hear; others by deed, doing against you what you would rather not endure; others by their temperament, being in their person and in their actions a bother and annoyance to you; and others by their thoughts, neither esteeming nor feeling love for you. You ought to suffer these mortifications and annoyances with inner patience, being silent for love of God and understanding that you did not enter the religious life for any other reason than for others to work you in this way, and so you become worthy of heaven. If this was not your reason for entering the religious state, you should not have done so, but should have remained in the world to seek your comfort, honor, reputation, and ease.
May this Advent prepare your life to receive a Savior who wants to save you in ways you cannot yet imagine....
Be not afraid.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Advent Retreat journal entry
For Advent this year, I went to retreat @ New Melleray Abbey.
I am here as I write.
The countryside is blanketed in freshly fallen snow;
a veritable sacrament of this feast of Mary's Immaculate Conception.
The silence outside is deafening;
the silence inside, pregnant.
There are no clocks here, anywhere.
None.
I looked.
Only the bells that sound the rhythm of worship.
The walls are stone, unadorned.
Stark, assaulting, unassuming beauty.
Beauty?
Yes, for somehow they say,
"Not us! Not us!
But Him who made us."
A silent Advent witness.
Silent stones bathed in the prayer of countless years.
No clocks to count.
Only bells.
And psalms in an endless procession;
chanted, spoken, murmured.
Psalmody, sung by monks who seem to defy
the clocks.
Here,
I find my life's complication and distraction
stripped away; forgotten;
or at least worn down.
I notice in the simplicity
the wilderness Voice seems audible;
or at least wilder.
Like the voice of a madman
crying out in the desert;
camel-hair clad;
divinely drunk, raw folly;
untamed by civil life
with words deadly as a knife
plunged deep within, into my heart;
threatening a thousand trifles:
repent!
I feel so alone, stripped of their cling;
but strangely, Alone.
I must go now, for the bells ring
and the clock awaits my return.
I am here as I write.
The countryside is blanketed in freshly fallen snow;
a veritable sacrament of this feast of Mary's Immaculate Conception.
The silence outside is deafening;
the silence inside, pregnant.
There are no clocks here, anywhere.
None.
I looked.
Only the bells that sound the rhythm of worship.
The walls are stone, unadorned.
Stark, assaulting, unassuming beauty.
Beauty?
Yes, for somehow they say,
"Not us! Not us!
But Him who made us."
A silent Advent witness.
Silent stones bathed in the prayer of countless years.
No clocks to count.
Only bells.
And psalms in an endless procession;
chanted, spoken, murmured.
Psalmody, sung by monks who seem to defy
the clocks.
Here,
I find my life's complication and distraction
stripped away; forgotten;
or at least worn down.
I notice in the simplicity
the wilderness Voice seems audible;
or at least wilder.
Like the voice of a madman
crying out in the desert;
camel-hair clad;
divinely drunk, raw folly;
untamed by civil life
with words deadly as a knife
plunged deep within, into my heart;
threatening a thousand trifles:
repent!
I feel so alone, stripped of their cling;
but strangely, Alone.
I must go now, for the bells ring
and the clock awaits my return.
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Creator of the Stars of Night. . .
A micro blog here.
Scientists have offered a new guesstimate of the size of our cosmos.
300 sextillion.
O Thou, Maker of vastest space
we laud and magnify Thy Grace
which bowed into that lowly Place
where starlight bathed Thy infant Face.
How great is our God.
Let us worship.
Scientists have offered a new guesstimate of the size of our cosmos.
300 sextillion.
O Thou, Maker of vastest space
we laud and magnify Thy Grace
which bowed into that lowly Place
where starlight bathed Thy infant Face.
How great is our God.
Let us worship.
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