Posts

Holy Fear and the Shadow of the Cross

Today, the Church takes us under the shadow of Calvary to behold our salvation and to approach this sacred place requires a reverence and awe that are not of this world. The Man of Sorrows gives Himself for our salvation, lays down His life that we might live. We come here today because of the burden of guilt that we have carried for far too long, the reality of death that we cannot avoid, and the desire to be understood and loved, to be connected to Someone who can relieve the sense of alienation that we suffer, to the only One who can fulfill at last the desires of our hearts. We dare to call out to Him “remember me” because of the heart-piercing gifts by which the Holy Spirit moves our hearts.

Saint Hildegard von Bingen describes this supernatural grace that she discovered when she entered into this shadow of God’s immensity. Fascinated and astounded, she has discovered awe in the presence of a reality greater and more real than is she. Tested, challenged, and tried, this gift from above makes her dare to approach nonetheless, and to stand humble, attentive, and ready to act. The tedium that can sometimes overcome a soul in prayer has no power over her now. Completely alert, this profound reverence prevents her from losing her focus, gives her the courage to stand firm, to behold, to listen, to adore. She personifies this astonishing super human gift, describing a mysterious figure covered with eyes, a creature who never loses sight of the immensity of Divine Justice, a being of merciful contemplation whom she identifies as “the Fear of the Lord.”

We, frail though we are, are all called to stand before the immensity of God’s justice and truth just like Saint Hildegard. The gift of fear of the Lord remains meaningless if we do not ponder the great mystery of human weakness and divine power, the abyss between actual human achievement and the demands of divine justice, and this for even the most pious and holy among us. What is this mountain, this immensity of Divine Justice, but the very mountain on which the Father glorified His Son, the mountain on which stands that Cross around which the whole world, each one’s life and all of history turns?

Up against the price that He paid for us and the greatness of the salvation He won for us, no one who is unwilling to bend the knee and bow the head should ever dare approach this King of Glory. Christ crucified knows our presumption and pride, our capacity for self-delusion, our hypocrisy, all the ways we overestimate ourselves, and even more, the ways we hate and torment ourselves.  These spiritual diseases are not acceptable to Him but for love of us, each one, He accepted their consequences unto death on the Cross. So He offered His last wordless cry, the prayer that still echoes between heaven and earth, a cry that death could not silence, that hell could not contain, this prayer from a heart that our cowardice and lust for power rent open.  This cry of love is the last word concerning all things human, the fullness of everything the Father has yearned for us to know, the voice that is heard the immensity of Divine glory. We dare not listen without the reverence this supreme act is owed.

If we are to stand before the mystery of the Suffering Servant who, raised on the Cross, revealed the unity of divine justice and mercy at the price of His own blood, then we need the Holy Spirit to protect us from our own cowardice and mediocrity. If we ask with humility, He gives us the same hope-filled fear that He breathed into the good thief and that He sent to stand with Saint Hildegard. If we will persevere in Calvary’s shadow, the Holy Spirit will move us with humble awe and wonder to renounce all the evil and mistaken judgements we have made about God, ourselves and neighbors.

When we tremble before the love, justice and mercy revealed on the Cross, holy fear makes us know that our Crucified God does not intend his admonishments to crush us but to prepare us, to make us humble and vulnerable enough to carry out His work in the world.  Holy fear will prevent us from losing heart. Today, Saint Hildegard’s vision of Divine Justice and Holy Fear gives us the courage to stand before the righteousness of God, to beg “remember me”, to confess his sovereignty, to bow our heads and to kiss his feet. 

/0 Comments/by

Contemplating the Triumph of Mercy

The resurrection is a mystery of the triumph of divine mercy over human misery.  When the Father raised Christ Jesus from the dead, humble humanity was not overcome, surmounted or diminished.  Instead all that is good, holy and true about this life was rescued from futility and death.   Christian contemplation beholds this victory and by faith allows the splendor of Easter morning to baptize the soul anew.   


Th prayer of faith sees the resurrection of Christ from the dead has the first fruits of an astonishing work of God.    The Risen Lord animates this work of new creation as a fountain of grace, a boundless source of divine love flowing into our parched hearts.   Those who drink from these living waters are no longer prisoners to the dying life we now live. Humble prayer drinks this in and discovers the hidden fruitfulness of God.



Just as Jesus rose from the dead, Christian prayer rises up in faith.  To believe that Jesus is risen from the dead, this is to lift up our hearts to the Lord and take our stand on the firm ground that knows evil is not the last word about our lives.  This faith may well be tested by our mediocrity and repeated failures, but if we do not deny Christ, He will not deny us – instead His faithfulness to us is being revealed in our struggles to be faithful.  


The Risen humanity of Christ is the very yeast of prayer so that even in the depths of our most bitter struggles, prayer rises to God.   By His passion and death, Christ sewed into the mystery of sin, the mystery of grace.  The mystery of grace makes all things new so that even when we fall short, turning to the mystery of Mercy we can always make a new beginning.  In this work of grace, it is God’s inexhaustible love and not our failures that defines who we are.  He continually lifts us up.


Prayer is all about grace, the grace that flows from the wounds of Christ.  This sheer gift entrusted to humanity can only be welcomed in humble faith.   It is the gift of the merciful love of God at work in us.  


Prayer ponders the dimensions of merciful love, a suffering love pierced to the heart over the plight of another.  God is pierced over the plight of each one of us.  This is why He could not bear that we should suffer alone.   To show us how much He has implicates Himself in our misery, He suffered death on the Cross for us.  So that we might know our dignity, our freedom, the saving truth about who He is and where we stand before Him, Christ drained to the dregs the cup of our misery, treasuring each drop because He treasures each of us even more.  Prayer is the response of a heart that is moved with gratitude for this inestimable gift and, in this gratitude, opens the heart to be like God’s – pierced by love.  


Christian contemplation takes all of this in by faith.  In the dawning of the Third Day, we come to know how no sin, no addiction, no shortcoming, no weakness, and no other burden of guilt can overpower or exhaust the love of God at work in those who believe.  This suffering love is the truth and this truth is what sets us free.   Even when believers allow themselves to fall back into the slavery of sin, the very thought of this new freedom stirs a longing to return to the life of faith.  This is a holy freedom filled with God’s ineffable freedom, a freedom to turn back, to reverse course, to rediscover the embrace of the Father.  It is a freedom that is expressed in conversion from sin and renunciation of anything that threatens our dignity as sons and daughters of God.  It is a freedom to seek the goodness and mercy of God yet again.  


To pray in this freedom is to keep vigilance with the eyes of the heart so that with every breath, in every moment, we might gaze on a love so much stronger than any form of slavery or even death.  A new life blood animates the spirits of those who live by such contemplative faith so that even when they suffer death, the life by which they live only becomes stronger.   Here, precisely because they are more fully alive, their praise becomes all the more beautiful.    Unfolding in all kinds of astonishing ways throughout space and time in the lives of those who put their trust in the Risen Lord, this illuminating work of love brings the only thing really new our old, tired existence has ever known.  Here, prayer that lets itself be captivated by the freshness of merciful love ponders a true word of hope for a discouraged world.  

Christian prayer extends through the vast horizons of love pioneered by Christ into human poverty.   The mysterious prayer of the Lord, a prayer that implicates the whole of his sacred humanity in merciful love, effects radical vulnerability and complete trust in the goodness and wisdom of the Father’s plan in every situation, no matter how difficult.  Here, the prayer of the Word made flesh is not merely an example for us to follow.  His prayer is a new principle that animates the cry of recognition and love that lives in the Church and resounds throughout the cosmos in every trial, suffering and joy.  
/1 Comment/by

The Blood of the Lamb and the Sign of the Cross

For Christians, the ancient rites of Passover and the Passion of Christ are deeply connected.   To deliver the People of God from slavery in Egypt, God sent an angel of death, a great power that stole from families the lives of those they deemed most precious.   To protect His own People from this destroying angel, He commanded the Hebrews to gather as families, slaughter a lamb and to sprinkle the blood of this lamb on the doorposts of their homes.  Seeing the blood, the angel of destruction passed over the homes of those who belonged to the Lord.  In the tradition of Christian prayer, this sprinkled blood foreshadows the power of the Blood of Christ signified by the Sign of the Cross.  So much did the early Christians connect their faith in the Blood of Christ with that of the saving events of the Passover, St. Paul explains, “Our Paschal Lamb, Christ has been Sacrificed” 1 Cor. 5:7.

Ecce Homo
By St. Albert Chmielowski of Krakow

The Gospels explicitly connect the sacred rites of the Last Supper of the Lord with the Passover celebration.  There are also other theological contexts connecting the sacrifice of the lamb with the Cross of Christ. (See Mark 15:25-37.)  In the Gospel of John, according to St. Augustine in Tractate 117, Jesus dies on the Day of Preparation for the Passover, the day on which lambs were slaughtered for the celebration of passover (See John 19:14).  The diversity of these Scriptural traditions is symphonic, speaking to the inexhaustible horizons of the Lord’s saving work, a mystery so vast and beautiful the only proper response is thanksgiving (eucharist).

Whenever we prayerfully reflect on the beautiful connections of our salvation prefigured in Exodus and fulfilled in Christ, our hearts are made vulnerable to the vision of the early Christians.  Their vision was filled with wonder over the blood of the sacrificial lamb and what it revealed about the Mystery of the Cross.   They marveled over how the blood that was shed in ancients rites foreshadowed the Blood of Christ they received by faith and they rooted their worship in this contemplation.

“The Passion of the Christ was prefigured by the Jews when they received the command to mark the doors of their houses with blood.  It is by the sign of His Passion and Cross that you must be marked today on the forehead, as on a door, and that all Christians are marked.”  St. Augustine, De catechizandis rudibus, as cited by Jean Danielou, The Bible and the Liturgy, Ann Arbor: Servant Books (1979), 167.

St. Augustine is connecting the ancient rite of sprinkling the blood of the lamb, a saving sign for the Hebrews enslaved in Egypt, with the cross that is given in the baptismal rites, a saving sign for those seeking freedom from sin.  Before baptism, the Church entrusts the Sign of the Cross to the chosen catechumen by tracing a cross on the forehead with the Oil of Catechumens.   This ancient Christian rite is continued in our Catholic practice today.   Those who receive the Sign of the Cross (sphargis)  through this anointing are safe from demonic attack in a manner similar to the way ancient Hebrew families were saved from the angel of death.   The blood of God, the life of God, is more powerful than evil.

“There is no other way to escape the destroying angel than by the blood of God, Who by love has poured out His blood for us.  And by this blood, we receive the Holy Spirit.  Indeed the Spirit and the blood are related in such a way that by the blood which is connatural to us, we receive the Spirit which is not con natural, and the gate of death is closed to our souls.  Such is the sphragis of the blood.”  Paschal Homilies of Pseudo-Chrysostom as cited by Jean Danielou, The Bible and the Liturgy, Ann Arbor: Servant Books (1979), 166. 

Making the Sign of the Cross is like covering ourselves in the Blood of Jesus.  Whenever we make the Sign of the Cross with devout faith, we are renewing our baptismal commitment and the Lord communicates His life to us in new and unimaginable ways.  This Sign of Victory plunges us into the saving power of God foreshadowed in the Exodus.  In a world of all kinds of slavery and death, this Sign of Freedom reminds us that God has intervened.

This Sign of Salvation proclaims to all principalities of destruction and powers of darkness that God Himself has implicated Himself in our plight and helps us remember that we are never alone — no matter how difficult or dark the circumstances we must face.  This Sign of Hope renews our faith that the saving power of His Blood is such that no matter how intense the struggle, no irrational force in the heavens above or on the earth below is able to surmount the love of God.  Through renewing this Seal of our Hearts, the heart covers itself again with the Blood of the Lamb so that even in death it knows Eternal Life.

/1 Comment/by

The Mysterious Prayer of Gethsemane

There are stories about great saints who struggled to pray in the face of great difficulty.   This can be baffling until we try to enter into the Passion of Christ and consider the movements of His Heart before the merciful love of the Father.  Until we contemplate the prayer of the Word of the Father, this struggle to pray is often deemed to be merely a stage through which we pass.   Yet, in the Garden of Gethsemane (see Luke 22:35ff), the bloody sweat of the Son of God reveals this struggle as a supreme moment of Christian contemplation, a terrifying standard against which the truth of all our other prayers can be discerned.


The hymn of praise learned with the Suffering Servant on the Mount of Olives is shrouded in a mystery.  It is against this mystery that therapeutic approaches to prayer should be discerned.  Psychological or physical tantrums are silenced before the authentic cry of heart offered by the Son of Man.  His love for his disciples and devotion to the Father challenges any consumerist attitude toward the things of God.   His sorrow and spiritual poverty helps us feel the appropriate shame we ought to have over any gluttonous expectation for mental relief or euphoric experience.  Against the dark terror Jesus confronts in prayer, spiritual consumerism can only be seen as limiting the freedom that our conversation with the Lord requires.   



The Word made flesh baptized every moment of his earthly life in this kind of prayer.   Every heart beat and every breath was so filled with zeal for the Father and those the Father gave Him, divine love ever exploded in His sacred humanity with resounding silence, astonishing signs, heart-aching wonders and words of wisdom which even after two thousand years still give the world pause.  Each verse of the Gospels attempts to show us His self-emptying divinity boldly hurling His prayerful humanity with the invincible force of love to the Cross.  


In Gethsemane we glimpse how the Son of Man availed Himself to these mysterious promptings of the Father’s love, an unfathomable love that is not comfortable to our limited humanity.   Unaided human reason cannot penetrate the divine passion that compelled Him into the solitude hidden mountains and secret gardens.   His vigil on the Mount of Olives can only be understood as the culmination of the ongoing conversation to which He eagerly made His humanity vulnerable.   


If, in this culminating movement of heart, Christ sweat blood, we who have decided to follow in the footsteps of our Crucified Master should not be surprised by moments of great anguish in our own conversation with God.  In the face of this mystery, we must allow the Risen Lord to give us His courage.   What is revealed on the Mount of Olives helps us see why Christian prayer can mature into a beautiful surrender, a movement of love which gives glory to the Father and extends the redemptive work of the Redeemer in the world.   What Christian contemplation sees with the Son of God can involve very difficult struggle, through the strength that comes from the Savior even the terrifying moments of such prayer can resolve themselves in trustful surrender: “Not my will… Yours be done.”  

A vision of prayer that contemplates in the midst of terror and anguish is probably not a popular subject, but I think a very important one today.   For further reflection on this I refer you to “Blessings that are Difficult to Receive” on Dan Burke’s Roman Catholic Spiritual Direction blog.

/1 Comment/by

How are we able to hold fast to our faith? He is Risen!

In the midst of our busy lives, it is easy to be overwhelmed and to feel overcome by difficult circumstance.  For those who strive to pray, Christ risen from the dead allows us to taste this only in order to help us come to spiritual maturity.  He himself comes to give us hope, that we might stand firm and not lose heart.   This is the great spiritual battle of prayer – our victory is assured because Christ rose from the dead and has not abandoned us.   It was along these lines that, to encourage the faithful entrusted to his care, an ancient author once wrote:

“As we have born the image of the earthly man, the image of human nature grown old in sin, so let us bear now the image of the heavenly man: human nature raised up, redeemed, and purified by Christ.  We must hold fast to the salvation we have received.”

Christ comes to those who trust in Him, and He is constantly coming in ever new ways.  He is there, risen from the dead, to help us hold fast – enveloping us in his love and establishing us in his truth.  He silent presence knocks on the doors of our hearts.   His voice whispers in the stillness of our prayer.  He gently admonishes the wayward and leaves the proud vexed.  He firmly defends the innocent. He patiently seeks the lost.  He lifts up the lowly.  He lovingly gazes into the eyes of those who hold fast, and gratefully rests in the hearts of the humble.  He speaks of beautiful mysteries that await those who will persevere until the end.  

To be visited by the Lord in this way is not merely to have good feelings or pleasant thoughts.  He who is risen in the flesh to new life offers us heavenly power over everything that seeks to dehumanize us in this present old life.   If someone is trapped in sin – call to Him, for He is the unconquered liberator.  If someone is overwhelmed with sorrow – go to Him, for He is the Consolation of all consolations.  If someone has been unjustly treated – Jesus the King of Righteousness takes up your cause.  If someone is anxious and it seems that death itself overshadows you – fear not for the Prince of Peace is at your side.

Christ is truly risen!  Real power flows from his glorified body and He longs to show us the victory He beholds even now. This is why Easter is the greatest of all feasts ever known – it contains the essence of Christian hope, the secret of true prayer, a glimpse of the victory God yearns to realize in our own lives.   Trust in Him who comes for you – hold fast to the salvation you have received, bear the image of the Heavenly Man – raised up, redeemed, purified by his blood.  

/0 Comments/by

The Passion of Word and Silence

This week we make pilgrimage with the Word made flesh to the Cross.  We walk with crowds who welcomed Him, souls who could not stay awake with Him, souls who betrayed Him, souls who denied him, souls who falsely accused Him, souls who mocked Him, souls who abused Him, souls who ignored Him, souls who condemned Him, souls who were too afraid to stand for Him, souls who ran from Him, souls who wept over Him, and souls who followed Him.  This week I remember that I have been, in different ways, all these souls – and it is time to ask the Lord for his grace, to get up and to follow Him on the Way.  This week, whoever we are, Christ crucified looks on us with love – his eyes searching for our eyes, his heart thirsting for ours.

It was the Beloved Disciple who stood at the foot of the Cross with the Mother of God’s son – they stood in faith believing even in the face of the anti-thesis of all for which they had hoped.  It was there Christ entrusted one to the other – so that every Beloved disciple who takes her into his home learns the wisdom of this moment.   This is the moment where the immortal Word weds our mortal silence – embracing our death that we might finally live life to the full.  May the Lord draw us into this moment – the moment which discloses the immensity of his inexhaustible love.

/2 Comments/by

Faith in the Risen Lord

What does it mean to believe that Jesus rose from the dead?   It means that by faith in Him, the same power by which He overcame death is given to us.   By this power, death is no longer the last word of our life – the barrier of death is transformed into a gateway.  This power comes from God the Father and it is revealed every time we act in our faith in Jesus.  To act in our faith, our abiding in the presence of Christ, is to express the love that has overflowed from Him through his wounds onto us.  To act in faith is to be bathed in the blood of Christ.

For me, all the disputes about faith and works are resolved when we see that the works of faith come from the inexhaustible depths of God’s own heart.  Since they are gifts from Him who loves us, since they were bought at the price of his Only Begotten Son, since they manifest the glory of the resurrection and anticipate the life in the world to come – how can we not share these works with the world?  In light of the Fire with which God loves us, how can we let the lonely go unloved or the hungry unfed or the naked unclothed, or the homeless unsheltered? 

/1 Comment/by

The Good Thief

Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom….
…Amen, I say to you: this very day, you will be with me in Paradise.

We are all thieves. This is what is revealed in Genesis about Adam and Eve. Seduced by an enchanting proposition, we coveted fruit that did not belong to us. We wanted knowledge of good and evil which we did not earn. What did we believe that knowledge would give us but power? And why did we want this power but that we were not grateful for being made in the image and likeness of God? Not satisfied to accept as sheer gift God’s loving providence, we coveted divine powers out of lust to be in control. We thought we deserved to be gods though we had barely distinguished ourselves from thoughtless beasts. Like wild animals, we bit the hand that fed us. An echo of this resounds in every act of thievery; every act reminds us of what we made of ourselves before God.

The sense of security that we tried to steal for ourselves has led to our condemnation. The more we steal security, the more insecure we become. We have tried to rely on our skills to manipulate, deceive and overpower. But we have taken something we cannot repay. It is not that we have hurt God. In becoming thieves, we have destroyed ourselves, our capacity to trust God. Our covetousness has made us gluttons ever subject to insobriety. Rash judgment, contention and even strife overpower our hearts. In our pride, we have convinced ourselves that we cannot humble ourselves to beg. In our shame, we made ourselves too afraid to take responsibility. Who will pay the debt that alone can release us from our self-made prisons of fear, egoism and despair?

We need only look at the man crucified next to us. He too is a thief. He has no responsibility to bear our debt, yet He has stolen it from us. There he is drinking in all our malice, ingratitude, covetousness, petty quarreling, gluttony, insobriety, lust, anger, resentment, bitterness, fear and despair. Yet there is love in his eyes as his gaze fixes on us. We must not turn our eyes away from that face: beaten beyond recognition, covered with blood and spittle, and in dying agony. He has stolen the burden too great for us to bear, and if you fix your gaze on Him, He will steal your heart as well.

Once He has our hearts, how can we remain silent? How can we not trust? There are always malicious voices speaking words of condemnation. For them, such trust is ridiculous. In their chosen ignorance, they reject the one gift they need the most and He alone can give.  This gift cannot be stolen.  It must be recieved. But with mocking manipulation, they belittle the work He wroughts for us.  In the place of true freedom offered them as a gift, they bitterly demand a cheap parlor trick, “Come down off that Cross.” 

Since that day, this has ever been the monotonous condemnation of Hell in this world.  Why does God allow suffering?   Why does He not magically stop it?   Why does not God save Himself?  And so, even if it is only at the evening of our lives, we find ourselves his witnesses before this challenge. Gazing in the eyes of Christ, you know that this challenge cannot go unanswered.  As your own voice echoes, you find the freedom to take responsibility for yourself and for the first time you have the courage to accept the consequences for what you have done.  This courage comes from Christ who is bearing these consequences for you and with you – He will never abandon you.  You can trust Him because you see in his eyes, He trusts you even more.

Fellow thieves, let us together overcome the temptation to think our voices as a condemned criminals have no credibility. The only ones with any credibility at all are those who have looked into His eyes. Your voice, fellow thief, is credible to Him, and in the end; He is the only One who counts. Your prayer is a precious consolation for the One who bears so much rejection – and for this small recompense on your part, He is giving you eternal life even now.

/0 Comments/by

The Passion: Where we learn to rest in the Heart of Christ

During Holy Week, we are invited to enter into the heart of the Lord by sharing His passion with Him.  This can only happen through prayer.  Only through prayer can we pick up on the subtle movements of his heart, movements that involve ourselves, those we love and the whole world.  When you enter into the Heart of the Lord of Hosts, he immediately baths you in His Blood, purifying us of sin and filling us with a loved filled hope which not even death can overcome.

On Thursday night, we will celebrate the Lord’s Supper.  This is the sacred Banquet in which Christ made himself our spiritual food.  His Body and His Blood are given to save us and sustain us in our Christian way of life.  Like the martyrs before us, without the flesh and blood of Christ, we cannot go on.  Everyone who has believed in the power of Christ’s Blood has experienced this saving and sustaining power.  They know His Blood is Life in a world of death.  They experience deep in their hearts that His Blood is not an escape from this world, the Blood of Jesus is the world’s only salvation.  When believers drink from the Cup of the New Covenant, Christ’s Eternal Life flows into them, and if they are open in faith, this divine outpouring will fill them to the point where they live no longer their own life, but His Life in them.   

Those who allow themselves to be completely immersed in the life of Christ think like Him, act like Him, and more than anything else, pray like Him.  They see the world through resurrected eyes – what others see as purposeless, they know as filled with invincible hope.  Such men and women become living signs of hope.  Such hope looks crazy to those who refuse it.  To be a sign of hope means always to appear as if you have lost your mind.  Those wise with the wisdom of this world call this delusional.   The great spiritual writers call this Holy Inebriation.

To conquer death, we must be recreated in Truth.  Recreation, the new creation, re-establishes us in the Truth we have primordially rejected.  Without the Truth, we die and our lives are simply a living death.  We must know the Truth, we must live the Truth.  We must feel and think the Truth: the Truth about ourselves, the Truth about God. 

To be inebriated with the Blood of Christ is to be completely overwhelmed by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the Lord who teaches all truth.   The Holy Spirit comes through Christ’s blood and into the deep hidden recesses of our memories, thoughts and feelings – making all things new, conforming all these inner powers to the One who is the Way, the Truth and the Life.   For this new creation to begin, we must follow Christ into the Garden and learn to say with Him, “Father, if it is your will, take this cup from me.  But not my will, your will be done.”

Those who have the courage to learn to pray this prayer with and in the Heart of Jesus will discover the blessings of poverty, hunger, thirst, sorrow, purity of heart, peacemaking, and persecution – not only for righteousness sake, but also for the sake of Jesus Himself.  This happens today in alarming public ways.  It also happens in the more hidden places of our day to day work and family life.  St. Therese, the Little Flower, first tasted it after Christmas Midnight Mass.  Maximilian Kolbe filled himself with it in a starvation bunker. The point is when you are rejected, despised or betrayed because of your love of Jesus, Jesus has blessed you, permitted you to be identified with Him.  He has entrusted you with discipleship and is teaching you how to carry your Cross and follow Him.  The Veneration of the Cross on Good Friday has a whole new meaning for those following their crucified God.

This must be difficult to read – indeed it is solemn and the most serious reality of this life.  The truth about ourselves and about the Lord is hard to think about.  Oftentimes we feel the urge to skip over Christ’s Passion, to leave him in the garden or on the Cross so that we can rush to the resurrection.  Indeed, the mystery of Holy Saturday and the wonder of Easter Morning we will share in later posts.    But for now, let us rest in the heart of Christ: the night before He died, His struggle with the Cross, His last loud cry.   It is in the Passion that Christ’s heart is revealed and given to us.  It is in attending to what he suffered that we learn to rest in his heart.  It is in the Cross that we find union with God.  This is why what we are celebrating this week is not simply the calling to mind of tragic historic events.  Instead, we are reflecting on the very mystery of our new creation – how that mystery was revealed in history, and how that mystery carries us in the present moment.  Those who will wait with the Lord and keep vigil with Him will find themselves plunged into His life in a completely new way. 

Through the Blood the the Lord and the power of the Holy Spirit, Christians find freedom from every lack of love.  Where there is no love, they find a way to put love, and because of the power of God, they find love.   Where there is a struggle to forgive, they find the courage to surrender their bitterness to God, and discover compassion for even their enemies.  Where there is the sting of indignation, the Holy Spirit teaches them how to pray for their persecutors.  May the Lord fill you with these graces as you struggle to rest in his Heart.

/6 Comments/by

Psalm 22 and the Prayer of Christ from the Cross

“My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”  Last Saturday, following a conference on the last seven words of Christ, a few retreatants asked about these words.  They wanted to know whether Jesus actually felt abandonned.  They had heard that the reason he recited the first words of Psalm 22 was not really to express his own personal feelings as much as to reassure his disciples that God would be victorious even in the face of the cross. 

To hold this, however, is to make a facade out of the whole passion of the Lord.  It is true that the words of Jesus are meant to reassure us.   Yet to hold that he did not actually feel what they suggest makes the cross far too abstact and intellectually acceptable.   For those who want to begin to pray like Jesus, we must realize that he never said anything he did not fully mean.  When he said these words, he was truly disclosing his own agony.  Only when we attend to the real anguish behind these words can we find the courage to pray when we too feel abandoned.  To understand the rest of this post, I recommend actually praying this psalm attending to the tension between the evil that is experienced and the faith which adheres to the truth.

Psalm 22 contains two movements of the heart that seem completely contrary to one another, an awareness of overwhelming wickedeness and of the faithfullness of God which seems impossible to sustain.   In the beginning of the psalm, a man ravished to death with holes torn in his hands and feet is complaining to God because God does not seem present or mindful of his plight.   He is not only abandoned by God but also surrounded by enemies who have frightened, overpowered and consumed him – dogs, bulls and lions.   His clothes have been stripped off and stolen, the object of a game.  He is completely vulnerable with no one to protect him.   This is what he experiences and this is what others see as his actual situation.   This experience is not the last word.   Though he feels completely forsaken, he chooses to praise the Lord and to believe in his goodness.  This second movement of heart seems completely discongruous with what has actually happened to him.   How is it possible to believe that God is mindful of “the affliction of the afflicted” when He seems so absent in the face of great suffering?

Those who do not believe that Jesus actually suffered this tension know very little about the mystery of the Cross or the power of the Christian faith.   It is the cross and only the all too dirty bloody mess of the cross that creates the spiritual space by which true friendship with God is established.   It is only because Jesus knows what the absence of God truly is that He is able to reveal the glory of the Father to those who also suffer this absence.  

What is most difficult about human suffering is not the physical or even psychological pain, but most of all the awareness that suffering renders life meaningless.  There are those moments when our hearts are completely gripped by the crushing discovery that there is no human or natural reason to hope, not only for oneself, but especially for all those one loves the most.  I cannot help but think that when Jesus began to pray Psalm 22, the anguish He felt included the knowledge that all those who would follow Him would have to undergo the same overwhelming sense he was drinking in at that moment:  like Him, as they struggled to cling to the Father, they would feel that their own prayers were rejected, that their own faith was without purpose.

Here is the reality.  The abyss of human misery, an abyss we will inevitably fall into as we approach the reality of our own death, involves a kind of rejection that the Lord suffers with us.   It is when we feel most abandoned by God in our efforts to love Him and those entrusted to us that we are most intimate with Him in this life.  Such suffering love is always redemptive, especially when it is rejected and despised.  The persecution of such faith opens up deep caverns in the human heart through which God’s love can flow into the world, if we remain faithful in believing in him.  The reality is, loving faith in the Lord does not take away suffering or the experience of abandonment.   Instead, it transforms it, endows it with meaning beyong what is natural, even beyond this life. 

The cross is a place of hope, the place of encountering God, not only because Jesus indicated that this was the case, but because He suffered the absence of the Father for us and with us, opening up a purpose and meaning for each of us which only faithfilled love can know.  The cross is the place where the absence of God and faith in Him collide so that God’s power might be revealed.   It is the divine power which discloses itself only in the midst of suffering that real hope can be invincibly based.   By this hope, the hope that flows from from the side of Christ, we find the courage to pick up our cross and follow the Lord.  Jesus knew, even in the face of his own experience, that God is mindful of the affliction of the afflicted.  By becoming completely one with him in his death, we, members of his Body, “proclaim His deliverance to a people yet unborn.”

/0 Comments/by