Pray without Ceasing!

“Pray without Ceasing!” (1 Thessalonians 5:17)

This rather daunting command governed life in the monastic deserts of Egypt, Palestine and Syria during the first generations of holy men and women who laid the groundwork for the monastic world.  No explanations, no tips on how-to, no list of extenuating circumstances, just a those three terse words. 

St. Paul had never heard of monks or nuns, since there were none in Christian circles in his day.  He was actually speaking to all Christians.  And he was speaking primarily of living a relationship rather than going through certain prescribed motions.  Prayer, after all, is not a matter of technique but of the intricate and profound communion between God and humanity.  What comes to mind (mine, anway) is Michelangelo’s haunting portrait of the creation of Adam and Eve painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  You have probably seen reproductions, if not the original.  God, in wind-blown beard and colorful robes, with Eve tucked in the crook of his arm, is stretching out his hand toward Adam, who does the same.  The impression given by the strenuous reach of God’s forefinger toward Adam and Adam’s toward God is that the two have just now been detached from one another in the act of creation.  The few inches of blank sky between God’s forefinger and Adam’s is the birthplace of the urgent prayer that wants to join created to Creator, and Creator to created.  In this portrait, prayer is the poignant longing that draws one unceasingly toward the other.  What later became words and rituals and competing schools of prayer, each armed with its own how-to manuals, is nothing more than translations of that poignant longing into ways of bridging that gap between one finger and the other. 

Monastic spirituality is eminently practical.  St. Benedict recommends that we start with our feet on the ground (see RB 4:62, of which this is a very loose paraphrase).  Like their Jewish progenitors, the first Christian communities wove services of psalmody to sling across the chasm, giving voice both to God and to humanity in mutual conversation.  They too were practical people.  They believed that if you’re going to pray always, you’d better start with committing yourself to prayer at fixed times.  Thus began the long tradition of the Liturgy of the Hours or Divine Office which is spelled out in relatively great detail for Benedictines in the Rule of St. Benedict, especially Chapters  VIII-XX.

But Benedict fills in the spaces between the Hours of the Divine Office with other moments of prayer, lest we forget for long about those few inches across which the human heart and God are always reaching toward each other. 

The Prologue sets the scene with these words:  “First of all, every time you begin a good work, you must pray to him most earnestly to bring it to perfection” (Prologue 4:4).  That seems simple—a quick sign of the cross, a bow of the head, maybe a murmured “God, come to my assistance,” beloved by St. John Cassian, one of Benedict’s inspirations, and then get down to it.  You’ve said your prayer, now do your work.  The fundamental flaw here is that in a life of unceasing prayer, you don’t stop praying when you start working, even though you may have to redirect your attention to the task at hand.  God is still very much there with you.  The early monks kept their awareness of the connection alive by stopping frequently to pray consciously, but they were usually weaving mats or baskets and could afford to take prayer breaks.  Other work doesn’t always allow us that luxury, but quite often it doesn’t totally exclude it either.  If you can take a coffee break or a restroom break, you can take a prayer break by murmuring a verse from your lectio or just giving a thought to God as you travel across the room or down the hall.   If you take the ophalmologists’ advice about moving your eyes of the computer screen from time to time, you can use those breaks for brief prayers as well.  Neither kind of prayer break need be long.  Jesus was not impressed by length of prayers or streams of words, remember (Matthew 6:7).  And you can end your task as you began it, with some sort of  acknowledgment of God’s presence and love at work in and with you as you went about whatever business you’ve just completed.

However St. Benedict’s injunction to pray before you take up any good work also serves a different but related purpose.  First of all, stopping to pray before you begin the work provides you with a “stop, look, and listen” moment, a moment for discernment. This work you’re about to do—is it in fact a good work?  Or a work well timed?  Should you really stop to play Scrabble on your computer right now, or should you get on with whatever responsibility took you to the computer in the first place?  (This is the Voice of Experience of a Scrabble addict, me.)  More seriously, if this work isn’t something you can honestly pray for God to bless—if it’s a spot of tax cheating or meth making or writing an email designed to wound the recipient—should you really be doing it at all?  Trying to baptize any of these tasks with prayer is more dishonest than Benedict would readily countenance.  Better to rethink your options.

St. Benedict also recommends prayer moment at specific moments.  For instance, he recommends that we pray for forgiveness when we realize we’ve sinned (“uh-oh, that was a snide bit of sarcasm”, or “did I just lie about the doorbell to get out of talking to a lonely friend”, or “I might as well have hit the kid as say that to her!”).  St. Benedict advises to admit it rather than dodge the issue—and prayer is a healthy way to do that.  Pray for God’s blessing when you take up a new responsibility, even something as apparently insignificant as taking your turn serving the meal or washing the dishes.  In RB 35:15-18, the Rule describes the formal weekly blessing of incoming and outgoing kitchen servers, but the principle can easily be applied to the less formal trading of all sorts of household tasks.  Prayer helps us to see the job in its true light, as an opportunity we’ve been given to serve another in the simple undramatic ways that weave unseen webs of love in homes, workplaces, and supermarkets, wherever human beings are and God is busy creating bonds between us.  Pray before you eat (see RB references to the blessing before meals in various places).  Prayer reminds us of gratitude and, like the prayer before work, gives us a moment of discernment about how to approach the choices meals require and perhaps the conversation that will be shared at table.  Pray sometimes when you’re resting and alone.  Benedict suggests, for example, that monks might want to do some lectio divina during the afternoon siesta, but he wisely refrains from  making it a rule (RB 48:5) .  It may seem odd to pray during rest time, but after all, Jesus did say, “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest”  (Matthew 11:28).

These are only some of the opportunities we have to throw filaments of prayer across that gap between Creator and created, honoring the urgency of the longing Michelangelo captured on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.  Of course we can only talk about what we do on our side of the gap, but Michelangelo reminds us that as we reach for God, God is reaching for us.  Paul, very well aware of the gap and the mutual pull enlivens it long before Michelangelo, tells us how to live in it:  “Pray without ceasing.)

July 11, 2014

Solemnity of St. Benedict

©2014, Abbey of St. Walburga

Long-Fingered Light

Easter lies too far beyond our experience for our imaginations to grasp much more than impressions of startling appearances of a beloved Lord and Master who is but isn’t dead, who is but isn’t a ghost, who is but isn’t the familiar figure his followers knew so well.  What was he like?  Well, flesh but not flesh as we know it, wounded but not with wounds as we know them, transformed but not in any we can really picture.  He appeared unannounced in locked rooms, walked incognito with puzzled and discouraged disciples, ate solid food but passed through solid walls.  Conceptual explanations of the resurrection don’t help much more than our flawed images do.  They make use of words we know, but they use them to expound a reality we don’t, not really. 

We’re in good company, to judge by the general confusion that seems to have left the first Easter Christians babbling contradictory of accounts of who saw what when and who believed whom—but quite often didn’t.  A stammer was probably the most honest way they could have described a reality into and over which they stumbled in happy but fearful discovery.  I sometimes feel as if all our Easter alleluia’s are our own contemporary way of stammering out a truth for which we have no really coherent words.

The risen Christ, transformed into the Fire hidden at the heart of human flesh which set Peter babbling on Tabor, sheds a light so bright it blinds us.  Paul could tell us something about that from his experience on the Damascus road.  But in fact, all the early believers could.  The gospel stories of Jesus’ appearances after the resurrection, and the Acts of the Apostles, which we read in its entirety during the Easter season during the liturgy, is the story of that light reaching out of an unimaginable future to touch one by one the dark places in which Christ’s early followers walked: the apostles’ fear, Mary Magdalene’s grief, Thomas’ angry doubt, Peter’s shame.  Those are consoling stories because the familiar and beloved Master, Teacher and Healer appears in person to cast light into experiences we too have known.  Fear, grief, doubt and shame are all shadows, sometimes consuming shadows, through which we all have walked.

But the story doesn’t stop with those personal encounters.  Jesus disappears from the scene at the Ascension, or seems to, but the Light does not.  We see a lame man condemned to a lifetime of begging at the Temple Gate spring up and walk at the sound of Jesus’ name invoked by Peter.  We hear of fights between Christians of differing ethnic origins settled by Peter’s creative wisdom.  Peter had learned a thing or two about humility by then and saw that no one could do everything that was needed, so he assigned some community members to be deacons who would care for practical needs the apostles couldn’t address.  Time management through delegation is not a new invention, just a new name for an old one.  We recoil at the sight of an angry mob driven by their religious beliefs to stone Stephen to death only to see Stephen himself walk through a horrible death with the courage inspired by the sight of the risen Christ, whom no one else, apparently, could see.  We see disciples jailed and freed, Paul held in suspicion by fellow Christians (for very good reason),  apostles arguing about what to require of Jewish converts, preachers thrown out of synagogues and cities, communities split in their loyalties to different leaders. We see, in other words, all the dark corners in which even Christians and Chrisitan communities sometimes find themselves even now, some two millennia after the resurrection.  We too know of crippling illness and injury, of jealousies that split families and communities, of offended believers casting killing stones—a story that appeared on this morning’s news, in fact—of Christian ministers jailed, of Church leaders held in suspicion, of Church leaders arguing policy and practice, of preachers fired or driven out of town, of communities divided by loyalties to opposing pastors.  The darkness of the New Testament church is far from outdated.

When we read Acts, we do not have the consolation of seeing the Jesus we’ve met in the gospels appear in these stories to solve all the problems.  What we see instead is what he promised:  the power of Spirit and Word at work illuminating flawed human beings like ourselves to see things in a new way, to discover suddenly what it means to “love your enemies as yourself,” to pick up pieces and find creative ways to put them back together so that the image of God can shine more clearly in a world still deeply held in the grip of darkness. 

The Light of the risen Christ still reaches long fingers from the hidden depths of God into our present shadows to pry us out of the dark grip of sin and death.  I cannot myself imagine the risen Christ, not really.  All my inner pictures seem unreal.  And I certainly cannot explain him.  But in the annals of the early Church, in the chronicle of the world, and indeed in the story of my own soul, I can see the Light at work.  And that Light is very real indeed.

Copyright 2014 Abbey of St. Walburga

Judas

A shorter version of this reflection appears in the April, 2014 issue of Give Us This Day, published by The Liturgical Press (www.giveusthisday.org).

Judas Iscariot went to the chief priests and said, “What are you willing to give me if I hand him over to you?” They paid him thirty pieces of silver, and from that time on he looked for an opportunity to hand him over. (Matthew 26:14-16)

Judas is a question mark: why did he do it? Matthew tells us what Judas did, but he doesn’t tell us why. Down through the centuries, readers and commentators, librettists and screen writers have filled in the blanks: he did it for the money, he did it because Jesus had failed to live up to his expectations of a political messiah, he did it because the devil made him do it, he did it...well, no one knows why he did it.

As we read, Judas becomes a mirror the Gospel holds up to us. In it we see the face of our own betrayals looking back at us. Piety may forbid us to see anything but horror in Judas for what he did. After all, he sold Jesus to his torturers and murderers. But honesty requires us to admit that he is not alone in having sold down river the one thing that mattered. How many of us have sold our prayer for entertainment, our integrity for power or prestige, our life’s work for an easy ride? Is selling God’s gifts “for a handful of trifles” any less heinous really than selling the Savior?

Come now, you’re probably saying, there’s no comparison. I’ve made my little compromises, sure, but nobody died for it. Is that really true? Jesus, Son of God, died in a few hours on one particular afternoon whose echoes have reverberated among believers and doubters alike ever since, but we, now made children of God, die no less decisively when we trade away our own God-given truth over a lifetime of little compromises. St. Basil the Great defines sin as the use of God's gifts for purposes other than those for which they were given. Most grievous, he says, is the misuse of love—God’s gifts of love, our own love for our the tasks God has given us, our love for those among whom we were planted in this world. A gifted storyteller puts the gift to use writing trash for cash. A gifted singer holds back songs that change the world for fear of criticism. A gifted parent sacrifices time for the family in favor of clean and lovely surroundings or a weekend in front of the TV or a fishing trip. Not major crimes, surely? Ah, but the serpent’s tooth poisons by small bites. And the serpent’s whisper is well disguised as “everybody does it” or “you owe it to yourself ” or “come on—don’t be a prig.”

After a while, maybe, we forget we have options. The good news that seems to have fallen on deaf ears in the tragic Judas is laid out before us during Holy Week in all its urgency. We may well have our little stash of silver coins hidden somewhere, rewards for our betrayals of true selves, but it’s never too late to trade them in again for forgiveness, freedom, life. The loss may be painful, the prospect of change frightening, the way back long and hard. But the offer is always there.

It was there for Judas. Jesus forgave Peter, who denied him, and the other disciples who abandoned him, and even the men with hammer and nails who crucified him. Surely he was just as ready to forgive Judas. Why didn’t Judas accept? Why didn’t he allow the Savior to save him from his own despair? Why did he hang himself after three years in the company of God’s mercy made flesh? I wonder if it was because he had so eroded his soul with a lifetime of betrayals that he could no longer see the outstretched hand. Having walled himself into the very small cell of his own self-interest and shame, perhaps he could no longer recognize the open door. And who knows? Maybe, in the privacy of one of those moments of anguish and mercy that go unreported by the evangelists--who had reason to think ill of Judas anyway--God's finally managed to pry open Judas' fist and fill it with something far better than thirty pieces of silver. I hope so. But what went on for Judas in his darkness remains as much a question as his motives.

If Judas is question, puzzle, thorn in the flesh of the Christian mind, he is also, like all of us, mystery. How many of us can really fathom in ourselves the depths where betrayal and grace meet? I would rather not reduce Judas to a simple explanation. I would rather allow him to remain a mirror. If I can’t see into his soul, perhaps he can let me see into mine. My prayer is for the courage to look.

Note: The phrase "for a handful of silver" comes from Robert Browning's moving poem about betrayal and forgiveness, The Lost Leader. See http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/282.html

Copyright 2014, Abbey of St. Walburga

By Pickax or Angel

At the outset of Lent, we considered the season as an important stretch in our spiritual journey. We might have read the encouraging words of St. Benedict: “Do not be daunted immediately by fear and run away from the road that leads to salvation. It is bound to be narrow at the outset. But as we progress in this way of life and in faith, we shall run on the path of God’s commandments, our hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love” (Prologue 48-49)

But as we look back, at least some of us will have to admit that we don’t seem to have done much running. Sometimes an aging snail could have beat us to the next turn in the road. At other times, we’ve spent most of our time picking ourselves up after falling over one rock after another. On the First Sunday of Lent, the cautionary tale of that conversation with the serpent in the Garden of Eden may have alerted us to the likelihood of rocks ahead. A more sober theological description would speak of the effects of original sin or the cumulative results of our personal histories of sinful choices, which do indeed hobble our feet or trip us up as we do our best to follow Christ, our Way. Some of these rocks are mere pebbles, easy to pick up and throw aside with a bit of repentance and some healthy asceticism to retrain our travel habits, but others loom large and immovable. At some point in Lent, we may even just sit down in the blocked path, put our heads in our hands, and lament, “How, O Lord, can this rock be uprooted? My pickax is broken, and I’m all out of dynamite!”

The Easter story will come to our rescue with a hint and lesson. When Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary” arrived at the tomb hewn into the hillside and firmly sealed with a large slab of rock on Good Friday, “there was a great earthquake; for an angel of he Lord descended from heaven, approached, rolled back the stone and sat upon it” (Matthew 28:2).

Let’s start by considering the purpose of the stone to begin with. It wasn’t intended to keep Jesus in. It was meant to keep others out. No doubt Joseph of Arimathea, who put it there in Matthew’s account, wanted to preserve the dead Master from any indignity on the part of intruders. The chief priests and Pharisees were more worried about the disciples stealing the body and then claiming that Jesus had risen from the dead, so they demanded guards as well as the stone itself. And anyway, as we learn from Jesus’ appearances to the disciples in the upper room three days later, he could walk through walls, so a mere gravestone, however heavy, would have been no problem.  

Sometimes, as we’re sitting down before a large lump of stone in the path, it helps to remember the purpose of that stone too. It’s meant to do just what it has done: to stop us in our tracks while Jesus disappears from sight down the road beyond it, or we imagine he does.  The rock is meant to keep us away from joining him. It’s interesting to wonder further who put it there? It may look at first blush as if we did. If it’s a weighty composite of our own history of selfish wrongdoing, yep, we made it. But this is the Lenten road we’re on, no matter what the calendar may say as I write this or you read it. We set out with the intention of breaking through whatever was keeping us from following the Lord. We didn’t run ahead and drop a boulder on the way to make that harder. The psalmist warns of pits and traps laid across our path by an enemy. This rock has trapped us. It’s not unknown for the true Enemy to use our own weaknesses, failings and sins against us, to keep us from reaching what St. Benedict calls the mountain of God (cf. Prologue 23, quoting Psalm 15). So who is more likely to have dropped this rock right in front of us to bring our “run” to a skidding halt and make us sit down in discouragement, thereby guaranteeing that we will go nowhere soon?

This is where the angel comes in. First, the angel presents us with the sobering truth that some rocks are indeed too formidable for our little pickaxes. Secondly, the angel tells us the even more sobering truth that if we have imagined all along that rock-removal, even pebble-removal, was primarily our responsibility, it’s about time we met reality face-to-face. One of Lent’s hidden temptations is the illusion that we are our own saviors. We decide what our Lenten program will be: what sins and failings we will address, what our conversion will look like, and what steps we will take to engineer it. Sorry about that, says the angel. It’s true that you are an indispensable collaborator in the work, you and your little pickax, even when you’re tired of the effort, discouraged by apparently poor results, and ready to punch out on the Lenten time clock. It is not true that you are the primary force in blasting pebbles and mountains out of your way as you seek to run toward that great encounter we call Easter. That would be God, says the angel---who is, of course, God’s messenger.

Lent may be over when you read this, or it will be over soon. But you already know that neither God nor our lives are confined by the liturgical calendar. The season of Lent ends, but the work of Lent never does (cf RB 49!) So the rock on the road and the stone at the tomb, with the angel sitting atop it, are always there to remind us of the reality and power of God’s grace, even when the Rocky Mountains themselves seem to have sprung up between us and the Lord we seek. As the women at the tomb learn from the angel, though not in so many words, it’s really the Lord who is seeking us. And to God, even mountains are pebbles.

Copyright 2014, Abbey of St. Walburga

The Lesson of Harriet Tubman

In a recent issue of Give Us This Day, Robert Ellsberg tells the story of Harriet Tubman.  She was born into slavery in Maryland in 1820.  A woman of deep spiritual experiences, she endured for years until, at the age of 29, she was inspired to act on her enduring inner conviction that God wanted her to be free.  From her home on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, she made her way by night to Pennsylvania and ultimately to Philadelphia, traveling at night with no map, no compass, no guide except the North Star, always in peril of her life.  Long after Appomattox,  for the rest of her very long life, she went on working for the liberation of those still bound in one way or another.

Her story inspires the imagination.  We can easily daydream about the heroism of reaching the land of freedom and then going back for those still enslaved in the place we came from.  It’s a pleasant thought, one that allows us to fantasize about dangerous deeds but excuses us from doing them because, of course, we are still on the road to the land of freedom a long way ahead of us—beyond Lent, beyond next year, beyond death.  Time enough to go back for the others when we get there.

The gospel doesn’t much hold with daydreaming instead of doing.  For us, the real lesson of Harriet Tubman is that wherever we are on the road to freedom, we must keep going back for those behind us.  Where would we be, after all, if others hadn’t come back for us?

Note:  Give Us This Day is published by The Liturgical Press, www.litpress.org

©2014, Abbey of St. Walburga

The First Sunday of Lent: Genesis 2-3, Matthew 4

Once upon a time, our story goes, there was a Being whose essential truth was an extraordinary communion of  three distinct persons so profound that the three, though distinct, formed one reality.  To this Being, human language gives the name God.  (Of course, "a Being" isn't quite right.  God is not one being among many, as theologians wear out their keyboards trying to explain.  God IS in a way that can't be said of anything else that exists. Let that much do for now.)

One day, when there were as yet no "days" because there was no time, God set about creating what we know as the universe we live in.  In the last verses of the creation story as told in Genesis 1, God created humanity: "Then God said: Let us make human beings in our image, after our likeness....God created mankind in his image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them" (Genesis 1:26-27).

From the artistic genius of a Michelangelo to the illustrations for children's Bibles, the habit of the imagination has been to picture "male and female" as we meet them every day:  two distinct people, one looking like a man, one looking like a woman.  That makes sense to us because that is what we know.  However, the brilliant eleventh-century biblical commentator, Rashi, offers a different perspective: ""God created him first with two faces, and separated them." Blessed John Paul II takes a similar position in his reflections on the primal unity of the human in the Genesis account  as gathered in Male and Female He Created Them: A Theology of the Body.

The poet of Genesis 1 sets the creation of the first humanity at the conclusion of a narrative picture of primal harmony, where each component has its name, its purpose, and its place in the vast scheme of things, and each owes its origin to the divine Creator.  This harmony has never lost its appeal.  It remains the dream that underlies the prophet Isaiah's vision of a holy mountain where predators and prey dwell in peace (Isaiah 11:6-8), words translated, for example, into the numerous paintings of "the peaceable kingdom" by Quaker folk artist Edward Hicks (April 4, 1780-August 23, 1849) which sometimes appear on Christmas cards. 

The picture of primal harmony shifts from reality to dream when the first humans shred it.  The tragedy is laid out in Genesis 3.  The serpent, the deceiver who will grow into a dragon in the Book of Revelation (Revelation 12:9), convinces Eve to pluck and taste the forbidden fruit by assuring her she will not die but will become like a God.  The tragic irony is not lost on the reader familiar with Genesis 1, where the first human beings were made in the image and likeness of God.  Eve's story was written before the Genesis creation poem, though, so she is eager to have what she has already been given but doesn’t know it.  So we come to the famous, or infamous, moment when she crunches down on what the western world would come to see as an apple.  No doubt it tastes good--forbidden fruit usually does till it has hit us where we live. So she passes it to her other half, who takes and eats it without a word, sealing the fate of Eve's daughters to a long role in theology, literature and society as the dangerous temptresses who seduce men into sin. At least in Genesis 3, the man seems pretty willing to be seduced if being handed a piece of fruit counts as seduction.  In fact, since Eve says nothing at all to him, we should perhaps shift the blame to the serpent. Adam was listening to his spiel along with Eve and seems also to have fallen for it.

The seeds of forbidden fruit spring up to become a poisoned harvest.  As soon as the woman obeys the serpent rather than God, and on the basis of an inexplicable trust built on very shaky grounds ( or so it appears to anyone who hasn't succumbed to the serpent's way with words), and as soon as the man ratifies her decision by making it his own, the world falls apart.

These two favored children, the first-born of God's creative love suddenly run for the bushes when they hear God's voice as he arrives for a customary evening stroll in the garden.  For the first of times uncounted, God has to go looking for them.  When God starts asking questions,  these two "faces" of one humanity get into their first fight, or at least what would likely become their first fight when they eventually try to pick events apart and understand them as they stand  outside a gate closed, locked and guarded against them.  Adam dumps the blame for that fatal bite on Eve;  she dumps  it on the serpent; the serpent is smart enough to let it happen without saying a thing, like someone who starts a fight between two others and then steps back out of the way.

God is forced to spell out for them the consequences of what they have done.  "That garden you were placed into, Adam, the one that should have provided you with the satisfaction of your own kind of creativity as you cultivated it, coaxed it into bearing fruit for the future, tilled and planted and cut from it the wheat for the first loaf of home-baked bread?  That garden will now rise up and work against you, making you work it by the sweat of your brow at every hand's turn.  Sorry, your choice.  The children you and Adam were charged to bring into the world to take up the task of caring for it, Eve, the ones who should have given you nothing but joy at their arrival?  They will now give you terrible pain at their birth.  (Eve will learn only after her boys are grown that they will bring more pain than she could ever have imagined during delivery once they reach maturity.)  Sorry, your choice too.  And this place, this beautiful garden I planted for you?  You've got to leave it for a much colder, harsher climate in lands that will never be your friends.  Your choice, your choice, and My everlasting grief!  It will cost you more than you dream of now, and it will cost Me my Son."  Or words to that effect!

So Adam and Eve, shivering in their fig leaves, prepare to leave what later generations would call paradise, to face the soul-searing loneliness of a world from which all harmony has fled, even the harmony of spouse with spouse, brother with brother.

We've all been here ever since, trying to make our way home to the garden.  When Jesus joined us on the road, he began his public ministry with a forty-day stint in the desert, as recounted in today's gospel.  At his lowest point, after a very long fast, which was probably not measured in terms of how many small and normal meals he ate per day, the Tempter from the garden reappeared on the scene for another conversation.  It was a key moment. 

With Eve and Adam, he had won the first battle, but not the war. Of course the war was not with poor, silly human beings.  They were just cannon fodder.  The real war was and is between Evil and God.  (C.S. Lewis imagines all this brilliantly in The Screwtape Letters.)  And here was a man who was the image of the Father in  far more profound way than the first couple (Colossians 115-20).  Here was the one who was the beginning of the new humanity made in the image and likeness of God, the one in whom the image would be brought to its planned perfection once he passed through death to eternal life in God.  It isn't clear that the Tempter knew all that.  He did seem to think there was at least a good chance that this one, at last, was "the Son of God" in a different ), even though the Tempter might not have been sure what that meant.  What he was sure of, it seems, was that here was God's Achilles heel.  Bring this one down, and the war would be over and won.  And not by God.

The Tempter, remember, is the one who specializes in falsity beyond any human beings can come up with.  And he is cleverly persuasive with it.  What he addresses to Jesus seems to be Satan's own definition of what the Son of God should look like, what he should do.  He's not as clever as he thinks he is.  He clearly gives away what he would do if he were the Son of God, or even (his obvious hope since that first conversation at the fruit tree).  He would prove his status and his power in such a way that no one could doubt or deny him.  He could and would do the one thing God will not:  he could force the obedience of all lesser beings.  He doesn't have the handicap of a real Son of God in that game.  He does not love.  Quite the contrary.

This cunning Tempter bases his script on a vision of human beings falsified to the core core.  He wants Jesus to betray his own truth as the one defined by what he will teach:  love of God and neighbor so great that it takes precedence over any hint of self-interest.  The whisperer tries to persuade him to do that by acting as one totally isolated from all relationships, the one in whom the disintegration of all bonds begun in Eden is finally brought to completion.  He tries to convince Jesus to act entirely by himself alone and for himself alone, with reference neither to God nor to neighbor.  "You must be hungry.  Feed yourself by your own power . You know you have it in you to turn these stones into bread.  Forget the myriads of starving human beings waiting everywhere for you to provide them with bread, the real Bread of Life.  Force God's hand to take care of you.  Power is all!  You can control even God-- his own words in Psalm 91 prove it.  He may be called "almighty," but love has made him a weakling after all.  Take over the empire that awaits you, take over all the kingdoms of the world--in a moment, without effort, and certainly without that stupid business of the cross that lies in your future if you stay on the path you're traveling now."  The Tempter may not realize that here he has let slip his real plan. He has put on God's mantle, for it is God who says in Psalm 2, "You are my Son. It is I who have begotten you this day. Ask of me and I will give you the nations as your inheritance, and the ends of the earth as your possession". Clever, this Tempter, but sometimes not too smart.

He doesn't win.  Not this battle, and not the war, though he doesn't seem to know that yet.  He will keep trying in Jesus'  lifetime;  he is still trying in ours.  Let us not underestimate him.  Genesis 3 reminds us how easily our hungers can dupe us into choosing quicker, easier satisfactions than the long, hard road Jesus has carved out for us.  The fruit that looked so good to Eve has lost none of its appeal.  And history teaches us that though Evil may never win the war, indeed cannot,  this persistent Whisperer seems willing to make do with success in one small  battle after another—with one of us as the prize. If the Tempter cannot now kill Christ,  it appears he can at least take pleasure in wounding him again in his only vulnerability, his love for us. 

However, Matthew's story of that fateful meeting in the desert reminds us that there is a power that will defeat the whispers every time.  It is the word of God.  The more we absorb it, the greater will be our defense against seductive untruths (see John 8:31-31).  But we needn't worry about our own uncertain ability to wield this weapon with success against subtleties that undermine even the strongest resolutions.  The story that unfolds through Lent into Easter and beyond assures us that Christ, who not only speaks the word with authority but is the very Word made flesh, will never walk away and leave us to our own devices. "I am with you always," he says (Matthew 28:20). However alone and powerless we may feel,  he is assuring us that he will never abandon the arena for a more comfortable spot far away in heaven.  He will continue to rescue and shield us until the last sentence of our story is written, and God lays down the pen. 

So, Christ's message to us on this first Sunday of Lent is what it has always been: "Do not be frightened by the words you have heard" (Isaiah 37:6). And, when we are nevertheless shaking in our shoes--let's be honest, the Tempter seem frighteningly strong as he tries to pull us into the undertow in a chaotic sea—Jesus says again what he said to the disciples in the boat at night:  "Take courage, it is I; do not be afraid" (Matthew 14:27).

Notes:

Rashi is the name commonly given to RAbbi SHlomo Itzhak (February 22, 1040 – July 13, 1105).  The sentence found here is quoted from Avivah Gotlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

C.S. Lewis’ imagined account of a conversation between a senior demon and his nephew about the incomprehensible fact that God seems actually to love us human vermin, as the demon calls us, whereas the devil is intent upon devouring us instead is worth reading during Lent.  The title is The Screwtape Letters, and you will find it available in many print and e-book editions.

©2014, Abbey of St. Walburga

Lent 2014: Part 1

Here we go!

Lent arrives this year on Ash Wednesday, March 4, and ends on Holy Thursday, April 17.

For Benedictines, however, Lent is with us always, in every season of the year.  St. Benedict says, “The life of a monk ought to be a continuous Lent” (Rule of St. Benedict, 49:1)  If you look at Lent as a season of penance that goes on too long, a season when visions of chocolate or coffee or cigarettes or whatever you have chosen to give up dance in your head, a season you’d just as soon either skip or at least get through as quickly as possible, this is not good news.  No chocolate, ever? Give me a break!  A long break, like from Easter till next Ash Wednesday.

St. Benedict himself admits that “few…have the strength for this” (RB 49:2), so he lists some Lenten practices to “wash away the negligences of other times” (RB 49:3).  He makes it sound like a season for a spiritual tune-up, a soul-diet, a time of intensity geared to prepare us to renew our baptismal vows honestly at Easter, freed of all the little compromises we have made to lighten their observance.  In other words, it is a season of intentional conversatio morum, that change of behavior that is intended to fuel a change of heart.  And in some ways, that’s exactly what Lent is.

The season of Lent has its own particular landscape:  the landscape of desert and mountain.  The forty days of Lent hark back to Israel’s forty years in the desert, Moses’ forty days’ fast on Mount Sinai prior to receiving the Law, Jesus’ forty days’ fast in the desert following his baptism. 

The desert offers a vivid image of Lent.  Its sun and win strip life down to the bone.  Quite literally, actually, as Georgia O’Keeffe reminds us in her stark paintings of cattle reduced to clean, white skeletons scattered on the sands of New Mexico’s deserts.  Lent does the same for the human spirit.  The fire of the Sun rising from a dark world and the darker valley of death until it bursts into glory at Easter burns away all our masks and disguises, all our falsities, all the inessentials with which we sometimes seek to hide our essential truth, even from ourselves.  The light of the rising Sun, Jesus Christ, illumines us through and through, revealing not only our selfishness and sinfulness but also the essential strength and goodness we may have forgotten were there.  It was he who said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).  The wind of the Spirit whips away our heavy backsacks and lunch boxes, filled with all the unnecessary stuff, both material, without which we imagine we cannot live.  Turns out that, in the desert, we actually can’t live with  it.  The accumulated weight of all the baggage we carry will weigh us down till we can’t move at all, even as far as the nearest water hole.   The Sun and Wind of our Lenten desert change us.

Do you begin to see why St. Benedict says that our lives should be a perpetual Lent?  These changes aren’t confined to a few weeks only.  The process of transformation is the process to which we commit ourselves in promising conversatio morum, with its intertwining realities of heart and behavior.  Lent is the essential home of the Benedictine spirit, and we stray from it at our peril. 

One approach to Lenten asceticism is to choose to change habits that we would like to leave behind for good, not just for six weeks.  Sometimes the small steps we take during Lent—giving up something not too important or choosing to do something we don’t ordinarily do—are not just steps but stepping stones to larger changes.  We might give up chocolate with the hope (and, more important, the prayer) that we can learn to make our own decisions about what we take in, whether that be unnecessary food or unnecessary entertainment or unnecessary gossip at the grocery store, rather than to leave the decisions in the hands of old habits that have served us badly.  Chocolate may be a small thing but building up our decision-making power is not.  Rather than giving something up, we might choose to spend fifteen minutes a day, three days a week, reading Scripture prayerfully.  That’s not much time, but it’s amazing how hard it can be to set aside even such a small fragment of our day to grow in our relationship with God.  Fifteen minutes three times a week is nowhere near the unceasing prayer that is the Benedictine ideal, but it’s a genuine start. 

The monastic wisdom of past ages understood that small starts along the broad, well-paved road to an undesirable destination or along the steep and narrow road that leads to salvation are a great deal more significant than we might recognize, especially if a well-honed sense of pride requires great leaps toward holiness on Ash Wednesday.  Humility, a distinctly Benedictine value, provides us with a practical realism that will take us a great deal farther than high purposes that ride on nothing but air. 

A perpetual Lent does not require a wardrobe of hair shirts, one to be worn every day of the week even after Easter.  It does not require a life-long fast so severe that we pass out along the road.  It does not require that we shut ourselves into our room every day after work until midnight.  It doesn’t even require that we give up chocolate so firmly forever that we wound the loved one who gives us a box of our favorite kind on our birthday, or that we become bad-tempered ogres whom our entire family begs, please, to eat just one piece for their sake.  A perpetual Lent requires a commitment to the desert road that leads us to change and grow in small, simple ways until our own self, risen from old dust into the full maturity of Christ, comes as a shock to us when we wake up on the day of our own personal Easter.

But most important of all, a perpetual Lent is not a solo act of heroism.  It is a long journey taken in prayerful company with Christ, the only One who really knows the way, and with all the rest of the ordinary folk he has invited to come along.

Ash Wednesday is a day of small beginnings.  We will revisit the desert road on this blog when we are farther along the way.

Blessings on your journey!  And let us all pray for one another as we go.