December 15, 2012 • St. John of the Cross

Today—well, yesterday, actually—the Church celebrates the memory of the sixteenth century Spanish saint, John of the Cross, Juan de Yepes – probably the greatest Christian mystical writer of the last thousand years, and one of the greatest poets in the Spanish language. He was a man who worked not only for the reform and simplification of the monastic life of his time but also for the purification of the inner life of Christians from fantasy, self-indulgence and easy answers. If you haven’t heard of him, you’ve probably at least heard the phrase that he introduced into Christian thinking about the hard times in discipleship – 'the dark night of the soul'. My own first encounter with his work came pretty late in my theological education. I was on retreat in the days just before I was made a deacon. I had been offered one of the guest houses at a convent called “Fairacres” in Oxford, and my spiritual director gave me a copy of his book the Ascent of Mount Carmel. Before I settled into my reading and reflection, though, I joined the sisters for their evening meal. It was more simple and austere than anything I could have expected, and I’d lived at a monastery for the past three years. A small tossed green salad, a few spoons full of potato soup, and a tiny square of peach crumble were handed to me, mixed together all in one wooden bowl that made me think of the opening scene from Oliver Twist. About an hour later, I scaled the convent wall after Compline, and headed down the Iffley Road to find a curry house that would properly fortify me for the work ahead. I chose, poorly. That night I had my own ‘dark night of the soul’ as I was gripped by a combination of spices and grease that my body was ill-equipped to digest. But since I was up anyway, I dug into the book.

I found John of the Cross to be ruthless in his criticism of the ways in which we prevent ourselves from opening up to the true joy that God wants to give us by settling for something less than the real thing by confusing the truth and grace of God with whatever makes us feel good or comfortable. He is a disturbing and difficult writer. Not someone to congratulate ordinands on a job well done in completing the formation that will allow them to engage in ordained ministry, but someone to challenge that ministry and sharpen it for whatever trials lie ahead.

He wrote that an intimate experience of God comes from experiencing ‘darkness’ in God’s invisible light, and the darkness of faith alone. God’s darkness is not at all like our darkness. It is illuminating, even if it is invisible. It is in those moments when we cannot find God, times when we feel abandoned by Him, moments of grief, despair, and darkness—all too familiar to each of us these days, especially after yesterday—it is in those moments that John recognized God was still very much at work. He likens those moments in our lives to the moment when a parent takes their hands away from a toddler, to let them try a few steps under their own balance, even if it inevitably means repeatedly falling on their bottoms.

Using the language of darkness and light, John draws his readers into an awareness that our comprehension of God’s presence in our lives is only in its infancy. In one passage, which has stuck with me all these years, he speaks of a sunbeam going from one window of his cell to another window, and, he wrote, if the sunbeam does not encounter anything—a fleck of dust or the wall—then it passes through without being noticed, but that does not mean that the light was not there. He applies that to God’s spiritual or supernatural light which bears a relation to the ‘eye of the intellect’ in the same way that physical light relates to the eye of the body. Here instead of matter and sensible images, we have to work with concepts and forms. He presses this with imageless thinking, for images and symbols are creaturely representations and closed modes of thought which are apt to obstruct our apprehension of divine truth. He developed a disciplined unknowing, or darkness, imageless knowing. But the point of all this is that the invisibility of God, has not to do with darkness, but with the infinite excess of divine light over the created light which creates the images and symbols which fill our hearts and minds. God is dark to us, and unapproachable, because of the inability of our impure minds to fathom the absolute purity of his being. If it is difficult to know God, that comes from two things: the excess of divine rationality over our rationality, and in the impurity of our perception, the opaqueness of our mind. Knowledge of God can take place only when something stands in his light and reflects it to us, when a fleck of dust catches the sunbeam. (remember, mortal that you are dust) And that is the ministry which begins here today—two servants of God, given grace to take your place as proclaimers of the Good News, by vowing to stand in that light as best you can, and to reflect that light by your words, actions and lives, as best you can. To make the invisible light of God visible, to bring it into the created world, the world of flesh and matter—to make incarnate the light of God, using your own body and soul.

St John of the Cross also left us, in some of his poems, one of the most breathtakingly imaginative visions ever of the nature of the Joy of the Incarnation. He is recognized as one of the greatest poets in the Spanish language; and part of his genius is to use the rhythms and conventions of popular romantic poetry and folksong to convey the biblical story of the love affair between God and creation.

One of his sequences of poetry is called simply the 'Romances'. It's a series of seventy five short verses, telling the story of the world from the beginning to the first Christmas – but telling this story from God's point of view. It begins like a romantic ballad. 'Once upon a time', God was living eternally in heaven, God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, with perfect love flowing uninterrupted between them. And out of the sheer overflowing energy of his love, God the Father decides that he will create a 'Bride' for his Son. The imagery is powerful and direct: there will be someone created who will be able, says God the Father, to 'sit down and eat bread with us at one table, the same bread that I eat.'

And so the world is made as a home for the Bride. Who is this Bride? It is the whole cosmos of beings who are capable of love and understanding. In the rich diversity of the world, the heavens and the earth together, God makes an environment in which love and intelligence may grow, until they are capable of receiving the full impact of God's presence. And so the world waits for the moment when God can at last descend and – in a beautiful turning upside-down of the earlier image – can sit at the same table and share the same bread as created beings.

As the ages pass on earth, the longing grows and intensifies for this moment to arrive; and at last God the Father tells the Son that it is time for him to meet his Bride face to face on earth, so that, as he looks at her directly, she may reflect his own likeness. The Son comes to set the table, and to prepare the bread which is to be shared, by living a life of servanthood, and being always obedient to the Father Who sent Him. It’s no accident that Bethlehem means ‘home of bread.’ When God has become human, then humanity will recognize in his face, in Jesus' face, its own true nature and destiny. And the angels sing at the wedding in Bethlehem, the marriage of heaven and earth, where, in the haunting final stanza of the great poetic sequence, humanity senses the joy of God himself, and the only one in the scene who is weeping is the child, the child who is God in the flesh: 'The tears of man in God, the gladness in man, the sorrow and the joy that used to be such strangers to each other.'

In John’s poems, the coming of Christ is not first and foremost a response to human crisis; there is remarkably little about sin in these verses. But his vision takes us further back into God's purpose. The whole point of creation is that there should be persons, made up of spirit and body, in God's image and likeness, who are capable of intimacy with God – not so that God can gain something but so that these created beings may live in joy. And God's way of making sure that this joy is fully available is to prepare a table for them, and to share bread with them, so that human beings may see what they are and what they are for. The sinfulness, the appalling tragedy of human history has set us at what from our point of view seems an unimaginable distance from God; yet God is very near to us, no matter how far we have placed ourselves from Him. It means that when He appears on earth He takes to himself all the terrible consequences of where we have gone wrong – 'the tears of man in God'; yet all that is only a shadow on the great picture, which is unchanged.

This is a perspective that is necessary when our own sins or those of a failing and suffering world fill the horizon for us, so that we can hardly believe the situation can be transformed. For if God has the power and freedom to enter our world and meet us face to face, there is nothing that can destroy that divine vision of what the world is for and what we human beings are for. Nothing changes, however far we fall; if we decide to settle down with our failures and give way to cynicism and despair, that is indeed dreadful – but God remains the same God who has decided that the world should exist so that it may enter into his joy. In all those moments of doubt and despair that you will encounter in your ministry, your new vocation is to proclaim that we can still meet the God who has made human tears his own and still works ceaselessly for his purpose of peace and rejoicing, through the witness of brave and loving people on both sides of the dividing wall.

The birth of Jesus which we are preparing to celebrate, in which that uncreated light which holds the universe together in history as a single human body and soul, and which finds its place in our lives as bread broken and shared, is an event of cosmic importance. It announces that creation as a whole has found its purpose and meaning, and that the flowing together of all things for the joyful transfiguration of our humanity is at last made visible on earth. Dear friends, the time has come, stand up and serve the vocation by which He has graciously called you to make His light shine in the darkness, and to feed a hungry world with the bread of heaven.

Finding Freedom in a Concentration Camp

~Fr. Michael

In 1939, just as World War II was beginning to rage throughout Europe, the young German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was in New York, exploring whether he should stay there.  He had offers to be a pastor to the German emigrants fleeing Europe.  He had made himself deeply unpopular with the German regime, making radio broadcasts critical of Hitler and running a secret society for clergy in Germany who could not accept the way that the Nazi state was controlling the Church.

After what he describes as draining struggle, he decided to go back to Germany.  He left knowing that he was returning to a situation of extreme danger.  Six years later, he was dead, executed for treason in a concentration camp.  We know all this because he wrote letters to family and friends from the camp, which have become one of the greatest set of theological reflections of the twentieth century.  He had left behind the chance of freedom as most of us would understand it and re-immersed himself into a complex and risky world, getting involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler, living as a double agent, daily facing the prospect of arrest, torture and death.

But freedom was one of the things he most often wrote about.  In a poem he wrote in July 1944, he sketched out what he thought was involved in real freedom – discipline, action, suffering and death.  Not quite what we usually mean when we talk about freedom. These reflections take us into the heart of what it is for someone to be lastingly free.

The freedom he is interested in is the freedom to do what you know you have to do.  The society we live in gives us all sorts of messages about what we should be doing, and our own longings and preferences push us in various directions.  If you have the discipline to test your passions and preferences, and come to an understanding of yourself, it can give you the courage to act.  When you act, you take risks.  You become less free, in our normal understanding of the word, because you are bound by the consequences of you action.  But what is really happening is that you are handing over your freedom to God and saying, ‘I’ve done what I had to; now it’s over to you.’  Freedom, he says, is ‘perfected in glory’ when it’s handed over to God.  And this finds its climax in the moment of death, when we step forward to discover what has been hidden all along – the eternal freedom of God, underlying everything we have thought and done.

At the end of Bonhoeffer’s journey, as he writes about his inevitable execution, is a vision of the joy that can only come when you discover that you are at last in tune with reality, God’s reality.  Everything else, the stories you tell yourself, the pictures of yourself that you enjoy thinking about, the efforts to make yourself acceptable – all this falls short of reality.  ‘The truth will make you free’, says Jesus; and that is what sustains Bonhoeffer in prison, where he learns the true nature of freedom.  It reflects Jesus own promise in the Beatitudes, ‘Blessed are the poor, those who are hungry for justice, those who make peace’; these are the people who have got in touch with what eternally matters, with God’s reality.  These are the free people, because they have been liberated from all the fictions, great and small, that keep us locked into our anxieties and ambitions.  These are people who are not afraid to die because they have discovered what supremely matters and are willing to hand over everything to God.

Some religious people talk about letting of our minds settle so that it can truly reflect God, like a still pool.  As Bonhoeffer’s life and death make clear, this is not some sort of refusal of the world; it is rather the only way we can ever act in the world so as to change it, because we open the way to God’s action, through us, but not just through us.  Looking quietly at all the clutter that prevents us from seeing ourselves honestly, looking quietly at the ways in which the world we live in muffles the truth and so frustrates the search for justice and love – this isn’t a luxury.  This is how the truth makes us free.  Not free to whatever we want, but free to be real, to be truthful, to abide in the truth, as John's Gospel puts it.  After all, what other sort of freedom is finally worth having?  It may cost us everything we thought we needed to hang on to; but – as the history of Christ’s journey to the cross and the resurrection makes clear – the end of the story is a fulfillment, a homecoming, for which we can never find adequate words.  It’s the freedom to be what we most deeply are.

January 6, 2012 • The Epiphany

A few of us talked back and forth about having a Christmas Pageant tonight. And while I find them to be wonderful ways to get kids involved and to learn the fundamentals of the Christmas story, they also make me a little uncomfortable. No, I wasn’t traumatized too badly by my own participation in them as a child, which, as a preacher’s kid, I can assure you was frequent. The reason I’m uncomfortable with them, is that they jumble up two stories, stories that are distinct and separate, and they mix them into one story. The first story is the Christmas story: the story of Jesus birth in a stable, of angels coming and singing the good news to the shepherds that God had finally acted decisively on behalf of the poor, the weak, and the excluded. The Christmas story is told to us by St. Luke, and no one else! Luke’s gospel was written as good news for the poor, the weak, and the excluded, and He shows us a Jesus who heals and empowers the powerless to take God’s message and His love all over the world. The second story is the Epiphany story, the story we celebrate today. The story of people who didn’t know God, but who looked for God, finding an irrefutable sign that God was acting in the world, and that He wanted to draw all the nations in to see what He was doing to fulfill His promises and to bring His message and His love to them. The Epiphany story is told by St. Matthew, and no one else! Matthew’s gospel was written to show that Jesus was the fulfillment of prophecy, and the extension of the God’s promises to Israel to the rest of the whole world. Two stories, told by two different storytellers, to two different audiences, to make two different, but similar points. If that comes as a surprise to you, then you’ll understand why I wonder about Christmas pageants sometimes.

The story of the magi is often confused in people’s mind’s because of this. We sing about three wise men, but the Gospel doesn’t tell us how many seekers there are, or that they were kings, or even what their gender is, it only tells us that magoi—mages or sages—come, and that there are three symbolic gifts. Gifts that symbolize Jesus being God, and King, and human all at once; gifts that symbolize our whole lives, and the resources of the whole world. When we hear about them right after the story of the shepherds, we often suppose that they are there to provide a bit of balance: that first the poor, and then the rich, get to come and adore Jesus; or that first the Jews, and then the Gentiles get to worship Him—but none of that is in the story at all.

I’ve even heard this feast of the Epiphany denounced as “exclusive” and “elitist”, because these rich people come and bring posh and expensive gifts that most people couldn’t afford. How are we to follow that example? How are we supposed to live up to that? Where do you find myrrh at 6:30 on a Friday night? But anytime someone interprets the Gospel as ‘exclusive’ or ‘elitist’, we should know that something’s wrong, because the Gospel is intended to be inclusive, and for everyone, and to interpret it any other way is misleading. This feast, this epiphany, and the revealing and dawning that we celebrate, far from being exclusive, is among one of the most inclusive messages in the Bible. The visit from these sages shows us that Christ really is for all people everywhere, not just us; it shows us that everyone, from every culture and background can find the signs of God’s love in the world around them; it shows us that this Jesus we love and worship isn’t some religious or theological idea that we have to convince other people of, but that He is what every part of creation longs for and seeks, whether they know Him by that Name or not.

This is part of what we believe as Christians, not that we have a monopoly on God, or that ours is the only path to Him, but that Christ can be found on many paths. We believe that Christ is the only way to the Father, but we also believe that Christ is present in all parts of God’s creation, that all truth points to Him, that true love leads to Him, and that signs of this are to be found in every part of creation: the blades of grass, the flakes of snow, the ocean depths, the mountain heights, and even the stars of the sky. We profess this belief every week when we say that “we believe in Jesus Christ…through whom all things were made.” In the Christmas morning gospel, we heard St. John affirm this when he told us that Jesus is the Word of God, and that “without Him, was not anything made that was made.” That is the good news, that’s the inclusive message of the Gospel that we celebrate today, that through Christ, God can be found by any and all who seek after Him.

Matthew’s story is about people who had no exposure to God, or to the relationship that God had with Israel, no knowledge of the promises that God made to them that one day He would come among them to save and help them. They knew nothing of any of these things. What they did know was that there was beauty in the world, that there was order to nature. They knew that good was preferable to evil, that love and peace were preferable to hatred and violence. They knew that something had set these wheels in motion, and that there was a reason that the world was this way. They knew the same things that most people from most belief systems around the world know, and they tried to make sense of it. Matthew’s story is about people who set out on a journey to try to find these answers, people who sought diligently for the missing pieces of the puzzle that the world had laid out for them. Somehow or another, they found each other along the way, and they decided to search together. They taught each other what they knew as they journeyed on together, and shared their experiences. Eventually, they saw something which filled them with joy and wonder: a sign that gave them direction and purpose, a new light that had dawned on the world that illuminated their path. So they ran to it, and prepared the best things they could offer. They followed the signs that they were given and were led to Bethlehem, and there they found a miracle that was beyond their expectation or comprehension: That God, who created the heavens and the earth and all the stars in their vast array, had come among them as a humble child, in real flesh and blood, to pour out His love on anyone who wants it. And they saw him with their own eyes, and they worshiped Him. And it changed everything, it changed their whole lives. The last thing we hear about them is that they ‘went home by another road.’

It’s the same for us, really. All of us have sensed in our lives that there is something behind the good and the beauty and the love we see in the world. All of us have tried to put the pieces together and figure it out. All of us are on a journey, in search of the answers to those questions. Somehow or another, along the way, we have found each other, and we have decided to continue our journey together. As we go on, we share our experiences and teach each other what we know. And the heart, the high point, of our journey comes in the signs we get that fill us with joy and wonder, the signs that give us direction and purpose, the lights that shine on us to illuminate our path. The signs that point to a miracle beyond our expectation or comprehension: that God Himself, who created the heavens and the earth has come among us in real flesh and blood, to share our lives, and to pour out his grace and love upon us. But we don’t meet Him in Bethlehem, sitting on His mother’s knee; we meet Him here in Eau Claire, here at our little cathedral, sitting there on the table He asked us to prepare for Him. And if we let it, that miracle changes everything, it changes our whole lives. It opens up a whole new path for us to follow and a whole new home for us to return to. The question is yours to answer: will you go home by the same old road to the same old patterns and routines? Or will you return by a different road?

The Society of Ordained Scientists

~Fr. Michael

This past month, I was admitted into a group which is at the vanguard of one of the most important conversations in the world:  the Society of Ordained Scientists.  The group was founded in the early 1970s in the UK by Professor Arthur Peacocke, a luminary in the nascent field.  This group is an international assembly of clergy with advanced degrees in the sciences, and with a robust history of publications addressing the issues raised by the imposition of the false dichotomy between Science and Theology by our modern culture.  I was beyond honored to join the ranks of John Polkinghorne (my external dissertation examiner), David Wilkinson (the President of my college and my Advisor), John Templeton, Robert Russell, and Alister McGrath, and countless others besides, as a newbie and a hanger-on.  If those names are meaningless to you, I suggest at least a simple Google search if not a more in-depth exploration of the fantastic literature and program that they have produced. 

I call the conversation between Science and Theology ‘most important’ because it is clear that the common view in the world around us, fueled by ignorance and lack of education, is that these two world-views are disparate and opposed to one another.  There have been quite a few popular writings in recent years which suggest that religion is passé and irrelevant in the face of science.  The work of Richard Dawkins suggests that religion is just a behavioral vestige of superstitious tribalism, practiced only by those who lack the mental capacity to form rational ideas.  The same author advocates eugenics, and termination of down syndrome babies and others with congenital birth defects as ‘scientifically ethical’; he proposes that strategic ‘wars of elimination’ should be waged to eliminate the populace which hold ‘superstitious beliefs’ in order to ‘liberate free thinkers’.  That line of conversation is dominating the public field—Dawkins’ spurious books have outsold the aforementioned authors by three times—and is rabidly opposed to the system of ethics proposed by the Gospel.  You can begin to see, I hope, why I regard this as among the most important conversations in the world—this is not just an idle conversation, but rather policies, and ultimately, lives, hang in the balance.   The ideas of Gospel ethics deserve not just my time and attention, but yours as well.

The three-day biannual retreat that I attended at the start of January is the continued effort to establish a new province of this society in North America, primarily an effort to make the Society and its meetings more accessible to supportive clergy and congregations.  It was a genuinely spiritual retreat, with reflections and conversation facilitated by the Bishop of Rhode Island, himself a physicist and teacher.  We gathered in regular prayer and conversation about all available issues, from genetics to cosmology, and encouraged one another in our common ministry.  I have to say, it was one of the most refreshing retreats I have ever attended, I was challenged by the level of thought that was presented, just as I was encouraged by the level of witness.

Perhaps most important of all, I was connected anew to a network of fantastically talented colleagues, each of which is working, in his or her own neighborhood, to use the light of science to shed light on the work of the Church, and also, using the vast storehouse of ecclesiastical resources to inform our scientific endeavors.  

There was a moment at the close of the middle day of the retreat, when I publicly made apology for ‘geeking out’ and talking about the relationship of the relationship of an extremely esoteric field of mathematics (the Lie geometries of the Platonic Solids, if you’re interested) to theology.  Bishop Knisely cut me off, mid-apology, to say, “What on earth are you apologizing for, Michael?  We’re your people!”  I must say, it felt good.