I had meant to write about this earlier -- in fact, I had, and then I deleted it. I'm still struggling with how much to say here, whether these ramblings about my life right now are of any interest to anyone or just a form of spiritual navel-gazing, but I've decided to see it as a tracking of the movement of grace and a personal reminder to myself of what my focus should be. If it's of no interest to anyone else, to me it deserves noting and meditating on. (And, finally, it's my blog. Deal with it.)
I had mentioned before that I thought Holy Saturday would be a significant day for me, and it was. I went to St. Matthew's Cathedral for confession that morning, and as I sat in the pew in front of the open, empty tabernacle and looked around at the statues hidden by heavy purple cloth, I suddenly felt completely relaxed and at home: "This fits. This is right for me." It's hard to explain that in a way that doesn't seem morbid, but the fact was that, at that specific point in the liturgical year, everything was congruent with my spiritual life. It felt utterly peaceful to think about Jesus in the tomb -- knowing with certainty that the Resurrection was coming, but for now, "God is asleep", as it says in the Office of Readings for the day.
I was finally able to meet for spiritual direction with Father Donahue this afternoon, and he encouraged me to stay there. "I think it's true that our lives reflect different aspects of Our Lord's life," he said. "You've been given the chance to go down into the deep end -- into the darkness, but into the heart of the Redemption." We talked about St. John of the Cross and his explanation of why God will sometimes remove all sense of His presence from a soul and all of the person's powers of thought and imagination in prayer. "It's to get rid of the notion that we have any power at all to come to God ourselves. It has to be all Him." His advice: stay there in the peaceful, dark quiet and let God do all the work.
"Exploration into God is exploration into darkness, into the heart of darkness. Yes, to be sure, God is light. He is the light by which all light is light. In the words of the Psalm, “In your light we see light.” Yet great mystics of the Christian tradition speak of the darkness in which the light is known, a darkness inextricably connected to the cross. At the heart of darkness the hope of the world is dying on a cross, and the longest stride of soul is to see in this a strange glory. In John’s Gospel, the cross is the bridge from the first Passover on the way out of Egypt to the new Passover into glory. In his first chapter he writes, “We have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.” The cross is not the eclipse of that glory but its shining forth, its epiphany. In John’s account, the death of Jesus is placed on the afternoon of the fourteenth day of the month of Nisan, precisely the time when the Passover lambs were offered up in the temple in Jerusalem.
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Here on Calvary’s hill, all is fulfilled. It is the glory of Jesus’ cry, “it is finished.” The cross is the moment of passover from the old covenant to the new. Weeping at the cross, Mary is both the mother of sorrows and the mother of hope. The resurrection glory is discerned in the way that Christ dies. Now the reason for the whole drama becomes clear in the Son’s unqualified obedience to the Father, even to death, and the Father’s promise to glorify the Son. John says nothing about the risen Christ appearing to his mother. The other disciples discovered the resurrection glory at the dawn of the third day. Mary had already discovered the glory in the cross. There she took “the longest stride of soul.”
“In the Cross of Christ I Glory,” declared the nineteenth-century hymn writer John Bowring. It seems a strange, even bizarre, glory. “We have beheld his glory,” St. John wrote, meaning that he was there, with Mary, beholding the final and perfect sacrifice. In the churches of Asia Minor that were founded by John, Easter was celebrated not on Sunday, as with the other churches, but on 14 Nisan, the anniversary of Christ’s death. This was his “hour” of glory. The resurrection ratified and reinforced what was already displayed on the cross. When John, therefore, places Mary at the cross, he is placing her at the very center of salvation. She was there, with him, beholding a glory different from, even the opposite of, everything ordinarily meant by glory. It was God’s glory, which is love.
This is the light in which we are to understand those exultant passages in I John. “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life the life was made manifest, and we saw it, and testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us.” (Mary and I, we saw it!) John continues: “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” “So we know and believe the love God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.”
In the cross we see that of which humanity is capable: self-transcendence in surrender to the Other. All the evidence to the contrary, we are capable of love."--from Death on a Friday Afternoon
"Lord, when clouds gather on the horizon and everything seems lost, when we find no friend to stand by us and hope slips from our hands, teach us to trust in you, who will surely come to our rescue. May the experience of inner pain and darkness teach us the great truth that in you nothing is lost, that even our sins – once we have repented of them – come to serve a purpose, like dry wood in the cold of winter."
Via Crucis at the Colosseum
Rome
Good Friday 2009
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