Union: let the Darkness come upon you - Lenten Reflection #4 (2012) Last week I spoke about Reflection, and mentioned a little about contemplation.

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1 Union: let the Darkness come upon you - Lenten Reflection #4 (2012) I said to my soul, be still, and let the darkness come upon you which shall be the darkness of God. Eliot, East Coker III Last week I spoke about Reflection, and mentioned a little about contemplation. Another way to approach these two we said was to think of them together as one form of prayer that gently oscillates between active and receptive modes. As Lent continues and we boldly engage in our reflections the tensions that arise through doubt and fear, we may find ourselves coming close to some understanding of how we desire to respond to God s love. If we were following the dynamic of the Spiritual Exercises, we would be coming close to making an election - a choice and plan for our response. If, as we said before, Lent is a season of renewal and rededication of ourselves to God, then it is time now for us to formulate, put some flesh, on that plan. That is, to make it real and personal. Without the guidance and direction of a plan, we may find ourselves per una selva oscura [in a dark wood] like Dante Alighieri in The Divine Comedy. The first Canto of Purgatorio, begins like this: Midway in the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood, For the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard it is to tell The nature of that wood, savage, dense, and harsh - - The very thought of it renews my fear! It is so bitter death is hardly more so. Finding ourselves lost, alone, without direction, can indeed seem bitter. The purpose of our reflection and contemplation should be to receive guidance for when we find ourselves in the dark woods of our journey, the darkness that we will inevitably encounter. Election is simply the volitional component of our response to Mystery, a decision on our new course in the nautical metaphor. And tonight I want to invite us to think about that plan, that choice which will require us to turn away from every other choice at every corner, to select one path over another at every turn.

2 Virgil, who accompanied Dante on his journeys through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise in The Divine Comedy, is not likely to join us on ours. But we don t have to travel alone. My thoughts tonight, following the third phase of the Spiritual Exercises, are intended to focus on the close union between our own sufferings and the saving sufferings of Jesus. As we go through Lent, in our practices we can attempt to live His passion. That is, to labor with Christ through all of His anguish, His struggles, and His sufferings. If we were to pay particular attention to how the Divinity seemed to hide Itself from Jesus in His passion so that He could experience the very human condition of feeling helpless in suffering, we may get closer to our own feelings of doubt and uncertainty. In a Mysterious way, we may enter into suffering that is not just ours and not just Christ s, but a suffering that is ours and Christ s at the same time. We can come to realize in suffering this way, that Christ loved us so much that He willingly suffered everything for our rejections and sins. The sufferings I speak about are not just the sufferings of His passion, but all His experiences and all ours, the experiences of our creaturehood all of what it means to be human, for He became human for us. If we join all of what we experience as humans with His experiences, we will inevitably find ourselves asking, What can I, in response, do for Him? The What can I do for Him? is the very guidance and direction we seek in our dark woods, and Jesus Himself in a mystical way, which is the way of the Holy Ghost, will accompany us on our journey, not Virgil. He will be for us the Truth, the Light, and the Way. So how can we go about doing these things? How can we live the passion? We might also ask why should we live the passion, to what end? And why stop there? When I thought of this, I thought of the 5 W s: you know, the questions Who?, What?, Where?, When?, and Why? Well, the answer to Who? in this drama, the dramatis personae of our Lenten journey into the passion, are just God in Jesus and us we sinners. This drama is about our narrative and His.

3 The answer to Where? is wherever we find ourselves right now, our present spiritual state, the place from which we will begin our new journey. Our place is discovered by us through reflection and revelation, through our faith tradition and other faithful people. The answer to Where? is here. The answer to What? is this new thing God is doing in us, it is our new course. It is our choice and plan for renewal and rededication to God. The answer to When? we have from Lancelot Andrews as I mentioned last week. He said we must repent Now! Now is the time, but now and forever too, since we have concluded that this must be an ongoing process. The answer to When? is during this Lenten season and during every other season in which we are still graced with life. And so answers to the How? and the Why? are all that we lack. I am not exactly certain where we shall find ourselves when we have answered all five questions, but surely we can t stop here! How to go about living the passion, it seems to me, is a relatively easy question to answer. We have so many opportunities through our Anglo-Catholic faith tradition and our church home, The Parish of All Saints. Some of these we are engaged in this very night. The Stations of the Cross, for example, are intended for just this purpose. We travel the Via Dolorosa, the way of grief, in order to experience empathically His passion, and to make reparation for the sufferings and insults that Jesus endured on Golgatha and on the endless crosses upon which he continues to be crucified. Our traditional practices during Lent, such as devotion, reflection, sacrifice, and charity or service to others are also ways in which we attempt to live the passion. A very beautiful and long-standing way to engage with the passion is through the ancient tradition of Lectio Divina. This practice is a way of engaging with the Scriptures (in this case the Passion Narratives,) that is intended to enable the Word of God to become for us a means of union with Him. In its present form, this tradition comes down to us from the Benedictine monastics, and has four parts: reading, meditation, prayer, and contemplation.

4 1) The reading is a careful and intimate reading in which we gently attempt to hear the still, small voice of God speaking to us through His Word. 2) In the meditation, we settle on a word or passage from the scripture that seems particularly to stand out to us, and we cogitate, that is we intently ponder or carefully deliberate on it. In this part of the tradition, we may find it useful to apply our senses to our deliberation try to see with your mind s eye, to feel, smell, hear or touch the details of the scripture. Try to feel the cold, and the wet grass as you agonize with Jesus in the garden. Some memorize and repeat the word or phrase over and over until they are moved to prayer. 3) For the prayer, we engage in a dialog or loving conversation with God who has invited us into this embrace, and we open ourselves through this scripture and the fruits of our meditation to be touched and changed by God. 4) In the final part, the contemplation, we simply rest in the presence of God, we allow God to come upon us and we silently rest in relation to Him. These are moments outside of experience and outside of time, wordless moments, in which we open our entire being to God without distraction and simply be with the I am. I have found that prayers approached this way were some of the deepest, most quiet and intimate times I have ever spent in the presence of God. Like Elijah in 1 Kings 19:11-13, in the midst of all the noise and distraction of our experiences, in our times of doubt and fear, we listen for and hear the loving and guiding voices of God. And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord. And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice. And when Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. And behold there came a voice to him, and said, What are you doing here, Elijah? A small Still voice! Can you hear it? Well, once again I do not believe that this is a complete list of the ways we can attempt to live the passion during Lent. I would like to think this tradition of sharing thoughts with one another, as in our reflection tonight, can also help to prepare us for union with Christ. Our liturgical celebrations during Lent, and even more patently our Holy Week practices are also examples of the way we attempt to live the passion. It seems to me that if we can be more intentional, more intimate, and more receptive performing all these acts, we can enter into a closer union than ever before.

5 And so we are left with the last of our W s, the Why? In his poem Death & Transfiguration, Paul Mariani, of Boston College talks about a painting of Raphael, his final work, which is a painting of the Transfiguration commissioned by Giulio de Medici for some French Cathedral. This is the Medici who became Pope Clement VII. The poem is about a visit Mariani made to the Church of the Transfiguration in lower Galilee which sits atop Mount Tabor and was built in 1924 by the Franciscans above a 6 th Century ruin. He describes that, in the lower corner of the painting a bystander overlooking an epileptic youth seems have comprehended the same strange thing that Raphael did in composing the picture. He seems to know that the youth has somehow come upon a Mystery. The poem reads: Like us, he has been bound round with fear, and only the One descending [the transfigured Christ]as he comes can sound those depths of cosmic light and dark, in which the young man writhes honeystuck in death, though he will the gospel says be raised again to health and to his father, in this prologue to the resurrection. That s it, then, it would seem: first the old fears descending, then dejection And the dunning sameness in the daily going round and round of things. Then a light like ten thousand suns that flames the brain and brings another kind of death with it, and then once more the daily round again. But changed now by what the blind beseeching eye has found. The answer to Why live the Passion? is revealed very nicely to us in this poem. Lent is our prologue to the Resurrection, to Transfiguration. The extent to which we can craft an appropriately generous response to God s love is critically dependent on our ability to empathically join our own suffering to the suffering of Jesus who became man for our sake. We join our sufferings to Christ s so that we can emerge with Him on Easter morning, in His triumphal victory over death. As Mariani said, we go from our daily round and round, through the passion of our own pain united with His, right back into our daily round. But in the process we are changed, transfigured with Him now able to see what the blind beseeching eye sees.

6 If we can recognize our own blindness and beg, beseech, God for the Truth, we too can be changed and transformed. The descending, coming, figure in Raphael s painting is the Transfigured Christ, coming in Glory and Victory. Like the epileptic boy, we too can be raised again to health and to our Father, in this prologue to the resurrection. To be saved from fire by fire, as Eliot said in Little Gidding. We immerse ourselves in this refining fire of the passion, nel foco che gli affina, in order to arise from the ashes, another kind of death as Mariani called it, into the light of a new life. Lent is our prologue to Victory which is the subject of our next and last reflection next Wednesday.