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With a Little Help from My Friends

May 27th, 2010 by Cybernun

This has been a wonderful season for flowers. The Easter lilies in our yard, though, bloom weeks after Easter Day has come and gone.

As they were growing this year, I noticed that one especially tall plant was leaning precariously toward the sidewalk. I knew I would have to stake it, if it were not to topple over onto the concrete. But I procrastinated, and as it grew and the buds got larger and heavier, I wondered why it was still upright. So one day I walked over to take a look.

What I saw was both simple and wonderful. The nearby cabbage palm had caught the lily in a loop of fiber and held it up – an almost invisible support. (When you see the pictures, you might think that I had tied a string to the lily, but it was all done without any human intervention.)

We have been witness lately, directly or indirectly, to enormous disruption and destruction: war, earthquakes, volcano, a cataclysmic oil spill. Is this disharmony within nature (including human nature) the ultimate reality, we may ask?

No. I am convinced that each small glimpse of beauty or harmony is a pledge of the beauty and harmony at the heart of all things.

“I get by with a little help from my friends,” sang the Beatles. And so do we all, whether we know it or not – even if we think we have no friends. This interdependence, which we human beings (or perhaps more to the point, we lift-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstrap-Americans) tend to forget, is part of the loveliness of creation.

Saint Ignatius of Loyola might agree with the Beatles on this point: we do somehow make it through life with the help of both human and non-human friends. During the First Week of the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, there is an intense awareness of personal sinfulness and also an awareness of the blessed relationship between the sinner and the rest of creation:

Ignatius speaks of “a cry of wonder accompanied by surging emotion as I pass in review all creatures. How is it that they have permitted me to live, and have sustained me in life! Why have the angels, though they are the sword of God’s justice, tolerated me, guarded me, and prayed for me! Why have the saints interceded for me and asked favours for me! And the heavens, sun, moon, stars, and the elements; the fruits, birds, fishes and other animals–why have they all been at my service!

The spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius, trans. by Louis J. Puhl, S.J. (Chicago: Loyola, 1951) [60].

The deeper reality at the core of creation is not our sinfulness, nor the very real pain and disturbances that can shake us to the core, nor the sorrows that can weigh on us until we feel we must break apart – but the beauty and harmony of God, as experienced in the communion of God’s holy creatures.

We get by, in spite of everything, even in spite of death, by the grace of God – and like the lily, with a little help from our friends.

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Come, Holy Spirit

May 21st, 2010 by Cybernun

COME, HOLY SPIRIT,
companion in our waiting
wisdom in our unknowing
comfort in our grief.

Should we be groping in darkness,
may it be only your cloud
overshadowing us
to bring us to birth.

Should our hearts shrink in fear,
send your tongues of fire
to make them bold.

And when the familiar has lost its welcome,
then breathe us into your future,
and be there
waiting to embrace us.

AMEN.

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Blessed Obscurity

May 5th, 2010 by Cybernun

In our Christian life, we encounter light (see “You Are Light“) – and also darkness.  But take note: there is more than one kind of darkness. There is a darkness that is not from God, the darkness of evil and sin.  This darkness we want to avoid like the plague.

And there is a darkness that is in reality light, but in our limited perception, it seems dark to us. This is a darkness that is as necessary for our growth and spiritual health as nighttime darkness is necessary for some plants to bloom.

This we may call a blessed darkness, a holy darkness.

It may be experienced simply as not being able to see or understand, because we are human Atelier Ten Tails Dreamingand the realm of God is the realm of Holy Mystery. While God is closer to us than we are to ourselves, God is also Other.  God is not like us.  “My thoughts are not your thoughts,” God tells us, “nor are your ways my ways” (Isaiah 55:8).   Sometimes we are given the grace to see how God is working in our lives and to experience in our prayer the light of God’s presence.  But often we can’t see.

One form of this darkness is the experience of waiting on God.

We see an important example of this near the end of the Easter season, after the Ascension of Jesus into heaven.   For a time, the disciples and friends of Jesus, along with Mary his mother, must wait in holy darkness.

Jesus has left them.  At least it seems that way.  Luke tells us in the first chapter of Acts that “a cloud took him out of their sight.”  Before leaving, Jesus had cautioned his disciples “not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father.”  So they go to the Upper Room, the Cenacle, and pray together.  They don’t know what they are supposed to do otherwise.  They don’t know what their mission is to be.  They don’t know how they are supposed to deal with the lack of Jesus’ visible presence in their lives.

This is the holy darkness of waiting in prayer. It means waiting in total dependence on God, since they are helpless on their own to bring about that for which they long.  This is the blessed darkness of Mystery, an obscurity that in reality is the Light and presence of Christ in newness, though experienced as absence and as emptiness and as unknowing, because it can’t yet be perceived until the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost.

There is a necessary waiting that brings us face to face with our own weakness and need and desire for God, and with the fact that we can’t control God or save ourselves.  It is a waiting that removes our conceit, along with any pride in our spiritual experiences.  We then accept the obscurity of this prayer as sacred, for when we are truly waiting on God, the unknowing that feels like darkness is filled with the invisible light of Christ.

God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.
(1 John 1:5)

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You Are Light

Apr 19th, 2010 by Cybernun

For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.  Live as children of light…
Ephesians 5:8

When I was a child, my dad, who taught aerospace engineering, would talk to me about “time dilation,” which I still find fascinating these many years later.

I learned that you could start out on a space ship to a distant planet and be away for a only a few years; but when you got home, everyone you knew would be long dead and gone, because time would have slowed down for you in relation to how they were experiencing time on earth.  Time, for a moving object – or a moving person – slows down more and more the closer the speed of the object approaches the speed of light.

Star Trek never seemed to me to take this into account in its adventures.  But in case you’re a Trekkie, I just learned that the Warp Drive on the spaceship Enterprise somehow creates an artificial time-space bubble that solves the problem.

Back on this earth, Einstein showed us that time is not constant.  Time is not an absolute.  It is light, the speed of light that is the constant (but even that is constant only in a vacuum).  And for a moving object, time theoretically would stop at the speed of light – if it were possible for it to reach the speed of light.

Light, not the speed, but light itself, rather than time, is the constant for us as Christians too, for Christ is our light. Christ is the light that never fails: unchanging, unwavering, undimmed.

What is more, we are called to become light.

In the gospel of John, we hear Jesus saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life” (8:12)

In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus says, “You are the light of the world. … let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven” (5:14, 16)

Being light is not automatic, however.  It doesn’t happen just because we call ourselves Christian.  If we are light, it is because we are united with Christ, our Light.  We are light because we walk in the light of Christ, even as we stumble and fall and let ourselves be raised up again.  We are light because we are growing in becoming who Christ is – growing in love, mercy, and compassion; becoming peacemakers; becoming comforters of those who mourn; becoming a healing presence, rather than one of division; taking on the mind and heart of Christ, so that our lives are radiant with the holy Light that dwells within us.

Watch Cybernun’s video illustrating the lyrics of the Russian hymn,
“God, You Are Clothed in Light“

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A Wounded Church at Easter

Apr 2nd, 2010 by Cybernun

Easter this year is a season of sorrow as well as joy for the Church.  We rejoice in the Resurrection of Christ.  At the same time we grieve because of the spreading revelations of sexual abuse of children by priests, and of bishops who have covered up the crimes.

We nod our heads when we read in the Gospel of Matthew:

Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me. (18:5)

Where do we find hope as members of this church whose leaders have too often not received the child as Christ?

Yes, we may reasonably ask why the media must focus on the Catholic Church, when respectable fathers of families travel to Indonesia and other countries to have sex with children, thereby supporting the lucrative human trafficking and child prostitution industries.  And when many others simply stay home and rape their own daughters.

It is undeniable that the Catholic Church is the organization that people love to hate.  However, in the Church we lay claim to a higher sort of life.  It is doubly shocking when persons who proclaim goodness are found to have wallowed in or abetted evil.  So perhaps the media can be forgiven for being particularly hard on those who represent the Church.

“Where was God?” countless victims ask.  “Where was God when I was being abused?”

We must not attempt a facile response, and indeed any words seem inadequate in the face of such heartache.  The only response, I believe – though it is not an answer to the question of why it happened – is that God was where God always is when the beloved is being betrayed and harmed: right there, in sorrow, in pain.  Right where God was when Jesus was being crucified.

As for a reason why, Christianity offers us no answer except for the reality of human freedom – a gift which is too often misused.

Sin, even when we think it is private, is always communal in its effects.  While those who have not been abused can never totally understand the experience of those who were, still we all share in some way – though a far lesser way to be sure – in the consequences of the evil.  We are a wounded Church this Easter season.

But if in the Crucifixion of Christ we are given a promise of presence – of a God who shares in the grief and pain – in the Resurrection we are also offered the assurance that evil does not have the last word.  Evil will never have the last word. In spite of all appearances to the contrary, the love, goodness, and holiness of God are stronger than even the most horrendous evil.

Do we just sit around and wait for that day when all tears will be wiped away?  No, of course not.  We must take strong, practical action to prevent abuse – and where possible to ease the suffering of those who have been abused – even if that means changing time-honored ecclesial structures.  And we must nurture the spiritual life, so as to grow in union with the Risen Christ, for this is the only way that the divine goodness and loving-kindness will be more clearly manifested in the daily life of the Church.

“By his holy and glorious wounds,
may Christ our Lord guard us and keep us.”

Preparation of the Paschal Candle at the Easter Vigil

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Posted in Easter, Grief, Suffering | 2 Comments »

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