The only thing to be done now,
now that the waves of our undoing have begun to strike on us,
is to contain ourselves.

To keep still, and let the wreckage of ourselves go,
let everything go, as the wave smashes us,
yet keep still, and hold
the tiny grain of something that no wave can wash away,
not even the most massive wave of destiny.

Among all the smashed debris of myself,
Keep quiet, and wait.
For the word is Resurrection.
And even the sea of seas will have to give up its dead.

D. H. Lawrence, “Be Still!” D. H. Lawrence: Complete Poems,
Edited by Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren F. Roberts

What are our own waves of undoing? What are the waves that feel as if they would smash us into oblivion?

• Exterior circumstances beyond our control?
• Profound loss, grief?
• Personal attitudes?
• Illness?
• Deep interior wounds?
• Discouragement or fear?
• Our own weakness or sinfulness?
• Aging or diminishment?

D. H. Lawrence says that the only thing to be done is to contain ourselves.  If this is so, how are we to contain ourselves?

Does this mean giving up on life?  No, not at all.  Does it mean adopting a fortress mentality – walling ourselves round about so that nothing can touch us?  No, just the contrary, I believe.

It means turning to what is most vital and most true to ourselves.

According to the poet, when we are feeling helpless against the waves of destiny, we must:

…keep still, and let the wreckage of ourselves go,
let everything go, as the wave smashes us,
yet keep still, and hold
the tiny grain of something that no wave can wash away,
not even the most massive wave of destiny.

When the ship we are on is sinking, we do not weigh ourselves down with stacks of old magazines or a closetful of clothes and shoes. If the house is on fire, we do not dally long enough to carry out the rubbish or even to pile up our favorite books or retrieve the jewelry.  We hold to nothing but the essential.

This “tiny grain of something” can only be the essential core of ourselves, what we have named in a Cenacle assembly as the mystical dimension of our life – that part of ourselves both as individuals and as corporate body that knows God, that is never apart from God, that sees God face to face even when our conscious life perceives nothing and is overwhelmed by the waves, even as we tumble over and over helplessly on the dark shore. Here the Holy Spirit prays in us and intercedes for us (see Romans 8). It is in this tiny grain that we are who we truly are.

LIke the widow’s mite (Mark 12), this grain may seem of little account, but in reality it represents all we are and all we have.  So we must let the “wreckage of ourselves go,” be still, and claim nothing but this indestructible grain.

• It is in this quintessential kernel of being that we are able to “keep quiet and wait,” though there may appear to be nothing left to wait for;
• It is here that sighs and murmurs, creakings and groans, once fearful, do not foretell destruction, but Resurrection;
• It is from this core that the Spirit at times surprises us with glimpses of beauty or goodness.

It is this tiny grain:

• that whispers in us that in all things God works for good with those who love God (Romans 8:28);
• that reveals to us that while our own love for God and neighbor is insufficient, we may love rightly and serve well from that same central grain through which we love with the love of Christ.

In truth each of us is being undone in one way or another.  If nothing else manages to undo us, time and age most certainly will accomplish the task.  The only tragic outcome would be not to yield to our remaking through that “tiny grain of something,” through the mystical core of ourselves where God is known.

Get away from yourself.
Come to church.

“Why would I want to get away from myself?” I think. “I’m the only self I have.”

Then I remember what Huston Smith says about the early Christians. He reflects that in spite of the danger they often found themselves in, they seemed happy. They had about them a radiance that was puzzling to others. The explanation, he says, lies in the fact that “three intolerable burdens had suddenly and dramatically been lifted from believers’ shoulders”:

1. “The first of these was fear, including the fear of death…”
2. “The second burden they had been released from was guilt…”
3. “The third release the early Christians experienced was from the cramping confines of the ego.” *

The “cramping confines of the ego”

The ego can not only cramp us, it can also be a tyrant. We may find ourselves trapped in a false self that is hungry for more of everything—more power, more esteem, more money, more diversion, more accomplishments, a more beautiful body, more, more, more… We can be deceived into thinking these are the things that give us joy. And no matter how much we acquire or accomplish, the tyrant is never satisfied.

Any of these “mores” can usurp the place of God in our lives. Or we can yield to the “more” of trying to make of ourselves little gods — which in reality is a twisted temptation, because as it turns out, our Christian call is already to be “participants in the divine nature” (see 2 Peter 1:3-4).

Participants in the divine nature

What an amazing thought! The false self, however, is not crazy about the idea of our being participants in the divine nature, for this wondrous gift must be accepted in a way that is alien to societal norms.

The seductive and absurd premise of the wildly popular book, The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne, is one that flatters the false self. There we are told, “You are the master of the Universe… You are the perfection of Life… your whole life and everything in it has been created by You.” (Notice the capital Y.)

Unlike The Secret, the Bible calls us to take on the mind of Jesus, who “did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave” (Philippians 2:7). Jesus, who would have had reason, we might think, to cling to equality with God, was free from the “cramping confines of the ego.”

The paradox is that the false self tries to be God, while our true self, found in God and participating in the divine nature, is the very soul of humility.

Continually turned toward God

In 1864, Saint Therese Couderc, the co-founder of the Cenacle, pondered the key to peace and joy, which she saw as surrendering oneself totally to God, as Jesus did. “In a word,” she wrote, “to surrender oneself is to die to everything and to self, to be no longer concerned with self except to keep it continually turned toward God.”

Of course being “no longer concerned with self” does not mean neglecting either our bodies or our spirits, both so precious to God. We are to nourish our bodies with wholesome food and nourish our minds and our souls with knowledge and prayer. But even as we care for ourselves, we are to be “continually turned toward God,” allowing God to transform us, so that our whole being, growing in the divine compassion and mercy, reflects our union with God. This is the only way to be happy and to be free of the domination of that perfidious false self.

For freedom Christ has set us free.
Stand firm, therefore,
and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.
(Galatians 5:1)

__________

* Huston Smith, The Soul of Christianity: Restoring the Great Tradition (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), 79-81.

“Enoch choices.”

I immediately woke up.

“Enoch choices?” I repeated. “What on earth does that mean?”

So, remembering that Enoch was mentioned in the Bible, I decided to look him up, and what I found was not one, but two Enochs. The first was the son of Cain (that child of Adam and Eve who committed the first murder), and the second was the descendant of Abel (the son who was murdered).

Concerning the first Enoch Genesis says that his father “built a city, and named it Enoch after his son Enoch” (4:17).

So Enoch had a city named after him, a sure way, you would think, to have your name remembered. The possibilities boggle the mind. There could be an Enoch City Hall, Enoch Theater, Enoch Public Library, Enoch Post Office, and on and on.

However, there is a second Enoch who appears briefly in the next chapter of Genesis. This Enoch figures in the genealogy beginning with Adam and ending with the sons of Noah. He was the father of Methuselah, known for longevity. But what is most remarkable about this Enoch is stated in one verse:

“Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him” (5:24).

What happened to Enoch? The verse is very mysterious. Unlike the first Enoch, whose name would today have been emblazoned in neon throughout his city, this Enoch seems to have disappeared. It is about this Enoch that the book of Hebrews says, “By faith Enoch was taken so that he did not experience death; and ‘he was not found, because God had taken him.’” (11:5).

The first Enoch had a city named after him. The second disappeared into God. Here were the choices. Was I going to build a city for myself, construct a monument to my own name, focus on my own glory? Or was I going to walk with God and fade from view, so that the glory and the name were God’s not mine? As John the Baptist said when his disciples complained that people now were turning to Jesus instead of to John: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30).

The 20th century mystic Raïssa Maritain wrote, “…we have, under the action of grace and through the travail of the soul, to leave our bounded heart for the boundless heart of God. This is truly dying to ourselves” (Raïssa’s Journal). Isn’t this what the second Enoch did, when he walked with God and was found no more?

From time to time over the years, those two words, “Enoch choices,” come back to me, to remind me, to challenge me, and sometimes to convict me.

So don’t think you can avoid anything by falling asleep during your prayer.

Not to us, O Lord, not to us,
but to your name give glory,
for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness.
(Psalm 115:1)

“Boundless Heart” image created from NASA’s Galaxy Cluster 1E 0657-556, courtesy of NASA and STScI

I love the prairie! So often I have seen the dawn come and the light flood over the land and everything turn radiant at once, that word “good” so profoundly affirmed in my soul that I am amazed I should be allowed to witness such a thing.

Our Cenacle foundress Saint Therese Couderc also knew that radiance. For her too, the word “good” was profoundly affirmed in her soul. She had a vision in which she saw the goodness of everything around her, and learned that God has communicated to all creation “something of his infinite goodness, so that we may meet it in everything and everywhere.”

I believe that one thing the Ascension of Jesus shows us is the goodness of earthly existence, indeed the radiance of human life.

As Karl Rahner points out, Jesus has not only ascended to heaven, but he has taken us with him! In this Rahner is following Paul who writes in Ephesians:

God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. (2:4-7)

Because Jesus has taken us with him, all that is proper to our human existence has become radiant. Nothing in the humanity which we share with Jesus is left to languish: neither our loves, nor the delight we have in the things of creation, nor our diminishment as we age, nor our disappointments, nor our pain. Nothing is wasted.

The radiance is often hidden, but occasionally we are vouchsafed a glimpse of what is really there, sometimes through simple occurrences and very small encounters. While ordinarily everything may seem solid and stolid to us, revealing nothing more than a surface reality, in those privileged moments events and people appear as if translucent, letting the glory that is theirs in Christ shine through.

If we are not paying, attention, however, we may not notice the beauty spread out before us:

• - A neglected plant in a pot abandoned outside the kitchen blooms through hurricanes and drought.

• - A student is returning to her homeland this summer to work for the destitude, in spite of the dangers of the political situation there.

• - The homeless woman who comes by our house expresses her longing for a real lodging, then prays, “But more of Jesus and less of me.”

Truly we should be amazed, like the narrator in Gilead, that we are allowed to witness such things.