Then we read: "Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to John, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying 'I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?' But Jesus answered him, 'Let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.' Then John consented." God asks our consent when he takes our part by taking our place.
Later, on the night before he was betrayed, Jesus poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet. He came to Peter and Peter said, "Lord, do you wash my feet?" Jesus answered, "What I am doing you do not know now, but afterward you will understand." Peter declared, "You shall never wash my feet." Jesus said, "If I do not wash you, you have no part in me." He will not serve us against our will. - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon
I read of a recently converted prison inmate who was so determined to share the Good News he'd found with his fellow prisoners that he initially literally fought with one of them to try to get him to accept the Gospel. God doesn't work like that. It isn't that God requires our permission, but that God loves us too deeply to work in our lives without it.
We aren't that way, because we don't love as selflessly as God loves. If things aren't going the way we think they should, we'll try manipulating things to get our way, controlling people's feelings and responses, pulling their strings.
We misunderstand God's intentions. We still insist on thinking that God is a spoilsport who wants to limit our fun and make us miserable. Knowing what it is in our lives that we are unwilling to give up, we convince ourselves that God's desire is to deprive us of that thing. We do not see how the treasure to which we cling is worthless, and cannot fathom the joy and the love that we forsake so that we might hang onto it, while God patiently waits for us to consent that he may take our place.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Dark adolescent nights
He was a year younger than me (turns out to be two). I don't know what he knew, but I suspect that we were probably about equally ignorant. I didn't understand why what we were doing was wrong, exactly. I knew it was private, but as a very sheltered fourteen-year-old, I don't think I grasped that it was sexual, or maybe I just didn't have a sense yet of what that would really mean. Still, I was certain to the core that it was wrong; my dad had made absolutely sure I understood that a few years earlier. I don't think I knew that our actions would be considered any more forbidden than that sort of contact with a girl would have been. When his older sister and, the following year, his brother my age, would accuse us of "being queer" with each other, I had no idea what that specifically meant, beyond being an insult implying strangeness. My chief familiarity with that word was from Robert Frost. And we didn't much try to hide what we were doing from the other boys by going off by ourselves somewhere, so we clearly thought of it more as "naughty" than "shameful." Neither of us understood the cause of the moisture that would dampen us after a while; we accused one another of urinating, as each of us knew that he hadn't. Again, I can't speak for him, but from my perspective we were just playing around in the dark, passing the time, and . . . and what? Indulging our curiosity? There was certainly no sense of attraction there (though, in hindsight, he was much better looking than I ever was), no sort of penetration, just mutual contact with each other and, for my part, no interpretation of our contact as being a form of sex, exactly - the idea of that wouldn't have appealed me, and not just because of the same-sex factor - so much as just something taboo. There was an air of the excitement of the forbidden.
Before the week was over, we kids would spend a sleepless plains night outside under that impossible canopy of stars, imploring the God whom I conceived of as being beyond them to please, somehow let my dad be okay. Mom had informed us of his mysterious, suddenly critical condition back home, which was taking us back from vacation sooner and faster than we'd planned. As we kids prayed together, I added a silent, desperate, hopeless intention that the wrong I'd been doing wouldn't be an obstacle to our prayers being heard, certain in my heart that it was. Dad had been his normal self when we left, but I knew his condition must be grave: why else would my aunt, uncle, cousins and grandparents be coming with us? (Did they all come the whole way? Or was it just dad's parents who flew home with us? I can't remember.) I didn't know then that our prayers had already been answered in the way that was probably best for a youngster living in the shadow of his dad's alcoholism. He was already dead, and mom was just waiting until we'd completed the trip back home - the four hour drive to Wichita, the flight(s?) from there to Baltimore; the return train ride she had planned was now out of the picture - to tell us. "Cerebral hemorrhage" was the intimidating medical term she served us to cut off our questions. It would be another couple years before she'd explain to me that his cranial bleeding was caused by the small, high-speed projectile of lead that he'd fired into his brain; it seems to me that she probably shared that some months before she informed me that he wasn't my biological father.
Maybe these two paragraphs, these two major events of my childhood, should never have gotten connected in my mind and in my gut. But I now realize that, because of their proximity in time and significance and location, they've always been linked in my unconscious mind, and probably inextricably so. I've examined different parts of this time in therapy, and have a far more mature theology, yet haven't managed to fully separate them. I wonder if it would have been better or worse for me if mom had been more open about dad's death when she told us he was critically sick? Would I have still felt as if his death was my fault, that my prayers weren't answered because of the gravity of my sin? If so, would I have perhaps attributed it more to his long-term disappointment over my shortcomings as a son and a (non-)athlete than to my perceived sins in the dark that week?
Oh, those are utterly useless questions. But the recent death of my dear uncle, his dad, who treated me with such compassion after my dad's death so long ago, has brought all of this to mind in a way I wasn't prepared for. I hope my cousin isn't as haunted by those nights as I am.
Before the week was over, we kids would spend a sleepless plains night outside under that impossible canopy of stars, imploring the God whom I conceived of as being beyond them to please, somehow let my dad be okay. Mom had informed us of his mysterious, suddenly critical condition back home, which was taking us back from vacation sooner and faster than we'd planned. As we kids prayed together, I added a silent, desperate, hopeless intention that the wrong I'd been doing wouldn't be an obstacle to our prayers being heard, certain in my heart that it was. Dad had been his normal self when we left, but I knew his condition must be grave: why else would my aunt, uncle, cousins and grandparents be coming with us? (Did they all come the whole way? Or was it just dad's parents who flew home with us? I can't remember.) I didn't know then that our prayers had already been answered in the way that was probably best for a youngster living in the shadow of his dad's alcoholism. He was already dead, and mom was just waiting until we'd completed the trip back home - the four hour drive to Wichita, the flight(s?) from there to Baltimore; the return train ride she had planned was now out of the picture - to tell us. "Cerebral hemorrhage" was the intimidating medical term she served us to cut off our questions. It would be another couple years before she'd explain to me that his cranial bleeding was caused by the small, high-speed projectile of lead that he'd fired into his brain; it seems to me that she probably shared that some months before she informed me that he wasn't my biological father.
Maybe these two paragraphs, these two major events of my childhood, should never have gotten connected in my mind and in my gut. But I now realize that, because of their proximity in time and significance and location, they've always been linked in my unconscious mind, and probably inextricably so. I've examined different parts of this time in therapy, and have a far more mature theology, yet haven't managed to fully separate them. I wonder if it would have been better or worse for me if mom had been more open about dad's death when she told us he was critically sick? Would I have still felt as if his death was my fault, that my prayers weren't answered because of the gravity of my sin? If so, would I have perhaps attributed it more to his long-term disappointment over my shortcomings as a son and a (non-)athlete than to my perceived sins in the dark that week?
Oh, those are utterly useless questions. But the recent death of my dear uncle, his dad, who treated me with such compassion after my dad's death so long ago, has brought all of this to mind in a way I wasn't prepared for. I hope my cousin isn't as haunted by those nights as I am.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
The verdict is in
The angels were stunned, the stars hid their light, the universe went silent at the audacity of it, the wrongness of it, the outrageousness of it. The Judge of the guilty is himself judged guilty. Here now at last, in all the thick catalogue of human rebellion, is the lie so brazen as to surely bring down upon the heads of the insurrectionists a punishment swift and terrible. But no, the prisoner standing in the dock calmly responds, "For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice." - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon
The judgment to which Fr. Neuhaus refers is not merely the judgment carried out upon Jesus of Nazareth. He spends a couple pages developing the idea of how we conclude that we are not to blame for the wrong in the world, and that therefor God is guilty, or nonexistent. But our audacious judgment meets its match in Jesus' willingness to accept it.
But how, we must ask, is God glorified by the humiliation and death of God? This great reversal of everything we think we know is too much to bear. Dark is light and light is dark, right is wrong and wrong is right and a lie is recruited to the service of the truth. The order of things is shattered. Precisely so, our disordered order is shattered so that things might be restored to order. - ibid.
I'm not sure we've ever been so insistent on our own idea of order, on the rightness of how we understand the world to be, on fairness as we insist it must be, on our right to determine for ourselves (and impose upon others) what is really right, as we find ourselves in this day. God will not insist on restoring order for us. As long as we insist that we know best, we will be allowed to continue in our disordered order. But if, gazing upon the injustice of Jesus on the cross, we quietly consider why a just God might have accepted it even though it was so exemplifyingly unfair, perhaps we get humble enough to reject the logic that screams how justice must be, and that any opposing voice - no matter how tender - is that of oppression, and must be silenced.
The judgment to which Fr. Neuhaus refers is not merely the judgment carried out upon Jesus of Nazareth. He spends a couple pages developing the idea of how we conclude that we are not to blame for the wrong in the world, and that therefor God is guilty, or nonexistent. But our audacious judgment meets its match in Jesus' willingness to accept it.
But how, we must ask, is God glorified by the humiliation and death of God? This great reversal of everything we think we know is too much to bear. Dark is light and light is dark, right is wrong and wrong is right and a lie is recruited to the service of the truth. The order of things is shattered. Precisely so, our disordered order is shattered so that things might be restored to order. - ibid.
I'm not sure we've ever been so insistent on our own idea of order, on the rightness of how we understand the world to be, on fairness as we insist it must be, on our right to determine for ourselves (and impose upon others) what is really right, as we find ourselves in this day. God will not insist on restoring order for us. As long as we insist that we know best, we will be allowed to continue in our disordered order. But if, gazing upon the injustice of Jesus on the cross, we quietly consider why a just God might have accepted it even though it was so exemplifyingly unfair, perhaps we get humble enough to reject the logic that screams how justice must be, and that any opposing voice - no matter how tender - is that of oppression, and must be silenced.
Behind
As a result of traveling by air over the weekend, I have about 4 pages marked in Death on a Friday Afternoon to come back to and write about. The last time I tried something like that I couldn't figure out what it was that I'd found so noteworthy. I sure hope I don't have that problem this time!
Who I am
It's really nice when an intimidating thing you discover (remember) about yourself underscores who you are rather than undermining it, especially when you've always avoided it for fear it would do the latter.
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