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June 21, 2020“Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed, nor secret that will not be known.” (Mt 10:26)
This saying is difficult. The Greek words for “concealed/revealed” can also be translated ‘covered/uncovered’ or ‘veiled/unveiled’. We all like to be covered, both physically and psychologically. One need only call to mind the common occurrence of ‘being naked in public’ dreams. Psychologists tells us that, in order to function in society, we create for ourselves a persona, an outward projection or edited version of our self, to protect and camouflage our sensitive, often wounded or rejected inner self. We wear veils over our true selves, deceptively sheer, but apt to conceal imperfections. We all have secrets. Some may be like skeletons in our closet that we daren’t look at ourselves, never mind allow someone else to see. As a child I would sometimes think that everyone in heaven could see what was going on in my head – they may see good in me, but they would also see…something else. What could be more nightmarish than living in a fishbowl, with everyone party to our innermost thoughts, feelings, dreams and dreads?
If there is one religious concept that has us trembling in our boots, it is judgment. Gerhard Lohfink’s wonderful book, Is this All there Is?: On Resurrection and Eternal Life, contains this description of judgment:
“Above all, it is disclosure. Before God, the absolutely Holy One, nothing remains hidden. Everything is revealed. Everything comes to light: the individual’s concealed and private thoughts, the silent and hidden deeds, even the things that have never been spoken about, never reported, never judged—even things the perpetrators did not know about because they were buried deep in the cellars of their souls.” (Lohfink, Is this All there Is?, p.149)
Such a searching of inner thoughts and motivations could scarcely leave anyone with their dignity intact. The “uncovering” of which the gospel speaks, this apocalyptic revealing of the inside of things, is surely a fearsome prospect. “For while we are still in this tent, we groan under our burden, because we wish not to be unclothed but to be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life” (2 Cor 5:4).
And yet Jesus says: “Have no fear.”
Is he speaking only to the immaculate ones, those irreproachable in deed, word or thought, those with no secrets, for whom judgment holds no terror?
“The Lord looks down from heaven upon the children of men,
To see if even one is wise, if even one seeks God.
All have gone astray; all alike are perverse.
Not one does what is good, not even one.” (Ps 14:2-3)
Pessimistic as this assessment of the human condition may sound, it is not inaccurate. Even saints have sinned. Even martyrs have prevaricated. Who among us has never acted self-indulgently, refused the help that could be given, or given way to the temptation to pass off our pain on another? And what of all the sins of the world, great and small, and the atrocities known and unknown which cry out for justice? The question is not whether we have fallen, whether judgment is needed to restore justice to the world and each person, but who is this Lord who looks down on us, and how does he look?
“Let a man consider
that God is always looking at him from heaven,
that his actions are everywhere visible to the divine eyes
and are constantly being reported to God by the Angels.” (RB 7)
As a novice studying the Rule of St Benedict, I reflected a good deal on why we find the repeated emphasis on God’s vigilant omnipresence frightening or threatening. Indeed, if we think of God as being like Big Brother in George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, we have reason to be afraid. Big Brother, the personification of a totalitarian regime known as “the Party,” watches citizens by means of surveillance cameras for any sign of dissident activity, punishes offenders with unspeakable torture, and seeks to regulate speech and even thought according to its own self-perpetuating aims. Some people read this into Benedict’s Rule, into monastic or religious life in general, into the Church, or into any authority figure. Dystopian novels like Orwell’s serve as warnings, based on humanity’s experience of abuses of power in politics. This experience is real, on the macro scale of nations and states, but also on the micro scale of families and communities. We have been wounded in one way or another by those with authority over us. Those elected to represent us in government have failed us. Those who should have loved us unconditionally have failed us. Authority has failed us, and so we withdraw from it, once bitten, twice shy.
“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.” (Mt 10:29)
But such a view of authority does not do justice to St Benedict, to the gospel, to the God revealed in the scriptures. Benedict describes himself as the “loving father” who invites his children to come back by the road of obedience to the Father who welcomes them home. One may be put off by a reference to the “loving Father” becoming a “dread Lord,” but I suspect Benedict is pointing to the punitive figure that arises in the imagination of one with a wounded conscience. God does not watch in order to gather material for condemnation. “I swear I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live” (Ez 33:11). He is ever present, ever watching, waiting for any sign that his children have remembered him, ever calling out: “Is there anyone here who desires life?” (RB Prol.). I have come to treasure the verse: “Haec fecisti et tacui / This you did and I was silent” (RB 7:30-Ps. 49:21). This Father who watches over every sparrow as it falls watches over me too, when I fall. But he never gives up. He keeps watching, waiting, hoping and loving.
“The Father who sees in secret…” (Mt 6:4, 6, 18)
If we can believe in the Father who looks and listens and waits with love-longing, we may find ourselves less afraid of being seen in our nakedness and more willing to draw back the veil. We may even begin to desire it, to long for the all-seeing, all-knowing gaze of the Creator that reveals us to ourselves in goodness, truth and beauty. Lohfink goes on to emphasize the oft-neglected positive dimension of judgment:
“Also part of the judgement is our astonished joy at the goodness in our own lives and those of others…. When we encounter God in death we will for the first time recognize with full clarity who we really are…. And so the encounter with God in death will become an encounter with truth: the truth about God, about others, about the world, and above all the truth about ourselves. In that sense we can even hope for judgment, because truth is something in which we can rejoice. I hope for myself that for once clarity will appear in all the dark corners of my life: that, for example, I will learn what I have desired for my life at depth. I hope that confusions will be clarified and the tangled web of guilt and innocence will be unsnarled, that the true good will be visible, the ambiguous made clear, the only apparent good uncovered, and the evil in me exposed. I hope that everything that is pulling apart, scattering, and dividing my life will be gathered up and brought home. Clarity in the face of the all-penetrating truth of God has to be something altogether liberating—and probably it is precisely in that clarity that the unimaginable mercy of God is revealed.” (Lohfink, Is this All there Is?, pp.150, 151, 153)
We may then discover that there is treasure buried in there, among the skeletons. And even the skeletons might turn out to be places of encounter with the God who raises the dead.
