Fourth Sunday of Lent
-
March 11, 2018We are closely approaching our time of liturgical immersion in the passion and death of Christ, and it seems fitting to me that we are also approaching the sixth and seventh steps of humility, the steps that seem to express most fully a monk’s resemblance to Jesus in the depths of his poverty, humility, struggle and apparent failure.
The Fathers speak of the active life and the contemplative life, not in the sense of apostolic works versus prayer but in the sense of a stage of growth in the spiritual life that requires much effort and positive choices as contrasted with a more passive stage in which God does much of the work in us like a Divine Physician performing a delicate surgery---an experience in which the obscurity we experience could easily be compared to anesthesia. Michael Casey, too, in his book “Truthful Living,” indicates that the sixth and seventh steps are involved with abasement and that abasement comes almost naturally to one who has a certain level of spiritual experience, but can be very unhealthy for someone without sufficient experience or interior readiness.
Of course, the abasement in question is abasement in union with Christ. I remember Mother Marion once saying something to the effect that there’s nothing so irksome as listening to someone else’s success story. What tends to help us more than anything else is to hear what the other had to go through to get to where he or she now is. In one of St. Bernard’s most beautiful prayers he expresses this: “What wonder would it have been, Lord Jesus, if when that hour came for which you were born into the world, you had shown yourself full of fortitude, since you had power to lay down your life and no man was able to take it from you? Far more glorious was it---considering that everything was done for our sakes---to conduct yourself in such a manner that not alone the sufferings of your body but also the feelings of your heart should serve to promote our interests: that as your death vivified us, so should your fears fortify us, your sadness rejoice us, your weariness refresh us, your agitation calm us, your desolation console us.”
Fears, sadness, weariness, agitation, desolation. A person who is inside the sixth step of humility, the essence of which is contentment in God even though one may be in the midst of the poorest and worst, resembles the suffering Christ so much. So also does the person who is inside the seventh step of humility, the essence of which is profound conviction of one’s poverty before God. “I am a worm and no man.” We love to be with such people and we have a certain awe in their presence---an awe before their depth and their freedom from dependence on security, achievement and reputation. That is why St. Francis is so extraordinarily loved, I believe. Let us listen again to those words we heard not so long ago, words which echo his thoughts about holiness and which express the heart of abasement in the sixth and seventh steps of humility. They certainly shine a clear light on St. Benedict’s sense of the poor and worthless workman of the sixth step:
“Suddenly Francis turned toward him with an expression of loving kindness. ‘Yes, Brother Leo,’ he said with grave calm, ‘people are not great until they rise above their work to see God alone. It is only then that they reach their full stature. But that is difficult to do---so very difficult…To follow the call of God, people give themselves to a project enthusiastically, passionately. That is good, even necessary, for such enthusiasm is creative. However, to create something is to put one’s mark on it, to declare it one’s own irrefutably. The servant of God then runs the greatest danger…This is the tragic moment when the religious life borders on despair, when a person struggles all alone in the night with the intangible. A person believed that it would be sufficient to do this or that in order to be pleasing to God. But now everything is turned against them. People are not saved by works, however good they may be, but rather, they themselves have to become the work of God. They must make themselves more formless and malleable in the hands of the Creator than clay is in the hands of the potter…They must be more desolate and abandoned than the dead wood of the forest in the heart of winter. Only by starting from this pitiful condition and avowing complete poverty of spirit can people offer a boundless trust to God, confiding to God the absolute initiative of their existence and of their salvation.’”
Using the words of Benedict in the sixth and seventh steps, it is contentment in the midst of the poorest and worst of everything and total faith in God in the midst of one’s absolute poverty that a person finally becomes the work of God, finally becomes like Jesus from the inside out.