A Reflection for III Epiphany All Saints Church,
Southern Shores, NC
January 21, 2018 Thomas
E Wilson, Rector
“Go To Despair or Go Deeper”
Question: How did you
this week wait in silence for God?
You know, I have been looking over my work here as your
Rector, and I realize that I have gotten you so busy and I wonder if that has
been a good thing? One it can burn you out when you get so busy that you no
longer have time to and you have no energy for growth of your faith, and, two
we don’t spend enough time being still with our lover Jesus.
A friend of mine suggested I watch a webcast from the Center
for Action and Contemplation with James Findley speaking on The Dark Night
of the Soul, a poem by St. John of the Cross, a sixteenth century Spanish
Poet, Monk, Mystic and Spiritual Director. The poem has eight stanzas of five
lines apiece which is a description of what happens when the old Spiritual
Practices of being in God's presence just don't seem to work anymore and as
Findley says that it seems “like you have made an appointment with God and God
doesn't show up”. It is as that point he says that we have a choice of “going
into despair or going deeper.” He suggests that this point happens in all
relationships facing the empty moment. If we want to go deeper, we need to
begin to die to one's own ego of being in control in order to be fully in union
with the Other: going deeper is the seeking of lovers one for another. The poem
suggests God has done that for us in the person of Jesus, the loving emptying
of Godself to be in full union with creation and we in faithful response empty
ourselves.
Let me read you the first and last stanzas of the poem so
you can see and get a taste of the journey.
(http://poemsintranslation.blogspot.com/2009/09/saint-john-of-cross-dark-night-of-soul.html
)
Once in the dark of night,
Inflamed with love and yearning, I arose
(O coming of delight!)
And went, as no one knows,
When all my house lay long in deep repose
AND
I stayed there to forget.
There on my lover, face to face, I lay.
All ended, and I let
My cares all fall away Forgotten in the lilies on that day.
There on my lover, face to face, I lay.
All ended, and I let
My cares all fall away Forgotten in the lilies on that day.
John of the Cross wrote 2500 poems and I am only about 2400
behind him because I get too busy doing my own agenda. This particular poem is
shocking language for a Monk, but that is the point; for this deeply sensual
man wants union with God, full and complete joining with God so that he becomes
spiritually one with the Divine. It is in the same flavor as The Song of Songs in the Bible; on the
surface it is like an erotic love poem and as such it is shocking to many
people because we are more comfortable with having a distance from God. Many of
us like God to stay in God's heaven and be available only when we really,
really, need help. Some people tell me they come to church to “pay our respects
to God”. Paying respect to the authority, the head of the organization, the
impersonal ruler of the universe and to Mister Christ; no first names please
that would be presumptuous.
John of the Cross, a Spiritual Director, has to write two
books to explain what was behind this 40 line poem and how to live and move a
prayer life toward that goal of intimate union with God. The poem is not about
studying scripture or theology to find more about God in the third person, he,
she or it, or of going to do more ritual to get the dance right practicing for
the senior prom after we die, but of finding a way into silence WITH God.
The Psalmist for today sings: “For God alone, my soul in
silence waits . . . as we pour out our hearts, for God is our refuge.” Thomas
Merton wrote that in his silent prayer time he becomes a different person “Prayer becomes what it
ought to be. Everything is quiet. . . . Plenty of time. No Manuscripts, no
typewriters, no rushing back and forth to church, no Scriptorium, no breaking
your neck to get things done before the next thing happens.”
But the silence can itself be fearful. Merton
again writes:
God, my God, God whom I meet in darkness, with
You it is always the same thing! Always the same question that nobody
knows how to answer! I have prayed to You in the daytime with thoughts and
reasons, and in the nighttime You
have confronted me, scattering thought and
reason. I have come to You in the morning with light and with desire, and You have
descended upon me, with great gentleness, with most forbearing silence, in
this inexplicable night, dispersing
light, defeating all
desire. . . . Is it true that all my motives have meant nothing? Is ittrue that all my desires were an illusion ? While
I am asking questions which You do not answer, You ask me a question which is
so simple that I cannot answer. I do not even understand the question.
It is the emptying out of oneself in yearning for the other
and getting rid of all the things that get in our way and in that silence
returning the love that we know we have received by being alone with your lover
without an agenda or dealing with questions that we do not even understand. It
is God's love for us and his union with us in human form in Jesus that’s the
shocking thing for many people, what Paul would call a “scandal”.
The lessons for today are about the scandal of God. In the
Hebrew Testament story the teller of this metaphorical story wants to give us a
character named Jonah who is so scandalized by God asking him to go to Nineveh,
that great city, the home of Jonah's enemies, to tell them, people he feared
and hated with every fiber of his being, of God's love for them and asking that
they repent of the evil they are practicing and accept God's love. Jonah is so scandalized;
he enters into despair of this God’s promiscuous love that he runs away from as
far as he can. Then he ends up going deeper into the belly of the fish. Now for
desert people the belly of a fish is about as far away for the presence of God
as you can get or imagine; it is the dark night, and there in the dark Jonah finds
himself still sheltered by God. He finally agrees and does the job haphazardly
but everybody repents. This makes Jonah even madder and he walks away in a
sulk, but God keeps sheltering him. God, the lover keeps pouring out Godself on
Jonah who doesn’t want to receive it and on the people of Nineveh who don’t
deserve it.
Paul in his letter to the Corinthian’s excerpt for today he
urges to be aware that everything we worry about is passing away but they need
to empty themselves away for the things that define them and turn to their
lover alone. They can despair, which some of them are doing in Corinth or they
can go deeper in love, for without love everything they do is . . . but that is in Chapter 13 of 1st
Corinthians and we are only in Chapter 7, so you know that is the point he will
get to. For all the losses and successes in this world the responses remain the
same; we have a choice; to go to despair or to go deeper into love.
In the Gospel Mark remembers Jesus coming to people who
experience the despair that God seems so far away. Jesus gives them a choice
“Go into despair or go deeper and follow me.” They fall in love with him and
leave everything behind to go deeper. Mark was not interested in writing a
factual biography of the life of Jesus; rather he was interested in showing
people ways of responding to the spirit of this loving resurrected Lord operating
in their midst.
Notice in this reading how the word “immediately” is used.
Mark has a fondness for that word and will use it 39 times, but don’t confuse
this with Jesus being in a hurry because at least 13 times in Mark’s Gospel, he
takes the disciples, or he goes alone himself, into silence; “to come away with
me by yourselves to a quiet place and I will give you rest.” Jesus keeps giving
them a choice as their ministry has successes and failures and the choices are
always the same: Go to despair or go deeper into love.”
“Go to Despair or Go Deeper”
I am not saying anything but am
far from silence
as the monkeys in my mind do
jumps off one tree
to another, dangling pretty
things for me to see
and marvel and want to solve to
find a balance.
I want to be in charge, be the
master of my fate
and grant the divine an audience
with my soul
to get marching orders on how to
make whole
as breaking chaos seems to take
my life of late.
But wait; I am not wanting God
to open doors
to something unknown, rather to
furnish an old
musty comfortable room where I
once did hold
to bygone consolations now
littering the floors.
The invitation comes to take the
deeper road
ending when me in You make our
full abode.
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