Saturday, January 20, 2018

"Go To Despair of Go Deeper"




A Reflection for III Epiphany                         All Saints Church, Southern Shores, NC
January 21, 2018                                                                     Thomas E Wilson, Rector
Jonah 3:1-5, 10            1 Corinthians 7:29-31             Mark 1:14-20              Psalm 62:6-14
“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.

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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