Points
The acceptance of God’s unknowable will is harder than action designed by us to serve Him. We build our last outpost of a false self-based security in religion itself by supposing that we serve Him by acts, even of superficial charity, that are disguised routes away from the simple tribulation of waiting for His will to reveal itself in our regard.
2. | Christ in the heart must obey Christ in the Church. This is the wisdom John learnt in Bulgaria before he became Pope. The Catholic alone is ground fully between the two millstones – Christ urging him to charity; Christ as the whole Visible Church, expressed overtly through the decision or lack of decision of the hierarchy, asking him to wait till the Church is ready for his charitable acts. |
3. | Let us pray to become the bread that is broken and the wine that is drunk. Our Master’s greatest beauty is shown in His true death and apparent impotence. Love permits us to withhold nothing of ourselves. Yet He does not force the lock of our wills, jammed by fear of the wholly open and unprotected situation; He waits for us to join Him willingly and be crucified along with Him. |
4. | Because of our sins we can ‘become’ Him only as the Penitent Thief ‘became’ Him. If somebody says – ‘Ko wai koe?’ – ‘Who are you?’ – let us reply sincerely – ‘Ko Hemi te tutua au’ – ‘I am Hemi’ – (or X— or Y— or Z—) ‘the sinner, the worthless one.’ When any one of us becomes a nobody, then our sins can be set aside, and Christ can act in us, because our sins proceed from a ‘somebody’ who is a creature claiming falsely to be the centre of the universe. |
5. | If we have a true disinterested love for any fellow creature, He allows us the greatest freedom in expressing this. The freedom is our chiefly subconscious page 449 and intuitive response to the need of the Other, who is Christ in disguise, Christ still suffering in the body of humanity. Let us not narrow this to the Visible Church. ‘Ubi charitas, ibi Deus.’ Yet only a deep asceticism has the power to distinguish the deepest needs of other souls. Consider the Curé of Ars, the patron of priests – to some a repellent figure because of his extreme asceticism – yet without this asceticism he would have been swallowed up by his penitents’ false version of their needs. |
6. |
To become a child, in the Christian sense, is simply to recognise one’s absolute dependence on the benignity and mercy of God. It is learnt best when we turn away, for a while at least, from our largely unconscious but massive dependence on creatures – a friend’s approval, the cup of coffee that calms and insulates us and sets the day in motion – and throw ourselves into that central gap, that very abyss, in which we see our helpless childish cloud-wrapped dishevelled selves apparently lost, unsupported, doomed by our own nullity. This is to ‘test’ God experientially. Then the Psalms come to life for us –
‘I am like dry ground, Lord! Water me!’
We are then close to Christ in that we experience God’s will towards us – in our minds, nerves, souls, our very bones – as ‘wrath’ – we become a supplicatory voice of anguish entreating, perhaps for the first time in our lives wholeheartedly, His mercy on ourselves and all creatures. Since we exist, it is plain we are still supported by Him. He will indicate in His own way and time that He also nourishes and embraces us and makes us grow in love. Personal sins are not the particular fuel of this furnace. Their effects may of course make purification slower. But – as this poor man sees it – to know God’s ‘wrath’ in this way is to know that He is holy and terrible and absolute and unknowable and that one is oneself wholly dependent on this Deliverer. This is, I think, to become a child. It is also perhaps to become a man. |
7. |
Ascesis and austerity are different things, Austerity may itself be a ‘security’ – ‘Look, Lord, I am fasting for You! Let me buy You off this way. Don’t let me fall absolutely into Your hands!’ So the fish might say absurdly to the sea – ‘O Sea, don’t let me be enveloped and sustained by You. Look, I am wriggling my fins!’ Ascesis – if I have the term right – is a movement away from the imagined support of creatures to the terrifying ‘insecurity’ of a full dependence on God. page 450We may construct a God who does not terrify us – a philosophic God – a tolerant God – a God of life who is not also the God of death – a God who smiles on lovers, however superficial their ‘love’, as long as they feel, happy. These are shadows and weak images of the God who Is – the one we know and dread and love at the bottom of our desperate hearts – the One without Whom we cannot live at all. Let us not look for ‘safety’ – let us look for God. Ascesis is the inner road to Him. I count it that ascesis and what the Church calls poverty are the same thing. They both involve a withdrawal from the support of creatures. |
8. | The best book in which to find Him is the human face. |
9. | He wishes us to learn to be joyful in the furnace. ‘Alas, Lord, that I am I! Blessed Thou, Lord, Thou who art!’ |
10. |
The Church in her most ‘human’ and superficial aspect has not done well in telling her children to fear Him. They then imagine that by ‘being good’ – meaning, following a safe course – they will avoid His ‘wrath’. This is a schizoid God, a God of divided mercy and justice. His mercy and His justice both proceed from the reality of His love. This poor man is accustomed to think of ‘the justice of His mercy’. Let us tell them – tell ourselves – that His love met His Chosen Race in the ovens of Auschwitz. Martin Buber knew this better than we do. Let us recognise it is impossible for us to approach Him ‘tidy’, ‘sinless’, insulated from the fire of His redeeming and purifying love. Let the liar and the avaricious man and the adulterer lie down before His altar and say – ‘Lord, I am who I am. Radically I cannot change myself. I am indeed a powerless imbecile. Accept me as I am. Enter my soul and change me into whatever, whoever You want me to be – I don’t know what or who. Do this in whatever way You wish. I am the clay. You are the Potter. Break me or make me. Hard as it is for me to overcome my dread, I know I have no other choice. Make me the instrument of Your love. Make me the bread that is broken and the wine that is drunk.’ Then the Church would begin to be more fully the Church. 1972? (683) |