Space Enough, and Time

For me, most Lenten seasons start with the “bang” of Ash Wednesday but quickly fall into a slough of messy hopes and habits.  That’s a cost of being interested in the church calendar as a member of a church that doesn’t do much with the calendar.  But I’m also not a big “give things up” kind of guy. Which brings me to this comment by Erik Valden in the chapter of The Shattering of Loneliness that deals with the “dying daily” pointed at in Ash Wednesday:

A monastery is a specialist environment designed to support perseverance over time.  It is a place where the depths can be faced in Jesus Christ.  It stands by its very existence as an extended hand of friendship to all who have looked into those depths and found them fearful.  Monks and nuns hope, by their lives, by their prayers, to invite fellow seekers to look up, to find their hearts touched by a deep remembrance of God’s original caress.  To remember this is to awaken to hope.  And to find comfort the does not deceive.

And so a comfort and a challenge: the comfort that somewhere Christians are able to live into a way of life that can be difficulty to grasp and seemingly impossible to maintain, and the challenge that it’s possible to do such a thing outside of the rhythms of a monastery.

The church can and should, of course, be a picture of this reality, too.  Something about perseverance was, perhaps, part of the draw and the reason to stay.  From the book’s introduction, Varden writes:

The Church became for me an inspirer of remembrance.  It permitted me to read my banal, sometimes squalid life into a narrative of redemption that not only reaches back to time’s beginning but remembers forward, to eternity.  To stay within that narrative’s crux is to hear, sometimes with terrifying clarity, the desolate cries of mankind; to hear, too, the rasping voice of evil; and that, not vaguely round about, but in one’s heart.  One can only persevere in such hearing by attending, at the same time, to another, discreet but ordering voice that speaks “It is accomplished!”  It manages, by harmonic genius, to fathom the violent cries of “Crucify!’ and the angelic ‘Hosanna!’ in a single chord that rises out of dissonance towards unheard beauty.

+ + + + + + +

The second “remembrance” that Varden writes about it the Old Testament to “remember you were a slave in Egypt.”  He spends much of the chapter’s early section in Deuteronomy while also reminding us of our own live:

Insofar as I enter the logic and flow of biblical remembrance, I am made aware that I, who today may have attained some degree of freedom, was not always free.  I am asked not to forget how the transition came about, to see my desert journey as a process of redemption. Only by recalling what I was  can I acknowledge what, by grace, I have become.  Forgetfulness threatens to envelop us, however.  The smog of perceived entitlement obscures grateful retrospect.  It happened in Canaan, where Israel, God’s vassal, developed, soon enough, a notion of itself as landowner.  It easily happens in each of our lives.  We claim rights where grace is at work, and so are made ungracious.  We inhale the chief intoxicant of spiritual life: self-righteous ingratitude.  

Varden makes the connection, then with Jesus’ command to remember via the Last Supper, which is a retelling of the Exodus event that gave the Hebrew people their freedom.  He reminds the reader that Paul in his letters would often remind his readers of his own past and of the constant call to the freedom that Christ brings (and that we in our immaturity too often try to thwart).  Before moving into the story of Mary of Egypt, Varden concludes:

Each of us will have his or her own story of deliverance.  We should not make a fetish of it, nor proclaim it indiscriminately, but we are not to forget.  I may claim citizenship of Jerusalem above (cf. Philippians 3:20); but if I forget where I came from, the wastelands I have passed through, I forfeit my right to call it ‘home’.  For to remain in that place of light, I must know I am a guest brought in out of darkness.  I must learn to respond to grace with grace, to take nothing for granted, and so able to receive all as gift.