Today’s memorial of Paul of the Cross reminds me of how my Mom loved crosses. I can’t tell you how many crosses mom collected, but it was clear that she loved crosses. All kinds of crosses, from the ornate to the very simple. Whenever we went on a trip somewhere, we would look for a cross to add to her collection. Not only did she collect them, but she shared them – she gave them away. I have never counted the ones that she gave me. One day I’ll have to go from room to room in the house and see just how many it is. I never asked her why she loved the cross so much. But as I look at her life, I know that she did not have any glamorous idea of what the cross means. She knew well the suffering it entails and lived her life in a way that never rejected the cross. She found beauty and challenge in the cross in a way that I have rarely if ever seen before.
It seems the cross is present everywhere around us these days. It’s almost as if Jesus is looking at today’s evening news, or checking Facebook or twitter, and witnessing the passionate and quite volatile expressions over the presidential candidates, when we hear his passionate address to his disciples in today’s Gospel (LK 12: 49-53):
“I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!
There is a baptism with which I must be baptized,
and how great is my anguish until it is accomplished!
Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth?
No, I tell you, but rather division.
From now on a household of five will be divided”
He is seeing the “divisions” that exist (most if not all of which we have created) and then he appears to say that this is the way it has to happen. Not that he is condoning violence, exclusion, or some of the dehumanizing that we see going on all around us in our nation and world, but he is saying I believe something about the reality of discipleship. And, he starts with the “reality” for him.
This baptism of fire that he has come to give the “earth” is none other than his very life and death which transforms both (life and death) by “crossing” them. The cross then becomes the way to new life and resurrection fully expressed in the blessing of God’s Spirit being breathed upon all of us. Jesus knew with no small amount of consternation, as we see in Gethsemane that He had to die on a cross in order for us to SEE what real Life is about! Death cuts across life to expose the depth of Love in Life at its source – God! And this is our pattern of reality – life, death, new life. So we are forced with questions over and over again. What do we have to die to? What are our crosses?
The “divisions” that Jesus seems to be saying he has come to “initiate” are the “crosses” that we must realize and embrace so that peace as complacency is revealed. When we can see these “divisions” then we can confront them in a way that can allow REAL peace to take its place. We have to see how our created divisions are complacent death to us. And that calls for a real dying to ourselves that can be quite painful. In a sense this is the cost” of peace. I’m not talking about a ransom that has to be paid, but the experience of transformation that for some mysterious reason always involves the cross and some type of death.
Death has to intersect life in order for transformation to happen. In other words, it appears that suffering, rejection, and feelings of aloneness that we all experience to some degree or another are precisely that which can afford us the vision to begin to really see our lives for what they are. The “divisions” we create to exclude each other must be exposed in order to be confronted. But this new “seeing” is risky and uncomfortable and will unfortunately result in…
“… three against two and two against three;
a father will be divided against his son and a son against his father,
a mother against her daughter and a daughter against her mother,
a mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.”
(Might we add father-in-laws against son-in-laws?)
How much will we let our stubbornness and self-complacency blind us or perhaps more so deafen us to what really is happening, what really needs to be heard? How can we start to see the tawdry egoist concerns that we throw at one another, which result in vehement vitriol and even violence? Haven’t we experienced enough of that as of late?
What is the bigger picture? What are the bigger questions that we should be asking? Case in point, does the presidential election in this country even come close to posing those questions, much less answer them? A house divided falls, as we are told by Jesus elsewhere. The lines of “division” can raise important questions, but are we listening to them? How are we hearing this “baptism of Fire,” which is all about Life, but yes, about death too? The necessary deaths that we must all go through as we find by listening, i.e., REALLY listening, to each other, and learning of those things that we may need to let go of, surrender, as individuals, but even more importantly as a community of earth. No matter the outcome on November 8th, these big questions will still be around.
The outlook, though, is hopeful always. It is actually Paul, who is telling us this in his glorious letter to Ephesus, (EPH 3: 14-21), when he describes what this Life that involves death and Resurrection in God, the Real Life, is like…it’s all Good:
“Brothers and sisters:
I kneel before the Father,
from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named,
that he may grant you in accord with the riches of his glory
to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inner self,
and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith;
that you, rooted and grounded in love,
may have strength to comprehend with all the holy ones
what is the breadth and length and height and depth,
and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge,
so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
This is the life of God itself, the mysterious life of the three Persons of the Trinity, the relationship of LOVE that Gives itself away or “dies” to itself by nature. We are already in this Life of God but must continuously allow ourselves to perceive, receive, and embrace it. And how do we accept this Reality of relationship? Paul says it in words like “kneel,” “rooted and grounded in love,” filled with all the fullness of God.” This is a call to surrender, not as doormats to each other’s ego-driven presumptions and labels, but surrender to closed ways of seeing and hearing.
This Life in God, as Jesus says in the Gospel, does have to “blaze” away all that “stuff” or “rubbish” that is not real – what we hold on to in order to maintain a false sense of security. These are the necessary “deaths” to manufactured divisions that seek to separate us, that we must reveal to each other over and over again, as painful as that may be. It’s not a question of arguing about right or wrong so much as it is the loving task of nudging each other along in an ever-growing awareness of our shared place in this world.
This is that openness initiated by God the Father (and Mother), in Christ, through the Holy Spirit, as Paul says to the Ephesians, a way of accepting or “kneeling” before our shared inheritance in God, “from whom every family in heaven and earth is named.” For it is in this humble yet powerful acceptance or reception of the very Life of God that we will be strengthened “to comprehend with all the holy ones what is the breadth and length and height and depth…and…so…be filled with all the fullness of God.”
That is a tall order to fill it seems. But the difficulty is not prohibitive. As Jesus says, the risk is beyond critical, “how great is my anguish until it is accomplished! But this “accomplishment” is not something attained so much as something to finally see and then rest within. We cannot capture that which is Love, for we are already caught in it – God! It is a way of leaning into a space without the blinders of prejudice and privilege and learning to see as God. For when we do this, we are really allowing God to see and Love in us! This is the mysterious beauty of the cross – the life intersected or crossed by death so that Life can be experienced in a deeper transformed way.
May we open our ears and eyes to the blazing baptism of God’s life upon which we try to stand on the edge. Dare we allow the God Who is Relationship, as Paul says, to “cross” us, i.e., to enter into our imagination and move us forward and outward to “accomplish far more than all we ask or imagine, by the power at work within us,” We then, in a sense, “give” our crosses away, like Mom, in a powerfully transformative way. Then the earth can be set on fire by a fiercely healing blaze of transformation that consumes all campaigns of hurt and mockery by true Divine Humanity.
Peace
Thomas