What Happens in Bethlehem Doesn’t Stay in Bethlehem

Posted on December 26, 2023 by jimfriedrich

Sandro Botticelli, *The Virgin adoring the sleeping Christ Child* (c. 1485), Scotland National Gallery, Edinburgh.

What on earth happened last night—at that little stable on the edge of town? It was all so strange, so unbelievable. Some of us are still sleeping it off. Some of us didn’t get any sleep at all, or maybe we were asleep the whole time and it was all just a dream.

There was a really bright star, and then the sky started singing: Gloria in excelsis Deo! It was angels, someone said. I don’t know about that, but it was so beautiful, as if music were being invented for the very first time.

And suddenly, we all started running, don’t ask me why, until we came to this cave––it was a stable with a cow and a couple of donkeys––and in the back there was a woman lying down on some hay, and a man kneeling beside her. And between them there was a little baby, just a few hours old, I’d say. What a place to begin your life! They must have been pretty desperate to end up there. Maybe they were refugees. Or undocumented. I don’t know. But they didn’t look scared or out of place. They seemed to belong there. And you know, I had the feeling that I belonged there too. We all did.

I can’t really explain it, but I got this feeling that everything in my life before that had just been waiting around for this moment, as if after a long and pointless journey I had finally come home.

And I know it sounds weird, but I swear that little baby looked right at me, as if he knew who I was––or who I was going to be, because when I left that stable I knew––I knew!––that my life was never going to be the same. Pretty crazy, right? I kind of hope it was just a dream, because if it’s not—where is all this going to take me?

That’s how I imagine the morning after speech of a Bethlehem shepherd. Intoxicated by wonder, struggling to make sense of it, and feeling both curious and anxious about what happens now, after this wondrous birth. What happens to me, to you, to the whole wide world? A change is gonna come, yes it will. Yes it will, because what happens in Bethlehem doesn’t stay in Bethlehem. It goes home with us, it gets in our blood, it becomes part of our story. Nothing in the world will ever be the same again. Nothing in our lives will ever be the same again.

And that is why, on the morning after, we listen to St. John’s grand prologue to the Fourth Gospel. Its cosmic perspective on the birth of Christ reminds us how vast and consequential was that humble birth in a lowly stable.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. . . And this divine Word became flesh and lived among us. (John 1:1-14)

In other words, God was not content to remain purely within the essence of the divine self. God desired to go beyond the inner life of the divine, to enter the confines and contingencies of time and space and history, to become incarnate as the mortal subject of a human life and experience the human condition from the inside. The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.

What a fantastic thought: God wants to be with us—not just love us at a distance but to be intimate with us, in communion with us, participating in our humanity while enabling us to participate in divinity, because Incarnation means that divinity and humanity are now and forever inextricably joined. Joy to the world, the Lord is come … let every heart prepare him room.

But perhaps we have some doubts about our capacity to receive such a guest. A 17^th-century poet named Matthew Hale worried about this in a poem called “Christmas Day” (1659):

I have a room
‘Tis poor, but ‘tis my best, if thou wilt come
Within so small a cell, where I would fain [willingly]
Mine and the world’s Redeemer entertain;

[He’s speaking about his heart here as the place he might entertain the world’s Redeemer;
Then he describes sweeping up the dust and cleaning up the mess, just as we would if we expected a houseguest. The poet will even try to wash this “room”—with his own penitent tears:]

And when ‘tis swept and washed, I then will go,
And with Thy leave, I’ll fetch some flowers that grow
In Thine own garden, [these flowers being faith and love];
With those I’ll dress it up …

yet when my best
Is done, the room’s [still] not fit for such a Guest.

[Well, if we can’t make our lives and our souls fit dwellings to house the divine, who can? God. God can make us fit, the poet says:]

Thy presence, Lord, alone
Will make [an oxen] stall a court, a cratch [manger] a throne.

These days, it’s not very easy to believe that humanity is a fit habitation for the God of love and the Prince of Peace. It’s a sign of our sad times that Christmas got cancelled in Bethlehem this year. The war, you know. No liturgies in the Church of the Nativity, no pilgrims crowding Manger Square. They say Bethlehem is like a ghost town now.

Posted on the Internet during the 2023 Gaza invasion (source unknown).

Sixty years ago, the Catholic contemplative Thomas Merton, who was not blind to the atrocities committed in his own time, could still say that we “exist solely for this, to be the place God has chosen for the divine Presence. The real value of our own self is the sign of God in our being, the signature of God upon our being.” ^[i] The Word indelibly inscribed on our own hearts and souls!

Some—theologians, poets, mystics—go even further, insisting that the Word becoming flesh means that the whole world is “charged with the grandeur of God.” ^[ii] Maximus the Confessor, perhaps the greatest Byzantine theologian, put it this way in the 7^th century:

“For having hidden Himself for us in the inner principles of existent things, [God] is correspondingly spelled out by each visible thing as if by letters. [The Divine] is wholly present in all together in the fullest possible way and completely in each individually, whole and undiminished.” ^[iii]

Contemporary songwriter Peter Mayer makes this point more simply:

When I was a boy in Sunday school, we would learn about the time
that Moses split the sea in two,
And Jesus made the water wine.
And I remember feeling sad miracles don’t happen still.
But now I keep track ‘cause everything’s a miracle:
Everything, everything, everything’s a miracle.…

This morning outside I stood and saw a little red-winged bird
Shining like a burning bush, singing like a scripture verse:
It made me want to bow my head …
‘cause everything is holy now.
Everything, everything, everything is holy now. ^[iv]

In other words, what happens in Bethlehem doesn’t stay in Bethlehem.
It wants to happen everywhere.

We might call this the Bethlehem effect—discovering the Word made “flesh” in the concrete stuff of our world, our stories, our very lives. The great Christian poet of the 4^th century, Ephrem the Syrian, describes the Bethlehem effect in one of his poems. He begins by proclaiming his Christmas joy:

Blessed be the Child Who today delights Bethlehem.
Blessed be the Newborn Who today made humanity young again.

[Then he describes the effect this holy birth wants to have on us:]

On this day of the Humble One let us be neither proud nor haughty.
On this day of forgiveness let us not avenge offenses.
On this day of rejoicing let us not share sorrows.
On this sweet day let us not be vehement.
On this calm day let us not be quick-tempered.
On this day on which God came into the presence of sinners,
let not the righteous look down on any sinner.
On this day on which the Lord of all came among servants,
let the powerful bow down to the powerless.
On this day when the Rich One was made poor for our sake,
let the rich share their table with the poor. ^[v]

On that holy night in Bethlehem, our human nature was lifted up when God chose to be one of us, to live and die as one of us. And we in turn may now share in the divine life. We are still works in progress no doubt, but we are bound for glory. St. Paul put this so beautifully: “All of us,” he said, “all of us, with our unveiled faces like mirrors reflecting the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the image that we reflect in brighter and brighter glory” (II Cor. 3:18).

Another ancient theologian said it this way: “As they who behold the light are within the light and partake of its brightness, so they who behold God are within God, partaking of God’s brightness.” ^[vi]

They who behold the light are within the light and partake of its brightness. That’s the Christmas miracle! Our pale mirrors are made to contain the most impossible brilliance. And even when we turn away from the Light, the Light comes looking for us. No matter how shadowy the paths we have taken, the Light will find us, and fill us with divine radiance. That is our destiny, says the Child in the manger. To walk around “shining like the sun.” ^[vii]

However … Before we get too carried away with our glorious destiny, listen to a line from the Victorian poet Mary Elizabeth Coleridge. When she imagines coming to the stable, and seeing the babe in the manger, she says:

The safety of the world was lying there.
And the world’s danger. ^[viii]

The babe in the manger is the world’s danger? What does she mean? I think she is saying that giving our lives to the Holy One will change everything. It will change who we are, what we care about, and how we live. In other words, participation in the divine life (which is the only way to become fully human) is not just a matter of “walking around shining like the sun.”

It also means letting go of certain cherished things and taking up our cross. The story of the Incarnation is more than the beautiful new-born child away in the manger. The child will become a man, and he is going to ask some difficult things of us someday.

Leonardo da Vinci, *Adoration of the Magi* (1481-2).

I don’t want to go very far down that road on Christmas Day. The twelve days of Christmas are a time for celebration and feasting, carols and good cheer, light hearts and extravagant hopes, joy and wonder, and lots of love. But I do want to share a poem by Luci Shaw, a Christian writer now in her 90s. She reminds us that the lovely babe of Bethlehem is going to grow up, and that we’re going to have to grow up with him.

One time of the year
the new-born child
is everywhere,
planted in madonnas’ arms
hay mows, stables
in palaces or farms,
or quaintly, under snowed gables,
gothic angular or baroque plump,
naked or elaborately swathed,
encircled by Della Robia wreaths,
garnished with whimsical
partridges and pears,
drummers and drums,
lit by oversize stars,
partnered with lambs,
peace doves, sugar plums,
bells, plastic camels in sets of three
as if these were what we need
for eternity.

But Jesus the Man is not to be seen.
We are too wary, these days,
of beards and sandalled feet.

Yet if we celebrate, let it be
that He
has invaded our lives with purpose,
striding over our picturesque traditions,
our shallow sentiment,
overturning our cash registers,
wielding His peace like a sword,
rescuing us into reality
demanding much more
than the milk and the softness
and the mother’s warmth
of the baby in the storefront creche,
(only the [grown] Man would ask
all, of each of us)
reaching out
always, urgently, with strong
effective love
(only the [grown] Man would give
his life and live
again for love of us).

Oh come, let us adore him—
Christ—the Lord. ^[ix]

Okay, I can’t leave you there, not on Christmas Day. So let me end on a note of wonder, with a poem by G. K. Chesterton. It was sung at this year’s Christmas Eve Lessons and Carols at Kings College, Cambridge. ^[x]

The Christ-child lay on Mary’s lap,
His hair was like a light.
(O weary, weary were the world,
But here is all aright.)

The Christ-child lay on Mary’s breast,
His hair was like a star.
(O stern and cunning are the kings,
But here the true hearts are.)

The Christ-child lay on Mary’s heart,
His hair was like a fire.
(O weary, weary is the world,
But here the world’s desire.)

The Christ-child stood at Mary’s knee,
His hair was like a crown.
And all the flowers looked up at Him,
And all the stars looked down.

Church of St. Mary the Virgin on Holy Island, Northumbria.

This sermon was preached at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church on Bainbridge Island, Washington, on Christmas Day, 2023.

^[i] Thomas Merton, “A Letter on the Contemplative Life” (August 1967), in Lawrence S. Cunningham, ed., Thomas Merton: Spiritual Master—The Essential Writings (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1992), 425.

^[ii] Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur.”

^[iii] Maximus the Confessor (c. 580-662). Quoted in Nikolaos Loudovikos, A Eucharistic Ontology: Maximus the Confessor’s Eschatological Ontology of Being as a Dialogical Reciprocity (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Press, 2010), 125.

^[iv] Peter Mayer, “Holy Now.”

^[v] Ephrem the Syrian (c. 306-379), Hymns on the Nativity (trans. Kathleen E. McVey, Paulist Press, 1989), adapted from a citation in Wendy M. Wright, The Vigil: Keeping Watch in the Season of Christ’s Coming, Nashville, TN: Upper Room Books, 1992), 95-96.

^[vi] Irenaeus (c. 130-202), Against Heresies, IV.20.

^[vii] The phrase is from Thomas Merton’s famous revelatory experience at the corner of Fourth & Walnut in Louisville in March 1958. “And if only everybody else could realize this! [the dignity of humanity conferred by the Incarnation]. But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

^[viii] Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (1861-1907), “Salus Mundi.” She was the great-grandniece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

^[ix] Luci Shaw, “It is as if infancy were the whole of incarnation,” quoted in Sarah Arthur, ed., Light Upon Light: A Literary Guide to Prayer for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2014), 125-126.

^[x] G. K. Chesterton, “A Christmas Carol,” was sung in a lovely setting by John Rutter on the 2023 Lessons and Carols from Kings College, Cambridge, during the annual live BBC broadcast with which I begin every Christmas Eve at 7 a.m. Pacific Time.

What’s Going On at the Asbury Revival?

Posted on February 20, 2023 by jimfriedrich

Asbury University Revival (February 2023).

True religion, in great part, consists in holy affections.

— Jonathan Edwards

“After Thursday, I was like, okay, I’m going to go sleep. But [God] was like, ‘No, I have more for you.’”

— Lauren, Asbury University student

On February 8 the morning chapel service at Kentucky’s Asbury University concluded, as usual, with a spiritual song. Then most of the students filed out to go to class, but the band kept playing, and a few stayed behind to sing along around the altar. What happened next has startled the world.

“I was like, all right, we’re just going to be around here for one or two more songs, and we’re going to go to class,” said Lena, an Asbury student. “But there was like something in my soul that said no-no-no, we’ve just got to stay here. So I just stayed. A little while later I thought I had only been there like maybe an extra 20 minutes. It had been like 3 hours. It just started turning into something bigger and crazier.”

Word spread through the campus that people were still singing and praying in the chapel. Classrooms and dorms began to empty, and by the end of the day the 1500-seat worship space was packed with students and faculty, singing, praying, and testifying to the power of God in their lives. Two weeks later, it’s still happening, day and night without ceasing.

Live video on social media quickly went viral. People from all over North America began to converge on Asbury to join in. Still others flew in from faraway places like Finland, New Zealand, and Indonesia. University officials estimate that tens of thousands of pilgrims have shared in the experience. The line to get inside can be hours long.

It’s been called the Asbury Revival, but some are wary of this designation. Too many have been wounded or betrayed by manipulative gatherings and domineering evangelists in the name of “revival.” Some prefer to call it an “outpouring” (the university’s preference), a “renewal,” or an “awakening.” One student said she was switching from “revival” to “encounter” because the divine presence, not the internal experience of the worshipper, was the central meaning here.

Whatever is happening, the watchword has been “radical humility.” Student Asher Braughton says, “I truly believe that the revival has been built on humility; that this revival isn’t focused just on one person—not one worship leader, not one pastor, not one speaker, not one student. It’s focused solely and only on Jesus Christ.” Or as one of the event’s speakers put it: “The only celebrity in this house is Jesus.”

During the “Great Awakening” in the eighteenth-century, the emotional excesses of the revivals worried the church establishment. Was it sincere? Was it of God? Historian George M. Marsden summarizes the criticisms in vivid terms: “Using vulgar appeals to sentiment, they would generate mass hysteria that they encouraged people to regard as evidence of the work of the Holy Spirit. Scores or even hundreds of people would shriek, swoon, or fall into fits.”

Although one student leader, mindful of the building’s aging fabric, had to announce that there would be “no jumping allowed in the balconies,” the tone in the room has been generally mellow. A youth minister described it as walking into “a holy hush.” There have been moments of exuberant cheering and clapping, but much of the music and prayer invites a tranquil surrender to the spiritual flow. Watching it online, I thought of Thomas Merton’s gently fervent plea: “Sink from your shallows, soul, into eternity.”

On the first day, Asbury professor Clint Baldwin was having lunch in the cafeteria when someone stopped at his table to say, “You know, the students are still in there, and they’re still worshipping the Lord. You should go over and see what’s happening. It’s a sweet, sweet thing.” Baldwin soon joined the awakening and saw that it was good. “This was just people saying we’re going to stay on and sit in the presence of the Lord and see what the Lord would have for us.”

Lauren, the student quoted in the epigraph, described the worship as all-consuming: “Nothing else matters anymore except being in the presence of Jesus and worshipping him for the rest of my life.” She acknowledged the hyperbole of this—she would of course continue with the life of a student—but her perspective on everything had been transformed. “Ways I have of viewing people negatively—it doesn’t matter anymore. Anxieties and worries that I have, it doesn’t even matter.… Whenever you can just let go and surrender and forgive, then, you’re just set free.”

The majority of worshippers are under 25. Living through a time of immense stress, they hunger for the healing peace of God. In spontaneous prayer groups around the chapel, or in testimonials from the stage, many have openly shared their deepest griefs and heaviest burdens. Their vulnerability has been met with tenderness and love. When a young woman shared her story of attempted suicide before the whole assembly, a multitude of women came forward to lay their hands on her. “An hour later she was dancing and smiling with a joy on her face that I had never seen before,” said one witness.

“God is moving through this generation that has been so affected by mental health,” says Asher. “Once this revival ends, we can carry this message of goodness and forgiveness … The chains of suicide, the chains of depression, the chains of anxiety can be broken in Jesus.” Many of the songs reflect this hope in their melodic repetitions of heartfelt cries:

Jesus, Jesus, you make the darkness tremble—
your name is a light the shadows can’t deny …
You’re never gonna let, you’re never gonna let me down …
He is for you, He is for you, He is for you …

There are of course critics and skeptics. All religious experience is bewildering, even suspect, for those who stand outside it. It is a reality both given and received, not grasped or possessed. Its truth abides in its own domain of experience. You can’t judge it at a distance, as a spectator. You have to go inside it, open your heart to it, be in loving relationship with it. As the mystics testify, certainty is only found within the experience.

Among believers, there is certainly a proper concern about delusion and self-deception. “Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14). But religious experience can be tested by its fruits. Asbury’s president, Kevin J. Brown, is an encouraging witness to the Outpouring’s authenticity:

“Since the first day, there have been countless expressions and demonstrations of radical humility, compassion, confession, consecration, and surrender unto the Lord. We are witnessing the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.”

Some may worry that the strongly personal nature of the Asbury Outpouring excludes concerns beyond the self like racism, social justice, global conflict, and the fate of the planet. However, nothing I have seen or read so far suggests that these young people disconnect personal transformation from social change. Surrendering to God is inseparable from a lifetime of service to neighbor and world. One’s own soul is too small a kingdom for the Lord of history. The collective witness and shared compassion of the Outpouring bears witness to that truth.

As for the abundance of deep feeling, vulnerability, open-heartedness, and the ecstatic willingness to be swept away, we need more, not less of that in the Christian life. Those kids are singing and praying and testifying as if their lives depend on it; as if God matters more than anything; as if Jesus will wipe away the tears from every eye; as if a new reality is breaking through the cracks of our broken world.

But can it last? The particular happening in Asbury’s chapel is winding down this week. The university needs to resume its institutional mission, and the town of Wilmore, hospitable as it has been, can’t handle the crowds forever. “It is not ours to hold alone,” Brown says. “We are not the keepers of this movement … Pray that what is happening here will spread.”

Although it seems a bit sad that this foretaste of heaven—singing around the throne for all eternity—must come to an end in the temporal world, the Holy Spirit blows where it will. Outbreaks of public Christian fervor and collective spiritual passion may turn up elsewhere, take new forms, or return to a dormant state until the next eruption. Revelation, not longevity, is the point of epiphanies. They have their moment and vanish, but their impact—and the truth they manifest—endures in hearts and minds and communities.

I have no doubt that many of those who are living through this experience will be forever changed by it, as will the worlds they inhabit and the people they touch. Professor Baldwin, recalling similar revivals at Asbury in the 1950s and 1970s, notes that “people still talk about those [past] moments in revival that shaped the trajectory of how they chose to live for the sake of the Lord onward from that. That’s a hope that we would have for this.”

Even watching online from afar, I have found myself deeply moved by the Spirit-filled assembly. I especially love the heartfelt singing and the manifestation of shared joy. One of my favorite parts was today’s invitation for people to come forward and recite their favorite verses from Scripture. When a small African-American boy read from the prophet Joel (2:28), delivering that luminous text with his boyish voice—innocent as Eden—I was blown away:

Then I will pour out my spirit on all flesh;
your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
your old ones shall dream dreams,
and your young ones shall see visions …

Joel’s prophecy has taken flesh at Asbury, day after day since the eighth of February—all those beautiful young faces, shining with God’s future. Like the rest of us, they will lose it and find it again and again. But they have set their feet upon the sacred Way. God bless them.

The Outpouring will continue to be streamed by Asbury University through Thursday, February 23, at https://www.asbury.edu/outpouring/

The words of Clint Baldwin, Asher Braughton, Lauren, Lena and Kyle (the youth minister) are taken from a February 12 conversation with Shane Claiborne on his YouTube channel, Red Letter Christians: “Update from the Asbury University Revival”

The words of Asbury President Kevin J. Brown can be found at the Outpouring link above.

The Pursuit of Happiness

Posted on May 18, 2022 by jimfriedrich

Comet Falls, Mt. Rainier National Park (July 29, 2005).

The tables outside the cantina were full of beautiful laughing men and women.… Everyone who sat there looked on display, the women in their lovely summer dresses, the men with their hair oiled back on their heads, their tanned bare feet resting proprietorially on top of their Gucci loafers. One wanted to applaud them for presenting such a successful vision of life: you could almost believe they had lived their whole lives, had been reared and groomed from birth, for this one particular night: that this was the pinnacle, this golden summery evening they had all reached simultaneously.

Yet it made me a little sad to see them there, laughing and drinking champagne, for you knew it was all downhill from here.^[i]

— Peter Cameron, Andorra

The narrator in Cameron’s novel experiences the “golden summery evening” at the cantina through the lens of his own unhappiness. He has fled a failed life in America for a Mediterranean idyll, but joy continues to elude him. This apparently happy scene of shared human pleasure only deepens his alienation. Unable to join the fun, he judges the beautiful, laughing people for their complacency, their privilege, and their shallow indifference to mortality.

In Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, Clarissa Vaughan recalls her own close encounter with happiness, when she made the mistake of thinking it would last.

It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still somewhat shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness.… What lives undimmed in Clarissa’s mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it’s perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right there. There has been no other. ^[ii]

What is happiness? It can be pursued, but can it be possessed? The word is derived from “hap,” an Old English term for fortune or chance—something that happens to us, for good or ill. But “happy” and “happiness” have come to denote only the good things, without the mishaps.

If asked to recall our happiest moments, a multitude of memories would rise to the surface. But if asked whether we are happy now, or living happy lives, how would we answer? The University of Pennsylvania is conducting an online Authentic Happiness Survey, with twenty-four groups of five statements each to measure the presence or absence of happiness. Group 24, for example, offers the following choices:

My life is a bad one.
My life is an OK one.
My life is a good one.
My life is a very good one.
My life is a wonderful one.

The #1 statement in a group is always pretty dismal (I’m usually in a bad mood … I’m pessimistic … I am unhappy with myself … I feel like a failure, etc.) The #5 statement sounds way too good to be true (My life is filled with pleasure … If I were keeping score in life, I would be far ahead … I always get what I want … My life is filled with joy … I could not be happier with myself, etc.).

The majority of my own answers landed in the middle (#3), reflecting a pretty typical mix of highs and lows. I had no #1s, a couple of #2s, six #4s (three due to privilege, three due to personality), and two #5s (“I truly love my work” and “Most of the time I am fascinated by what I am doing”—both of these reflecting a mixture of privilege, personality, and the good fortune of getting to do what I love). My authentic happiness score was 3.46 out of 5. That seems about right for a privileged white male occasionally beset by the minor melancholies of disappointed hopes, both personal and generational.

It was an interesting survey, one of many attempts to grapple with the unhappiness of our times. Currently, the most popular course at Yale is “Psychology and the Good Life,” created by Professor Laurie Santos in response to the mental health crisis among college students, who, she says, are “much more overwhelmed, much more stressed, much more anxious, and much more depressed than they’ve ever been.”

In a survey of Yale students taken before the pandemic, 60% said they had felt “overwhelmingly anxious” sometime during the last year. And 50% reported feeling “completely overwhelmed” in the past week. For many college students, and for Americans in general, “happiness feels increasingly out of reach.” The pandemic, climate change, and the politics of fear and hate have multiplied our sorrows and anxieties almost beyond measure.

According to University of California (Irvine) professor Sonia Lyubomirski, author of The How of Happiness, 50% of one’s happiness is determined by genes, while 40% flows from our thoughts, actions, and attitudes. That leaves only 10% attributable to circumstances, although many people believe that circumstance is the key factor in personal happiness. If I change my job, my home, my partner, I will be happier. Lyubomirski’s numbers assume, of course, that one’s basic needs are being met. For a war zone Ukrainian, a Central American refugee, or a long Covid sufferer, circumstance weighs far more heavily.

Santos’ course, and her ongoing podcast, The Happiness Lab, seek to help people address the more significant 40% factors: thoughts, actions, and attitudes. I’ve only listened to the first episode, but many have testified to the value of her efforts.^[iii]

Happiness is a subject of supreme interest. Everyone wants it, but for many it seems in short supply. It’s also hard to define. A century ago, Vita Sackville-West questioned its usefulness as an index for life.

But what was happiness? Had she been happy? That was a strange, clicking word to have coined—meaning something definite to the whole English-speaking race—a strange clicking word with its short vowel and its spitting double p’s, and its pert tip-tilted y at the end, to express in two syllables a whole summary of life. Happy. But one was happy at one moment, unhappy two minutes later, and neither for any good reason; so what did it mean? … Certainly, there had been moments of which one could say: Then, I was happy; and with greater certainty: Then, I was unhappy—when little Robert had lain in his coffin, for instance, strewn with rose petals by his sobbing Syrian nurse—but whole regions had intervened, which were just existence. Absurd to ask of those, had she been happy or unhappy? … No, that was not the question to ask her—not the question to ask anybody. Things were not so simple as all that. ^[iv]

Well then. Am I happy or unhappy? I have had moments and days when it was indeed bliss to be alive. But what should I say about those intervening regions where the evidence is mixed? Is happiness only an occasional oasis in the desert of ordinary time, or can happiness reside in the barren places as well?

“Small things go a long way,” says Zadie Smith. “All day long I can look forward to a Popsicle. The persistent anxiety that fills the rest of my life is calmed for as long as I have the flavor of something good in my mouth,” ^[v] Rebecca Solnit, arrested for demonstrating at a nuclear test site in the Nevada desert, said that “even when you’re in handcuffs, the sunset is still beautiful.” ^[vi]

In The Spiritual Meadow, John Moschos’ seventh-century collection of tales about desert monastics, an elder warns a wayward disciple, “Brother, pay attention to your own soul, for death awaits you and the road to punishment.” The disciple took little heed, and when he died, the elder continued to worry about his fate.

The elder fell to his prayers and said, “Lord Jesus Christ, reveal to me the state of the brother’s soul.” He went into a trance and saw a river of fire with a multitude of people in the fire itself. Right in the middle was the brother, submerged up to his neck. The elder said to him, “Didn’t I warn you to look after your own soul, my child?” And the brother answered, “I thank God, father, that at least my head is spared from the fire. Thanks to your prayers, I am standing on the head of a bishop.” ^[vii]

Even in hell, small things go a long way! And happiness can turn up anywhere, as poet Jane Kenyon reminds us:

There’s just no accounting for happiness …
It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night. ^[viii]

We are grateful when it comes, and for the memory it leaves. But happiness is more than the occasional perfect moment. It is a practice, a way of being, a fullness of life which transcends the inevitable fluctuations of fortune. Such a practice might be summarized in two words: authenticity and love.

At my ordination to the priesthood (September 17, 1970).

Authenticity is fidelity to your truest self: becoming more and more like the person you have been created and called to be. Sometimes the way is rough and steep. Sometimes you get lost or delayed. But by God’s grace, you embrace the journey. Parker Palmer describes this process as a matter of vocation:

Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic selfhood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks—we will also find our path of authentic service in the world. True vocation joins self and service, as Frederick Buechner asserts when he defines vocation as “the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.” ^[ix]

Authenticity, then, finds its greatest expression in acts of love. Becoming our truest self takes us beyond our individuality, into the interdependent communion of the Divine Whole. My own happiness cannot be sustainably severed from collective well-being. Happiness, as it turns out, is not a private affair. It is the way of self-diffusive, self-offering love. And until justice and human flourishing are universally shared, the way of love will include suffering. Self-sacrifice for love’s sake can be costly and painful, as Jesus and the saints have shown. Happiness accepts the truth of that. No justice, no peace. But it is also true, as Catherine of Siena said, that “all the way to heaven is heaven.” You don’t have to wait until the end of time for happiness to show up.

“Do not look for rest in any pleasure,” said Thomas Merton, “because you were not created for pleasure; you were created for JOY.” ^[x] Happy are those with a hungry heart. Happy are those who give themselves away. Happy are those who do not mistake crumbs for the feast. Happy are those who know it’s not just about them. Happy are those who say yes to the gift. Happy are those who yearn for the Divine Beloved. Happy are those who don’t count the cost. Happy are those who love their story.

On the summit of Mount Sinai (May, 1989). Blessed is the way up. Blessed is the way down.
The trail is beautiful. Be still.

We think of Saint Francis of Assisi as a joyful saint, but he was also pierced by the stigmata, the wounds of Christ. And he taught that the most perfect joy is to be found neither in worldly things nor in spiritual enjoyments. Nor is perfect joy simply a matter of pleasure, contentment, or delight. This was bewildering and counterintuitive for his brothers, so he explained it this way:

“Imagine coming home to the monastery on a stormy night.
We knock on the door, but it is so dark
that the surly porter mistakes us for tramps.
‘Go away!’ he shouts.
And if we continue to knock and the porter comes out
and drives us away with curses and hard blows—
and if we bear it patiently
and take the insults with joy and love in our hearts.
Oh Brother Leo, write down that that is perfect joy!
Above all the graces and gifts of the Holy Spirit
which Christ gives to his friends is that of conquering oneself
and willingly enduring sufferings, insults, humiliations and hardships
for the love of Christ.” ^[xi]

Saint Francis wouldn’t have sold many self-help books, but he knew that happiness unacquainted with suffering and sorrow isn’t the real deal. “If it be sweet, if it be not sweet,” ^[xii] my story is what I was made for. My story is why I’m here. Happiness is saying yes to the story’s gift with a thankful heart.

The late Joseph Golowka, one of my most beloved elders, still roughing it in Baja at 86 (Sept. 24, 2005).

When I go back to earth
And all my joyous body
Puts off the red and white
That once had been so proud,
If men should pass above
With false and feeble pity,
My dust will find a voice
To answer them aloud:

“Be still, I am content,
Take back your poor compassion!—
Joy was a flame in me
Too steady to destroy.
Lithe as a bending reed
Loving the storm that sways her—
I found more joy in sorrow
Than you could find in joy.” ^[xiii]

— Sara Teasdale, “The Answer”

^[i] Peter Cameron, Andorra (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 149-150.

^[ii] Michael Cunningham, The Hours (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1988), 98.

^[iii] The statistics and quotes from Santos and Lyubomirsky are found in Adam Sternbergh, “The Case for New York Face,” in Lapham’s Quarterly, Vol. XII, No. 3 (Summer 2019), 81-85. Four times a year, Lapham’s Quarterly presents a marvelous and stimulating collection of writings and images from many periods and sources on a given topic. This issue’s subject is “Happiness.” Sternbergh’s article was originally published in New York Magazine in 2018. Additional quotes from Santos were taken from her podcast, The Happiness Lab, Season 1, Episode 1 (“You Can Change”): https://www.happinesslab.fm

^[iv] This excerpt from Sackville-West’s novel, All Passion Spent (1931), is also in the “Happiness” issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, p. 139.

^[v] Ibid., 134. Smith’s excerpt is from her essay “Joy” (New York Review of Books, Jan. 10, 2013).

^[vi] Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

^[vii] John Moschos, The Spiritual Meadow (written c. 600), trans. John Wortley (Collegeville, MN: Cistercian Publications, 1992/2008), 35.

^[viii] Jane Kenyon, “Happiness.”

^[ix] Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), 16.

^[x] Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation (1949), p. 172. Cited in William H. Shannon, Christine M. Bochen, Patrick F. O’Connell, eds., The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002), 231.

^[xi] Adapted from The Little Flowers of St. Francis, 53 chapters on the life of Francis of Assisi written at the end of the 14^th century.

^[xii] Anne Sexton, “Rowing.” “As the African says, / This is my tale which I have told,/ If it be sweet, if it be not sweet,”/ Take somewhere else and let some return to me.…”

^[xiii] Sara Teasdale, “The Answer,” in Christian Wiman, ed., Joy: 100 Poems (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 138.

On the Morning After the Nativity

Posted on December 26, 2021 by jimfriedrich

Simone di Filippi, Nativity (c. 1380, Uffizi Gallery, Florence).

That glorious Form, that Light unsufferable,
And that far-beaming blaze of Majesty,
Wherewith he wont at Heav’n’s high council-table,
To sit the midst of Trinal Unity,
He laid aside, and here with us to be,
Forsook the courts of everlasting day,
And chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay.

— John Milton, “Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”

There was a really bright star, and then the sky started singing: Gloria in excelsis Deo! It was angels, someone said. I don’t know about that, but it was so beautiful, as if music were being invented for the very first time.

And I know it sounds weird, but I swear that little baby looked right at me, as if he knew who I was––or who I was going to be, because when I left that stable I knew––I knew!––that my life was never going to be the same. Pretty crazy, right? Part of me hopes it was just a dream, because if it’s not, I have no idea what happens next. But I have to admit I’m a little nervous about where all this is going to take me.^[i]

That’s how I imagine the “morning after” speech of a Bethlehem shepherd. After such a vision, he’s intoxicated by wonder, struggling to make sense of it, and feeling both curious and anxious about what happens now, after this wondrous birth. What will happen now—to me, to you, to the whole wide world? A change gonna come, yes it will.^[ii] Yes it will, because what happens in Bethlehem doesn’t stay in Bethlehem. It goes home with us, it gets in our blood, it becomes part of our story. Nothing in the world will ever be the same again. Nothing in our lives will ever be the same again.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. . . And this divine Word became flesh and lived among us (John 1:1-14).

In other words, God was not content to remain purely within the confines of the divine self. God desired to go beyond the inner life of the divine, to enter the confines of time and space and history, to become incarnate as the mortal subject of a human life and experience the human condition from the inside. The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.

What a fantastic thought: God wants to be with us—not just love us at a distance but to be intimate with us. Joy to the world, the Lord is come … let every heart prepare him room. But perhaps we have some doubts about our capacity to receive such a guest.

I’ve been reading a couple of 17^th-century poets who expressed their own doubts our capacity to host divinity. Matthew Hale (1609-1676) in a poem titled “Christmas Day” (1659), said:

I have a room
‘Tis poor, but ‘tis my best, if thou wilt come
Within so small a cell, where I would fain [willingly]
Mine and the world’s Redeemer entertain …

Here he’s speaking about his heart as the place he would entertain the Redeemer. He goes on to describe sweeping up the dust and cleaning up the mess, just as we would if we expected an important houseguest. The poet even attempts to wash this “room”—with his own penitent tears.

And when ‘tis swept and washed, I then will go,
And with Thy leave, I’ll fetch some flowers that grow
In Thine own garden [i.e., the flowers of faith and love];
With those I’ll dress it up …
yet when my best
Is done, the room’s [still] not fit for such a Guest.

Well, if we can’t make our hearts fit dwellings to house the divine, who can?
Only God can make us so:

Thy presence, Lord, alone
Will make a stall a court, a cratch [manger] a throne.

The poet/priest George Herbert, in his own “Christmas” poem (1633), expresses the same need for divine assistance:

O thou, whose glorious, yet contracted light,
Wrapt in nights mantle, stole into a manger;
Since my dark soul and brutish is thy right,
To Man of all beasts be not thou a stranger:

Herbert’s poetry is always resonant with Scriptural references. “Beasts” recalls Psalm 49:12—prideful humans are like “the beasts that perish”—while “a stranger” evokes Ephesians 2:12—without Christ, we remain “strangers to the covenants of promise.”

Then Herbert, like Hale, calls upon God as the only one who can complete his moral and spiritual remodeling project:

Furnish & deck my soul, that thou mayst have
A better lodging, than a rack, or grave.

“Rack” is another word for a manger, but it can also mean an instrument of torture, suggesting the cross. In other words, the first time Christ came, humanity provided him the cross and the grave. The poet prays that next time Christ comes to us, we may give him better lodging—a newly furnished soul, adorned with God’s grace.

Both of these poets were saying: Let every heart prepare him room. But they were also confessing that such preparation is more than we can do by ourselves. However, with God’s help, we may yet become fit lodging for divine presence.

In the 20^th century, whose atrocities left our confidence in human potential badly shaken, the Catholic contemplative Thomas Merton could still claim that we “exist solely for this, to be the place God has chosen for the divine Presence. The real value of our own self is the sign of God in our being, the signature of God upon our being.”

Merton wrote this after a life-changing experience at the corner of Fourth and Walnut in downtown Louisville. As he was studying all the faces of the milling crowd, he suddenly felt an overwhelming love for all of them, even though they were all strangers to him. It was like what the shepherds experienced in the Bethlehem stable, where, as W. H. Auden said in his own Christmas poem, “everything became a You and nothing was an It.” ^[iii] Merton would later put his street-corner epiphany at into words.

“It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many mistakes: yet, with all that, [God’s own self] glorified in becoming a member of the human race.

“I have the immense joy of being [a human person], a member of a race in which [God’s own self] became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.” ^[iv]

Just so, on that wondrous Christmas night in Bethlehem, our human nature was lifted up as the place where God chooses to dwell. We are still works in progress no doubt, but we are bound for glory. St. Paul believed this when he said that “all of us, with our unveiled faces like mirrors reflecting the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the image that we reflect in brighter and brighter glory” (II Cor. 3:18).

A thousand years later, St. Symeon the New Theologian echoed Paul’s luminous text: “As they who behold the light are within the light and partake of its brightness, so they who behold God are within God, partaking of God’s brightness.”

They who behold the light are within the light and partake of its brightness. Our pale mirrors are made to contain the most impossible brilliance. And even when we turn away from the Light, the Light comes looking for us. No matter how shadowy the path we have taken, the Light will find us, and fill us with divine radiance. That is our destiny, says the Child in the manger.

What happens in Bethlehem does not stay in Bethlehem.

Nativity (12th century), Cloister of St. Trophime, Arles, France.

Bethlehem is not a dream fading away into the past. It is the human future. And Christmas Day is not the morning after. It is the first day of the rest of our journey deeper and deeper into God. And whether we know it or not, as we walk that pilgrim road, we are all shining like the sun.

As we used to say back in the day, “Can you dig it?” Can you embrace the wonder of the holy birth: the immensity of heaven cloistered in one small room, be it the Virgin’s womb, the Bethlehem stable, the human heart, or whatever place you’re in right now? Can you embrace the wonder? Will you?

The world wants you to believe far less.
But why would you want to do so?

In a novel by the Anglican writer Charles Williams, a young woman goes to church with her aunt on Christmas morning. She is a seeker, not quite a believer, but she finds herself touched by a carol they are singing:

Christians, awake, salute the happy morn
Whereon the Savior of the world was born;
Rise to adore the mystery of love,
Which hosts of angels chanted from above.

The young woman leans over and whispers to her aunt, “Is it true?” Her aunt, one of those quiet saints who has spent her life submitting to divine love, turns to her niece with a smile and says simply, “Try it, darling.”^[v]

^[i] It’s a risky thing to follow Jesus. At the end of the Fourth Gospel, Jesus tells Peter that “someone else will put a belt around you and take you where you would rather not go” (John 21:18).

^[ii] Sam Cooke’s prophetic cry for social transformation was influenced by Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech and Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Cooke said the song came to it in a dream. Listen to it and imagine a shepherd singing it after the Nativity: https://youtu.be/fPr3yvkHYsE

^[iii] W. H. Auden, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio. The line is from the Narrator’s concluding speech. Auden’s marvelous poetic dramatization of the Nativity, written during the dark days of World War II, is imbued with hope. Alan Jacobs’ helpful annotated edition is highly recommended (Princeton University Press, 2015).

^[iv] Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966).

^[v] Charles Williams’ Christmas novel is The Greater Trumps (1932).

“The year changing its mind”— Embracing Impermanence at the Autumnal Equinox

Posted on September 22, 2021 by jimfriedrich

These are the last days.
Already the stalks of lilies
have withered, and the gold petals
of the rose melt on the grass.

— Patricia Hooper, “Equinox” ^[i]

Summer has just ended, twenty minutes past noon in the Pacific Northwest. I am always sorry to see it go. The languorous days, granting us license to play and to dream, now bid us farewell. The year’s shadowless noon gives way to the urgencies of time. Poet Penelope Shuttle describes September’s turning point with succinct perfection: “The year changing its mind.” ^[ii] The autumn may be agreeably mellow at first, but we all know where it’s headed. Every Arcadia must fail in the end, every Paradise be lost.

Yesterday I made my final communion with summer in a tranquil float down the Deschutes River. Ponderosa pines, willows and tall grasses lined the banks. Snowy egrets swept past on radiant wings. An osprey spiraled upward into the blue. My mind sank into stillness. I knew nothing but Now.

When I threw some books into my suitcase for an end-of-summer vacation in eastern Oregon, I didn’t realize how autumnal my reading would turn out to be. Patrick Leigh Fermor’s account of his epic walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople—before he turned 20—preserves his vivid memories of an exotic world, from shepherds’ campfires in the Carpathian wilds to the sumptuous libraries in the country estates of cultured Austro-Hungarian patricians. But Fermor didn’t write his trilogy until he was an old man, long after the Middle Europe of 1934 had been swept away. The reader feels the shadow of not only lost youth but also a lost world. ^[iii]

Johan Huizinga’s The Autumn of the Middle Ages documents the passing away, in the cultural imagination of France and the Netherlands, of chivalric dreams of a more beautiful life. Before the sadness of fate and history set the dominant tone, says Huizinga, “in many respects life still wore the color of fairy tales.” ^[iv] At the end of the 14^thcentury, a French poet summed up the spirit of his despondent age:

La fin s’approche, en verité …
Tout va mal.

The end is truly near …
Everything is going bad. ^[v]

At a time when so much of our own “reality” seems to be a fading dream—democracy, climate, human health, civic sanity—the poet’s autumnal lament rings true. Happily, I brought a third book, containing a cure for such melancholy themes. In Thomas Merton’s journal of his experiences in the far East, the Catholic contemplative wonders whether he is seeing the “real Asia,” or simply finding “an illusion of Asia that needed to be dissolved by experience.” In a deep valley within the Himalayan foothills, he is instructed by the landscape:

“What does this valley have? Landslides. Hundreds of them. The mountains are terribly gashed, except where the forest is thick. Whole sections of tea plantations were carried away six weeks ago. And it is obviously going to be worse the next time there are really heavy rains. The place is a frightening example of annicca—‘impermanence.’ A good place, therefore, to adjust one’s perspectives. I find my mind rebelling against the landslides. I am distracted by reforestation projects and other devices to deny them, to forbid them. I want all this to be permanent. A permanent postcard for meditation, daydreams. The landslides are ironic and silent comments on the apparent permanence, the ‘eternal snows’ of solid [Mount] Kanchenjunga.”

The landslides become Merton’s teacher. Stability is an illusion. Even the great Himalayan mountain, in all its sublime majesty, is subject to impermanence. Once this is accepted, Merton is liberated from autumnal sadness, and a measure of Edenic summer knowledge is restored. He can live in the given moment, accepting its blessings with a peaceful, unanxious heart.

“The sun is high, at the zenith. Clear soft sound of a temple bell far down in the valley. Voices of children near the cottages above me on the mountainside. The sun is warm. Everything falls into place. Nothing is to be decided … There is nothing to be judged.” ^[vi]

Photographs by the author.

^[i] Reprinted in The Heart of Autumn: Poems for the Season of Reflection, ed. Robert Atwan (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 16. This fine anthology is one of a series on poetry of the 4 seasons.

^[ii] From “September,” Ibid., 17.

^[iii] I am currently reading the 2^nd volume of the trilogy, Between the Woods and Water (New York: New York Review of Books, 1986/2005).

^[iv] Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton & Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 9. This more recent translation is much preferable to the one I read in my youth, The Waning of the Middle Ages.

^[v] Eustache Deschamps (1346-1406), in Huizinga, 35.

^[vi] Thomas Merton, The Asian Journal (New York: New Directions, 1975), 150-151.

The Most Misunderstood Christian Virtue

Posted on February 23, 2021 by jimfriedrich

God guides the humble in doing right and teaches the divine way to the lowly

— Psalm 25:8

There was a hermit who was able to banish the demons. And he asked them: “What makes you go away? Is it fasting?” They replied: “We do not eat or drink.” “Is it vigils?” They said: “We do not sleep.” “Then what power sends you away?” They replied: “Nothing can overcome us except humility alone.”

— Sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers

When I spent Orthodox Holy Week in Jerusalem years ago, I saw an unusual ritual in the Syrian church on Holy Thursday. The patriarch, imitating the humility of Jesus, girded himself with a towel and knelt at the feet of the clergy to wash their feet. After this, he took his seat. Then the clergy surrounded his chair and lifted it above their heads, for “all who humble themselves shall be exalted” (Luke 14:11). From this elevated position, the patriarch gave us all a blessing.

Humility is perhaps the most misunderstood of Christian virtues. It has been confused with low self-esteem, or suffering devaluation by others without complaint. Religious tropes of unworthiness (“I am a worm, not a person!”) haven’t helped. But humility is foundational to spiritual growth. When the Psalm says that God “teaches the divine way to the lowly,” it means that there is something essential, life-giving and godly which comes only through humility.

In the 4^th century, Christian men and women fled the corruptions of a dehumanizing culture in search of a more authentic way of being. In the deserts of Egypt and Palestine, they discovered that humility was not just the first step on the path toward the “divinization” of our humanity; it was the path itself—the self-emptying process which makes room for God to fill us. This is the wisdom the Psalmist promised, and it became foundational for western monasticism, of which every contemporary Christian is a beneficiary. As Thomas Merton put it, humility “empties the soul of all pride and annihilates it in the sight of God, so that nothing may be left of it but the pure capacity for God.” ^[i]

Humility is countercultural in the age of “selfies.” It is the antidote for narcissism—grandiose self-importance, entitlement, insatiable lust for attention, and self-promotion. It gives glory only to God.

Humility begins with consciousness of sin—our own incompleteness, our distance from what we are made to be. This frees us from having to pretend to be what we are not. We drop the disguises and self-delusion, admit our weaknesses and limitations. We relinquish the need to be in control or make everything about us. We accept our dependence on God—everything is gift, not possession. We acknowledge our need for mercy.

Humility also heals our relationships with others. If we don’t have to be the smartest in the room, or the most important, or always correct, we can shed the arrogance, egotism, fear and competitiveness which disable loving community. We submit ourselves to the presence, influence and “otherness” of others, even when it is difficult to do, because interdependence is the truth of love. We even accept the hard things beyond our control without losing faith. And by not insisting on always having the best for myself, or asserting my rights without reverent regard for humanity or the planet, humility restores the balance of paradise.

Benedictine sister Joan Chittister sums it up this way: “Humility is the total continuing surrender to God’s power in my life and in the lives of those around me.” ^[ii]

^[i] Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (182), cited in William H. Shannon, Christine M. Bochen, & Patrick F. O’Connell, The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002), 216.

^[ii] Joan Chittister, O.S.B., Wisdom Distilled from the Daily: Living the Rule of St. Benedict Today (New York: Harper One, 1991), 65.

I took the photograph at the Venice Biennale in 2019. The sculpture is “The Guardians of Time” (2018) by Austrian artist Manfred Kielnhofer. The faceless anonymity of the monkish figures and the young woman refute the assertion of self. Even the latter’s self-conscious pose is at least practicing the posture of humility and surrender, if only in play (her act was spontaneous, inspired by the figures). But is not all Christian practice a form of play, where we try out a self we have not yet become?

Praying the Hours (2): Vigils

Posted on October 20, 2020 by jimfriedrich

This is the second in a series on the canonical hours, the ancient Christian practice for living a mindful day. The first, “Reclaiming My Time,” gives a general introduction, with a list of helpful resources for your own practice of prayer and meditation. This second reflection concerns “Vigils,” the liminal space between yesterday and tomorrow.

“Could you not stay awake for one hour?” — Lippo Memmi, Agony in the Garden (detail), Collegiata Santa Maria Assunta, San Gimignano, Italy (c. 1340).

What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed? And what if, in your dream, you went to heaven and plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “What if you slept?”

The night, O my Lord, is a time of freedom. You have seen the morning and the night, and the night was better. In the night, all things began, and in the night the end of all things has come before me.

— Thomas Merton, “Fire Watch, July 4, 1952”

Vigils is the most fluid of the canonical hours. It may be kept at midnight, or at 3 a.m., or just before dawn, as a prelude to the sunrise hour of Lauds. While the world sleeps, monastics rise from their beds and make their way in the dark to the choir. The sixth-century Rule of St. Benedict recommends that the first Psalm be read “slowly and deliberately,” to allow the community’s sleepyheads extra time to arrive. “If the resurrection of the dead is anything like getting up in the morning,” complains one monk, “I am not completely convinced that I want to be included.”^[i] But prayer never sleeps. “At midnight I will rise to give you thanks,” says the Psalmist. “My eyes are open in the night watches.”^[ii]

Vigils is not for all people at all times, but as an occasional practice it has much to offer. Being awake in the night is not like being awake in the day. We are different, our surroundings are different, and time is different. All these differences affect the quality of our consciousness, our physical energies, and our prayer. It’s no accident that the two most mysterious events in the gospels, the Nativity and the Resurrection, took place in deepest night.^[iii] “When all things were wrapped in peaceful silence and night was in the midst of its swift course,” said Meister Eckhart, “a secret word leaped down from heaven.…”^[iv]

The hours between midnight and dawn should not go unvisited by the waking self. They whisper secrets which sleepers never know. I’ve driven through black nights on lost highways, watched 72-hour film marathons with (mostly) open eyes, arisen at midnight to ascend Mt. Rainier with a headlamp, drifted in and out of sleep lying on the floor of the Fillmore Auditorium in the wee hours of a Grateful Dead concert, and curated all-night multi-sensory worship in a circus tent with 400 Episcopalians.^[v] Even though only the last of these was a specifically religious event, I always felt transformed to some degree by my night-journeys. By the time the sun restored the ordinary, I was no longer quite the same person. Something had shifted. Maybe it was the world; maybe it was just my eyes, or my heart. But the next morning I always felt radiant and new, like the first morning of Creation.

What is it about a vigil experience that makes this so? For one thing, my post-midnight self, even when awake, is more prone to a state of reverie, when the daytime’s fully conscious subject gives way to the “night dream” which, as Gaston Bachelard suggests, “does not belong to us. It is not our possession. With regard to us, it is an abductor, the most disconcerting of abductors: it abducts our being from us. Nights, nights have no history.… we are returned to an ante-subjective state. We become elusive to ourselves, for we are giving pieces of ourselves to no matter whom, to no matter what.”^[vi]

The world, too, is different in the dark—its solid forms dissolved into shadow, purged of detail and color, cloaked in absence. The noise and strife of daytime forgotten in the hush. Deep, deep silence: like the primordial stillness before the birth of everything. An environment without verbs. “Baptized in the rivers of night,” said Thomas Merton of the Vigils hour, the earth recovers its “innocence.”^[vii]

Time slows, pausing deliberately between yesterday and tomorrow. No longer a flowing river, it becomes a pool of infinite depth where we can wash away our hurry-sickness. “A single hour takes a long time to pass,” says a modern Book of Hours, “but living in it is discipleship for eternity.”^[viii]

In the Book of Genesis, Jacob has two contrasting experiences at the Vigils hour. In one, he is given a blissful vision of a ladder between heaven and earth, revealing the ultimate Reality so often invisible in the glare of sunlight. In the other, he wrestles desperately with God till dawn.^[ix] So it is for us. Sometimes our night vigil is bathed in tranquility and illumined by love. And sometimes we watch anxiously over a sick child or a dying friend, or pray for the ones who are afraid or lost in the dark, or wrestle with our own troubled thoughts, or wait with expectant and vulnerable hearts for the dawn of God.

Benedictine writer Macrina Wiederkeh distills the essence of Vigils prayer, when even the most restlessly wakeful are invited to rest in the sacred pause of what T. S. Eliot called “the uncertain hour before the morning.”^[x]

“In the middle of the night, I pray for those who sleep and those who cannot sleep. I pray for those with fearful hearts, for those whose courage is waning. I pray for those who have lost vision of what could be. When I rise in the middle of the night, my prayer is simply one of waiting in silence, waiting in darkness, listening with love. It is a prayer of surrender. In my night watch I do not ordinarily use words. My prayer is a prayer of intent. I make my intention and I wait. I become a deep yearning. The silence and the darkness are healing. My prayer is now a prayer of trust. I keep vigil with the mystery.”^[^xi]

When I was a teenager, the climactic all-night vigil in Alan Paton’s novel, Cry the Beloved Country, made a deep impression on me. In the days of South African apartheid, on the night before his prodigal son’s execution, the Rev. Stephen Kumalo, an Anglican priest, climbs a high mountain to pray—for his own failings, for the soul of his son, and for the liberation of his people. Hour after hour, through the darkness, he keeps vigil for Absalom (“my son, my son!”) and for all the broken and lost. When the sun finally breaks the horizon—the very moment of his son’s execution—he makes eucharist with a maize cake and tea, remembering with thanksgiving God’s promise of salvation. “But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret.”^[xii]

Over the years, the image of Fr. Kumalo on that nocturnal summit has informed my own affinity for Vigils. There is something profoundly uncanny about every “night watch,” when sleep is forsaken in order to contemplate “the Mystery of the world,”^[xiii] whose ineffability is uniquely conveyed in the hours of deepest dark and silence.

At Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, the monks would take turns making the rounds of the expansive main building on “fire watch,” guarding the multitude of flammable wooden spaces through the night while the community slept. Thomas Merton’s shift on the night of July 4^th, 1952, became for him a vivid metaphor for the spiritual journey into God, related in his famous “Fire Watch” essay.

As Merton moves thoughtfully and prayerfully through the monastic spaces, he retraces his personal history as a monk. Every room is inscribed with significant memory. But his fire watch is also the journey of the human soul. By first descending into the monastery’s lower depths and gradually ascending to its highest point in the abbey tower, he replicates the pattern of the Paschal Mystery and the Divine Comedy, where the way down becomes, in the end, the way up.

Merton’s “Fire Watch” reflection is framed by biblical images. It begins with Isaiah’s tower watchman keeping vigil through the long night, alert for a word of revelation. And it concludes with a divine word of comfort to Jonas, better known as Jonah, whose descent into the belly of the fish foreshadowed Christ’s death and resurrection.

“The sign of Jonas”––Merton’s term for the Paschal Mystery of dying and rising––is “burned into the roots of our being,” he said. And he described his own life’s pilgrimage as “traveling toward my destiny in the belly of a paradox.”^[xiv]

For the receptive soul, Vigils is the hour when we listen to the voice of silence, and rest in the grace of unknowing. In “Fire Watch,” Merton sums up prayer in the dark in four lines:

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.
This night, and every night, it is the same question.^[xv]

^[i] Mark Barrett, O.S.B., Crossing: Reclaiming the Landscape of Our Lives (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 2008), 11.

^[ii] Psalm 119: 62, 148.

^[iii] The Christmas midnight mass and the Easter Vigil both incorporate the Vigils aura of nocturnal mystery when they take the assembly deep into the night. But many churches sacrifice this dimension when they choose the convenience of starting so early that they end well before midnight.

^[iv] Meister Eckhart, cited in Elizabeth Yates, A Book of Hours (Noroton, CT: Vineyard Books, 1976), 50. Yates’ book contains prayers and reflections for each of the 24 hours. The Eckhart quote appears at Midnight.

^[v] A description of the all-night liturgy may be found here: https://jimfriedrich.com/2014/08/12/experiments-in-worship/

^[vi] Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 145.

^[vii] Thomas Merton, “Fire Watch, July 4, 1952,” epilogue to The Sign of Jonas (1953), cited in Lawrence S. Cunningham, Thomas Merton: Spiritual Master—The Essential Writings (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1992), 107.

^[viii] Yates, A Book of Hours, 55.

^[ix] Genesis 28:10-17; 32:23-33.

^[x] T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding” (section II), in Four Quartets. “In the uncertain hour before the morning / Near the ending of interminable night …”

^[xi] Macrina Wiederkehr, O.S.B., Seven Sacred Pauses: Living Mindfully Through the Hours of the Day (Notre Dame, IN: Sorin Books, 2008), 31.

^[xii] The last line of Paton’s novel, published in 1948.

^[xiii] Eberhard Jüngel’s name for the Divine, unencumbered with overuse or limiting connotations, offers an open space for the varieties of religious experience.

^[xiv] Merton, The Sign of Jonas (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1953).

^[xv] Merton, “Fire Watch,” in Cunningham, 111.

Easter Wings: An Ascension Homily

Posted on May 21, 2020 by jimfriedrich

All the other Distance
He hath traversed first –
No new mile remaineth –
Far as Paradise –

His sure foot preceding –
Tender Pioneer –
Base must be the Coward
Dare not venture – now –

–– Emily Dickinson, “Life is what we make it”

“He ascended into heaven. . .” We say this every time we recite the Creed. But what does it mean? Why do we say it, and what are we being asked to believe? Is it an embarrassing myth, a problematic metaphor, or an inexplicable fact? Many Christians would prefer to hurry past the doctrine of the Ascension, as if it were not something we should examine too closely. Nothing to see here, folks, just keep moving.

But maybe wondering what we do with the story isn’t the right question. What we really need to ask is: What is the story going to do with us? Where does it want to take us? How might it change us?

John Calvin, the great Reformation theologian, called the Ascension “one of the chiefest points of our faith.”[i] Really? Compared to the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Savior’s disappearance into a cloud seems a relatively minor part of the story. How much does it matter for Christian faith and practice?

Let’s begin with three things that the Ascension is not. First of all, it is not the end of Jesus’ presence in the finite and temporal world, the world of human experience. In the sixth-century Ascension hymn by Romanos, the disciples express their anxiety about being abandoned:

Are you leaving us, O Compassionate?
Parting from those who love you?
You speak to us like someone going on a journey. . .
Do not take yourself far away from those who love you. [ii]

We know that feeling. In a secular age, sometimes is seems that all divinity has just up and left this world without a trace. But if the Ascension was the end of one kind of presence, it was the beginning of another. Jesus is still here, but in a different way.

Secondly, the Ascension is not the Incarnation in reverse, as though God was briefly one of us, and now he’s not. A human life is finite, vulnerable, dependent and particular. It’s radically different than being the infinite God of power and might. But when, as the Bible puts it, Jesus ascended to “the right hand of the Father,” he didn’t leave his humanity behind. He took it with him into the heart of God.

Finally, the Ascension is not just about Jesus.
It’s about us as well.
If we are in Christ, then wherever Jesus goes, we go too.

Let’s look at each of these themes more closely. First, the question of presence and absence. The unique particularity of Jesus of Nazareth, a first-century Jewish male who lived and died like one of us, could only be experienced the way every finite existence is experienced: in its own place and time. If it’s here, it can’t be there. If it’s then, it can’t be now. Once Jesus was laid in the tomb, he could no longer be one object alongside all the other objects in the world. That physical walking-around-the-neighborhood Jesus was gone for good.

When Jesus rose from the dead, his identity and presence were no longer bound by the rules of time and space. His risen body could be both here and there. And the reason the resurrection stories lack the chronological realism of the Passion narratives is because they occur outside historical time. Encounters with the risen Christ were not additional chapters in the life and times of the earthly Jesus. They took place outside of history, at the border between our spatiotemporal world and whatever lies beyond it.

If Easter is not a historical narrative following the rules of space and time, then Ascension was not the next thing that happened after the resurrection appearances, because things don’t happen in sequence outside of time. So instead of thinking of the Ascension as another event in time, think of it as another dimension of resurrection. In his Easter appearances, the risen Jesus assured his friends that he would be with them always. In the Ascension, however, he made it clear that his presence would now have to be experienced in new ways and different forms. First there is Jesus. Then there is no Jesus. Then there is.

Ever since the resurrection,
seeing Jesus has required an act of recognition,
a moment in which we ask, “Jesus, it that you?”

Discerning the myriad forms of Christ’s presence is a fundamental practice for God’s friends in these latter days. We find Christ in sacrament and community, prayer and Scripture. We find Christ through forgiveness and reconciliation, compassion and service, justicemaking and peacemaking. Christ meets us in our neighbor and in the stranger; in solitude and solidarity; in church and on the street. Christ hangs on every cross, and returns in every resurrection.

As Jesus said before he left,
“I am with you always, even to the end of time” (Matt. 28:20).

But if Christ now tends to appear incognito, quietly “as One unknown,”[iii] what do we make of the Ascension’s theology of exaltation, celebrating the Christ “whose glory fills the skies?”

Hail the day that sees him rise,
Glorious to his native skies;
Christ, awhile to mortals given,
Enters now the highest heaven. [iv]

Charles Wesley’s familiar hymn is one of many envisioning the enthronement of Christ as the governor of the world. And we all appreciate the theological irony: the humiliated and rejected one turns out to wear the crown. But such a dramatic reversal risks undoing the Incarnation, as though the finite and vulnerable humanity of Jesus were only a temporary thing, given back after Easter like a rented costume. But that’s not what happened. The Incarnate word came to stay.

Yes, divine and human are radically different. Infinite and finite are radically incommensurate. Creator and creature can never be confused. And yet, without God ceasing to be God or Jesus of Nazareth ceasing to be human, heaven and earth have been joined in holy union, never to be put asunder.

The understanding of Christ as the divine Word, the shaping power of love through whom all things are created and sustained in their being, is not a theological footnote. It is key to the story of redemption that our Savior not only has the whole universe at his back, but that his way, the sacrificial way of self-diffusive love, is the very truth of God, and therefore the truth of how things are meant to go in the world which God has made. To be in Christ is to conform to the most fundamental reality, and the Ascension imagery of divine enthronement celebrates this crucial fact. Christ is the way, the truth and the life. Self-diffusive love is the law of the universe.

However, too much of this and we risk highlighting the divine at the expense of the human in the story of Jesus, as if more of one means less of the other. If we fully embrace our humanity, is there less room for God? Or if we are to be more like God, must we diminish or abandon our humanity because it is essentially incapable of receiving and containing divinity?

Jesus answers these two questions with “no” and “no.” In the self-emptying act of becoming flesh, God lost nothing of the divine nature, for the essence of God is love: the ceaseless mutuality of giving and receiving that constitutes the Holy Trinity. As for human beings, whose very existence is dependent upon, and constituted by, the reception of God’s gifts of life and breath and Spirit, our creaturely nature was never more itself than when Jesus managed to receive divine fullness with an open heart.

In other words, God was never more like God than in the act of giving Godself away. And humanity was never more perfectly realized than when Jesus exercised his created capacity to receive that gift in a finite way. Communion with God does not obliterate our humanity. It fulfills it.

Irenaeus, one of the first great theologians, said in the second century that “the glory of God is a human being fully alive.”[v] And this fullness of creaturely life is attained, he said, not by “a casting away of the flesh, but by the imparting of the Spirit.”[vi] God loves us just the way God made us: finite, vulnerable, embedded in the absorbing and messy narratives which comprise human be-ing. And what God desires is for us to live into our creaturely capacity to receive every gift, every blessing, and ascend into the divine communion which is our true and lasting home.

And this brings us to my final point. Ascension is not just about Jesus. It’s about us as well. As members of Christ’s body––with Christ and in Christ––we too are being drawn up to dwell in the vivifying presence of the Holy One––to enjoy God forever.

We call Jesus the Word made flesh because he showed, in the language of human flesh and earthly story, how the divine life could be translated into finite form as a life for others. From birth to death, Jesus was pro nobis: for us. And his Ascension was for us as well, to take us heavenward with him. Jesus did not abandon us. He went on ahead, as the “Tender Pioneer,”[vii] to prepare a place where we may join him.

John Calvin explained the Ascension’s shared, collective dimension in this way:

“Christ did not ascend to heaven in a private capacity, to dwell there alone, but rather that it might be the common inheritance of all the godly, and that in this He has also, by the power of the Holy Spirit, made it possible for us to share in the divine presence [viii]. . . . “Ascension follows resurrection: hence if we are members of Christ we must ascend into heaven.” [ix]

If we are members of Christ, we must ascend. This is the pattern of the Christian life: moving Godward. When I walked the Camino de Santiago, pilgrims encouraged one another with a wonderful word for this Godward movement: Ultreia!, which means Beyond! We are all pilgrims to the Beyond. Growth is our vocation. Transformation is our vocation.

But we can only advance with Christ and in Christ. No wings of our own can defy the gravity of our situation. The sins of the world weigh us down––all that heavy baggage that Thomas Merton called “the contagion of [our] own obsessions, aggressiveness, ego-centered ambitions and delusions.”[x] And in a time of pandemic, fear, illness and grief pile on their own crushing load.

Only the rising and ascending Christ can deliver us from so much gravity. Only Christ can give us what Anglican poet-priest George Herbert called “Easter Wings.” In his poem of that name, in which the words on the page are arranged in the shape of angels’ wings, he admits he can only fly “if I imp thy wing on mine.” He borrowed that peculiar term from falconry: to “imp” means “to engraft feathers in a wing to restore or improve its power of flight.”[xi] In other words, if we want to ascend, we need the help of Christ’s own feathers. If we’re going to fly, we need Easter wings.

As Herbert prays,

With thee
O let me rise
As larks, harmoniously,
And sing this day thy victories.

If you’ve ever heard an English lark, ascending high into the sky as it utters its ecstatic song, you will appreciate the charm of Herbert’s metaphor. A century after Herbert, hymnwriter Isaac Watts wrote my favorite Ascension lyric.

Thence he arose, ascended high,
to show our feet the way.
Up to the Lord our souls shall rise,
on the great rising day. [xii]

Of course, heaven is not susceptible to prepositions: “above,” “beyond,” or even “within” do not tell us where heaven is, since anything beyond space and time has no spatial dimension, and therefore no location. Neither heaven nor God are a place on any map. Still, by God’s grace we may discover their nearness even so, and breathe their atmosphere, in both this world and the next.

For physical and directional beings like ourselves, the imagery of ascending into the sky feels true enough. “Seek the things that are above,” St. Paul tells us (Col. 3:1). “Lift up your hearts,” says the priest at every mass. We don’t have to deny astronomy to know what these things mean. We feel the upward pull.

It’s not a matter of leaving creation behind, or shedding our bodies to become immaterial beings. “Behold, I make all things new,” says the Holy One. All things––not just our souls. The whole creation is being drawn higher and higher, further and further, deeper and deeper into God. Let everything that has breath shout “Glory!”

Ascension Day “Charade”?––The Puzzling Exit of Jesus

[i] John Calvin, Commentary on Acts 1:9, cited in Julie Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder: A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and Ascension (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), K1249 (The Kindle edition has no page numbers, so I use the Kindle location numbers). Canlis’ rich and thoughtful book is a great read, and has increased my appreciation of Calvin immensely. My other invaluable sources for this essay were Christ the Heart of Creation (Rowan Williams, Bloomsbury 2018) and The Word Made Flesh: A Theology of Incarnation (Ian A. McFarland, WJK 2019).

[ii] Romanos, “Kontakion on the Ascension” in Kontakia: On the Life of Christ, trans. by Archimandrite Ephrem Lash (Harper Collins, 1962).

[iii] This phrase is from a famous passage by Albert Schweitzer: “He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those men who knew him not. He speaks to us the same word: ‘Follow thou me!’ and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience who He is.”

[iv] Charles Wesley, “Hail the Day That Sees Him Rise” (1739). The prolific 18^th century writer composed over 6000 hymns, at least 10 of which are on the Ascension. However, his brother John, who gave some 40,000 sermons, never preached on the topic.

[v] Irenaeus (c. 130 – c. 202), Adversus Haereses IV.20.7, cited in Canlis, K2246.

[vi] Adversus Haereses V.8.1, in Canlis, K1960.

[vii] Emily Dickinson, “Life – is what we make it.” I quote the last 2 stanzas in the epigraph.

[viii] Calvin, Commentary on John 14:2, in Canlis K1218.

[ix] Calvin, Commentary on Colossians 3:1, in Canlis K991.

[x] Thomas Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action, p. 158, cited in Martin Laird, An Ocean of Light (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 11.

[xi] Helen Wilcox, The English Poems of George Herbert (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 148 n.19.

[xii] Isaac Watts, “Why do we mourn departing friends” (1707). Set to a shape note tune by Timothy Swan in 1801, it is #163b in The Sacred Harp (Bremen, GA: Sacred Harp Publishing Company, 1991). A powerful version from the 2^nd Irish Shape Note Convention (2012) can be heard here: https://youtu.be/7mCFMKNJIAg

O Emmanuel (Dec. 23)

Posted on December 23, 2019 by jimfriedrich

Climate March, Seattle (Eastertide, 2017).

O Emmanuel,
you show us the face of divinity,
you reveal the fullness of our humanity.
Come: enable us to become who we are.

As Advent draws to a close, we speak the most impossible of divine names: Emmanuel––God with us. “How can this be?” wondered the young woman chosen to be the Mother of God. How can human flesh contain the Infinite? It is the profoundest of mysteries, and the how of it is beyond our grasp. But this much we are meant to know: Incarnation doesn’t just happen to God. It happens to us as well.

In the Nativity, our humanity became a place where God chooses to dwell. We may still be works in progress, but we are bound for glory. As St. Paul put it, “all of us, with our unveiled faces like mirrors reflecting the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the image that we reflect in brighter and brighter glory” (II Cor. 3:18). Imagine that!

“It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race,” said Thomas Merton, “though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many mistakes: yet, with all that, [God’s own self] glorified in becoming a member of the human race.

“I have the immense joy of being [a human person],” he continued, “a member of a race in which [God’s own self] became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

Confirmands at Saint-Sulpice (Paris, Eve of Pentecost, 2012).

Backpacking with the Saints (Part 3)

Posted on September 19, 2019 by jimfriedrich

Osservanza Master (Siena), St. Anthony the Abbot in the Wilderness, c. 1435

“The saints I travel with are more than companions on the trail. When I’m backpacking, I listen to their silences, their laughter, their readiness to jolt me out of my distractions. Back home I ask them for their prayers, for help in understanding and interpreting them aright. We even work together at letting the wilderness take us places where neither of us might have gone before in our thinking. Ours is a vigorous, intimate discourse. We wrangle back and forth; they humble me by the depth of their passion. I sense the weight of my responsibility to them, but I love them as well. The ‘communion of saints’ is far more than a line in the creed for me. These endearing trail-weathered mavericks are my teachers––giant sequoias that fill me with awe.”

–– Belden C. Lane

The fourth and final theme of Belden C. Lane’s Backpacking with the Saints returns us to the place where we started. But we are no longer the same. The journey has changed us. “Delight (Returning Home with Gifts)” invokes a quartet of spirited and joyous saints to help us discern the gifts we have found in the wild, not only for ourselves but for the whole human community.

Lane’s first gift for the return is discernment, the clarity to realize our deepest desire. And our teacher here is the thirteenth-century Sufi poet and God-intoxicated mystic Jelaluddin Rumi, whose playful and earthy metaphors sweep us past our distractions and evasions to take us where more cautious and “serious” language cannot go. We are flutes blown with divine breath, or dry tinder for Love’s fire. We are chickpeas tossed into a boiling pot until we are made soft and flavorful. We are lovers crazy to get lost in the Beloved. “I became Him,” Rumi said. “Then he threw myself out of me.”

For both the mystic and the soulful hiker, God is everywhere, including the inmost self. A pilgrimage out into the wild is also a journey inward, toward the revelation of our true desire. Once we drink from the source of all our yearning, we can return with an awakened heart. “You are the Kaaba,” Rumi tells us. “Walk around yourself in wonder.”

Palouse Falls, Washington (August 21, 2014)

The second gift to take home is community, and Lane’s teacher is Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), the Jesuit scientist and theologian who saw Christ as the strong force of the cosmos, drawing all things together in an evolutionary process of convergence. “Love alone,” he wrote, “is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.”

Teilhard was officially silenced by a hierarchy uneasy with his visionary breadth, but he never ceased to celebrate the holiness woven into every atom and every star. As disciples of the one who said, “This is my body,” we must treat matter with proper reverence, he insisted. “By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, when in fact we live steeped in its burning layers.”

God is the mystery of the world, whose interdependent ecology mimes the trinitarian dance of eternal self-offering. Everything depends on everything else. Community in its purest form is communion. The wilderness wants to tell us this, and Lane is a good listener. Out in the wild on a starry night, a raucous Compline of bullfrogs and peepers signifies for him the perpetual liturgy of praise in which we all have a voice. “We join together as fragments of a greater whole, standing in awe at the immense and holy company that constitutes our common life.”

Edward Hicks, The Peaceable Kingdom (c. 1837)

Mohandas Gandhi is the next guide, and the gift is justice. Gandhi’s reverence for all living things, his compassionate attention to suffering, and his willingness to put himself at risk to restore community, all model just and loving practice in our endangered global habitat.

It’s hard not to spend time in the natural world without falling in love. Like all love affairs, it brings joys and blessings, but also great responsibility. Love is a fierce protector. We who love Creation must guard what is vulnerable and restore what is damaged. We must confess our complicity in the wounding of Creation, and refrain from further harm. We must speak and act on behalf of the whole community of created beings, loving our neighbors––both human and nonhuman––as ourselves. We must walk gently and reverently upon God’s earth.

Lane argues that a passion for earth justice is one of the greatest gifts we bring home from our wilderness encounters. His quote from Edward Abbey says it all: “Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.”

Fernandez Pass, west of the Minarets, Yosemite National Park (Sept. 8, 2008)

Holy Folly is the final gift, and Thomas Merton is the perfect guide. When Merton became the most famous monk of the twentieth century, his comic spirit laughed off the demon of self-importance. “If you see a meditation going by, shoot it,” he said.

Lane calls Merton a “Zen clown,” and links the monk’s notorious playful side to the tradition of holy fool, whose vocation is to mock our complacencies, subvert every oppression, and celebrate surprise. As Lane says, the holy fool “invites you to laugh at yourself and the silly pretensions that crowd your life. The gift of the fool may be the most telling of all the benefits that derive from backpacking as spiritual practice. There’s no end to the stories you can tell of dumb mistakes you’ve made on the trail. Self-effacement is easy, even for gearheads and hard-core hikers.”

Every spiritual journey is an embrace of profound folly. You leave the safe harbor of the familiar for the wild sea of unknowing. You trust in something you can’t see or even name. You sail off the edge of the maps, into God knows where.

From Via Negativa: A Worship Installation (text adapted from Richard Shelton)

My vicarious walks with Lane through the wild terrain of his book have illumined not only my hiking life, but the rest of my story as well. And what moves me most about him is a hard-won ability to embrace the gifts of the wild with both humility and courage.

He tells a story of going on a men’s retreat with Franciscan contemplative Richard Rohr in the Arizona desert. Rohr sent each of the group into the dry depths of Aravaipa Canyon for a solo overnight, a kind of vision quest. He told them to listen to whatever teachers might appear, and not to be surprised if they are given a new name in their place of solitude.

After dark, the desert wind kicked up, the kind of wind that bores into your nervous system with “an incessant, disturbing presence.” Unable to sleep, Lane suddenly “felt an urge to tell a story, as if the stars and whirling cottonwood leaves were asking for relief from the monotony of the wind.”

Perched on a sandstone ledge, face to the tempest, he began to recite every story he could think of, plus the many more which welled up from the forgotten places in his mind. “Then,” he writes, “in the darkness before dawn, I heard it.”

“A voice carried on the wind that seemed to speak inside my body. I didn’t think it. I simply received it, with an undeniable certainty. Four words addressed to me: “Speaks with the Wind.” Nothing more. But I knew in that moment that I had been called . . . I had been named.”

His account deflects the solemnity of that wilderness baptism with some self-deprecation. Who did he think he was, Kevin Costner dancing with wolves? But he knew the voice within spoke truly. And, to our great benefit, he consented to be “one that could speak in, with, and for the places I had learned to love and the saints who had taught me there.”

“It wasn’t about me,” he says. “But it required me.”

Joe Golowka, my backpacking mentor, Sespe Creek Wilderness (March 29, 1981)

All quotations are from Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as Spiritual Practice by Belden C. Lane (Oxford University Press, 2015).

All photographs by Jim Friedrich

	Nancy Valaas on What Is Your Most Precious…
	Midge Harder on Missing the Eclipse
	DAVID FLY on Missing the Eclipse
	The Paschal Wisdom o… on What Will the Cross Make of Us…
	The Paschal Wisdom o… on Just a dream? – Reflecti…

The religious imagineer

Where the fire and the rose are one

Tag Archives: Thomas Merton

What Happens in Bethlehem Doesn’t Stay in Bethlehem

What’s Going On at the Asbury Revival?

The Pursuit of Happiness

On the Morning After the Nativity

“The year changing its mind”— Embracing Impermanence at the Autumnal Equinox

The Most Misunderstood Christian Virtue

Praying the Hours (2): Vigils

Easter Wings: An Ascension Homily

O Emmanuel (Dec. 23)

Backpacking with the Saints (Part 3)

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: