Living With Contradiction. Esther de Waal
under the shadow of that tree which is the cross on the hill of Calvary – the cross that speaks to me of God's forgiving and redeeming love.
The cross also tells me that there are no short cuts. The wood that went to make the cross was taken from a living tree, but a tree that has been cut, shaped, transformed. The process of cutting, stripping and reshaping is never easy or comfortable; it is protracted and painful. Then the cross itself stands there, its main thrust downwards into the ground, its arms stretching outwards, a balance of two opposing forces, vertical and horizontal held together in a dynamic tension. Only so can it be life-giving. In that tension lies a most powerful image for what is at work in my own life. In that transformation I must expect to be shaped, formed and re-formed; nor can I ever hope to escape the tension that lies at the centre and makes possible the holding together of the whole.
Another way of expressing this truth would be to see it in terms of a continual dying and rebirth throughout my life. That I cannot have new life without death is the most fundamental and inescapable of all the tensions I have to hold on to. Here I remind myself of what was really involved in the nativity at Bethlehem, putting aside all the popular representations that have obscured a rather harsh reality: a child laid in a hollowed stone trough, warm human flesh placed on cold, bare stone, a prefiguring – right at the moment of birth – of the moment when that same body would be laid to rest in the stone of the tomb, death and life inextricably bound together.
St Anselm opens one of his prayers with the disarmingly simple words, “O God, who has formed and reformed me…” As I pray them I realize that this is one of God's mercies: that he allows me to remain open, vulnerable, sensitive to the ways in which he is ready to shape and mould me; that I am indeed clay in the hands of the potter; and that continually throughout my life the old gives way to the new – if I am willing (O let it happen, if I am ready to play my part.
I also realize that my own co-operation comes into play; that I must genuinely desire to move forward. My difficulty is that this desire is not always there, that often it seems so much easier and more appealing to stop, to look back, to fossilize, to refuse to grow. I also realize that I must be willing to receive, not proud and isolated, standing confident and aloof in my own self-sufficiency. Can I identify myself with those who sought out Christ in his earthly ministry, coming forward to find him and urge him to heal them? Seeking him out, waiting for him, making their way to him by themselves or with the help of friends? I can read the gospels as an account of a God of healing at work amidst the pain and suffering of the world. Certainly they make it plain that Christ walked in constant awareness of the pain of the world, as well as of its beauty and potential. He never minimized the problems of suffering and of evil. He never offered an explanation which would trivialize human anguish. But by taking human suffering seriously he took human dignity seriously. This comes over most poignantly in St Matthew's Gospel (9:35–6):
Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching and preaching…and healing…every infirmity. When he saw the crowds he had compassion for them, because they were harrassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd.
That analogy with a shepherd is a very powerful image. Ezekiel describes the care of the shepherd for his flock:
The Lord Yahweh says this: I am going to look after my flock myself, and keep all of it in view. As a shepherd keeps all his flock in view when he stands up in the middle of his scattered sheep so I shall keep my sheep in view…I shall look for the lost one, bring back the stray, bandage the wounded, and make the weak strong…I shall be a true shepherd to them. (Ezekiel 34:11–16).
“To bandage the wounded, and make the weak strong…’ In the Benedictine community the abbot holds the place of Christ and plays the role of good shepherd to the sheep. The shepherd is above all the one who seeks, who goes after the stray, who searches for the lost and who brings them back to the fold. There is here something which we all recognize. For not only are we seeking God. He is seeking us.
To seek God
means first of all
to let yourself be found by him.
He is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
He is the God of Jesus Christ.
He is your God
not because He is yours
but because you are His.
To choose God
is to realize that you are known and loved
in a way surpassing anything you can imagine
long before anyone had thought of you or spoken your name.
We are being sought, just as we are in all our weakness and woundedness. St Benedict writes as a man full of compassion and understanding. He expects much from all in his monastery, and yet he also recognizes that some are frail, old, sick, slow, lazy – and I may be any of these at various times in my life. He accepts this, indeed he starts from this, making concessions and allowances, building on the frailty and brokenness of our humanity. He points us a way to God which nurtures as well as challenges, which believes in our potential and yet makes sure that no more is asked of us than we can actually bear. A later Benedictine, St Anselm, writing in the twelfth century, expresses this nurturing, this gentleness in a prayer which asks
And you Jesus, are you not also a mother?
Are you not the mother who like a hen
Gathers her chickens under her wings?
St Benedict's starting point then is that Christ accepts me, just as I am now, with all my weakness and confusion, in all my complexity and contradiction. He does not want me to deny this. He does not ask me to act as though the frailty and the pain and the failure were not real. The first step for transforming that pain is to look at it with honesty, and then open myself up to God's healing and transforming love. I must not forget the pain that went into the shaping of a living tree into the cross. I must not forget that Christian discipleship is costly. Yet I hold on to the promise that ends the Prologue, that “we shall run on the path of God's commandments, our hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love”. It is in the certainty of that love, that total and unconditional love that makes all things possible, that we dare to move forward on the path of healing, transformation and new life.
Can I treat my own self with such compassion that I can layout honestly before God my strengths and my weaknesses, seeking help and guidance in those areas where it is most needed?
II
The Power of Paradox
‘we descend by exaltation and ascend by humility’ 7.7
“A harvester of grain, borrowing from others and making one bundle out of many that had gone before.” This ninth-century description of St Benedict draws a nice picture of a man open to different streams of thought.
At the very end of the Rule comes an unobtrusive small sentence which is in fact extremely illuminating. St Benedict cites for further reading, after what he claims is his own modest Rule, St Basil on the one hand and the desert fathers on the other. Now these two sources are very different in emphasis. St Basil is writing out of the experience of community living, the desert fathers out of the experience of hermit life. The former is more humane, aware of the relations between the brothers,