Skip to main content

Making Space to Enter the Mind of Christ

By

by the Rev. Paul McLain

“John the Short said, ‘I will invent a man composed of all the virtues. He would rise at dawn every morning, take up the beginning of each virtue, and keep God’s commandments. He would live in great patience, in fear, in long-suffering, in love of God; with a firm purpose of soul and body; in deep humility, in patience, in trouble of heart and earnestness of practice. He would pray often, with sorrow of heart, keeping his speech pure, his eyes controlled. He would suffer injury without anger, remaining peaceful and not rendering evil for evil, not looking for the faults of others, nor puffing himself up, meekly subject to every creature, renouncing material property and everything of the flesh. He would live as though crucified, in struggle, in lowliness of spirit, in goodwill and spiritual abstinence, in fasting, in penitence, in weeping. He would fight against evil, be wise and discreet in judgment and chaste in mind. He would receive good treatment with tranquility, working with his own hands, watching at night, enduring hunger and thirst, cold and nakedness and labor. He would live as though buried in a tomb and already dead, every day feeling death to be near him.’”

One of the things this time has taught me is the sheer fragility of life. I want to be gentler with the people around me, and I appreciate the gentleness given to me. Perhaps a better term for social distancing is “compassionate distancing.” An open question is, “What, if any, ways will this time change us?”

Today is Good Friday, a day in which we reflect on Jesus’s self-giving response to torture, humiliation, and death. My honest response is that I’m glad I didn’t have to go through what he did. But this day of all days calls us to enter the mind of Christ. Rowan Williams writes, “Jesus, because as a person he is one with the Word of God, in perfect communion with the Father, changes human nature by his personal loving surrender to God in every detail of his life and death. Those who live in him by grace are in the process of having their human nature changed as their personal relation with him develops; they are growing into what is always fully present and accomplished in him.”[1]

Jesus’s loving surrender is salvific for us, but it also calls for a response in how we are to live going forward. The “invented person” described in the beginning of this post by the desert father John the Short may seem out of our reach. But one thing we’re given right now is more unscheduled time to reflect on ways we can live more like Christ. For by making space to enter his self-giving love, we “have been appointed to ask for mercy for the world, to keep vigil for the salvation of all, and to partake in every person’s suffering.”[2]


[1]Rowan Williams, Where God Happens: Discovering Christ in One Another, 63-64.
[2] Isaac the Syrian, The Fountain and the Furnace, 165, as quoted by Maggie Ross, Pillars of Flame: Power, Priesthood, and Spiritual Maturity, 118.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bootstraps & Hermits

By
According to Laurence Freeman, some hermits used to say, "If you see a young man climbing up to heaven by his own will, catch him by the foot and pull him down to earth, for it is not good for him." Hard as I pull on my own bootstraps, I’ve never been able to lift myself even an inch toward heaven. Have you? The cliche has never made a lick of sense to me. It makes perfect sense, however, that a bootstrap would provide a fine grip if you’re trying to pull somebody else back down to earth. It seems the bootstrap theology of the hermits of the Egyptian desert was a near perfect inversion of ours. Our conception of economic life is one thing that’s floated off toward the heavens in my lifetime. We’ve increasingly thought of economic health more in terms of disembodied markets rather than incarnate human beings living deeply interconnected lives. It's more about Dow Jones Averages than actual people who get up in the morning and cook a meal or teach a child or install a fauce...
3 comments
Read more

Love Over Fear

By
After a long while in the Egyptian desert, Anthony said, “Now I no longer fear God, I love him, for love casts out fear.” by the Rev. Buddy Stallings When Scott first asked me to write a brief meditation on a teaching of one of the Desert Fathers, my response was, “Do you have any idea how long it has been since I have thought of a Desert Father?” In his inimitably kind way, he chuckled gently and told me the deadline for having it written. To tell the truth, even when I studied the Desert Fathers long ago in seminary, I didn’t think about them a great deal. None of them, not one, seemed like someone I would enjoy getting to know or certainly one with whom I would want to share a meal. Asceticism by definition does not elicit imaginings of culinary excellence. And, yet, even then, I was insightful enough to know that my real resistance was that I suspected they were on to something in their search for God that I most likely would never have the nerve or strength to engage: l...
3 comments
Read more

The Prime Directive

By Anonymous
Some brothers came to a holy hermit who lived in the desert and outside the hermitage they found a boy tending the sheep and using uncouth words. After they had told the hermit their thoughts and profited from his reply, they said, “Abba, why do you allow those boys to be here, and why don’t you order them to stop hurling abuse at each other?” He said, “Indeed, my brothers, there are days when I want to order them to stop it, but I hold myself back, saying, if I can’t put up with this little thing, how shall I put up with a serious temptation, if God ever lets me be so tempted? So I say nothing to them, and try to get into the habit of bearing whatever happens.” — I should start off by admitting to you that I watch Star Trek. You don’t have to watch Star Trek to understand this blog post, but why wouldn’t you? It’s a quarantine, y’all, and it’s a great show. I do, however, have one problem with Star Trek. Set in a time centuries from now, it depicts the human race as havin...
2 comments
Read more