The Contemplative Crisis

Easter time

02 Apr 2010

2 Apr, 2010 Death, Resurrection, Easter, Church

Jesus has died and the hot cross buns have been eaten. It is Easter time and more particularly, Easter Saturday, a time during which nothing seems to be happening. We are awaiting for the resurrection to come at daybreak on Sunday morning. Most will barely give a second thought to the significance of this holy period and are waiting for the time to come when they will be finally able to gorge themselves on chocolate Easter eggs.

The death and resurrection of Jesus are commonly seen as historical events with theological significance, although the articles which appear in our daily newspapers at this time each year shy away from making such dogmatic assertions about either the history or the theological implications which the remainder of the New Testament fills out in detail. These newspaper articles, which appear as reliably as the mutton birds (otherwise known as the Short-Tailed Shearwater, Puffinus tenuirostris), returning from the northern hemisphere each spring, prefer to see the Easter events as some kind of vague cipher which interprets human experience without the necessity of dealing with such awkward and embarrassing concepts such as redemption and its corollary, sin. They are written as: “Let’s talk about Easter” (we have to at this time of year), “. . . but let’s not get too close to the Christian testimony about it lest we get confronted with uncomfortable and unpalatable truths”.

Even theologians dodge the issue of why Christ died preferring to talk about the ‘Easter story’ as though it is some later construction by the primitive church community to construct their faith and project it back retrospectively onto the events of their long dead hero. You know when things are going to go bad in the conversation and that you will be shortly delivered shonky theology when a theologian starts speaking of the ‘Easter faith of the disciples’ as a credible way of saying that the resurrection did not actually happen; it’s just that the disciples believed it happened. I find it incongruous that civil engineers study the formulae of bridge building and believe it works, but theologians study religion and don’t believe it’s necessary to believe in what one studies, or even that it works. We have people like the retired bishop of the diocese of Newark, New Jersey, John Shelby Spong, who does not believe in the affirmations of the Christian religion and rejects classical theism, but continues to hold to his belief that his interpretation is true, in spite of the Church continuing to affirm each week and throughout its history, ‘We believe in . . . a Person whose life, death and resurrection are the basis of our salvation’. We believe in something, not just ideas which viewed from the perspective of these later days, are mere projections of the German Idealism and Existentialism which underpinned the theologians of which Spong is an acolyte. But I am now, not only digressing, but now sounding a little cynical so I had better focus on what this blog entry is about.

The death and resurrection of Christ do however, provide a metaphor for understanding a common experience of death, loss of hope and eventual resurrection. It is a hermeneutical key which helps explain a process that many Christians undergo. For example, we find our marriages die. The ardour which burned so bright has burnt itself out and we are left facing the fact that we are selfish and self centred people who have been using our partner for our own gratification. Yet mysteriously, in dying to this selfishness we see within, we are reborn and able to love more deeply. Resurrection has occurred. We are profoundly grateful that when we confess and acknowledge our wrong doing or attitude, we are accepted and loved by our partner. We have moved from a place of death to experiencing resurrection.

Those pursing a religious life (whether in a monastery or as a hidden contemplative in a suit and tie during the week), find it dies. Their idealism is unattainable, unrealistic and unrelenting. Leo Tolstoy was one who suffered this disillusionment and struggle deeply. Parental and family expectations were not enough, if that was the reason for embarking on the journey, as many discovered in the post-Vatican II era of the Roman Catholic Church. Many missionaries and ministers in Protestant denominations discover that we cannot use our role as ministers to pursue a religious life and view ministry as an annoying distraction. Rather, it is because we pursue a contemplative life that we have found a source of Life which gives life to our ministries and it is in ministering, that we are only doing what we are called to do. However, until our ministry dies, there can be little authentic ministry empowered by the resurrected life of Christ. We discover in the winter of death that we have been driven by compulsions, faulty expectations of ourselves, ambitions and insecurities and that there was little of Christ. Neither duty will fuel our activities nor youthful exuberance. Only gratefulness will suffice in response to the grace of God and give birth to humble ministry (Lk 8:47-50).

Relationships die and careers die and are cut short by redundancy, the failure of the business or the simple awareness which grows uncomfortably, that we are not going to be the next CEO, manager or captain of industry. Churches die. They die because a few powerful individuals treat it as their own personal fiefdom. The noses of visitors smell the scent of ego, hypocrisy, superficial warmth, control and death, not the aroma of Christ (2 Cor 2:15), or the scent of humility or hospitality. When the church community shifts its focus inwardly onto its own and begins to feel smug, it has lost its focus on mission and journeying on with God or welcoming the stranger. But until it dies, there cannot be resurrection, only false hope. Reviving the past is one such false hope. Trying to do the same things, but only better, or the latest idea, are other false hopes and will only extend their lingering death. They must die in order to be re-born by Christ. During this period of winter, of death, there is only silence. The birds have flown north to warmer climates and God has disappeared. It is a time of fallowness, when the earth is left open, exposed. Our inclination is to seek relief from this death, but we must not. A vigil must be held; we must wait and listen to our heart. Our heart is drawing us into a protracted period of prayer, of deep prayer, crying out, of tears and mourning. And when we are exhausted and bereft of hope, only numbness remains. Death must do its work of preparation. We are empty. It is only now that there is room in our life for a new work by God, of resurrection. It is Easter time, a time of waiting, but also a time when we are filled with hope dependent on the one who died a death so that death may no longer live.