I like the mystical drama of the wide open spaces, of a person standing alone, stripped of social armor, before the vastness of the elements. Thus I liked best the desert areas of Israel: the caves of the Essenes and the bright green stretch of reeds along the Jordan that cuts through the badlands just north of the Dead Sea. It is there that I see the prophets and imagine the stern moral hardness of John the Baptist as he chastised even the King for misbehavior, which cost him his head. You can imagine that he did not tremble or fear one bit, not this man of the desert.
However, that is more the story of the Old Testament. Much as I often do not want to admit it, the real strength of Christianity is not in the desert prophets of old or even the desert fathers of early Christianity such as Augustine or Origin. Rather, it is in the Passion, which leads to the greatest Christian celebration of all, Easter. Its strength is to be found in a sacrifice that among normal humans would only take place between victim and victor, between the weak and the strong. Yet somehow, it is the victim here, the weak, who proved to be the stronger.
On our trip through Jerusalem we got a greater sense of this sacrifice when we first visited Christ’s place of imprisonment in the palace, then the court where his trial took place, and then the Via Dolorosa, the surprisingly long road Jesus was forced to walk on his way to the cross. At the end of the “way” on the hill of Calvary we saw where the hard rock called Golgotha rests, a rock that once stuck high above the earth so that no comfort of common ground or privacy could be found. No, on that rock the victims stood out like bleeding thumbs, to die wretchedly and humiliated before a cruel and uncaring world. As encased in the walls of a cathedral as the rock now is, one still gets the sense of the maliciousness of humanity, of its capacity for depravity. There is no gentle New Age covering of warts here; here we see the hearts of Hitler and Stalin and Jack the Ripper and all the other villains of history written into every man, as it truly is of we dig deeply enough. On this rock Jesus died, hated and scorned by the terrible injustice of the mob – and everyman is a member of the mob. However, above this sense of communal human guilt we also are overwhelmed by the powerful truth that divine love conquers all, even in such an impossible situation.
I have listened to Christian speaker and writer Mathew Kelly, and have been encouraged to do a certain exercise of introspection. He advises us to clear the mind as much as we can in quiet or sacred situations and then listen for some small locution, some small interior voice that might come from a divine source. Try it and see – with some practice, it often works. The voice is usually very soft but also very calm and clear compared to the other ramblings that take place in our busy, busy minds. Not long ago, I did this exercise at church and received the message “The Heart (is) in the Rock,” along with an internal picture of the unadorned Rock of Golgotha. I then pictured a heart – a real one, not a Valentine card – partially merged but also standing out from the center of the rock. The message was clear: not only are we to turn our hearts of stone into hearts of compassion because it is the kind thing to do, but also because the heart is the stronger and more enduring of the two. This is a message that does not just console the weak, as the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, but also speaks of a far deeper truth that has come to us through Christ’s extreme example of compassion when he died on the rock.
This compassion is found everywhere in spiritual rites and writings. For instance, the Catholic Church has a tradition called “The Stations of the Cross,” where the entire passion of Christ, from Gethsemane to the burial, is played out at 14 “stations” that are set in the walls of the church. I participated in this a week ago and was truly startled by the language. The weeping and guilt and sorrow and unabashed love spoken of at each station is truly overwhelming. Here is an example: “My adorable Jesus, it was not Pilate, no, it was my sins, that condemned Thee to die. I beseech Thee, by the merits of this sorrowful journey, to assist my soul in its journey toward eternity. I love Thee, my beloved Jesus; I love Thee more than myself; I repent with my whole heart of having offended Thee. Never permit me to separate myself from Thee again. Grant that I may love Thee always; and then do with me what Thou wilt.” (Station #1). This first struck me as far too saccharin, but as the rite continues through the stations from blood to pain to more blood and death, we begin to get a bigger idea. It is talking, we come to understand, about our own sense of abandonment as we come to our own end, and it tells us in no uncertain terms that, should we love Jesus with the same passion he had for us, that this love will be returned many times over, even in the lonely pains of our dying hours– and then some.
But there is more than just reciprocity to discover from this compassion. In the writings of the mystic Luisa Piccarreta of the early 20th century, we find other breathtaking signs of total self-abandonment and intimate love. This passage I picked almost at random: “While she was trying to unite her thoughts to His, to circulate thoughts of love in each created intelligence, Jesus moved in her interior. Sighing, He told her that just as she cannot be without Him, He cannot be without her. His love for her surpasses the needs of carrying out His Justice, and forces Him to unveil Himself to her.” (From Life of the Mystic Luisa Piccarreta, the Middle Years, compiled by Frank Rega). This, too, is shocking, revealing an intimacy that comes very close to erotic love. I find it almost embarrassing, but there is something absolutely integral to learn here: that God is not some distant abstract image or authority. He is rather, as has been often said, closer to our self than our own breath or skin. He is like a close, intimate sexual partner except what is desired is not the body but YOU, totally, everything, because God has created and knows every part of you and wants – if I may use that word for a being beyond being who wants for nothing – all of it. There is reciprocity here too, of course: give everything to God and you will get everything from God, which is infinite beauty and wisdom and love and eternal life and so on. But beneath it all is the real standard of Love – a desire to cherish every part of you, and to give every part back.
I move back to the rock. In my locution and little interior vision there was the heart in the rock, Jesus’s heart in the Rock of Golgotha. This was about love, yes, but more explicitly, about how love – that is, the total kind of love that God has and that we must search for – is stronger than rock. Nowadays, that rock is encased by a cathedral that is dedicated to the Holy Trinity, and explicitly to Jesus. On that rock the Romans once crucified criminals and foes of various sorts in their typically brutal way. The Romans were, if anything, the rock: hard, unflinching conquerors who were obliged to kill even themselves should they fail in a mission. In the time of Jesus, the Romans had conquered all of Israel as well as the rest of the occidental world, reigning nearly unchallenged for better than 800 years. Not bad. However, all that is left of their empire are museum pieces and interesting historical journals. On the other hand, the poor, defenseless man they killed on the rock now has a cathedral over that very site dedicated not to the power of Rome, but to him – and more explicitly, to his love. Now, more than a billion inhabitants from every nation on earth call Jesus their greatest authority, and it has been 2,000 years from his death. Which of the two, the heart or the rock, is stronger? Which has endured and which has not?
There is mystical power in this, of course, but we can understand this phenomena even from a more mundane level. That is: the human spirit, who we are overall, is not nurtured by a rock, but from the heart. Later in life we are made to turn our own hearts into stone, but at our roots – at everyone’s roots, including the Roman’s – is the heart. The rock is really the sand on which the political and social world is based – that is, on physical might and force and power and status; but the heart is what all human life is based upon. It is this, then, that is the rock that endures, and the rock-like nature only a façade, a fabrication of an insecure self that needs armor and conquest to protect itself from its own frailties, which are based on its own ignorance of itself. It is this, this hard rock, that is the stuff of fancy, albeit of a dark nature; and it is this, this total love that describes God and his nearly unbearable compassion, that is the rock that endures. It is this rock that was Peter, on which the church was built, who was not a conqueror but a man of the heart.
We are still learning this – or at least I am. God is as close to us as our self, and he wants all of us, every last bit. In return he gives us the strength that endures forever, the heart-stuff that answers all needs and desires. He gives us back our reality as humans. From the Rock of Golgotha we learn that all else is an ephemeral dream of self-power that ends in the grave or on the ash heap of history.
I like the mystical drama of the wide open spaces, of a person standing alone, stripped of social armor, before the vastness of the elements. Thus I liked best the desert areas of Israel: the caves of the Essenes and the bright green stretch of reeds along the Jordan that cuts through the badlands just north of the Dead Sea. It is there that I see the prophets and imagine the stern moral hardness of John the Baptist as he chastised even the King for misbehavior, which cost him his head. You can imagine that he did not tremble or fear one bit, not this man of the desert.
However, that is more the story of the Old Testament. Much as I often do not want to admit it, the real strength of Christianity is not in the desert prophets of old or even the desert fathers of early Christianity such as Augustine or Origin. Rather, it is in the Passion, which leads to the greatest Christian celebration of all, Easter. Its strength is to be found in a sacrifice that among normal humans would only take place between victim and victor, between the weak and the strong. Yet somehow, it is the victim here, the weak, who proved to be the stronger.
On our trip through Jerusalem we got a greater sense of this sacrifice when we first visited Christ’s place of imprisonment in the palace, then the court where his trial took place, and then the Via Dolorosa, the surprisingly long road Jesus was forced to walk on his way to the cross. At the end of the “way” on the hill of Calvary we saw where the hard rock called Golgotha rests, a rock that once stuck high above the earth so that no comfort of common ground or privacy could be found. No, on that rock the victims stood out like bleeding thumbs, to die wretchedly and humiliated before a cruel and uncaring world. As encased in the walls of a cathedral as the rock now is, one still gets the sense of the maliciousness of humanity, of its capacity for depravity. There is no gentle New Age covering of warts here; here we see the hearts of Hitler and Stalin and Jack the Ripper and all the other villains of history written into every man, as it truly is of we dig deeply enough. On this rock Jesus died, hated and scorned by the terrible injustice of the mob – and everyman is a member of the mob. However, above this sense of communal human guilt we also are overwhelmed by the powerful truth that divine love conquers all, even in such an impossible situation.
I have listened to Christian speaker and writer Mathew Kelly, and have been encouraged to do a certain exercise of introspection. He advises us to clear the mind as much as we can in quiet or sacred situations and then listen for some small locution, some small interior voice that might come from a divine source. Try it and see – with some practice, it often works. The voice is usually very soft but also very calm and clear compared to the other ramblings that take place in our busy, busy minds. Not long ago, I did this exercise at church and received the message “The Heart (is) in the Rock,” along with an internal picture of the unadorned Rock of Golgotha. I then pictured a heart – a real one, not a Valentine card – partially merged but also standing out from the center of the rock. The message was clear: not only are we to turn our hearts of stone into hearts of compassion because it is the kind thing to do, but also because the heart is the stronger and more enduring of the two. This is a message that does not just console the weak, as the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, but also speaks of a far deeper truth that has come to us through Christ’s extreme example of compassion when he died on the rock.
This compassion is found everywhere in spiritual rites and writings. For instance, the Catholic Church has a tradition called “The Stations of the Cross,” where the entire passion of Christ, from Gethsemane to the burial, is played out at 14 “stations” that are set in the walls of the church. I participated in this a week ago and was truly startled by the language. The weeping and guilt and sorrow and unabashed love spoken of at each station is truly overwhelming. Here is an example: “My adorable Jesus, it was not Pilate, no, it was my sins, that condemned Thee to die. I beseech Thee, by the merits of this sorrowful journey, to assist my soul in its journey toward eternity. I love Thee, my beloved Jesus; I love Thee more than myself; I repent with my whole heart of having offended Thee. Never permit me to separate myself from Thee again. Grant that I may love Thee always; and then do with me what Thou wilt.” (Station #1). This first struck me as far too saccharin, but as the rite continues through the stations from blood to pain to more blood and death, we begin to get a bigger idea. It is talking, we come to understand, about our own sense of abandonment as we come to our own end, and it tells us in no uncertain terms that, should we love Jesus with the same passion he had for us, that this love will be returned many times over, even in the lonely pains of our dying hours– and then some.
But there is more than just reciprocity to discover from this compassion. In the writings of the mystic Luisa Piccarreta of the early 20th century, we find other breathtaking signs of total self-abandonment and intimate love. This passage I picked almost at random: “While she was trying to unite her thoughts to His, to circulate thoughts of love in each created intelligence, Jesus moved in her interior. Sighing, He told her that just as she cannot be without Him, He cannot be without her. His love for her surpasses the needs of carrying out His Justice, and forces Him to unveil Himself to her.” (From Life of the Mystic Luisa Piccarreta, the Middle Years, compiled by Frank Rega). This, too, is shocking, revealing an intimacy that comes very close to erotic love. I find it almost embarrassing, but there is something absolutely integral to learn here: that God is not some distant abstract image or authority. He is rather, as has been often said, closer to our self than our own breath or skin. He is like a close, intimate sexual partner except what is desired is not the body but YOU, totally, everything, because God has created and knows every part of you and wants – if I may use that word for a being beyond being who wants for nothing – all of it. There is reciprocity here too, of course: give everything to God and you will get everything from God, which is infinite beauty and wisdom and love and eternal life and so on. But beneath it all is the real standard of Love – a desire to cherish every part of you, and to give every part back.
I move back to the rock. In my locution and little interior vision there was the heart in the rock, Jesus’s heart in the Rock of Golgotha. This was about love, yes, but more explicitly, about how love – that is, the total kind of love that God has and that we must search for – is stronger than rock. Nowadays, that rock is encased by a cathedral that is dedicated to the Holy Trinity, and explicitly to Jesus. On that rock the Romans once crucified criminals and foes of various sorts in their typically brutal way. The Romans were, if anything, the rock: hard, unflinching conquerors who were obliged to kill even themselves should they fail in a mission. In the time of Jesus, the Romans had conquered all of Israel as well as the rest of the occidental world, reigning nearly unchallenged for better than 800 years. Not bad. However, all that is left of their empire are museum pieces and interesting historical journals. On the other hand, the poor, defenseless man they killed on the rock now has a cathedral over that very site dedicated not to the power of Rome, but to him – and more explicitly, to his love. Now, more than a billion inhabitants from every nation on earth call Jesus their greatest authority, and it has been 2,000 years from his death. Which of the two, the heart or the rock, is stronger? Which has endured and which has not?
There is mystical power in this, of course, but we can understand this phenomena even from a more mundane level. That is: the human spirit, who we are overall, is not nurtured by a rock, but from the heart. Later in life we are made to turn our own hearts into stone, but at our roots – at everyone’s roots, including the Roman’s – is the heart. The rock is really the sand on which the political and social world is based – that is, on physical might and force and power and status; but the heart is what all human life is based upon. It is this, then, that is the rock that endures, and the rock-like nature only a façade, a fabrication of an insecure self that needs armor and conquest to protect itself from its own frailties, which are based on its own ignorance of itself. It is this, this hard rock, that is the stuff of fancy, albeit of a dark nature; and it is this, this total love that describes God and his nearly unbearable compassion, that is the rock that endures. It is this rock that was Peter, on which the church was built, who was not a conqueror but a man of the heart.
We are still learning this – or at least I am. God is as close to us as our self, and he wants all of us, every last bit. In return he gives us the strength that endures forever, the heart-stuff that answers all needs and desires. He gives us back our reality as humans. From the Rock of Golgotha we learn that all else is an ephemeral dream of self-power that ends in the grave or on the ash heap of history.
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