The Restoration Project

by Christopher H Martin

6. Releasing Superiority

  7. Releasing Control

  8. Releasing Autonomy

  Most of the work of restoring The Last Supper was in carefully stripping away almost everything that wasn't painted by Leonardo. There was much to remove. In addition to dirt and pollution, seven previous restorations left layers of materials. There were hard resins from 1903, soft resins from 1924, and shellac from 1947. There was a particular shade of yellow that didn't exist until 1625 and so must have been from a later repainting. There were layers of wax beneath Jesus that refused to yield to any chemical treatment and so needed to be removed mechanically.34

  Special care was given to the faces, all of which had their own issues. Simon and Matthew were in particularly bad shape. Simon's profile was coarsely delineated by later re-paintings. His expressive features were weighed down and the top of his head was anatomically incorrect. Matthew's mouth had been reduced to a bitter and vulgar expression and, inexplicably, he was given a beard where Leonardo intended no such thing.35 Leonardo took great care to give each face a unique expression and character, based on his careful observation of the people of fifteenth-century Milan. If the world was ever going to see what Leonardo intended, all of this accretion needed to be carefully stripped away.

  Similarly, each of us has a face that was created uniquely by God in God's own image. Because of the unique way we were created, because of what has happened to us in life (and, unlike images in a painting, because of choices we have made), our whole image is not apparent to the world. I began this book by sharing the scriptural understanding that we are each made in the "image and likeness" of God. An ancient way to interpret that phrase is to claim that the "image" is indestructible because it is a sheer gift from God that can never be taken away. The "likeness" is all the ways that God intends us to be good, true, and beautiful as God is good, true, and beautiful. We have each failed to achieve our full potential and so fail to show forth our genuine likeness of God to the world. Like the faces in The Last Supper in the 1970s, our image and likeness has deteriorated and been covered over.

  Sins That Obscure God's Image

  We each have our own unique stories of deterioration. But the wisdom of the Christian tradition is that our likenesses to God tend to deteriorate in some similar patterns. The most memorable ancient description of our well-worn patterns of self-destruction is the seven deadly sins. Although the list is not in the Bible, it has been a useful spiritual tool since the early centuries of the church. In the western tradition, the most famous list of seven comes from the middle part of Dante's Divine Comedy, the Purgatorio. In that central part of the poem, the souls of the dead are being purged of their earthly sin on their way to Paradise.

  In each of the three parts of the Comedy, Dante must travel through a portion of the afterworld shaped to reflect the spiritual state of the souls he encounters. The first part, the Inferno, is in the deep pit of hell. The souls in hell are forever stuck in a pit, telling their self-justifying tales. The final part, the Paradiso, is in the celestial spheres where souls are forever dancing and singing God's praises, caught up in the bliss of the heavenly banquet. The middle portion, the Purgatorio, is on a seven-storied mountain. The souls in Purgatory are steadily working up the stories of the mountain with their hearts firmly fixed on going toward God. On each story of this mountain, these souls destined for Paradise are cleansed of the different sorts of sins they indulged in during their earthly lives. The seven stages of the mountain in order are pride, envy, wrath, sloth, gluttony, greed, and lust.

  By the time Dante arrives at the mountain of Purgatory, he has already received the assurance that after his death he will eventually end up in Paradise. However, he will not be one of the precious few who go directly to Paradise and so skip the process of purification in Purgatory. After death, Dante must first be cleansed of the sins that marred his earthly life. As he travels up the seven stories of the mountain of Purgatory, it becomes clear to him that, after he dies, there are three areas where he will need to spend extra time. Pride, wrath, and lust all afflicted the earthly Dante and made him less than he otherwise might have been. And so, for a period of time in the afterlife, Dante will join the other souls in circling pride, the first story of the mountain, with a heavy rock on his back so that he can learn humility. He will circle the third story of wrath, blinded by smoke until he masters meekness. He will burn in the seventh and final story of lust until his earthly desire is transformed into a pure love of God.

  Along with Augustine, Dante is clear that God refuses to be embraced alongside anything false, bad, or ugly. All of these must be left behind if we want to spend eternity with God. Purgatory is Dante's imaginative picture of the process by which God makes us worthy to be with God forever alongside all the other saints and the angels. In the book, Dante has the spiritual maturity to acknowledge the specific ways that the image and likeness of God have been corrupted in him. Further, he can imagine the sort of cleansing process he will need to endure in Purgatory if he is going to be made worthy to be with God. We can imagine that by the time Dante has traveled up the mountain of Purgatory his image of God will be revealed and his likeness fully restored.

  If we wish to reveal more of our divine beauty in this life, Dante gives us a great guiding principle. Of the seven deadly sins, we are likely to be particularly susceptible to three. One mark of spiritual maturity is to be able to name our three greatest areas of sin out of this ancient list of seven. Further, if we are available and alert, we may notice God provides us ways to be purged and cleansed even in this life of our most tempting and sticky sins.

  For myself I have come to see that one of my most prominent sins is envy, or "discontent and resentment aroused by desire for the possessions or qualities of another."36 While I have little envy for the possessions of others, I have been afflicted with the nagging sense that my inherent qualities are insufficient. I have felt that if I only had the qualities I perceive in certain others around me, I would finally be loved, admired, and respected. I have been at times unable to rest in the reality that God can rejoice in me just as God intended me to be. As a result, I have restlessly cast my eyes about, and with great discontent, tried and failed to assume the qualities of another.

  To be restored to the image and likeness of God in this life, I needed to be stripped of the sin of envy like the faces of Simon, Matthew, and the other apostles in The Last Supper were stripped of gunk and the distorted restorations of the ages. As we go into a time of stripping, we are all as the eleventh-century theologian and Archbishop Saint Anselm describes himself in one of his prayers:

  I acknowledge, Lord, and I give thanks that You have created Your image in me, so that I may remember You, think of You, love You. But this image is so effaced and worn away by vice, so darkened by the smoke of sin, that it cannot do what it was made to do unless You renew it and reform it.37

  I believe that, when the time was ripe, God, like a master restorer, chose to strip me of much of my sin of envy—a sin that, like smoke, had darkened the shining beauty of God's image and likeness in me. Reading, reflecting, and praying on these next three steps of humility held me steady through a time of God's renewal and reformation.

  My Refiner's Fire

  I knew for certain I was in a time of deep trial because of a dream. At the time I had the dream, I was in my mid-thirties and living in Los Angeles. In the dream, I was walking along a path by the ocean about halfway down a cliff. There was a cave and I walked inside it. At the back of the cave was a body in a bathtub. It was my body, and it was suspended above the bottom of the tub by fishhooks embedded throughout my flesh and held taut by a line to the side of the tub. When I woke up from the dream and tried to understand its meaning for my life, I knew my task was to remove the metaphorical fishhooks, get out of the tub, get out of the cave, and keep walking.

  The words that kept me centered as I tried to escape the cave in my dream came from a commentary on these next steps. Michael Casey wrote, "the o
ne who seeks nothing else but God progressively finds what he seeks. First he finds nothing else, then he finds God."38 I proceeded by faith that his words were true.

  My time in the cave had begun with a phone call that came to me out of the blue. I was in my office at my church in Connecticut when I got a surprise call from the head priest of a well-known church in Los Angeles. I had been looking for a place where I could spend most of my energy on attracting my GenX peers to church, and this appeared to be that opportunity. This priest cast a wonderful vision of what her church was, what it could become, and what my role might be. It was exciting, and a wonderful and inspiring vision of a thriving church.

  A visit to Los Angeles with Chloe, who is from Southern California, confirmed how attractive and vibrant the church was, and I soon committed to serving there. A few months later, I drove our car alone across the country while Chloe finished up her work on the East Coast. It was a quiet and centering time, filled with visits to good friends and family along the way. The only sour note was a sinking feeling in my stomach as I came off the high desert on Route 15 and into the Los Angeles basin. At a deep level, I already knew I was going to be facing a stern test.

  All went very well at first. My first sermon seemed to be a great hit with parishioners. Much to my surprise, I loved being in Los Angeles and remember showing up to work one day on the Santa Monica Boulevard in my collar and some brand-new stretch black jeans and feeling like the coolest priest in the entire Anglican Communion.

  Over two years later, a shift began. One element in the shift was the ordinary life cycle of parish programs and my own professional development. Who I was and the work I was called to do were starting to change from a focus on people my own age to teaching the Christian disciplines to people of all ages. Much more painful and confusing, however, was a shift in the staff dynamics. Another associate had arrived on the staff. He was demographically similar to me but had a very different set of gifts.

  At first I welcomed his addition and imagined that it would help create a kind of "dream team" among the senior staff of the parish. I thought we would accomplish great things together. Instead, in my envious eyes, he slowly became a rival and competitor, and I always seemed to lose by comparison. I could only see how others seemed to admire his qualities and disregard my own.

  I tried to press on as though things hadn't really changed that much. I assumed the situation would eventually shift back to the joy and energy I had felt in my first two years there. Meanwhile, my poor body and imagination took on the strain. My back was almost continually a mess of painful knots. I would perform most of my duties with an inner sense of emptiness, and my attempts at friendship and connection failed repeatedly as others seemed to prefer the company of the rival to me. I felt removed even from the activities that used to give me the deepest pleasure. I remember once looking on at a contemplative evening worship service of music and silence, beauty and calm, and feeling as though I were trapped under a sheet of ice gazing up at clean air and blue skies but drowning. It was then that I had the dream of the fishhooks. The fishhooks seemed to me all the ways my situation had hooked me. I knew I needed to get out.

  I went into therapy hoping for full insight, but I never got it. The therapist, who was a very wise and spiritually grounded Christian, counted me as one of her success stories simply because she helped me escape. After five years of service in Los Angeles, I left to become the head of my own church, which was a small, lovely, struggling community just north of San Francisco. For a time, I had to be content with fragments and glimpses of grace and truth. I had been stripped, but I didn't know exactly how or why.

  Step Six:

  Releasing Superiority

  content with the lowest

  — THE RULE OF SAINT BENEDICT, 7:49

  Reflection on step six helped me begin to get deeper insight. It is, in its entirety, "that a monk is content with the lowest and most menial treatment, and regards himself as a poor and worthless workman in whatever task he is given, saying to himself with the prophet I am insignificant and ignorant, no better than a beast before you, yet I am with you always." (THE RULE OF SAINT BENEDICT, 7:49) I knew all along that I needed to be careful with this step. Self-abnegation is very close to self-hatred, which is itself a sin. The process of diminishment is dangerous. An ancient piece of ethical advice is to remember that discretion is the mother of all virtues. Discretion is never more critical than when we find ourselves in the midst of these steps. The challenge is to accept the suffering without either lashing out in unjust anger at others or folding into an acidic self-loathing.

  I needed to get out of the cave before I could begin learning the wisdom of my time trapped in misery in Southern California. Some time after I left the church, one big piece of the puzzle fell into place. I finally came to grips with the fact that I suffered from envy. The harsh language of this step, for example that one is to think of oneself as "poor" and "worthless," absolutely undermines envy. If we don't have an inflated ego around anything we do, comparisons with others are not a problem. The sign that we are maturing gracefully is contentment with who we are and what we have accomplished. The scriptural quote in this step ends with the psalm writer's clear confidence that he is always with God, and that is enough.

  The contentment from this step eluded me, even years after leaving the Los Angeles congregation. I was still plagued by envy of others. With some trepidation, I headed back east to take a class in English spirituality. The class was taught by a seminary classmate who had become a professor of theology at a seminary. Now that I finally acknowledged that I was under the power of envy, I expected to struggle the entire time I was taking the course since my classmate's career was thriving. However, I found that it was not at all the case. Here was a man who was accomplishing everything I could have hoped for had I followed my gifts and passion in a slightly different direction. Yet, unlike my time in Los Angeles, I felt no envy. In fact, I felt genuinely delighted for him. Why?

  When I was in Los Angeles, I simply wasn't confident in who I was. I hadn't yet learned that I am lovable just as I was made. As a result, I was often driven to try to be the person others wanted me to be. I held onto the idea that others wished I was someone else: more charming and sociable, less intellectual and passionate. I believed my rival had those qualities, and it ate me up that I lacked them. My envy led me to believe things that were simply false.

  I was caught in a trap, too dependent on what others thought of me. The primary sin in all this sprang from my unarticulated expectation that I was going to be loved by others as though I was the most important person in the world. I believed I needed to be superior, assuming all possible gifts, in order to be fully loved. Words from the poet W.H. Auden capture so much of what drove me at the time. He says that the error in each man and woman "Comes from what it cannot have/Not Universal love/But to be loved alone."

  In Los Angeles, I was serving a parish filled with people in the movie industry. So many wanted to be stars—to "be loved alone." Yet they were almost always extras or, at best, playing secondary parts. Like them, I needed to learn that I was ordinary and not a star.

  On the mountain of Purgatory, the souls on the story of envy have their eyes sewn shut. They can no longer cast their eyes about restlessly but must focus inward. They sit side by side, their backs against the mountain and their heads resting on each other's shoulders. They are humble companions in the all-important task of becoming themselves, as God intended them to be. God for a time mercifully seals their eyes so that they can train their perception inwards, where God has given each soul all that is needed.

  Through the suffering I experienced at that church and the struggle toward healing afterward, I became more who I am. I became less significant and less superior and so more nearly a person. I am neither a star nor a golden boy. I am simply human and—like all others—made in the image and likeness of God. That is enough. There is no reason to cast my eyes about in envy.

  This has b
een the story of one person's struggle with just one of the seven deadly sins. There is no one story that will be true of everyone. We each have our own peculiar faults, and no one can force us to mend those faults that are deep in our hearts. We each have to go through our own process of releasing our own, often fearful, sense of superiority and of embracing our own humble yet beautiful identity as an ordinary human being. What Benedict saw so accurately is that we often need to ask ourselves, as we are going through a time of trial, if the pains we are experiencing are ultimately for our own good. Just because a process hurts does not mean that it is not an expression of God's love for us.

  Step Seven:

  Releasing Control

  a blessing that you have humbled me

  so that I can learn your commandments

  —THE RULE OF SAINT BENEDICT, 7:54

  The contrast between my first two years in Los Angeles and my last three rings true with one of the central observations in step seven. Spiritual growth is never steady and uninterrupted. There are good times, and there are bad times, and we have almost no control over this often disorienting fluctuation. We must expect the changes in fortune and then trust that God is in the midst of it all. Step seven concludes with Benedict quoting twice from the psalms. Psalm 88 reads, "I was exalted, then I was humbled and overwhelmed with confusion" (16). Psalm 119 notes that "It is a blessing that you have humbled me so that I can learn your commandments" (71, 73). In highlighting these psalms, Benedict communicates that we can expect times of exaltation and then times of confusion. Through both, we are called to release control and trust that God is slowly revealing to us God's own ways, so often different from our own.