One who never lost sight of both the reality of our changeable fortunes or the truth of God's steadfast love was Bernard of Clairvaux, an eleventh-century follower of Benedict. Bernard knew that life is difficult and filled with trials and suffering, and also that life is sweet and filled with joy and great consolations. Both of these things are true, and no one is immune from the former or utterly locked out of the latter.
A central teaching of Bernard was what he called vicissitudo and is often translated as alternation. He used the word to describe a wide range of experiences of a faithful Christian. On a grand level, alternation means the way a Christian experiences alternation between God's mercy and God's judgment. Bernard imagines that he is kneeling at Jesus' feet as he worships him and embraces one foot and then the other. He notices that if he stays too much on the foot of mercy, he grows slack, but if he stays too long on the foot of judgment, he is paralyzed in terror. On the earthly pilgrimage, he must have both feet to help him walk until, at the end of time or the end of his life, mercy makes its final triumph over judgment. For now, in this life, our experience of Jesus must alternate between mercy and judgment if we wish to live in truth.39
On a daily basis, alternation means that for even the most faithful follower of Jesus, the reality of God falls in and out of our attention. He writes, "this process of Alternation goes on all the time...the just one falls seven times and seven times gets up again...he sees himself falling and knows when he has fallen and wants to get up again and calls out for a helping hand, saying, 'O Lord, at your will you made me splendid in virtue, but then you turned away your face and I was overcome.'"40 The faithful one alternates between standing and falling but always asks for help.
Whether it is on the grand level or on a daily basis, the experience of alternation is meant to increase our love. Consider the story of the road to Emmaus. Jesus, his identity hidden, walks alongside his disciples and teaches them. Then "as they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. But they urged him strongly, saying 'Stay with us'" (Luke 24:28-9). This story can be viewed as an example of the way God works with our hearts by being with us and then seeming to pull away. God knows that absence makes the heart grow fonder. Above all, God wants lovers whose hearts are always growing in love.
Like many monks of his era, Bernard was drawn deeply to the Song of Songs with its poetry of secular love between a man and a woman transposed into a religious context. His greatest work is a series of eighty sermons on the Song of Songs. (And he only got as far as the beginning of the third chapter out of eight!) His imagination is filled with the notion of God wooing us like a passionate lover. His desire inflames ours, and our desire grows as our experience alternates between God's presence and absence. In one of his greatest sermons, Bernard confesses that God frequently visits his soul. He writes:
And so when the Bridegroom, the Word, came to me he never made any sign that he was coming; there was no sound of his voice, no glimpse of his face, no footfall. There was no movement of his by which I could know his coming; none of my senses showed me that he had flooded the depths of my being. Only by the warmth of my heart, as I said before, did I know he was there, and I knew the power of his might because my faults were purged and my body's yearnings brought under control...But when the Word has left me, and all these things become dim and weak and cold, as though you had taken the fire from under a boiling pot, I know that he has gone. Then my soul cannot help being sorrowful until he returns, and my heart grows warm within me, and I know he is there.41
Perhaps, like Jesus with his followers on the road to Emmaus, God parts company from us not to punish us but to increase our capacity for love. He wishes us to cry out with all the passion of a lover, "Stay with us!"
Maybe God wanted me to know the tenderness, heartache, and beauty of love in a deeper way than I was capable of in my mid-thirties. Maybe I was allowed to get trapped under ice and suspended by fishhooks so that, immobilized and frozen as I was, I could cry, from a most vulnerable place where I had no control, "God help me! I need you! Only you can save me!"
Step Eight:
Releasing Autonomy
does only what is endorsed by the common rule
—THE RULE OF SAINT BENEDICT, 7:55
The eighth step of humility is an intensification of membership in community. The process of membership begins in earlier steps, particularly in practicing sacred obedience where we learn the disciplines of joining a church, becoming friends with the poor, and committing ourselves to a Discipleship Group. In step four, cultivating patience, the process deepens as we train our hearts to quietly embrace suffering. Step eight is a complete reliance on the hard-earned wisdom of community and tradition. It is, in its entirety, "that a monk does only what is endorsed by the common rule of the monastery and the example set by his superiors" (THE RULE OF SAINT BENEDICT, 7:55).
This step emphasizes the truth that God made us as social creatures. Since the early centuries of the church, there have been two ways to understand that we are made in the image of God, the Three in One. When we explored the fifth step—knowing ourselves as God's image, we looked at how each of us individually is made in the image of God the Trinity and how the Three in One is reflected in our capacities to remember, receive, and love. But tradition has also taught that we are made in the image of God when we are together. The wisdom of the church is that the three persons of the Trinity are always and eternally loving each other. It is impossible to really picture what this means because God is beyond our imaginations, but many have tried to understand the social dynamic of God's love as a kind of movement. Perhaps it is akin to a dance, where each person of the Trinity is constantly loving the others completely, to the point of emptiness, and at the same time receiving love completely, to the point of overflowing. I picture a hydraulic system where the water is never still but always in motion.
We are called to love others with similar abandonment, trust, and generosity. It would be sweet if it were our natural state to love so completely. It is the greatest sadness imaginable that we are so very far from giving and receiving love in this way. We live in original sin and are always doing things that make matters worse. Our image and likeness keep getting ruined and covered over. By grace we humans have developed various ways to bind ourselves to one another so that love is more likely to flow freely, allowing us to show forth our true selves. As I experienced my time of trial, I was held up by loving people in a living tradition. In particular, I was borne up by my parish church, my wife, and a group of clergy colleagues. What sustained me was not just the love and support of each of these people, but the reality that each of them was bound to me in Christian covenant.
The large church—where I learned my hardest lessons—was a Christian community where Jesus was Lord, and that saved me. I was not alone in the raw human struggle to know God and make God the center of my life. I was bound to a community of other people traveling well-worn paths alongside me into the heart of God. I knew we were all brothers and sisters at the deepest level because of the powerful unifying sacrament of baptism. Ritually, we had all died to our old selves and been born again into the family of God, the household of faith, the body of Christ. Even the rival and I were made one in Jesus the moment we were baptized.
To my wife, I was bound in Christ until death in the covenant of marriage. On July 11, 1992 at the beginning of our wedding ceremony, the priest asked each of us if we would love, comfort, honor, and keep each other in sickness and in health and be faithful as long as we both live. We both said yes. Later, I looked into Chloe's eyes and said, "I give you this ring as a symbol of my vow, and with all that I am and all that I have, I honor you, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit."42 And she said the same to me. When my time of trial came, bound by our vows, she stood faithfully by my side.
The men in my clergy colleague group all shared the bond of the vows of ordination. We had each made vows to "labor together.
.. with (our) fellow ministers to build up the family of God."43 When we began our group of nine colleagues, we made a further commitment to each other to meet twice a year to support and love one another until death. A few years after we began the group, we had a horrific fight at the dinner table at a spring meeting. We were fighting over precisely the things that divide the church now, namely sexuality, restraint, and the obligations we have to keep one another virtuous. Later, we all noted how close we had come to breaking apart that night. What kept us together in that moment was that one of us, precisely as things seemed to be falling apart, said, "Remember, we have all put on Christ."
Each of these vows is an outward symbol of the inward spiritual reality that I am rooted, in a number of ways, to the community of people going back to the first people who gathered around Jesus. I am religious, not merely spiritual. The origin of the word "religious" is to be bound. I was bound to these others and so could be held as I endured a season of cleansing pain that I could not have endured alone, operating out of rules I had to make up as I went along. I needed the common rules of the tradition to help me through. I know I would have flinched, fleeing like the disciples on Good Friday, had I not been bound through these vows to community in Jesus.
Viewed in this way, and only with the benefit of time and hindsight, perhaps that bathtub in the cave was both tomb and womb. Maybe some of those ties were like the vows that held me in place while God did the necessary stripping. I had to die so that I might be made alive again in Christ.
Working on Our Belovedness
This chapter is the story of one of the Seven Deadly Sins in one person's life and how God seemed to gradually strip the sins by guiding me to release superiority, control, and autonomy. The same dynamics can be applied to other people and to the other sins of pride, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust. Beneath each of these self-willed distortions of the image of God lies the toxic misuse of our gift of free will. Humility requires that we slowly find ways to overcome our fears and hand ourselves over to God's greatness, providence, and all-embracing love. We allow God's will to reform and replace our own. In these steps we learn to trust God's work of renewal and reformation, even and especially when it is painful and disorienting.
Above all we must each find ways to constantly remember God's love. In the midst of my time of trial, at precisely the time I felt trapped by fishhooks, another seed was planted for my salvation. In the fall of 2003, I made my first visit to the Church of the Saviour, the high-commitment ecumenical church in Washington, D.C. that I discussed in an earlier chapter. The highlight was a short talk by lead pastor Gordon Cosby where he shared the distilled wisdom of his seventy years in active ministry. He described about a half dozen elements that needed to be in place if a Christian community was going to have authenticity and depth. One element was that every member of the community had to confront the things inside him or herself that blocked them from intimacy with others. He said that as part of that process of learning intimacy, each person "needed to be working on his or her belovedness."44
At the end of the talk, he invited questions. My hand shot up in the air. I wanted to know what it meant to "work on belovedness." Before I had the opportunity to speak, he qualified his invitation and said, "not the hard questions, no one has answers to those." My hand slowly went down. I knew my question had no easy answer. But the seed had been planted. In the midst of my time of trial, I learned that God and I needed to work on my sense that I, too, was God's beloved child. I am beloved for precisely the good qualities God has already given me. The same thing is true of you.
By God's grace, and only by God's grace, I believe that what God loves in me is more apparent to the world now than it was when I was in that time of trial. God has stripped me of some gunk and so what God created in me can now be more clearly seen.
Likewise, the process of carefully stripping The Last Supper revealed Leonardo's beautiful initial intentions for Simon and Matthew. For centuries viewers saw that Simon, who is at the right end of the table, was in receding profile and so looking down the length of the table to Bartholomew at the other end. This was not accurate. Leonardo created Simon's face in profile, looking slightly away from the viewer so that he is turned toward his neighbor Thaddeus. The church remembers that Simon and Thaddeus were martyred together. Perhaps Leonardo intended us to see the two of them in a moment that sealed their friendship.
Matthew's face gained new life by the restoration. His lips were restored to a soft fleshiness just opening in amazement at Jesus' announcement that one of them would betray him. His eyes acquired a new vivacity in their startled gaze, and the recovery of some of the smoky quality of Leonardo's art on his cheeks gave his face plasticity and softness. Finally, without the beard and with the restoration of the original lines, it was clear that Leonardo had given him the classic profile of a young aristocrat from ancient Rome. The loving hands of the restorers revealed truth, beauty, relationship, and dignity.45
These steps of releasing superiority, control, and autonomy are steps six through eight of our own restoration project, not the beginning. They only make sense in Jesus and in love if we are building on a very solid foundation of faith built over time. Now at this stage, personality can die, or at least begin its death throes, and true personhood can emerge. The scab can fall off, and the tender, beautiful, lively, flesh can be exposed without fear of annihilation.
Once, when I was driving through the clotted traffic of west Los Angeles, a phrase bubbled up into my mind that sounded familiar, but I couldn't quite place it. I wanted to believe it was scripture but wasn't entirely sure. When I reached my office, I spent part of the morning looking for it and soon found it in the third chapter of Colossians. It says simply, "your life is hidden with Christ in God" (3). As you endure your own alienation from sin and try to exit your cave safely, keep returning to these words: Your life is hidden with Christ. This is true because of the external bonds that have connected you to him. If you look to him first, you will be safe, you will be loved.
It will not always be easy. In any given Christian community, as in every family, there will never be enough support, respect, and admiration to go around. The human love that is available, tainted or untainted, will always outstrip the need. Always, always, always. But, as Michael Casey put it so precisely, our neediness is the counterpoint to the divine abundance.46 Christian communities become effective when we regard with total seriousness the ties that bind us together in Jesus and allow his love to work through us. This is the only way. We do not need to feel alone; neither do we need to earn any sense of belonging. As we are stripped of our illusions of superiority, control, and autonomy, God reveals the grace of true community grounded in God's love.
Mature humility emerges as we realize that the love that holds us to each other does not come from us. Not only are we not its source, we do not control it. More often than not, as we grow in humility we become less aware of how love has emerged from us and touched the lives of others. Part of Benedict's insight is that the less we think about our impact on others, and the less we try to control that impact, the more the divine love emerges from us for the sake of others. If we want to be people of love we must learn to be quiet and vigilant. And so we soon move on to the final four steps.
CHAPTER 6
Quiet Self-Mastery
9. Being Quiet on Purpose
10. Being Quiet from our Depths
11. Being Quiet and Gentle
12. Being Vigilant
In the end, the restoration of The Last Supper was fragile and incomplete. Some of the underlying flaws of the painting, which had been present since the beginning, could not be fully corrected. In some areas of the painting, the restorers decided to keep some of the former restorations, just so there could be some semblance of Leonardo's original intention. In other areas, they filled in blank spots with easily removable washes of watercolor. Presenting to the world an image as faithful as possible to the work of the master meant accep
ting and even protecting incompletion and fragility.
The same is true of us. In this life, what can be accomplished in our project of restoration has its limits. Our progress will always feel—and in fact will be—quite fragile. The world is not set up to guarantee us permanent bliss in this life. Any progress that we make in revealing the image and likeness of God can be quickly and easily undone, even in a moment. Some of the earliest images of the steps of humility show monks at the very top of a ladder, about to be embraced by Jesus, only to be dragged back down by little demons. Under stress, we all regress.
In Quietness and Trust
Will Be Our Strength
Jesus warns us that the world will never be our true home. He tells us that he is not of this world, and that, if we are following him, we can expect seasons and times of rejection, abuse, pain, and misunderstanding. On his last night, he teaches his followers,
If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you. If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own. Because you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world— therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you, 'Servants are not greater than their master.' If they persecuted me, they will persecute you (John 15:18-20a).
As followers of Jesus, we can expect that the world will not always be kind to us.
Neither has the world been kind to The Last Supper. There are some new structures in place to help prevent future abuse of the painting. Recently I was able to fulfill a childhood dream and see the painting in person. We had been instructed to arrive twenty minutes early and so found ourselves waiting with twenty other people from around the world in an outer chamber. At our precise ticketed time, a guide took us through two different sealed chambers with automatic sliding doors. The strict schedule and the holding pens are a sterile, dehumanizing way to approach a humanist masterpiece. The painting has been well protected but at the cost of spontaneity and intimacy.
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