The resentful person is always a person lacking in generosity….The passion opposed to resentment is generosity….A generous nature has, as a rule, no occasion for forgiveness, because it is always disposed to understand everything….But the only man capable of understanding everything is the man who is capable of loving everything.
For all of our monsters there is the loving forgiveness that can change the monster, free it from the spell of the wicked fairy, and liberate it to be beautiful, to be loved, and therefore capable of giving love.
We create other monsters when we have false expectations, those false expectations that are themselves monsters—false expectations of ourselves, our husbands, our wives, our doctors, our political leaders, our priests, our bishops, our pastors…
Michael Marshall writes:
The Middle Ages well knew that some of its priests were bad priests, but it never fell into the heresy of Donatism by demanding a subjective moral qualification to endorse the validity of the priestly functions. There was also room “in a large room” for Christian men to sin and be forgiven, for a man to be sexually incontinent in his actions and yet by the affirmations of penitence to remain chaste. It was well understood that whereas a man cannot properly be a Christian if he commits worldly or fleshly sins as a matter of settled policy and without regret or desire for amendment, he can certainly be a Christian if he falls into such sins—as we all do—at times of weakness, but does his level best, through prayer and striving, to allow the Spirit of God to dwell in him and conform him to Christ.
When we label a person a sinner, when we see only the monster, then we are unNaming, we are holding back that person from any hope of becoming whole, of becoming Named.
Naming the monsters in ourselves is a different matter. We cannot get on with the journey unless we do recognize and conquer our monsters. When Jesus came to Peter after the Resurrection and said, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?…Feed my sheep,” it was after Peter’s monster had reared its hideously ugly head, and he had three times denied his Master. One of the most heartrending moments in all of Scripture is just after Peter’s third denial, when Jesus turned and looked directly at him. And Peter went out and wept bitterly.
But he never pretended he hadn’t done it.
He never pretended that it hadn’t happened.
He never tried to whitewash it, or to alibi, or to rationalize.
He lived with it. And that’s what we must do, too.
All the men except John were conspicuous by their absence at the crucifixion. The women, the true princesses, were made of sterner stuff. For it’s usually the true princess who is able to see through the monster and transform it with love.
If that love is not given, the monster gets more and more monstrous. I know that when I am being monstrous I am being my least lovable, and yet it is only love that will stop me from being monstrous. And even at times when no human being may be able to see through the monstrousness and give me the love that will heal me, God can. There have been times when I have flung myself at God in rage and anguish and have felt myself loved and protected under the shadow of the almighty wings and have returned to being, because of this love. Then I can get on with the Quest, knowing that the Maker never gives job descriptions or asks anyone to list qualifications before setting out on the Quest.
The story of Esther is, as in many fairy tales, a going from rags to riches, from poverty to royalty; Esther is indeed a true princess. In the story of Beauty and the Beast, Beauty is the younger son. Her two elder sisters are looking for the values of this world—lots of clothes and rich husbands—and they think these things are their right, are owed them; they are “entitled,” as people say nowadays. So when their father loses all his money they are bitter and resentful.
But Beauty, the younger son, knows that nothing is ours by right—not good schools, nor warm clothes, nor more than enough to eat.
On our planet more people do not have these good things than those who do in the ghettos, in India, Venezuela, Haiti. Half the world is starving; the other half is on a diet. We are not privileged because we deserve to be. Privilege accepted should mean responsibility accepted.
The younger son accepts responsibility. Beauty’s love for her father is responsible and so, unlike her elder sisters, she is able to accept it when he loses all his money. And she is able to offer herself in his place to the horrifying beast. And in the end, she is able to accept the beast, to see through his hideous ugliness and to kiss him in spontaneous affection so that he is released to become the prince he really is.
Part of recognizing the monster-prince part of ourselves is accepting that we do not have to be worthy; it is remembering that God always works with unworthy people and that when something good is done, we do not do it alone. If I thought I had to be worthy I’d never start another book; I certainly wouldn’t be writing this one. What we are called to do is share our own story, without pride, as a humble offering.
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Another monster that would unName us is atheism. Olivier Clement says,
What we must say to the atheist of today is that however deep may be the hell in which they find themselves, Christ is to be found still deeper. What we must say to all those who are wounded by the “terrorist” God is that basically what is asked of man is not virtue or merit, but a cry of trust and love from the depths of his hell; or, who knows, a moment of anguish and startlement in the enclosed immanence of his happiness. And never to fall into despair, but into God.
For despair is perhaps the most terrible of all the monsters, leading to apathy, indifference, what the medieval theologians called accidie, the sloth of the soul.
The extraordinary thing is that if we are willing to plumb the depths of our hell, we find there not Satan, but Christ. But before we find Christ, we must have faced and accepted and kissed our monsters.
Christ in hell? Yes. Christ made it all. There is no place Christ’s love cannot go.
In the Russian Orthodox faith one of the most holy days of the year is Great and Holy Saturday, the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. On Great and Holy Saturday Jesus went through the gates of hell (shown in icons as the cross on which he was crucified), and harrowed it. As the farmer harrows the ground before planting, turning over the sod, so Jesus turned over hell, emptying it. According to tradition, first he pulled out Adam and Eve, and then the Holy Innocents, those children under two slaughtered by jealous Herod’s soldiers. Jesus emptied hell, which would not please those who want the “terrorist” God mentioned by Olivier Clement.
Thus, since hell is emptied, all the Old Testament heroes and heroines are available for sainthood! We can have Saints Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and Saints Abigail and Esther and Sarah, to name only a few favorites.
For the month of August 1990 I was in Russia, going mostly to seminaries and churches, and watching the marvel of the Russian church bursting forth like water from the rock as the state returned more and more church buildings to the church. In Leningrad (now once again St. Petersburg) we went to St. Isaac’s Cathedral and were told with great excitement that there had been a service there for the first time in seventy years. One of our group asked who St. Isaac’s Cathedral was named after, expecting to hear the name of some early Christian saint. Not at all. St. Isaac’s Cathedral is named after Isaac, son of Abraham and Sarah.
It is certainly a misreading of Scripture and of God’s love that has led some people to believe that those who were born before Christ’s resurrection are forever excluded from the kingdom. It is another example of literalism, more dangerous than believing that God had to accomplish everything with his left hand. Literalism tends to be cold of heart, not warm. Literalism may understand sex, but not love.
And what about hell now, for those born since the Resurrection, who have not lived by God’s love, who (perhaps) have
not accepted Christ? Thank God it is up to God, not me, and I am nervous around people who assume that they have a right to decide who is destined for hell and who for heaven.
There’s a charming true story of a small child’s literalism. One day at Sunday school the class was asked to draw pictures of Bible stories. This child drew a rectangle, with four wheels. The rectangle was obviously a cart, and seated in it were two stick figures. The cart was being driven by another stick figure. When the child was asked what the picture was about, the answer was, “It’s God driving Adam and Eve out of the Garden.”
God can indeed do anything needed; drive anybody anywhere, out of the Garden, and, ultimately, into the kingdom. God is not going to fail. The happy ending is going to come. It may take a few more billennia or trillennia, but God is going to succeed.
It is not always easy to affirm the final element of the fairy tale that pulls all our parts into wholeness—the happy ending. If it’s hard for us to accept our monsters and love them and free them to become the beautiful creatures they were meant to be, it’s even harder for most of us to believe in the happy ending. The elder brothers can never believe in it because they think it is something they have to earn, or make all by themselves. Sometimes we can accept the happy ending for ourselves but not for monsters like Tiberius and drug pushers and child molesters.
The happy ending, like the Quest, is not for the qualified, and we human beings can never quite understand the length and depth and longing of God’s love for all of Creation.
Our human icon of this love of God is the love of husband and wife. Surprisingly, the Song of Songs is still left out of the Episcopal Lectionary, despite the fact that the church appears to think it’s completely freed-up and open-minded about sex. The strongest language of love known to the human being is the language of love between man and woman. John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich—all the great mystics—were unabashed about using this language to describe their relationships with God and frequently quoted from the Song of Songs.
Similarly, Isaiah sings:
For your Maker is your husband—
the LORD Almighty is his name—
the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer.
The Genesis story of the human being’s turning away from God calls forth from God the cry, “Where are you?” And in Hosea, God calls out, “How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel?” And again in Isaiah, the Lord says, “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.” And Jesus cries out, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem…how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.”
And John says,
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
When the world rejected that love and crucified it, Jesus did not lash back; he cried out in love and forgiveness.
Things are never quite the way they seem: things do not look the way we think they ought to look. Isaiah’s description of Christ as the Suffering Servant bears little resemblance to the pretty young man with the beautifully combed beard and melancholy eyes we so often see depicted. But Isaiah’s description rings much more true. In his own day, Jesus was a monster to many, disconcerting them with his unpredictability and the company he kept, vanishing to go apart to pray and to be alone with his Father just when people thought they needed him.
Perhaps if we are brave enough to accept our monsters, to love them, to kiss them, we will find that we are touching not the terrible dragon that we feared, but the loving Lord of all Creation.
And when we meet our Creator, we will be judged for all our turnings away, all our inhumanity to each other, but it will be the judgment of inexorable love, and in the end we will know the mercy of God which is beyond all comprehension. And we will know, as Hosea knew, that the heavenly Spouse says, “I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion.”
It is too good to believe; it is too strong, so we turn away, and the church leaves the Song of Songs out of the lectionary. But we can put it back in.
To the ancient Hebrew the love of God for his chosen people transcended the erotic love of man and woman. For the early Christian, it was the love of Christ for the church. For all of us it is the longing love of God for his Creation, a love which is too strong for many of us to accept.
There is an old legend that after his death Judas found himself at the bottom of a deep and slimy pit. For thousands of years he wept his repentance, and when the tears were finally spent he looked up and saw, way, way up, a tiny glimmer of light. After he had contemplated it for another thousand years or so, he began to try to climb up towards it. The walls of the pit were dank and slimy, and he kept slipping back down. Finally, after great effort, he neared the top, and then he slipped and fell all the way back down. It took him many years to recover, all the time weeping bitter tears of grief and repentance, and then he started to climb up again. After many more falls and efforts and failures he reached the top and dragged himself into an upper room with twelve people seated around a table. “We’ve been waiting for you, Judas,” Jesus said. “We couldn’t begin till you came.”
I heard my son-in-law, Alan, tell this story at a clergy conference. The story moved me deeply. I was even more deeply struck when I discovered that it was a story that offended many of the priests and ministers there. I was horrified at their offense. Would they find me, too, unforgivable?
But God, the Good Book tells us, is no respecter of persons, and the happy ending isn’t promised to an exclusive club, as many groups, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, believe. It isn’t—face it—only for Baptists, or Presbyterians, or Episcopalians. What God began, God will not abandon. [H]e who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion….God loves every one, sings the psalmist. What God has named will live forever, Alleluia!
The happy ending has never been easy to believe in. After the Crucifixion the defeated little band of disciples had no hope, no expectation of Resurrection. Everything they believed in had died on the cross with Jesus. The world was right, and they had been wrong. Even when the women told the disciples that Jesus had left the stone-sealed tomb, the disciples found it nearly impossible to believe that it was not all over. The truth was, it was just beginning.
It is important to remember that after the Resurrection Christ was never recognized by sight. Mary Magdalene, the first person to whom the risen Christ appeared, thought he was a gardener and knew him only when he called her by name. When the couple met him on the road to Emmaus it seems evident that he did not show them his wounds; otherwise they would have recognized him. With tender love, he showed those wounds when Thomas needed to see them.
The disciples did not bother to try to understand the resurrection body. They doubted, and then they believed. They believed something so wonderful that it changed this broken, fragmented, beaten-down little group of men and women in a moment from depression to enthusiasm, from despair to new life, vibrant and unafraid.
When Paul was asked what the resurrected and cosmic body looks like, he snapped, “Don’t ask foolish questions!” How do you describe a spiritual body? You don’t. Not one of the Gospel writers tried to. Paul said, How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And then Paul, speaking more like a twentieth-century cosmologist than a first-century tentmaker, tells us that there are many kinds of bodies, many kinds of flesh. There are also heavenly bodies and there are earthly bodies…and star differs from star in splendor. And the seed of that Pauline paradox, the spiritual body, is planted in us at our baptism.
One of my friends and I often talk about ou
r husbands, missing their living presence. Her husband died only a year ago, and the wound is still raw. We talked today, via telephone.
“When I see him again, I will recognize him,” she affirmed.
I agreed, but I said, “He may not look the way he looked in life. But you will recognize him.”
Yes. She understood that. The seed that goes into the ground and dies does not look like the oak tree or the lilac bush or the snowdrop that comes up in the spring. But we will recognize each other, because our sight will have changed as much as our bodies: we will know each other in a deeper way than was ever possible in life, no matter how close and intimate our human bond has been.
To the Eastern Orthodox Christian, the Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension are seen almost as one blinding, simultaneous event, and there is much wisdom in this, for there is far too often a tendency to focus on either the Crucifixion or the Resurrection and to ignore the Ascension entirely, or to exult in the Resurrection and forget that the Crucifixion preceded it. The Ascension underlines the cosmic quality of the Crucifixion and Resurrection, and the truth that we cannot have one without the other. Paul says, If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men. Indeed, it would be a cosmic bad joke if our little candle flickered and went out and God did not care enough about us to complete what was begun at our birth and ratified at our baptism.
Too often pious people see Paul glorifying in the Cross, Jesus and him crucified, and forget Paul’s greatest song of glory, that of the Resurrection. Without the Resurrection, glorifying in the Cross becomes morbid to the point of sadomasochism. The Cross is easier to understand than the Resurrection, because the Resurrection bursts the bond of literalism and blazes with that reality that burns so fiercely and brilliantly that it is often too hard to bear. The Cross was a recorded, historical event; the Crucifixion of a man called Jesus is mentioned in a history written two thousand years ago. But the Resurrection bursts through and beyond human history and is part of God’s Creation story.
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