Whose life is it anyway?

So we enter into Holy Week where we follow the passion, death and resurrection of the life of Jesus. This week seems to come upon us so quickly that we can lose track of time and what has happened during Lent. Our practice of prayer, fasting and almsgiving helps us to see more clearly what God wants to reveal to us about our own life. This is not just our need to give things up but rather to show us what is central to our life. This can at times be a rude shock because in discovering who I am we discover a God who wishes to encounter us as we are even in our own sin, failures and broken promise. This is the heart of Lent not so much what we do but how God seeks us out to discover our who we are called to be. This is not an easy time because we start to realise that our Lenten discipline is about us opening the door and inviting God into the mess. We would much prefer it if God would come back when we have it all together. 

Thus we come to the point where the pain and suffering seem to come to an end in what feels like death to us. The Paschal Triduum can actually take us through a process of death and dying where we relive the hurts and losses that we have encountered in life. It is not easy because we can start to feel a deep loneliness and isolation. The emptiness feels too present and we look to ways in which we can avoid it. Even on Good Friday, there can be a rush to turn on the TV and watch the footy or undertake some other activity to avoid this deep absence which descends upon us. This is the liminal space in which everything changes and in which the absence transforms us. Holy Saturday is probably the most misunderstood of our days. There are very few actions but only a deep silence which falls upon us. The tabernacle is empty, the altar is bare, the Church echoes and our souls cry out for meaning. The very person we hoped to solve it for us has left the stage and leaves us with ourselves. This great scandal feels bereft of hope, lacking faith and challenging all that we love. This is the moment when we are called to be most present to the absence.

It is from this space that we encounter Easter Morning but not in the way we expect. The empty tomb says that he has risen but yet we do not see him. This is the beginning of a new life in which he reaches out to us from the very place in which we experienced the deep emptiness, loneliness and sadness. The place where we encountered our deepest fears and our darkest night. Yet it is from that place that he draws us forth into the light and walks with us on the way. He encounters us as we are and travels along the pilgrim way. Easter is no longer just about what we want but discovering who we belong to. The question that we now ask is whose am I and how will I live my life. The question is now no longer whose life is it but rather whose am I?

Who are you looking for?

I remember reading a review of Mel Gibson's "The Passion" which was shown in cinemas over ten years ago. It was a very powerful account of the journey of Jesus on his road to Calvary. It recounted these important events that happened to Jesus but in many ways left you with the same impression of him that you had when you first went to see the movie. If he was just to be judged as a good man, this was an awful and unjust punishment to any human being, if you saw him as God and man then you wondered on how this redemptive action encounters our own suffering.  It focused on the events surrounding Jesus rather than actually encountering the person.
Yet Holy Week encounters us as not just a retelling of the suffering, death and resurrection of Christ as though it was a documentary but rather it calls us to encounter the person of Jesus when we seem powerless and unable to change the course of the events. There is poverty which wishes we could fix it up or choose another way and yet we experience this is as people deeply moved by what unfolds. There is a desire to encounter the person who is at the heart of this event more than the events that surround him. We long to meet the person who invites us to journey with him to the Cross.

This is not just a call to feel particularly pious but rather to live his story in our own flesh and in our own world. We know how easy it is to view the suffering of others vicariously and to wonder how this comes to be in our own age. Why has the war in Syria dragged on for so long, how did the events of child abuse unfold in the Church and other institutions and people stay silent for so long, how do we allow peoples lives to suffer the indignity of life in refugee camps and offshore detention centres? These are only a few of the stories which can bring us to silence and yet in the midst of these stories we can either respond in rage or in love. The choice that Jesus made was that his life was transformed completely by the loving relationship he had with the Father. He surrendered his whole life to this relationship which formed and sustained him. I think this is the underlying story of this week. We need to keep our eyes on Jesus. For us, forgiveness is a person!

Our hearts are made for God and they will not rest until they rest in thee!

How is our Lent going? We have just celebrated Laudate Sunday and we are half way to Easter. This can be the very time when our prayer, fasting and almsgiving can start to feel burdensome. We wonder whether it is doing us any good and whether we are coming closer to Christ in the midst of what seems to be a relentless toil. We wonder whether what we have been doing makes a difference to us or to anybody else. Yet the important message is don't give up. Sometimes when we are tired we start to focus more on what we are doing rather than who we are doing it with. This movement into a deeper relationship with Christ is at the heart of all our Lenten discipline. It may be time to have a little Examin of who is at the heart of it all.

Our prayer seeks to be an encounter with God in which we raise two questions: who am I and whose am I? These two questions are not just onesided or ones which demand a simple response. In essence, we are called to encounter God as ourselves, not as someone else. While many spiritual guides can help us to go deeper into this relationship they cannot do it for us. They can accompany to tell us what they encountered so that we can have reference points for our own journey. It is only by encountering Jesus as we are that we can discover Jesus as he is.

Our fasting emerges out of this relationship. There are times wherein meeting God we can discover a deep emptiness that needs to be filled. There can be a temptation here to fill that emptiness by our own efforts and to meet our own appetites for wholeness. We can become afraid of that place where we disappear into an empty cave which seems to resound with our own voice. We can start to feel deeply fearful in this place and long to escape from this radical encounter. So because we fear to be in that place we fill it with noise, activity or stuff. As long as we do not have to experience this emptiness we can point to what we are doing, what we are in control of and things we own to show that my life has substance and meaning. Yet what we discover, is that these lessen our ability to hear the voice of God. In fact, when you look at many of the saints they would visit the cave so that they could hear God more clearly and discover what it was to be themselves. When we fast we discover a deeper meaning to be who are called to be.

It is from this place that we give our lives to others through Almsgiving. This is not just giving what is left over but rather a discovery that what I have is valuable to others. My life is not just my own. I have been gifted to bring life to others. This emerges not just as something I give away but rather a surrender to who I am called to be. By a surrender of my life to God, we discover that our lives are called to a deeper communion which is not just based on my effort but on God's grace which enables me to accomplish more than I can imagine.

Are our lives centred on God?

We can often start our day asking God to be present to us and to guide us through the day. There is something very healthy about this of surrendering ourselves over to God so that together we can do more than I could do on my own. Yet there is a trap which is also in this where we try to fit God into our agenda rather than allowing God to expand our worldview. It is almost the difference between spotlighting a particular issue and allowing everything to emerge into the light. In this first view, we narrow our focus just on to what interests us and what our concerns are. By this narrowing of our prayer just onto our own concerns, we can limit what else God has in store for us. This does not mean that our concerns are not important but they are not the sum of our whole life. In fact, it is quite natural to share them with God in prayer but they do not contain everything.

God wants us to see our lives transformed by love and mercy. When we become trapped into shrinking that only onto our own concerns we can miss the light which is being shone upon us. We are called to allow God to lead us into daily life and to notice those moments when we encounter grace-filled moments and give thanks. God is not called to revolve around the moments when we choose to be present but rather centring on God allows our lives to be transformed into a prayer where we start to see everything in that light. This is a Copernican revolution where we discover that God does not revolve around us but we are called to centre on God.