Tag: Virgin Mary

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Embracing Paradox

I’ve been appreciating Brené Brown’s newest book (Strong Ground). She names some of the paradoxes that wise and courageous leaders learn to embrace.

I immediately resonated with the chapter on the importance of “negative capability.” It’s a concept she found in a letter from the poet John Keats (1795-1821). Keats praises this capacity that he perceives in great men like Shakespeare – “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

There are moments when abiding in love and truth is particularly painful. These are the moments of the in-between, when we have only partial insights or unsatisfactory options. We feel the pressure to make something happen and get away from the tension as soon as possible. It becomes almost unbearable to abide and wait for fuller truth and goodness and beauty to emerge.

To be human in a fallen world is to live in this tension. We are stretched by two seemingly incompatible truths. On one side is the harsh reality of impermanence. As much as we attempt to deny it, our earthly existence is fleeting. Nothing gold can stay. On the other side is the nonstop human tendency for meaning-making. We insatiably interpret what is happening and why – a task that our brains engage both consciously and unconsciously, even while we sleep! We don’t like waiting to receive the fuller truth. We both desire and need to belong securely and trustingly to something solid.

To put the paradox differently, our human hearts were not created for endings, and everything good in this world comes to an end. What can we do?

As Brené Brown puts it, “Negative capability is a difficult muscle to build.  We’re wired to resolve tension and seek certainty.  This capability requires the ability to reach inward toward stillness rather than out toward counterfeit facts and reason.”

“Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10).

Even in turning to God, we are likely – in our urge to escape the pain of this paradox – to engage in yet another form of irritable grasping or controlling in the face of eternal mysteries that are never for sale, and will repel any attempts as seizing or sieging.

I’ve been reading the comments of a few thousand participants in the listening sessions I facilitated for my diocese this fall. You can feel attempts at grasping among many of our longtime parishioners who (in a world where everything has changed so much and so rapidly) expect their parish church to be the one place where nothing changes – only it already has, many times over. You can feel the grasping in the comments of hundreds of others who expect everyone else to adopt their political or liturgical ideology. If only we all thought this way, or all did things this way, our pain and suffering would go away. They forget the flaming sword that will not permit us to return to Eden (Genesis 3:24).

I empathize with their fear and restlessness because I know those movements in my own heart! I have my own versions of grasping or striving or hiding when the tension feels unbearable.

The real invitation is go deeper into the paradox without trying to escape it, nor to escape the tension found therein. This is exactly what Jesus and Mary do on Good Friday and Holy Saturday.

Jesus, true God and true man, does not erase or eliminate the dreadful consequences of our human freedom. Rather, he brings eternal love into the depths of our humanity, loves us to the end, and invites us back into relationship – with his Father and with each other.

His mother Mary does not do what so many churchgoers do when feeling the powerlessness of this paradox. She offers no fixing, no advice, no comparisons with others who have it worse, no backing away from his Cross. She stands with and witnesses.

Her with-ness and witness continue on Holy Saturday, a day of Sabbath – a day of stillness and rest. “Be still, and know that I am God” – these words sound so pleasant and peaceful in other settings. Not so much on a day of Sabbath rest in which your Son is buried in the tomb, and you are utterly powerless. Even then, rather than grasping or escaping, Mary embraces the promises of Jesus and waits in Hope amidst the paradox, not knowing how he will fulfill these promises until it actually happens.

Even after the Resurrection and Ascension, when so many questions remain unanswered, when the disciples are still downcast and doubtful, she abides with them and prays with them for nine days (Acts 1:10-14). They learn from her the capacity for passion and compassion that she exhibited so beautifully at each earlier moment of her discipleship, a capacity which grew and deepened as each mystery unfolded.

Yes, prayer and liturgy and Church are all part of our human response to this painful paradox – not so much being the answer itself, but the context in which The Answer can be encountered, again and again, stretching our capacity to receive – which also means stretching our capacity to suffer! The suffering of the Saints does not diminish as they grow closer to God. The greater their longing, the greater the gap feels between them and the living God. The greater their willingness to stay connected to others, the greater their capacity to suffer with. Show me even a few such saints, and I’ll show you a church community that is thriving on mission!

I find Brené Brown’s words both comforting and emboldening: “Resist the urge to reach for certainty where it does not exist. The longer we can hold that paradox, the greater our capacity to see and honor one another in our fullness AND in our contradictions.”

Faith and Christian community are essential, not as an escape from the tension of this world, but as a shared receptivity of the eternal, and of the mystery of each human person. It is in abiding relationship and receptivity that we can glimpse and taste the goodness of the Kingdom of God, and can persevere in our sojourning until this world definitively passes away, when Jesus comes again with full righteousness, wiping every tear away and abolishing death forever.

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More Than We Can Handle?

“God doesn’t give us more than we can handle.”

At least that is what many Christians say in the face of trial or loss. But is it actually helpful? And is it true? I believe it is rather unhelpful, and only partially true.

I’ve written before on the importance of learning to sit with sadness – something we tend to avoid! It’s hard enough when it’s our own sorrow. We’d rather plunge into busyness or fixing or numbing rather than face our grief. But it’s especially hard when we are in the presence of other people’s pain. That’s when the advice or clichés come out!

First, we’ll try to fix it – if there seems to be a way of fixing. We’ll be “generous” and offer to help; we’ll make suggestions for books or podcasts; or we’ll compare this person’s pain with our own or that of a friend – anything to help make the pain go away, because we don’t like to feel it, and we definitely don’t like to feel powerless.

In some cases (tragedies or definitive losses), there is nothing we can do. When fixing doesn’t work, we start grabbing for clichés. Surely one of them will be the magic wand that will make this feeling of powerlessness go away! Surely one of them will help this person feel better so that I can feel better.

Are these clichés helpful? No, I would say not. They often have the effect of “blaming the victim” or shaming others for feeling the way they feel. Rather than compassion (“suffering with”), clichés are a way of stepping back from the pain of others and leaving them to suffer alone.

I suppose there is a time and a place for distracting or diverting from pain. Perhaps we are in a survival situation and lack the time, resources, or energy to engage head on. If mere survival is the best we can hope for at the moment, then we can indeed turn to our arsenal of distractions and find ways to minimize the pain.

Even when we are ready to face heartache, we are still human, meaning we are limited. We can’t face it all the time. It can be appropriate to take a break from our grieving, laugh together at a joke or a movie, plunge into a hobby or game, and so forth. A cliché could be helpful as permission to take a short break from the pain.

But if our Christian families and communities are unable or unwilling to accompany people as they face pain and heartache, then where can they go? Jesus does not want his Church to be a place of mere survival, but God’s own hospital in which we experience healing, redemption, restoration, and total transformation. That only happens by facing our heartache, taking up our Cross, following Jesus, dying amidst our powerlessness, watching and waiting, and experiencing the newness of the Resurrection. If we desire to be “helpful” to those in pain, we must first walk this path ourselves – as Jesus did. We can’t give what we ourselves have not experienced.

Is there any truth to this expression, that “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle”? Sort of.  Here is what the apostle Paul says:

“No trial has come to you but what is human. God is faithful and will not let you be tried beyond your strength; but with the trial he will also provide a way out, so that you may be able to bear it” (1 Corinthians 10:13).

As you can see, the cliché is an oversimplification and distortion of what Scripture actually says.

Paul doesn’t attribute our trials directly to God’s agency. God permits or allows us to endure trials, but they are human. They are the result of a misuse of human freedom – by our first parents, by others who have caused harm, and by our own sins. Directly or indirectly, all trials in this life are the result of human sin. God allows these consequences because he has entrusted us with dignity, freedom, and  real authority amidst our stewardship.

God is faithful. He is absolutely committed to accompanying us through every trial. He will never abandon us, and will never leave us without every means of assistance that we truly need to move through the trial.

God provides a way out. There is a true exit to the trial. We tend to hunker down in our panic rooms, avoiding the heartache – and ultimately getting stuck. But Jesus himself, God’s own beloved Son, has plunged into our trials. He has gone there first, and has opened up a path to new life. If we follow him faithfully, if we share in his suffering and death, we will experience a radical newness and expansiveness – and not just “one day” in heaven.

As we see in the saints, there is an amazing foretaste of this newness that comes even in this life. If you study their lives, you will find a stunning diversity of humans, all with two common features: (1) They endured enormous trials; (2) They were incredibly joyful followers of Jesus.

Like them, we will be able to bear our trials: because God is faithful to his promises, because Jesus has blazed a trail for us, because he accompanies us, and because he won’t allow us to be tested beyond our strength. Therefore, we can hope.

Hope is the answer in the face of heartache. Hope refuses to be killed by suffering (or by clichés!). Hope perseveres – not by naïve optimism, not by secular stratagem, but by waiting persistently for our faithful God to fulfill all his promises. This is the hope of mother Mary standing at the foot of the Cross on Good Friday and at the tomb on Holy Saturday – believing God’s promise, staying present, enduring, pondering, and waiting. The joy of resurrection always comes to those who abide in hope.

May we be people of hope, this Lent and always!

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A Marvelous Exchange

O marvelous exchange! Man’s Creator has become man, born of the Virgin. We have been made sharers in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.

We pray these words each year on the eve of January 1 in the Liturgy of the Hours. In the wake of so many gift exchanges, we reflect on the one exchange that truly matters. The Son of God, who is eternally divine, willingly empties himself of his divine privileges (Phil 2:6-11). He assumes human nature, born of the Virgin Mary in the flesh.

The result is a one-flesh union that weds humanity and divinity together in the person of Jesus. He is the eternal Son of God, who is himself God (John 1:18). He has truly taken up human flesh. He dwelt among us; he abides with us still.

The theological term for this mystery is “the Hypostatic Union” – which means that Jesus is truly human and truly divine, with both natures united in the one person, who is the eternal Word of God. Mary gives birth to that one eternal person, which is why the early Church (at the Council of Ephesus in 431) insisted that it is right to call her theotokos – “God-bearer” – or as we typically say in English, “Mother of God.” She gave birth to a person, not a nature.

More importantly, humanity and divinity are truly wedded together. This is the first taste of the eternal marriage feast between Jesus and his bride, the Church. A week ago, on Christmas Eve, the Liturgy of the Hours pondered the same mystery:

When the sun rises in the morning sky, you will see the King of kings coming forth from the Father like a radiant bridegroom from the bridal chamber.

The Father sends his own Son among us like a bridegroom, traveling to wed his bride and bring her into his Kingdom. This process begins with the Incarnation – the Word becoming flesh. In his person, humanity and divinity enter a one-flesh union that makes it possible for us to receive grace upon grace from divine fullness. The process continues with him freely and totally giving himself on the Cross, truly dying, and truly rising. Then, in the Ascension, he exalts human flesh in the presence of his Father. All is prepared for the feast – and we are invited to share in it!

We now live in this in-between time of “already but not yet.” Humanity has already been wedded to divinity in the person of Jesus. Human flesh is already exalted at the right hand of the Father. All of humanity is invited to share in this marriage covenant. The only question is what we desire and whether we will give our consent.

Recall the story of the merciful father in Luke 15 (known more popularly as the story of the “prodigal son”). The larger context of the story is the eternal feast, to which we are all invited. The older son is still preferring his own not-so-marvelous means of exchanging: If I do this, then you have to do that. He would rather be an employee than a son. He is enraged with envy as he watches his younger brother freely receive far more than he ever dared to dream or desire.

His father speaks tenderly to him, “My son, you are here with me always – all that I have is yours!” (Luke 15:31).

Here we encounter the profound truth of the “marvelous exchange” that Jesus brings. All that is his is ours. That means that we, too, are beloved children of God. It means that we, too, get to share fully in the eternal marriage feast – not because we have been diligent in our duty, but because God delights in us as his children and desires to celebrate with us forever.

A wise priest recently heard my Confession and reminded me of my own favorite story of Luke 15. I spend so much of my time laboring – chasing the illusion of getting “caught up.” I allow myself to succumb to the unrealistic expectations of others – and to my own even more demanding expectations. That puts me in the role of the elder son, toiling away in isolation, and envying those who seem to have enough time to feast. Eventually that joyless labor exhausts me, and then I shift roles to the younger son, seizing joyless pleasure for myself with entitled anger. When I get stuck in that elder son / younger son cycle, my life truly becomes miserable.

And the Father’s gentle invitation is still always there: My son… All that is mine is yours…

As the Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us, “To become a child in relation to God is the condition for entering the kingdom” (n. 526). Will I claim that identity as a beloved child of God? Will I surrender all of myself to him so that I can receive from his fullness?

It is a special invitation to a marvelous exchange. I am invited to give God my humanity: ALL of myself, just as I am. My tendency is to focus on the more presentable pieces of myself – which are not nearly as amazing as I like to think they are. Those are usually my “elder son” pieces, but God desires my “younger son” pieces as well. And he desires the pieces of me that are buried yet more deeply – some of which are still a mystery even to me. But he knows them all, because he sees me in my wholeness. He desires ALL the pieces – so that he can divinize all of them as he restores me and exchanges my shame for his Glory.

In the 300’s, Gregory of Nazianzus declared, “What has not been assumed has not been healed; it is what is united to his divinity that is saved.” The Father invites me to give all the shattered pieces to him so that he can pour divine fullness into all of me. It is an invitation to vulnerable receptivity in an intimacy that exceeds that of the one-flesh union of earthly marriage – which is the best sign and symbol for what is to happen. But earthly marriage will fade away in the Kingdom (Matthew 22:30), giving way to the eternal wedding feast of the Lamb. Even now we are invited to surrender ourselves with the vulnerable receptivity and humble dependence of little children.

When we do so, we receive the power to become sons and daughters of God. We receive grace upon grace from his divine fullness. We begin sharing in the feast.

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