Make Ready the Crib

We are now almost at the crib: and in this season, of the year 2006, the crib resides truly in each heart. Our cribs are places of preparation now, in contrite and happy expectation of the travel-weary little procession of St. Joseph, Our Lady, and the Babe she carries within her. Our hearts, humble and stable-like as they are, are true echoes of the first stable in Bethlehem. Did not the Lord wish to show us, by His arrival in a humble stable, the very image of His desire to enter into all hearts, hearts open to Him in true contrition, purity and humility? And does He not offer us the means by which to prepare our hearts, namely His own grace won on the Cross; these graces to which we must respond with a humble giving over of our wills to His? Are we not constantly re-soiling the stable, and in need of His help which He gave to His Bride, the Church, won through His suffering, suffering which began at Christmas? How are we to clean the stables which are our hearts without help, without following the words He left with the Church? I find the words of Thomas `A Kempis profoundly apt in these days of Advent, just before the arrival of the True King:

"The Kingdom of God is within you, saith the Lord. Turn thee with thy whole heart unto the Lord, and forsake this wretched world and thy soul shall find rest. Learn to despise outward things, and to give thyself to things inward, and thou shalt perceive the Kingdom of God to come in thee. For the Kingdom of God is peace and joy in the Holy Ghost, which is not given to the unholy. Christ will come unto thee, and show thee His consolation, if thou prepare for Him a worthy abode within thee. All His glory and beauty is from within, and there He delighteth Himself. The inward man He often visiteth; and hath with Him sweet discourse, pleasant solace, much peace, familiarity exeedingly wonderful. O faithful soul! make ready they heart for this Bridegroom, that He may vouchsafe to come unto thee and dwell within thee. For thus saith He, If any love Me, he will keep My words, and We will come unto Him, and will make our abode with Him.

Give therefore a place unto Christ, and deny entrance to all others. When thou hast Christ, thou art rich, and hast enough. He Himself will by thy provider and faithful steward in all things..." (from The Imitation of Christ)

Conforming to Christ

I have often struggled with the idea of conforming to Christ: I think, "How can I conform, I am so weak? I can barely will the idea, much less handle thinking on an emotional or practical level about the reality of it."

I then say a prayer for help and enlightenment. Why the fear? I think fear comes because Our Lord was prophesied to be, and was beyond measure, a Man of Sorrows. Crowned in His crucifixion, Jesus' life on earth was, to the outside observer, a life fraught with much that would break the heart of a lesser man. He was a man born far from home; a man who lived in relatively poor conditions. He chose, as God, to live in what was considered the 'low-class, working-class' area of Israel: He chose to identify with the despised and the low of the world and to suffer the ignomy that accompanies such a choice. As a Rabbi, a Teacher, he confronted the rot and evil which had grown up among those in religious and political positions- and this kind of confrontation inevitably brings stress and persecution in its wake. He did not turn from sorrow, or 'live above it' - a nice way to say you are ignoring it- instead, He wept with those who sorrowed, and brought rejoicing forth from the sorrow when He found faith in the grieving.

All of these choices of God, and the events in His life, are viewed by us as through the wrong end of the telescope: as if they are enacted on a stage, far away from our lives. This is natural, I suppose, for the obvious connection between my life and the life of Christ does seem like a long thread, covering long distances: the distance between a Creator and creature. It is truly a distance we cannot cross ourselves, that distance between how Christ lived His life and we live ours.

God Himself comes to us, the purpose being because He loves us with such a passion as to wish us to be conformed to Him, to become small, but true visions of His heart. He wants to be with us, and to bring us home with Him. To do this, He made Himself a bridge between earth and heaven- I am thinking of St. Catherine of Siena's vision of Christ as a bridge which is found in her Dialogues, or talks with God. Reading the understanding given her in ecstasy of this Divine Bridge is worth the effort. I cannot reproduce the beauty of it here in this short essay.

Nevertheless, He is a bridge: and He comes to us, and wishes to remain close. He is gentle, and gently calls us to conform our lives to His: a baby in Our Lady's lap, a lover of the poor, a simple and hardworking person, a person who understands deeply the sorrows of this life, in our own as well as others; a person who does not turn from nor fear those sorrows, but looks to them as opportunities to become more like Him in charity. He calls us to lay down our lives, our desires, in His service- as He did in the Father's service- and he beckons us to follow in His footsteps on the dusty, messy and dirty road through a landscape so far from perfection, but in need of His light and joy. Finally, He asks us to accept crucifixion: and this comes differently for each person, for God knows each person more intimately than he knows himself.

The essence, though, of crucifixion is the giving over of the self- of the will- to the service of God and for the love of one's neighbor. This does cause pain, and in times of the persecution of Christians, it causes death like unto Christ's. There are other kinds of crucifixions, though, and one only has to learn the lives of the saints in all the ages to understand how many types there are.

All this frightens me.

The answer comes to me, like wisp of frankincense smoke: to conform to Christ cannot be done through one's natural will and abilities: the foundation and beginning must be deep love of God, as Christ has for the Father and the Holy Spirit. This love cannot be earned, but must be earnestly begged of Him who gives gifts lovingly, mercifully, and in greatest abundance. We must start with this love, we must desire it, and then our foundation for conformation in Christ is begun. We cannot hope to get anywhere besides either failure or massive pride (like the Jansenist heresy) without this gift of Love.

After we have asked for, been given, and responded to the graces of God, namely His Love, then we begin to understand that for those who love God, this life on earth, this exile in a valley of tears, is itself a conforming to Christ. You see, if you love God with your heart, soul and mind, you will suffer tremendously because this love cannot be fully consummated in union until you "know as you are known". Perhaps, I don't know, some of the great contemplative saints reached this union while still living on earth: but I think that they still suffered a sense of exile, and suffered the uncertainty of those who lived around them. In heaven, 'your shores are safe and secure' (A'Kempis).

So our daily lives, each moment, becomes a chance for conforming to Christ, in that each moment suffused with the love of God while in exile on this earth is a moment that is imbued with the life of Christ.

Have I given a picture of melancholy and morose -looking Little Christs? If I have, I have failed in explaining, so I will add this last: The love of God is Joy itself. The great mark of the Christian, or one-of-Christ's, is great joy and love in both times of sorrow and joy. Not the superficial ignoring of sorrow, or escapism, but a deep and solemn joy and a deep love and hope that exists ever under tears or the weight of life. Our shoulders may be scarred or bowed, but our eyes still sparkle like a child's in his Father's embrace. And there is peace, a peace in knowing that all happens in our lives for our ultimate good. This peace is only possible as a gift from God, a gift won by our sincere asking.

For those of the world, the Cross is foolishness, for they see it as a purposeful impoverishing of oneself for naught. For those who love God, the Cross is everything. The Cross is part of a personal and love relationship, it cannot be understood otherwise. It strips us of the dross of sin, it allows us to know our Saviour as only those who have loved and suffered together can know one another. It is not a stumbling block but a purgatory on earth, a place of fire, that purifies us and mysteriously builds in us the love of God in proportion to how much we allow it to turn our hearts from created things in this world. Everything we think or do, through the Cross, becomes the love of others through first loving God, like a man who tells another the hard truth, in love, in the face of persecution from the very person he is trying to help; or he who stands for the Faith and for true morality, at great loss of worldly opportunity for hismself.

If you lose your life for God, you will save it. If you look to garnish and coddle yourself, you will come to naught.

I'm a little less frightened now and more focused on love than fear. Oh, yes! "Perfect love casts out fear". May God perfect His love in me, and in all who, knowingly or not, search earnestly for Him.

May I Meet You by The Crib

A Reprint

When our first parents fell, they fell, in a cosmic sense, off the earth, away from the centre, pulling creation with them, the bloody weight spiraling down, down and around until they found themselves monarchs of the Upside Down Kingdom.

Their heads were down, reason and will existing now under the emotions, under the passions, a body inverted; and their children made civilization upon civilization upon civilization: these grew like an upside down tower, a Tower of Babel reaching across eons of time; entrenched, a foundation of sin.

Dante captures this topsy-turvy nature of rebellion very well in his depiction of the Devil: a grotesque animalistic creature with three heads, his body towering through the centre of hell like a perverted axis: but his head is, of course, at the lowest level of hell, at the bottom.

Photo: Bethlehem:The Door of Humility, leading to the Altar of the Nativity

The only way back, God-given, is to reach not above the head, in this Upside Down Kingdom of Sin, but rather to reach for the ground: to go to the ground is to actually go up: up in the real sense, in the sense of the Right-side Up Kingdom, the Real Kingdom. To reach for the feet, for the ground, to lower one'’s head to the dust of the earth, and to look there for up. God gives us this grace: to desire the humus, the dirt from which we came, to place that dirt on our heads in repentance: to look for salvation among the lowly and despised of the earth.

So we come, by God'’s grace, to a small cave at the edge of town, away from the clinking of coins and the open mouths of laughter by the fires, to the animal-warmth of the primitive stable where the shepherds, wiry like juniper branches, lean on their crooks, faces inscrutable in the shadows. We come to the new Eve and to the Foster-Father, and to the Way, to the Doorway, the Word made flesh; to that Holy Couple covered in the humus of the road and in the humility that comes from keeping close to the humus in the Upside Down Kingdom. And we come to worship the Child Who is the only Flesh entirely of the Real Kingdom:Who is the Real Kingdom.

The Child'’s appearance is a scandal to the Upside Down Kingdom, for He is a living picture of the Right-side Up Kingdom, and shows the other for what it is, by His very existence. Only those who are looking to the ground, looking in humility or in desperation, will see Him in hope. The rest will only see Him as a stumbling stone.

May I meet Him at the Crib, may I see you there, too. I kneel, looking into a tiny Face of loveliness, mirroring the Mother'’s in the flesh: and something else there, too, of the Father, that I cannot grasp; I feel the pain of my soul'’s smallness, its limits, as I look at His face. I look away in shame, and I see the glow of Him reflected on your face. In common shame, we somehow smile and by unspoken agreement, look again into the face of God: in hope.

Photo: Bethlehem, "Kissing the Star" : The Birthplace of Our Lord

Hope of this Holy Doorway, into a Kingdom of Charity and Light, and Him. So, it is thus for these two thousand years since His coming in the flesh. And we, part of His Church, we are meant to carry the Child, the King of the Right-side Up Kingdom, across the terrain of the world, to transform it, to turn it Right-side Up: for all things will be made new, in Christ. And we carry Him, and follow Him: for the good suffer for the evil: this mysterious economy of love and suffering is the turning to the Right-side Up. He is our only hope, the Child, He is our salvation, for of ourselves, we are nothing.

May I meet you by that Crib this Christmas.

Death in Advent

Death is suddenly there: a sickness, some hoping, a little rally, and then- nothingness. Frozen eyes, stiffened limbs, the heaviness of entropy. When Death is in front of you, naked, in your home, there is neither sparkling ornaments of glory nor dramatic clothes of nobility and grief. You are stricken with a whip in the face, your feet of clay are crumbled and you are forced to look at the terror and the grotesqueness, the humilation and the deep sorrow. You know death then as punishment, as a ripping, a breaking, something utterly foreign to the momentum of life: and this, even at the death of an animal, a small bird you have loved. You see a hollowed, twisted shell and you remember the inevitability of your death.

Then you cry, for the existential experience of the poor being who has been taken by force from it's earthly home, who has by some mystery, been pulled through a merciless turnstyle, experiencing a pain unknowable, a psychic pain which cannot be a survivor's pain: a supernatural pain.

You cry, when you know in the flesh the permanence of it, and that there is no use to "We should have"- or "next time". The destiny of that being is out of reach for this lifetime, the paths are cut asunder and run now on different planes of existence. You weep, then, with the helplessness of the created: you know both the existence of death and the power of God in the same moment-He who holds life and death in careful hands: but they seem so universal, these hands, like the ten-foot, over-sized, steel-like hands of a Soviet sculpture. You feel that He who understands death is the clock-maker of the Deists, who is simply responding out of eons to some alarm in His workings, and you are not even seen. Your beloved is simply picked up, and is gone; and you are left with the remains, the visceral horror around which you must gather the clothes of ritual.

And later, when you are tired of weeping, you are in God's house, and you ask Him: "Help me to understand this, this death." And He does not speak of the why, or the whereabouts of the dead one, but He looks at you, soul to soul, and He sends you a verse first: "I know when a sparrow falls to the ground"- and He infuses to you a new understanding of the word "know" in that verse; He makes you realize that it is meant as the Genesis-meaning of "to know"- that is, a word more like "to live within" or "to be with in the deepest sense possible to the objective known": that somehow, He knows each death in creation intimately. And your heart contracts in a sudden rush of understanding, when your soul-eyes look into His soul-eyes, and you see Him once again on the cross, turning death backwards with His own death. You see, also, His man's eyes, once also a child's eyes, once also a helpless baby's eyes in the crib at midnight: and in those eyes you see empathy: a simple being with you in your pathos, your grief. You connect with a Person who has known this grief, this death, in the same visceral sense that you have just experienced it. A look steeped in knowing togetherness.

You think, suddenly that God has deemed to be your brother in the flesh at all times, and now especially in your grief. And you know that Love can do no less: and He is no Deist's dream, but Lover in intimacy with all. And the word "How" raises itself to your consciousness, unbidden, and unanswered. You leave that question there, I suppose until you can ask it without sin or vain curiosity.

And you rejoice in this Little Coming in love, like a tryst of lovers in the corner of the church, but your heart expands in the joy of a guilt-less and passionate love, a love born partly of the thrill in the condescention of the Holy Trinity, to visit such a small stable of a soul, a soul wounded by the facing of death.

And you remember it is the beginning of Advent, a coming, and you remember the baby in the crib, hidden at midnight, a baby come to grow and die a shocking and early death. You remember the face of uncorrupted St. Bernadette, and St. Catherine Laboure with her eyes still open in a look of fierce joy. And you allow the experience of death to be a drawing, a drawing like a current in the sea, towards Him.