Mystically at the Crib

Tomorrow night, God will again, for us, be born. We remember it in the ancient Jewish understanding of 'remembrance': it is a real, true re-happening, mystically, in our hearts and minds. As Fulton Sheen said about the crucifixion, through its re-presentation, we are able truly to be invited there, to the cave outside Bethlehem.

What do we see there? What we see, or don't see, reveals us, just as the sight of the scapegoat reveals us: do we see the poetry of truth, the true myth, or are we too ensconced in the poetry of the world, the narrative of the inner circles, the drama written by the powerful?

There was a great cartoon posted on Facebook recently: It was a couple, the woman pregnant, dressed in the clothes of today's poor: hoodies and shabby jeans. The man was on the payphone, and the woman was seated on one of those kiddie rides you see sometimes outside grocery stores--a donkey that rocks back and forth when you put quarters in it.

It is an exercise in seeing: what would you see if transported, as you are mystically, to the cave outside Bethlehem? An insignificant, poor couple who were not important enough to have a place to stay; a tiny baby that in all probability would either die before adulthood or become another insignificant, poor person struggling to survive; a scrap of human flesh hidden in the arms of a woman, another kind of insignificant in that culture and time.

Would you be a wise man? "The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord." Wisdom is the ability to see the real significance of things, even those which seem insignificant to the world: perhaps especially those things. Wisdom is to recognize truth, to know enough of God to know that He is capable of becoming a baby, to follow His star no matter where it leads, and beyond human expectations for the signs of power, to follow that light to Weakness Incarnate.

Would you bring him gold nonetheless, though it may appear to everyone else to be throwing it down a charity hole?

Would you know enough to bring him myrrh; would you know that the sweetness of the nativity scene was also a vision of a more profound form of suffering and emptying than anything you could imagine on your own? Would you, as Caryll Houselander said, see the wood of the cross embedded in the wood of the cradle? Would you see that He was already on the road of suffering, taking the form of a poor flesh-scrap, intentionally risking the suffering of being profoundly misunderstood?

Would you know enough to bring him frankincense, the precious granules that were only burned before a god? Would you know that the telos of frankincense was now finally realized as the smoke gently rose before the poor, the laid aside, the refuse?

Would you be a shepherd? Like the poor child in your poverty, unsurprised by the animal stench and the rawness of the scene, but drawn in because in your familiarity with contemplation in the wilderness and the long night watches, could you see what was different here? Could you look past the suffering and see unusual beauty in the face of the Mother, in the aura of angels surrounding the Child?

Would you be, instead, an innkeeper, with so much else before your eyes, so many pressing concerns, that you only saw the insignificant poor couple who could not pay hiked rates for rooms? Would you be one of those crafty people who, as Jane Austen said, have "a presence of mind [which] never varies, whose tongue never slips"?

Would you be a Herod, a mover and shaker who, though pretending to be pious, are instead in love with power, with influence, with your own abilities, your own intellect--who sees only two categories for the Christ child: either someone to be used, or someone to compete with? Are you daunted, scandalized, fearful of God's choice to totally empty Himself and to suffer? Are you doubtful?

Let the Christ child reveal you to yourself. Perhaps you will find all these characters inside. The suffering of the child, of the mother, of the foster father is meant to assuage justice, to test you, to educate you, and to save you. He cannot save you if you do not know yourself, know that you need to be saved from selfishness, fear--and above all, as Fr. Zossima in The Brothers Karamozov says, from "the lie to yourself." He cannot love you if you do not know you need His love.

The scapegoat, for the first time in history, will, in the power of love, turn the scapegoating into a feast of love, and healing. He will become the Feast.

The baby in the cave is a paradox that reveals you and demands your potential for dignity, sacrificial love, demands in love that you become what you were made to be---and does this with the sweet, absolutely helpless cry of a newborn child. His very helplessness, like the poor of the world, the helpless, the humble, calls you out. What will you see when tomorrow night, you stand outside the cave among the shepherds and wise men?

Whom Job Reveals

Job. Just the name can stab the heart; reading his story makes the knife turn. It is like reading news accounts of young and old people, innocent in many senses, trying to live their lives and create order as best they can, who have been gunned down: for what? The question, that question that is itself another form of suffering, perhaps the most concentrated form of all suffering, rises immediately: why?

The "why" must be answered in particular lives, and also by human beings together, but most importantly, it must be answered by God. And He does. As John Paul II shows us in Salvifici Dolores, the story of Job reveals new dimensions, new meanings of suffering beyond all expectation:

Job is at an intersection between Moses' record of a story of a God emerging from the mists surrounding human consciousness and something much more profound. In Job, the loss of every good, to the point of the disintegration of Job's own body, mirroring the writhing of his soul is a poetic, biting, visceral image of suffering. The intersection is that of two different definitions, meanings, purposes of suffering that come together in the events of Job, which coalesces with other Old Testament writings, but somehow, mysteriously, reveals something latent, deeper, more profound about suffering.

In the Pentatuch, especially in Genesis, we see that there is a Creator of a natural, supernatural, and moral order; Genesis itself is a pageant not only of virility and variety, but primarily of order. There is an Order-er, and thus He is also the Lawgiver, the laws of creation reflecting the order, the laws, of Himself. When that order is dis-ordered in some way, justice becomes necessary in a new way: now it is not only a giving of what is due, it also suddenly becomes a demand to re-order. This demand is fulfilled in punishment. Adam must wrestle with the elements to survive, instead of everything falling over itself to give him abundance; Eve must be relegated to a politically lower order and suffer pain.

Suffering related to order and justice, is, I think, easily understood by the human mind. Thus Job's friends, from this humanly understood, more simplistic order, look diligently for the causes of his suffering. "It must be rational," they say; "It must be something you've done," they murmur. Most of the ancient religions and many philosophies build their edifice on this, and this alone. The Greeks had natural forces personified, each force conflicting but ultimately bowing to a cosmic order. Reward and punishment is the paradigm for all of us at a purely childhood and very human level; indeed, it is a reflection of the natural law in us, in all of us. There is order; thus, a dis-ordering force must be dealt with.

Nowhere in the Greek tragedies do we find an absence of fault as related to suffering. All must have a rational, just, ordered source. Nowhere in Hinduism do we find an absence of fault as a part of suffering.

And nowhere in Islam do we find this absence of fault. God is Supreme Order, and also Supreme Will. Punishment and reward are, as is normal for human beings, paramount in this worldview. If one understands God's will, and sets out to right any warpings of it, to spread that will, then one can understand how to mete out reward and punishment to most fully effect that will. Sharia law is the day-to-day expression, in minute form at times, of this will, interpreted by, depending on the form of Islam, the imans, or the caliphs (when there has been one reigning), or the mystics. It is so important because it is the daily expression of the will of God, which is all-important, that ordering force upon which all civilization, all meaning, all goodness, rests.

When thinking about the current political situation and indeed the whole of Islam's history from its first origins as a Judeo-Christian-Arabic amalgamation, we find ironically that Islam has much in common with Judaism: the focus on following the laws and will of God in all parts of daily life, that the whole of a person's life is dedicated to this 're-ordering' of the self towards the ordering of God, and that there is definite reward and punishment obvious not only in the direct suffering from subjective cause to effect (excessive drinking producing bad health, or a parent's sin affecting the children through the generations), but also on an entire people. Do they follow God as a human community or not? Are they 'holy' or 'set apart' for God, in His will, or not?

Thus, the truth that suffering is punitive, a re-ordering of that which has been dis-ordered, a 'guarantee of the truth and power of the moral order' could be argued to be almost a universal human concept, at least in the ancient faiths, the ancient world. The rub happens when we have to figure out who is qualified to articulate both the order as it applies to human communities and persons. Is it Moses? Mohammed? Buddha? Brahma? Zeus?

As we move on in Genesis, and meet the sufferings of Israel as he goes into exile, slaves for years for his chosen wife, wrestles with the angel of God, and loses his favored son to the greed of his other sons, we find a new kind of suffering. Suddenly suffering, as in the wandering homelessness of the desert, becomes not only punitive but also educational: it is revealed as a discipline, and even a means by which God brings about a higher good. In a highly poetic and mysterious way, we see those whose sufferings have made them more worthy to know, little by little, the Creator in a personal way. We see suffering, as John Paul II says, as a certain 'doing good to the subject' a re-ordering not only necessary for the guarantee of the Cosmic Order, but for the re-ordering of the person or the group.

We can see this also in other worldviews: Oedipus moves from an irascible, immature, prideful person into a luminescent, sacred entity who seems, at Colonnus, to enter the world of the gods through his uber-human, Job-like suffering; Odysseus becomes a truly political, moral person, more than the Cretan, cunning, liar-warrior of the Iliad as he finds new sources of suffering in disordered land spots among the sometimes writhing, sometimes wine-dark, sea; from wreckages to the super-ships of discourse, he becomes a man of profound language instead of a clever barbarian.

We see this also in Islam. The Sufi mystics, the Koran, all point to a kind of education out of punitive suffering. The system, so far, is quite logical and understandable if one understands the 'rules.'

Enter Job.

It is as if the old worldviews show up in the persons of his 'friends.' Zeus says, "You did something wrong"; Buddha says, "You must endure it and hope for something better"; Moses says, "It is so you can see the laws of God."

And Job refuses them all, because he is the definitively innocent man. He is more than a particular person, he is a poetic archetype, he is a Sign of the innocent, good man--we know this because we know that every particular, historical person has some fault within him, inherited or taken on through his own actions of disordering. But Job is innocent, good, so much so that he incites the envy of the Evil One. His sufferings do not come from a fault.

Again, and let it sink in: Job's sufferings do not come from a fault. In a sense, this is unprecedented. The order of the Cosmos is revealed by, is guaranteed by, suffering connected to faults, disorder. Does the order of the Cosmos lie in a heap, is it cheapened by the Sign of Contradiction that Job has suddenly become, as he sits in his filth, despised above all men?

Here, though it has echoes in other Old Testament writings, a deeper meaning of suffering is revealed in a raw, intense way: it is a test. Job's true loyalty to God, to Order, to Goodness, is tested, and through all forms of suffering, the most intense form perhaps being falsely seen by other human beings, an outcast in the purest form, that of being blamed when one is innocent, being profoundly misunderstood so that any physical suffering is made ten-fold, in loneliness and abandonment: even more profound, living in the temptation that to all human and rational account, God has disappeared, abandoned him who had served Him well.

Job's deepest complaint is the cry "Why have you forsaken me?" It is what is truly under the universal human question, "Why?" in the face of suffering.

In Job's refusal to bow to human wisdom, in his courageous assent that "I know my Redeemer lives," his dignity and profound depth as a human being, an image of God is manifested. The test reveals Job to himself, helps him "to regain the soul he thought he had lost."

And Job reveals more, much more. He becomes, himself, a questioner. He is searching in the dark, that profound darkness that suddenly is shown to be profound light. He questions God because he knows, beyond all else, that God is Good. What he finds, when God speaks to him in the whirlwind, is something beyond all reckoning: he finds, of course, power; of course He finds immutable will; but Job, when he lays down in dust and ashes, repents. Why does he 'repent'? The whole point of the book was that he had done nothing wrong. "Repent" means a "turning direction into the right way again"--Job, though he had done nothing wrong, did not really know God. When suddenly, because of his suffering, that great test, he comes into direct dialogue with God, he sees something--perhaps not with the eyes of the body--yet seeing nonetheless. His whole life, his understanding is turned, because he sees a great mystery of love when he sees God; he is known and he knows. Perhaps, though we don't know, Job sees the God who will reveal the most profound meaning, the true meaning, of suffering.

Beyond justice, beyond education, there is the suffering of love. There is God who is not only Omniscience and Omnipotence, Lawgiver--the God of the Pentatuch, the God of Sinai, the God Mohammed used as a model for Allah--there is He who "opened His suffering to man, because he became a sharer in human suffering." Through this 'com-passion' (co-suffering) God suddenly could live within each person in a new and profound way. The Cross was and is a point of union, a crossing, with each person beyond every other union. Because of the greatest descent into weakness, being pinned to a criminal's punishment, an absolute openness to the Power and Will of God was effected: by God Become Man.

Absolute emptying of what was the Highest is the most emptying possible: and this openness, because like Job, who partially reveals this greater Sign, was not based on a fault, was not based on a punitive order. It was love. And this great openness of weakness and love made a great space, an infinite space, for God to fill up again with power and love, to manifest Himself through the opened intersection between Himself and man, to pour living water out into the desert , among the wreckages of the world, over those suffering because of faults and sin, and when received, to make the latent seeds of human dignity, love, and greatness flower again. This was the also the co-gift of God and the great Christian martyrs, and as John Paul II says, all those who suffer for love, for others, for what is right.

Suddenly, suffering is also love. And it not only saves, but it creates, and regenerates, as Job was created anew, brought to a higher level, "happier than before." Jesus is Job, because He was human without fault, but He is also God in the whirlwind. Finally, the union, the thing for which we are hoping against all human hope when we read Job's story, is accomplished in Christ. He makes possible what Job saw but could not accomplish because his emptiness was, still, only human emptiness.

Christ asks us, each one, to live His dream with Him, His descent into profound emptiness in the light of the Resurrection. He gives us each a chance to make our suffering salvific, creative, to add our own paint to his great canvas, to again rediscover the soul, the greatness, the profound love, 'the awareness of life,' of hope, the dignity we are because--because He first loved us. With Him, our suffering can change the world, and we may not know the true value and joy of it until we can see God face-to-face.

We live in a world that still, in its exhausted punitive maliciousness, runs on reward and punishment: each worldview desperately trying to get back at the others because everything else but 'my way, our way' is 'disordered' or 'less than.' We live in a giant king on the mountain game that spews out reams on 'order' and 'justice.' Terrorism is punitive revenge, no matter who is doing it, and often it is a cover for groups attempting the most effective domination of all: the hidden kind, the kind that uses others' passions and beliefs for absolutely selfish aggrandizement. It is a hurricane-world, but it is only a blustering and barbaric imitation of Job's whirlwind which is the whirlwind that most truly reveals God, as Isaiah knew, in the gentle wind at the center, the weak and soft wind that is the power of salvific love.