Questions from a Monastery
Dear Friend,
I am writing from a monastery in the Shenandoah Valley. I came here to be still, to remember how to pay attention, to be silent, and (maybe) decide where my body will take its final rest.
Instead, I am mostly finding new questions that I hope you might consider worthy of your attention. Here is one. (This is not my question. I stole it from Diana Butler Bass, but it definitely got my attention.)
“What is my personal responsibility as a Christian citizen to love my neighbor, to offer charity, and to practice kindness and mercy?”
I wonder if I have any personal responsibility to shape the empire or even the Church into my own ideal, or any other ideal, or to have any position on efficiency in government or vaccines or,….well, you get the idea (and it’s hard impossible for me to find any place where Jesus advocated for any value over love, though I’d be happy to be proven wrong. I wonder if my only responsibility is to let God do His continuing work to shape me into His image by letting God make my world ever smaller and for me to love God and then my neighbor as if he or she were the entire world. By leaving grand ideas behind, which for me inevitably turn into idols that usually displace both love of God and love of neighbor.
I often wonder why I so often withhold love from those who many seem to believe are beyond God’s circle of compassion. So let me ask you directly: Who are the people, if I were to love unconditionally, might cause you to rethink your friendship with me? Would we remain friends if I throw my door wide open to members of the LGBTQIA+ community, to people who have come to America illegally, who offer medical procedures you find incompatible with your deeply held values, and what if I invited them into my home for dinner and offered them a warm shower and a hot meal, and soap for their dirty feet, or would you turn your back on me? What if I were to offer the same to those who voted for the wrong candidate, who stand firm in their conviction that America was founded on Christian values? What if, endorsing no position at all, I threw my door open to those who just as adamantly insist that the founding fathers really meant it when they separated church and state? What if I invited those who have taken all the right vaccinations or taken none of them with an unimaginable degree of righteous indignation for anyone who disagrees with them?
Does my befriending and loving your enemy make me your enemy?
It’s fair to ask me the same question, and I wish I could honestly say that there is nobody to whom you could offer love that would compromise our friendship, but I don’t think that’s true, no matter how much I want to believe that it is.
Here’s the thing: As far as I can tell, that was simply never part of Jesus’s calculus. He simply loved, and let the chips fall where they fell. There didn’t seem to be anybody outside of Jesus’s circle of compassion. He was shameless and maybe even reckless in who he chose to love, and didn’t seem all that concerned who did and who did not like it.
For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’ But wisdom is proved right by her deeds.”
Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 11:18-19
I am beginning to wonder if the greatest gift I have been given is the gift of “nothing to lose,” and if that is so, I wonder if my responsibility to love and especially the wretchedly unloveable - is even greater than I imagined because the consequences seem far lighter for me.
I am not sure I’m answering the bell. Rather, I am sure I am not. I want to say, “If you find yourself hungry and weary and on the margins. you are welcome in my home. Just come. No questions asked. No shaming. No confessions or repentance required by me. None. You are God’s beloved, and that’s enough for me.”
But I do not say that. I am afraid. So instead of loving, I find a popular ideal to hide behind, and attach my identity to those who also hide behind this same ideal. What if the highest ideal were simply to love the person standing right in front of me with the same passion that Christ loves them?
Okay, next question:
What if this process of dying, which is everybody-always, might be the process of finding peace in uncertainty, in discovering the freedom of not knowing?
I find myself less and less troubled by uncertainty; Not only less troubled, but embracing uncertainty and searching for the beauty of new mysteries (paying closer attention?), which is different than searching for answers to new questions. Yet I am so deeply impatient with those who deny me this hope of not knowing. I find myself bristling at those whose first response to uncertainty is to reach for Google and to explain away the mysteries of bird song or the blue hue over the morning mountains, or to offer black and white certitude to Jesus’s often perplexing words or to offer answers to questions I have never asked, nor will, indeed, ever ask. How much better, it seems to me, for me, to live and to allow others to live in the beautiful ambiguity of not knowing and to find their peace there-knowing as we do, that at the end of our lives, when we have only the pretend-certitude that serves absolutely nobody, and that the only certainty is mystery, so perhaps it’s a good idea to start getting acclimated to mystery now.
Unrequested answers feel more and more assaultive to me, and shameful, as if by accepting the unknown as unknown (or, worse, accepting something as unknowable), I betray my own laziness especially when all knowledge hangs from a branch at the end of my limbs in a tiny box with the logo of half-eaten fruit that connects me to everyone and everything and all times. If all knowledge is good and immediately available, then wouldn’t willful ignorance reflect a deep character flaw?
The serpent didn’t say, but maybe implied, “All your answers are right here in front of you. You do know, after all, who put the tree here in the first place, Don’t you? I know He told you not to eat its fruit, but doesn’t it seem a tad disrespectful if you do not to cherish this gift that your creator offered to you? Just think about it. Will you? I wonder if you might change your mind.
I wonder if our growing yes to faith in God is a shrinking no to faith in absolute certainty. I wonder (and I completely recognize the irony that I am doing the very thing I despise) if those who offer up solutions might be so uncomfortable with not knowing, that even to sit in a darkened room with someone who is at peace with mystery is deeply unsettling, so they reach for the brightest light that they can find, not to assuage the discomfort of the ignorance of their friend, but their own.
I have been that person. It took the imminence and ubiquity of death to recognize and to accept ambiguity as a gift to be cherished - above even the gift of certainty. After all, ambiguity is freedom, and cracks open nearly every door - while certainty slams all doors shut - and tightly. All doors but one..the exclusively right door. For some, for me once, knowing which was the right door was freedom. No longer. Freedom is the spacious place where nearly anything is possible, and any flower might grow from any spot in any garden.
He brought me out into a spacious place;
Psalm 18:19
There is a reason this remains among my favorite poems:
The Place Where We Are Right
Written by Yehuda Amichai and translated by Stephen Mitchell
From the place where we are right
flowers will never grow
in the spring.
The place where we are right
is hard and trampled
like a yard.
But doubts and loves
dig up the world
like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
where the ruined
house once stood.Will you read me this poem over and over again as nightfall approaches? Remind me to gather up my doubts and loves and hold them close as the precious gifts they are, and to love, and yet to keep my distance from those who know for sure, who insist on the adequacy of their self-made God-boxes to contain the boundless One. Will you always remind me that hope thrives where doubt and love roam freely in the spacious place?
And if not that one, then this one? Again and again and again.
Mysteries, Yes
by Mary Oliver
Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.
How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds will
never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.
Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.Again, Please. Again. Don't let me forget.
Oremus,
Chris
Lord Christ. Holy is your name.
How deep is this love, that you turn none away from your table? Set lavishly with fresh flowers and good wine and crusty bread and thick butter and virgin oil,
May all consent to your your grace and love and sit in the peace of you, bathed in soft music, If it be your will,
May we know and trust your love, and accept the gifts you offer freely and may we accept the grace of your forgiveness and freedom from shame while we endeavor to offer forgiveness as freely as you. For there is where true joy resides.
May you open the ears of our hearts only to you, and protect us from fear and lies, which your perfect love blows away like smoke on the wind. And when, once and finally free of fear, may we let your love flow through us with reckless abandon, like you, up to and past the limits even of our own lives.
If it be your will, may wisdom be proved right in our deeds.
Amen
I Love YOU brother.
I love this Chris.