Time to be still

Today’s readings: Isaiah 50, 5-9; James 2, 14-18; Mark 8, 27-35.

The answer to the God-question in life is often influenced by many other answers we give to many other questions, not least among them the question about our own identity.

The way you imagine who God is and the way you search for Him depend a lot on the way you face life and its turbulences. As R R Reno writes in his article Out of the Ruins, “One must be still so that the divine surgeon can work his healing arts.”

God gracefully moulds our lives. Like St Peter, very often we want to react and do something. We lack the patience to let the surgeon intervene where and when necessary. Besides, it does not fit with our modern-day culture to be still, to let ourself be moulded. In our journeys of faith, there is always contrast between God’s design and our expectations.

The paradox of God and of the Christian mystery remains always intriguing. God can never be the end product of our rationality. Even if our faith needs to be rational and intelligent, free space needs to be left for the irruption of God at some point in time or in the debate. It may be unexpected and bewildering, but it’s part of the formula.

It transpires quite clearly from the gospel that the core identity of Jesus knows no variations. Yet when we come to the journeys of faith we can speak of variations on a theme. One’s journey of faith is too intimate and personal to just lend itself to the one-size-fits-all mentality.

Wherever we are, dabbling in different versions of spirituality or resting on a scientific explanation of things, we may become aware of what we are not finding. We are not always capable of getting up on our feet because the guidance comes from God, not us.

This may sound too Augus­tinian, it smacks also of an excessively pessimistic assump­tion that we basically lack the capability for full and sure spiritual discernment. Augus­tine’s own self-analysis is clear, particularly where he states that “the soul needs to be enlightened by light from outside itself”.

St Benedict translated this into the vow of stability. The so-called spiritual arrows of divine love highlighted by Augustine take concrete forms that shape our lives. This is the stability St Benedict speaks about in his rule and to which the prophet Isaiah seems to be referring in today’s Canticle when he speaks almost in terms of paralysis: “For my part, I made no resistance, neither did I turn away.”

This non-resistance on the part of Jesus is what eventually puts Peter off in the gospel. We hardly ever think seriously about Jesus who is rebuking Peter and what it exactly means. There are things even today for which Jesus would rebuke his Church and those who in his name won’t let go of models of Church and ways of projecting Christianity that are obsolete and obstruct God’s irruption in the lives of people.

The conflict between Peter and Jesus in the gospel highlights the conflicts we still experience in our communities, but mainly within our own selves. Discord and lack of understanding do not always have to do with doctrine.

We’ve always seen the Church as divided in two between the Church teaching on one side and the Church learning on the other. But we hardly give it a thought that at the end of the day the entire Church is at one and the same time a teaching and a learning Church. In the presence of Jesus both the common people and Peter missed the point about who Jesus really was.

There is so much we need to learn from people who them­selves have deeply experienced God’s irruption in their lives and who may also be better than us at true spiritual discernment. Different as our journeys of faith may be and varying in intensity, whoever we are and whatever our rank, the mystery of God puts us all on the receiving end. In Isaiah’s words, it is the Lord who opens our ears.