Edges Magazine Issue 29: A Time for Honesty

EDGES MAGAZINE Issue 29

May 2002

A TIME FOR HONESTY A TIME FOR HONESTY

Father John Michael Hanvey works within our organisation.

Lent begins with ashes and ends with an untenented cross, and an empty grave. Our faith starts with someone who is not there, who is not where we thought he would be. It begins with absence.

The words of Mary of Magdala are familiar to me, as to all who take this strange journey that costs so much,

‘They have taken my Lord away
and I don’t know where they have put him.’ JN 20.13

The absence of God aches its shadows in mind, heart and soul. Where once he filled my empty wandering mind there is now a darkness. Where once he tamed the rampant storms of passion unleashed with fury in the Night, there is the same fadinglight. Where once he danced before my eyes in raptured strains of liturgy, now there is a sorrow. Sometimes it’s like having lost the keys, the door, the light, and even more frightening having lost myself and Him. I sometimes look with envy on those whose faith brings comfort and assurance. But it seems this is not the path that I must tread.

And yet I would not have it any other way, on my better days. I see this wrestling with the dark angel, like Jacob did, as wrestling with none other than the Divine. It’s part of a maturing process in the spiritual life, where we no longer cling to our God, like a frightened child, but let him go, so that he can reveal himself as such a ‘fast God’, always not there when we arrive, yet leaving us clues that he has been there, like a pheasant flattening and warming the grass, then away. He is always leading us on to seek a deeper and more profound discovery.

Images of my past God now seem anachronistic. The comfortable pillows of my youth which held my head and spoke of warm security in familiar ways have now slipped away. I don’t have the props that kept me strong anymore. Rather I feel submerged in a sacred doubt, helpless, uprooted, dangling between heaven and earth – but with brief glimpses, and small understandings – often in the eyes of people who love me and whom I love, sometimes in poetry, once in St. Peter’s Square, as an old man spoke to us with a faith built on rock. I see Christ playing in their lives, almost teasing me on in my rather knocked about faith.

Lent is a time for the honesty of the desert. In this empty place there will be temptations to flee from it so that we are not alone with our God. In this place the attractions of a hedonistic lifestyle or the pursuit of power and self-importance will be strong. Fasting and prayer and care for the weak and needy, the lonely and the unloved seem the only real safeguards. We are only really at ease in the market place if we are at home in the desert.

The desolation of Christ’s passion is always present. In our work at T.H.O.M.A.S. we see Christ in his dereliction, and we are reminded of our own. This keeps us in touch with our earth-bound and flesh-bound spirituality.

‘Ashes to ashes and dust to dust in sure and certain hope of the resurrection.’ – a resurrection first announced to the apostles by a woman, and a former prostitute at that. I must admit, I do like His style.