Do you find that the Bible is coming alive in a new
way? It has already come alive to anybody in this room, or we
would not be here. But isn't the Bible coming alive even in a
new way? If there were a rule that I had to read the Bible, it
would turn to dust. The same thing would happen if I read it because
somebody said that at 5:00 or 6:001 had to read it. But, these
days, I like to have the Bible close by.
Let your bearing toward one another arise out of your life in Christ Jesus, for the divine nature was his from the first: yet he did not think to snatch at equality with God, but made himself nothing. assuming the nature of a slave. Bearing the human likeness, revealed in human shape, he humbled himself. and in obedience accepted even death-death on a cross. Therefore God raised him to the heights and bestowed on him the name above all names, that at that name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven, on earth and in the depths, and every tongue confess, "Jesus Christ is Lord," to the glory of God the Father.
So you too. my friends. must be obedient. . . you must work out your own salvation in tear and trembling; for it is God who works in you, inspiring both the will and the deed for his own chosen purpose.
(Philippians 2)
I am going to read you a poem. It was written by
one of your colleagues. Each one of you should have a copy. I
hope you take it home with you.
Life is so painful
so overfull these days truly-they are the last aren't
they-
The days of your life
are always the last days. There are no other days no other days
to be angry
to be a Fighter for the Faith to loath injustice
and to burn the laws that oppress rather than give
freedom.
Life is joyfilled and endlessly caring these days
these last days of your life aren't they-
There is no other time
to be caring
to be with your whole life the compassionate lover
of the world that you are.
I don't mean to be impertinent to the artist by commenting
on that poem, but I do want to say that whenever the church has
been alive she has declared to the world: "These are the
last days." For the first time in my life that makes sense.
For anybody who is alive, these days are our last days.
I want to continue talking about taking care of yourself.
If you have not been catapulted into the profound depths of consciousness,
you do not have to talk about taking care of yourself. The normal
structures of society take care of you pretty well. Once in a
while somebody flips out of them and has to receive special treatment;
most of us make it to the grave. But once the deeps of consciousness
have opened up, and you have dared to walk into those portals
of consciousness until the day you die, you are vulnerable in
a way that you cannot even describe. You had better take care
of yourself.
When I think of taking care of yourself, my mind
goes to standing at attention to life. Taking care of yourself
is finding the means by which you stand at attention.
I feel as if I have dug through twenty miles of the
rubbish that has been piled upon religious exercises through the
centuries. But I finally got down to the secret of it all: it
is to experience your experience. That is underneath all the wisdom
and insight about the devotional life. Taking care of yourself
begins with standing at attention, and that involves at least
four things.
The first of them is checking on your spiritual attire;
that begins in the morning. I should think that the thing you
would fee r most would be appearing spiritually nude at any time.
I remember a great phrase from the Christian milieu in which I
grew up: "Don't ever be caught anywhere you would not want
to be if Jesus were to come." If you could take some lye
and a brush and scrub all of the crusty moralism off that phrase,
you would get down to something absolutely essential. I do not
intend to be caught spiritually nude ever again.
The second thing that is involved in standing at
attention is the external .environment. I would not dwell
my days anywhere else than in a mace where I chose what I would
be unconsciously addressed by. I might make terrible mistakes,
but I would not choose to expose myself to any environment which
did not address my profound understanding of my own selfhood.
The third thing is what I call the crutches of integrity.
Integrity is not a simple thing. Of all the agony that we go through,
deciding our integrity is the hardest. One of the crutches of
integrity is humor, being able to laugh at yourself and knowing
when you have to get other people to laugh at you.
The last thing that has to do with standing at attention
is afterbrooding. I cannot tolerate anger in myself. I do
not go around trying not to get angry; that would be old mood
virtue. You could spend your whole life trying not to be this
or that. But I cannot stand myself when I get angry. I hate myself
for days at a time.
When I get angry, I try to stop myself immediately.
And then I try to remember the point before which I was not angry,
and after which I was angry. Then I start pushing, and the moment
I begin to grasp why I am angry, then I forget the whole thing.
There is no sense of guilt; that is not what I am after in doing
this. I am trying to spot what I am angry about. You know that
you are never angry about what you think you are angry about.
When I have located the real reason for my anger, then I can deal
with it. After brooding is dealing with your responses to life.
The second arena of taking care of yourself is to
grasp the substance of it. That substance is the Dark Night of
the Soul.
You do not take care of yourself in a vacuum; there
is content and it is strange. The content of taking care of yourself
is the intensification of the Dark Night of the Soul and the Long
March of Love.
The interior dynamics of belief and trust and certitude are, phenomenologically, the awarenesses of humiliation and of weakness and of rsentment. I wish somebody years ago had been able to help me understand that this resentment is the fight of God itself. It is not some violation of a moral principle that has nothing to do with my life. How many times, even this morning, I resent, I resent. The last awareness is suffering. I like to call it "salvific suffering".
In the Long March, which is the Dark Night looking
outward rather than inward, you grasp that, in the profound depths
of consciousness, there is only dislocation. You have read about
people of the 1960's being dislocated. I understand that. But
it has taken me a long time to see that profound consciousness
is always dislocated. There is no home. I am a stranger here.
And, in the depths of profound consciousness, life is always a
sense of ineffectivity. In these depths, life comes always as
depletion, worn-out-ness, expendedness. Finally, life always comes
as salvific unfulfillment.
The categories of the dynamics of hope are the intensification
of these. The intensification of the first set of these categories
is what I call ghostliness. Everything becomes sheer mystery as
the contingency that is humiliation intensifies and the contingency
of rootlessness intensifies. Never again are you clear about anything.
Never again are you clear that you are right. Never again are
you clear about any idea, , any concept. There is no ground. All
is sheer mystery. Ghostliness-the strange presence, which is forever
incomprehensible, consumes your being.
The second category is the intensification of weakness
and ineffectivity. It is the experience of a ceaselessness.
It is as if you were on a treadmill. Never again will you have
the experience of going anywhere. You experience ceaselessness
when you become aware that, after having given your whole life
to alleviate the suffering of mankind, when you die there will
be just as much human suffering as if you had never lived. So
it shall ever be until God rolls up the pathway of Creation itself.
You know how every few days you say, "When I
get this done things will be different. Surely they cannot continue
this way." That may be true for some people, but not for
a man of profound consciousness, not for a man of the spirit'
not for a man who has put all of his life on the line. That man
experiences the eternality of ceaselessness, and it just about
drives him crazy. But unless you have that experience, you know
nothing about the profundity of consciousness itself.
The third category is called nothingness. This is
the intensification of resentment and the intensification of expenditure.
You experience yourself as simply not there anymore. I do not
mean that as some moralistic, altruistic concept. Quite the opposite!
It is a horrible experience to experience yourself just not there
anymore, that your relationships are there, but you are not. Then
it is that you understand, in a way that profoundly frightens
you, that resentment is born out of a sense that you have become
the doormat of God himself. When you are filled with resentment
toward me, that resentment is not located in me. You can put that
in un-theological language! Being uses being. That is our life.
The last category, the intensification of salvific
suffering and salvific unfulfillment, is salvific presentness.
It is as if you are not there anymore; Being takes you over and
you become the presence of Being in the world. Perhaps you smile
when you sing the hymn, "Make me a captive, Lord, and then
I shall be free." But remember, you are a captive.
I do not think the church helped me when I was young
to see the dread of that which fascinated me, the terror of that
which was my glory. I am no longer my own man in any way whatsoever.
Whenever you see me strive to be my own man, then you have a clue
to the fact that I am not my own man. I am free only in total
and abject surrender to Being itself, so that my presence is never
again my presence, but only the presence of Being itself.
I am describing the dynamics of hope. And perhaps,
after all, you did not want hope as much as you thought you wanted
hope. I mean the hope that cloth not let you down. I mean the
hope that is beyond hope. The hope that is over against your hope.
What I have just described is the substance of taking care of
yourself.
A few days ago, a young lass came in at 5 o'clock
in the morning, sat down and began to talk. Only three sentences
had poured out before I saw, clearly, that she had a dose of the
Dark Night of the Soul. So I said, "You do not have to say
any more". I began to tell her what she had come to tell
me. Her head started to nod and I could almost hear her saying
to herself, "How in the world does he know exactly what has
been going on in me'?" The point is that underneath all human
illness is The Dark Night of the Soul-not underneath some, but
all human illness-the Dark Night of the Soul.
Now I understand how the Starets developed the capacity to see through a situation before anything was ever mentioned. In 20 or 40 years in the desert, they developed a discipline that enabled them to understand and to embrace the profundity of consciousness itself. Before someone opens his mouth, you know what is underneath his words. You know that if you had time enough to sit there and pull the leaves of the artichoke aside, you would get back to the same heart. Today's new transcultural human being is discovering the essence of man all over again. And the essence of man-that which we all hold in common-is the Dark Night of the Soul.
You think that you have a problem with your wife?
You think that you have a problem with your Prior? You think that
you have a problem with some other culture? You think that you
have a problem with your assignment? Under- neath all of them-
the Dark Night of the Soul.
I meet you again and again, and I have this tragedy
and I have this glory, and yet more and more it is as if you are
not there. Only the Mystery that I encounter in you, (and I could
not encounter it except in you) is before me. Before that Mystery
there is only humiliation and weakness and resentment and suffering
and rootlessness and ineffectivity and expenditure and unfulfillment.
Only in the midst of this, only here, nowhere else, are you aware
that the heavens open and the voice cries out, "Thou art
my beloved son." It is only there that the heavens break
loose and you hear the voice, "Blessed art thou."
Taking care of yourself is seeing to it that you
do not experience these dynamics one by one but all at once, in
every situation. How could you get to me, if I had already eaten
my weakness'? And eaten my humiliation'? And eaten the fact that
there is no home for me anymore, save Heaven itself? I am talking
about being your own man. I am talking about being a man of the
spirit. I am talking about being a man of faith. I am talking
about being a Son of God. I am talking about working out your
salvation in fear and trembling, knowing that Being itself is
depending on you.
My Lord Jesus, before life had a chance to humiliate
him, humbled himself and found in that humiliation the pride of
being God's Son. It is being hurled back on the Word: My life
is approved.
"Attention! Here and now! Here and now!"
It is being a man of the profound deeps in every situation, for
the rest of your life to the glory of God. And do not forget the
rest of us. If you do not care for yourself, if you collapse,
we have to carry the whole 1oad.
Joseph W. Mathews