RADICAL POVERTY OF CHRIST IN US

 

Our five week journey through Lent has perhaps held Spirit-blessed treasures. 

We may have been blessed to recognize that many of our human weaknesses have become uncloaked and hidden in them, the spiritual pride that estranges us from God may have been exposed; God's gift of humility may have begun to nurture a contrite heart and we have bent the knee in obedience; being subject to temptations may have gradually revealed to us the reality of our profound poverty in our world arena where having and being in control fills the tabernacle of our self; and we may have been graced at last with the desire to surrender our all into God's love.

Weakness :  humility : obedience : temptations : poverty : surrender.

This may have been the story of our encounter with ourselves during our Lent this far. 

This was the Story of Christ Jesus' encounter with Satan in the desert, an encounter that was the prelude to the coming week which opens with Passion Sunday.

Christ's willing Weakness in His Sacred Humanity incurred the devil's assault on the Lord's Humility; on Christ's Obedience to His gift to His Father of total Self-renunciation. The devil's strategized temptations against the Lord's radical poverty: Christ's chosen and complete surrender to a total impoverishment held in His Sacred Humanity.

This is the Story of the Lord's Temptations in the Desert....

He surrendered His Glory to become weak in His Sacred Humanity; 

He personified         Humility; 

                                Obedience;

                                Poverty. 

                                

Our own story of Lent holds the same....

                                       

weakness; humility; obedience; poverty; surrender.

                                 Our Savior's Story holds our story.

"When the devil had finished every temptation, he departed from him, for a time"  (Lk 4:1-13).

                              ".....FOR A TIME". 

                            

                                Holy Week is that time. 

During Holy Week, all hell finally released its utter hatred for the One Who had vanquished the devil's  temptations in the desert. Evil had waited for three years to despoil, mock, destroy the self-renunciation of our Savior. It is through His choice of total Self-Renunciation that Jesus redeems us. 

He clothed Himself with the "dark robes of our frailty ", with the utter poverty of our weak humanity.

Satan assaulted that radical poverty because in that choice of uncompromising poverty, our poverty, the Lord Jesus became utterly poor. 

"To become human means to become 'poor', to have nothing that one might brag about before God. To become human means to have no support, no power... Jesus held back nothing. He clung to nothing, and nothing served as a shield for him: 'Jesus did not deem equality something to be grasped at, but emptied himself.'" (Phil 2:6)

Satan despises this poverty, weakness, this humility, this obedience, this surrender to love because the devil has the deepest fear of virtues that he cannot fight.

This is Christ's Mighty Powerlessness. 

And in Him, He becomes our might in our powerlessness. 

When we humbly acknowledge our human frailty, our finiteness, our lack of control, our sinfulness, we allow Christ's power to work within us. 

And Spirit Lord speaks to our souls when we read and respond to the words of St. Paul :

"That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, I am strong." (2 Cor 12: 9-11)

Perhaps in our prayer this holy week, we might sit with this reflection from Johannes Baptist Metz :

    "Have we really understood the impoverishment that Christ endured? Everything was             taken from him during the passion, even the love that drove him to the cross. No longer         did he savour his own love, no longer did he feel any spark of enthusiasm. His heart gave      out and a feeling of utter helplessness came over him. Truly he emptied himself. (Phil         2:7) God's merciful hand no longer sustained him. God's countenance was hidden during      the passion and Christ gaped into the darkness of nothingness

     and abandonment where God was no longer present. He reached his destiny, stretched         taut between a despising earth that had rejected him and a faceless heaven thundering         God's 'NO' to sinful humanity. Jesus paid the price of futility." 

                                     And the Savior asks only this of us:

                          " Couldn't you keep watch with me even for one hour?" (Mk 14:37)

MIRACLES OUT OF HOLY DARKNESS - 5TH SUNDAY OF LENT

Lent: a time of the Mystical Presence of God, a time of transformation, powerlessness, spiritual dryness, a wilderness time when our  soul prays without feeling His nearness or experiencing His sweet consolations. If our quest for God during these parched times draws our soul to acts of raw faith then we may thank Him with a holy joy which is an un-felt joy, because in such spiritual drought, we may be certain that our prayer is being nurtured into maturity and our soul is being uniquely perfected by Spirit Lord Himself. 

"Prayer finds its supernatural efficacy in the quality of the faith that animates it" (Blessed Marie Eugene of the Child Jesus).

When the Lord permits us to endure times of painful spiritual darkness, our souls are being de-formed in order to re-form and trans-form us. And the growing pains wound. The quality of our faith seems to be being stretched to breaking point because God needs it to hold a  measure of His supernatural power to join Him in a willing suffering that will win Him many souls.

Such are times of great transformation because our faith is being measured by and empowered by God Himself, animated by the gifts of Spirit Lord. And in this spiritual darkness, we may ever remember ... where are the gifts, so too is the Giver.

We can locate our own Lenten spiritual journey in an event involving the deep suffering of Martha, friend of Jesus (John 11:21-39).

Martha and Mary had sent word to Jesus to let Him know that their brother, Lazarus, was very ill. 

Jesus had great love for these three people.

Yet, when the Lord heard about Lazarus' serious illness, and despite the confusion His decision brought about in the Apostles, Jesus delayed returning to the home of His beloved friends.

When He and the Apostles finally arrived, Lazarus had died four days before and was already entombed:

"LORD, BY NOW THERE WILL BE A STENCH; HE HAS BEEN DEAD FOR FOUR DAYS" (John 11:39).

If ever we have been in a crisis, or immersed in an overwhelming circumstance that shakes our faith, or unable to breathe in a deep hurt that seems to draw only confusing silence from Heaven, we may hear something of our own wounded bewilderment voiced by Martha to Jesus when He finally arrived:

"Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died."

There had been only silence from Jesus to Martha's message to Him when she pleaded for His intervention. These, her words to Him, seem to suggest that her faith in Him was shaken, a life-time period of four days when Martha may have been immersed in a dense spiritual darkness. 

Perhaps we too may be permitted to endure Martha's spiritual suffering. 

At such times, and during our Lenten darkness, we remember the profound reflection from St. John of the Cross: "God does not fit in an occupied heart."

We plead with Him to help us to see, name and surrender all that is disordered and that occupies our heart, distracting us from His Presence in our souls so that we may make greater space for Him. 

When He draws near to us, our spiritual eyes, unaccustomed to the brilliance of God's Presence in our soul, become temporarily, spiritually blind. This is the time when St John of the Cross guides us and leads us into the "holy darkness," when our blindness causes us to stand still, when we have no prayer formulae to help us to move in the "right" direction to find Him, when our senses are powerless to "feel" our way, where our ability to reason is enfogged, and our will, often fed  by our disordered emotions, begin to be purified, when God's sweet consolations and enlightenments are starkly absent. 

In this precious holy darkness of deeper purification, when our Director is Spirit Lord Himself, we begin to die to self. 

We return to the Gospel exchange between Jesus and Martha to hear Martha's astonishing proclamation of faith in her profound darkness. We hear her living those mysterious words of Blessed Marie Eugene:

"Prayer finds its supernatural efficacy in the quality of the faith that animates it." 

The Lord Jesus tells Martha that He is the resurrection and the life, that whoever believes in Him, even though they die, they will live:

 

And in full hearing of the silent, stunned crowd, He digs deeper into Martha's soul,

"... whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?"

OUT OF THOSE DEPTHS OF HER HOLY DARKNESS, OUT OF HER DESOLATION, HER ABJECT POWERLESSNESS, HER PROFOUND GRIEF, OUT OF THE SEEMING BETRAYAL FROM A DEEPLY LOVED AND TRUSTED FRIEND. FROM THESE DEPTHS OF HER INTERIOR TURMOIL, WE HEAR MARTHA'S STAGGERING WORDS OF FAITH: 

"YES, LORD, I BELIEVE THAT YOU ARE THE MESSIAH, THE SON OF GOD, WHO IS TO COME INTO THE WORLD."

We may almost see the shocked faces of those crowding around Jesus and Martha, pushing forward to hear every word spoken by them. 

And the Lord Jesus approaches the tomb, commands that the stone be rolled back, and calls Lazarus out from death.

"Prayer finds its supernatural efficacy in the quality of the faith that animates it." 

Jesus, God had probed deep into the soul of Martha, found there a magnificent faith that had been perfected with the spiritual scalpel of suffering, and He, the Lord, had rewarded the "quality of the faith" that He found there, and immediately, He raises Lazarus from the

dead.

We may take to prayer the words of St. Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face:

"Jesus works miracles for his dearest friends only after he has tested their faith. He let Lazarus die, even though Martha and Mary sent word that he was sick. But after the trial, what rewards! LAZARUS RISES FROM THE DEAD."

From our own holy darkness, where God is re-forming and trans-forming our souls, we may ask: how can we surrender ourselves endlessly when we feel that we have nothing to give Him, only utter powerlessness, desolation? 

We pray again with St. Therese ...

                         "And even when I have nothing, I will give Him this nothing.

                          You, Lord, will descend to my nothingness and 

                          transform that nothingness into living fire."

We will then hear the Lord's reply:

                                

"SEE, I COME QUICKLY. I HAVE MY REWARD IN HAND" (REVELATION 22:12).