Having the Courage to be Crucified

Receiving the Courage to Go Forth by Catherine Doherty

To put things together and to make the connections is what we have to do today. You know, my friends, we are walking at times on the brink of what appears to be a disaster area. The whole earth is a disaster area. So many of us cry out in anxiety and agony because an awareness of something wrong is very deep in us. We try to remedy it, but we don’t want to go far enough. This is our tragedy—we don’t want to go far enough. You see, there is only one way to save the world, and that is to be crucified. There is one unifying entity in the world, and that is Love. Unless we can accept this, we just aren’t going to go very far. To possess peace you must be violent with yourself. You must take the pain, the sorrow, the tears, the joys of the world upon yourself. And in order to do that, you have to literally tear yourself apart, symbolically speaking; you have to open your heart and make room for all humanity. It is as if the Lord is saying, “You have to tear out of yourself all that isn’t of me, and let me fill you up.” Where else will I get the courage to be crucified? Or to be martyred by being ridiculed, put aside, pushed out, not listened to, but still continuing to do what I think I must? It takes guts. It takes courage. But guts and courage are nothing. They are not going to get us there, because what we have to face is beyond us. We have to have God, and we have to pray. On our own we cannot do it. Prayer and fasting and constant recourse to God, the Jesus prayer and so forth, are the only ways of really getting there. Life is definitely ascetic, a mortifying spiritual combat, but Eastern spirituality finds its ascetic endeavors just in living. It says, don’t look too much in books; don’t try too hard for ascetic efforts. Just remember: God works and you sweat—and then, keep on sweating! Don’t give up in the situation of the moment. This is the real penance. In order to answer all the questions we are eternally asking, let’s put our mind into our heart and meet God there. In that silence of the heart, between us and God, most of our questions will fall away like old rags. We must pray to encounter him who lives in our heart, for then we will become truly human. What is a human being? A human being is someone filled with God! Folding the wings of the intellect and allowing the Holy Spirit to take possession of a person is one of the hardest things for modern man to do. I can kneel, or else prostrate myself, Russian style; empty my mind of everything, “fold it” and lie still. Whether for an hour or two, or for fifteen minutes, it doesn’t make any difference. But a moment will come when it seems that my soul is awake. Do I think of the answer myself? Is the Holy Spirit inspiring me? I don’t know; but suddenly I get up and I have a solution. How does it come? No voice spoke to me, so I didn’t hear anything. No vision stood before me, so I didn’t see anything. I had nothing to touch with my two hands; and the wings of my intellect were folded. I didn’t think. I was just lying there, or sitting, or kneeling and the answer came. No two people function alike, because God deals with each one uniquely. However, you have spiritual fathers to lead you so that you can finally close the wings of your intellect and wait in patience and simplicity. “Lord speak, your servant is listening.” (1 Sam 3:10) You combine the insights given by the Gospel to the faith given to you in baptism, and then you incarnate the words through faith. You listen with your whole heart, your whole mind, your whole body. Then you arrive at a point where the wings of the intellect will be opened by the Holy Spirit, and the intellect illuminated by the Trinity will really be the listening ear of God. You might have to act against all natural reason and intelligence. You might have to take a plunge into an incredible darkness of faith. Day by day, you will fight with that, because our natural intelligence will say, “This is impossible.” It’s the eternal paradox of the Gospel and it just kills us! It really kills us, and perhaps we must be killed in order to resurrect. Each contact with God is bloody at first, and this is just what we are trying to escape. Here is Jesus Christ, and here I am in Jerusalem. There is a straight line between him and me. If I follow this straight line, I glimpse the meaning. If I go around a different way, I will never catch the meaning. But to catch the inner meaning, I have to go along that straight line without deviation. After this contact with God, after we really turn the cheek because we are in love with him, we suddenly experience such freedom that we are in some kind of paradise. There is peace, serenity, and joy in our souls. Tiredness disappears, and concern about ourself disappears; and there is not only freedom but also a tremendous song that wells up in our hearts and sings, notwithstanding pain, sorrow, depression, and what have you. Then you know that God is alive; and life has sense. Once life has sense and direction—well, that is freedom and that is happiness. How can you give this kind of peace to anyone? How can I possibly give it to you, or you to me? How can I go into the heart of another? You can only find those depths by love. It is entering into the very marrow of the other person. It is “knowing without knowing” what is to be done. It is as if you were dead to everything around you; you hear and you don’t hear; you see and you don’t see. Slowly, God takes you by the hand, until you reach the bottom. And then you can see into men’s hearts from the other side—from God’s side. Then he says, “Now you know. Act accordingly.” You have to love with a love that transcends all understanding to do that. Your love is incomprehensible, because you don’t love, he does. He was crucified in order to enable us to do this. Golgotha gives us freedom from that strange juridical hang-up that we have: “It’s unfair; they’ve cheated me,” and so forth. It may or may not be true, but that’s neither here nor there. He was lifted up to draw all things to his Father, ourselves included. To try to keep religion on a purely spiritual level is to escape the reality of everyday life, the nitty-gritty reality that the incarnated Christ met head-on. As I repeat endlessly, we must touch God and we must touch men, and that will make us cruciform; then we shall know both the pain and the joy. It is in that crucible of anxiety and anguish, of standing naked before the naked God, before the naked Christ on the Cross, that we will receive from him the courage to go forth.