If anyone wishes to
follow me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever would save their life will lose
it; and whoever loses their life for my sake will save it. [Mark 8:34-35; Matthew 16:24-25; Luke
9:23-24; John 12:25]
One of Rowan Williams’ more extraordinary sermons was about
a French priest of the 19th century, the Abbé Huvelin of Paris. It seems scarcely credible, but this consummate
pastor was actually a card-carrying neurotic.
He suffered from gout, migraine, depression and what they called
neurasthenia. He received a constant
stream of his parishioners while lying in a darkened room. He conducted catechism classes and visited
the sick. The Abbé Huvelin was in fact a
remarkably gifted pastor. And Rowan
Williams finds in this an example of what it might mean to take up your
cross.
We commonly make that expression mean something like making
the best of all our hardships in life, physical weaknesses, big disappointments…
whatever it is, we call it bearing one’s burdens, carrying one’s cross. Well maybe… but it’s a richer truth than
that. We all bear our crosses, inevitably,
whoever we are. The Abbé Huvelin was an
injured and scarred man, yet God had given him a ministry. Rowan Williams points out, each of us has
factors in life which cannot be undone or unmade. Our wholeness and status with God is not some
eliminating of all the bad things and their memory, but rather our
acknowledgement of who we are and all our truth. This is the person God sees and knows and
loves, and who emerges in a contemplative life of silence and consent.
I have discovered that teaching about the ego tends to get
me into trouble. The egos of some people
feel immediately threatened, and they react dismissively or even with
anger. While the ego has many good and
necessary features, in our culture it typically sees its task also as a kind of
cosmetic surgeon, hiding the blemishes, excusing the weaknesses and failures,
concealing the fact that we do have flaws which may be beyond remedy. Our growth in grace has very much to do with recognising
and befriending our neediness and mortality – bearing our cross -- consenting
daily afresh to live (in St Paul’s words) by the Spirit and in truth, meeting
and embracing the true self, becoming ever less able to take the ego seriously
or to be dominated by its demands, being daily born again.
Interestingly, when the American Episcopalian Church came to
revise their Communion liturgy, and they came to the ancient Eucharistic
invitation you will recognise: Holy
things for those who are holy… some Americans wanted to change it to: Healthy things for healthy people. In New Zealand in recent times we even began
to talk about “healthy churches”, by which we meant churches in which nothing went
wrong any more. It’s fantasy-land. “Holy” does not mean everything perfect and
nicely religious. “Holy” is people attending
to God, like Moses at the burning bush, people submitting their egos and their
future to the Spirit of Christ and to loving grace. Here
it is in St Paul, perhaps too direct for modern taste, but right all the
same: You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self… and
to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the
new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and
holiness. [Ephesians 4:22-24].
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