by CCW | 9 April 2020 10:33
Where is God? So some ask in relation to the Covid-19 crisis. The answer is right where God always is, namely in the midst of the world’s suffering and never more so than during Holy Week, the week of Christ’s Passion. The sufferings of Christ embrace the sufferings of our world. In a way, that is the point about suffering that belongs to the religious and spiritual perspective of many of the religions of the world. It is all about how we follow our Dharma in the face of conflict and suffering in the Hindu perspective, about how we face Dukka in the Buddhist view, about how it is far better to suffer wrong than to do wrong in the Greek ethical and philosophical traditions, about how we just might learn through suffering about the greater mercy and truth of God in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic understanding.
Holy Week concentrates our minds on the sufferings of Christ for us, for our world and day. There is something that is learned in and through suffering but only because of the grace and goodness of God. That is the point of the Christian focus on Christ who feels our suffering more intensely, nore fully, than we can ever imagine. In our rather apocalyptic times, John Donne’s sonnet about “what if the present were the world’s last night” has an especial resonance. He bids us look within to “the picture of Christ crucified” and to ask “whether that countenance,” the face of the suffering Christ, “can thee afright,” frighten you, and “can that tongue adjudge thee unto hell/ which prayed forgiveness for his foes’ fierce spite?” He has in mind, I think, the images of the crucified Christ after the Black Death in the 14th century which decimated Europe, images which depict Christ’s sufferings in terms of the sufferings of the victims of that catastrophic pandemic. In so looking and listening, we discover a great good. What seems so ugly is really a “beauteous form” which “assures a piteous mind.” Sin and love. We learn the latter through the former. Amazing grace is divine mercy.
Matthew and Mark give us the most agonizing and disturbing cry of Christ from the Cross. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It is his cry of dereliction, of abandonment, and yet it is a prayer to God. It voices, as no other word from the cross does, the full meaning of sin and suffering. It is about alienation. It is about extreme isolation and separation. He voices the truth of human separation from one another and from God. But he voices it to God. It is prayer.
Thursday in Holy Week is known as Maundy Thursday. It comes from Christ’s words about a new commandment, novum mandatum in the Latin. What is that new commandment? That you love one another. The Passion of Christ shows us the love of God for us in and through the most extreme form of human suffering.
There are seven words of Christ from the Cross that are derived from all four Gospels. Matthew and Mark together contribute that one great and disturbing word of separation and abandonment, not unlike what so many feel at this time. To recall this word is to know that you are not alone but are being carried into the love of God. Luke and John each contribute three words. The ordering of the words of the Cross, it is interesting to note, derives from the Americas, from Lima, Peru, from which it spread back to Europe and influenced, profoundly, the spiritual imaginary of Protestant and Catholic Europe and in its musical expressions, such as Haydn’s ‘Seven Last Words.’ A Jesuit missionary, Fr. Alonso Messia Bedoya, after a sequence of earthquakes in Lima in the late seventeenth century, in other words, in a time of suffering, organised the words of the Cross in the order in which we now regard them. They begin and end with a prayer to the Father from Luke’s Gospel. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,”… “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” Somehow through the sufferings of Christ we are gathered into the love of God.
Luke also gives us the second word; his word to the penitent thief crucified with Jesus. “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.” Paradise? Christ is hanging on the Cross in all of its agony and he speaks of paradise? Why? “Remember me,” the crucified thief beseeches Jesus, “when you come into your kingdom.” Paradise, Jesus says, with me. It is a most beautiful and affecting word that counters and corrects perhaps the language of the wilderness of self-isolation and the negativity of social distancing. That language suggests opposition and fear; a demonising of the other. We need another metaphor that will strengthen us and connect us in these distressing times. Here it is, cloister.
Paradise is an ancient Persian word. Christ is on the Cross, in what must seem to be the most extreme sense of the wilderness of isolation and abandonment, of loneliness and fear. “I have known you in the wilderness,” God says in Hosea. Yet Christ in the wilderness of human sin and suffering speaks of paradise. The word refers to a garden of pomegranates, a garden of delights. It becomes associated with the garden of Eden. It is used in the Greek Septuagint translation of the Song of Songs, the great love-poem of the Jewish Scriptures. In its Latin translation, it takes on a further meaning. The term is hortus conclusus, a garden enclosed. This term is applied to the monastic communities of Europe from which it carries over into our schools and universities. It is translated as cloister. Cloisters are enclosures of learning, places dedicated to learning and the love of learning; in short, a cloister is an intentional community of care and compassion.
John Donne, in another amazing sonnet, talks of God “yielding himself to lie in prison, in thy womb,” in Mary’s womb as a prison! Yet, as the sonnet concludes, that prison is where God’s “immensity [is] cloistered in thy dear womb.” It signals purpose and intention, of goodness and truth. The purpose and intention is God’s intention for our suffering humanity through his suffering with us. Perhaps, just perhaps, we can think less of the imprisonment of isolation and more about a cloister of care where we can intentionally, prayerfully, and thoughtfully think about the good of one another. You are ‘cloistered’ as part of the life of the School and its life; an intentional community that seeks the good of each other out of love and respect, out of dignity and duty, even in the face of the fears and anxieties of these times. That kind of love turns the wilderness into a garden. In the cloister we are together as a community of care and prayer. It can be learned in the midst of the world’s suffering and sorrow. Be cloistered and so be connected and supported. Be KES.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2020/04/09/kes-chapel-reflection-week-of-9-april-2/
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