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[ Back to index of March articles ] Bearings:
Lent is a time for looking at how we cope with being put to the test. Jesus taught his disciples a special prayer which included the plea that God would spare them from peirasmos - the great ordeal which might break them. If "lead us not into temptation" is to be more than a mere formula, we ought sometimes to spell out what we are praying for. This prayer presupposes that we have come to some painful knowledge of the flaws in our character that can cause us to betray what we love when stress reaches a certain intensity. As people talk to me about the current conflicts in the church over sexuality and authority, many are aware that they present a major spiritual test. Many intuitively sense that the danger doesn't lie in the controversial issues themselves - the church is not actually committing apostasy, it is not the end of the communion, or the abandonment of the Bible. The real danger lies in the way controversy itself can become corrosive. Real damage is done to our souls when we are sucked into the melodrama of mutual recrimination and anathematizing. Our spirituality should give us tools for protecting ourselves against being wounded and poisoned, and from harming others. The theme of spiritual combat is not an easy one to make our own these days. The Bible speaks of the "whole armor of God" that helps us quench "the flaming arrows of the evil one" but the imagery of armor and hand to hand combat with devils seems as remote and unreal as those awful stained glass windows of Arthurian knights in shining armor that were popular at the beginning of the last century. It certainly doesn't do much for many women that I know. We need to find new forms of imagery for what Buddhists call "skillful means" - those tried and tested methods of dodging and eluding the forces that can hook us into futile, destructive patterns of thinking and behaving. Intercession is one of those skillful means, but if we pray for our "enemies" - those with opposing views in controversy - from a distance, asking God to enlighten and convert them we can actually make things worse, intensifying our separateness. We need to find forms of intercession that dissolve the interior schism between us. One way is to pray in ways that imagine God's arms of love holding ourselves and those we oppose in a single embrace of love. Another is the constant practice of letting go and handing over to God. Evil doesn't have to seduce most of us in dramatic ways. It is enough to trap us in preoccupation. Church conflicts can have that destructive power not because the antagonists and bystanders are bad people but because strife breeds fretting that sucks the energy away from our creativity. We need to encourage one another with words like "I don't want to go over this again. I feel the need to refocus on these other challenges. I need to let this go just now…" And, interiorly, it means practicing the most common form of putting one's trust in God, handing these complex matters over to God's hands, surrendering the burdensome anxiety that Jesus named as the bane of our lives. God is like the patient master trying to get the dog to release the bone on which it has clenched its jaws, urging us to "drop it." We can't take in the nourishment we need if our jaws are locked on a worry. Indeed the word worry itself comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for an animal shaking the prey it has in its teeth. An important skill can be learned from therapists or a wise spiritual director. They can catch us out getting all worked up about some issue in our lives as a way of avoiding the deeper questions. They know not to get caught up in the drama and with some gentle questions can lead us back to the deeper questions, the ones that are much more creative to ask. Current controversies are drowning out deeper questions about sexuality, questions about what the erotic dimension of life reveals about God. Sex seems to promise even more than it actually delivers, as if it constantly points towards a deeper union, a more intense passion, a greater bliss than we actually achieve with one another. Sex is full of transcendent hints and intimations of the creator's passionate desire for creation, God's longing for us to experience blissful union with the divine. We need to learn how to make it safer to talk to one another about the gifts and the wounds in our sexual lives and discover the Spirit in and through sexuality. Let's hope some people find the courage for this kind of deep conversation. Martin L. Smith is a well-known spiritual writer and priest. He is on the staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. [ Back to index of March articles ]
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