Growing in Holiness

When I was a teenager, I was very torn about how to live the Christian life. My faith kept inviting me to have a new relationship with suffering and hardship through a deeper share in Christ's life. But suffering and discipline were the very things I wanted to avoid. The hedonistic materialism of a living on the Coastal California in the 1980s was a hidden undertow pulling me pretty "far out." Its not that I lost my faith as much as I had not yet learned the price of discipleship. I wanted to be a good Christian, but I could not understand why self-denial and discipline needed to be part of the package. This lukewarm posture became dangerous when a poisonous thought entered my heart. One of my high school friends, a young athlete who actually suffered from a very painful chronic disease, said that he had heard that there were Christians who did not suffer, who actually lived their whole lives without facing any hardship at all. We both marveled over whether there was an easier way to follow Christ than the path of the old rugged Cross.

That this was a dangerous form of doubt did not dawn on me. I did not doubt Christ's power to save me, but I was doubting how He wanted to do it. I doubted whether His power actually needed to be at work in my weakness. Was there a path from glory to glory without the Cross? Lurking in this doubt was not just fear, but also vanity. If I sought Him in the tribulations of youth and remained faithful in the hardships that each day brings, I was afraid that others would think me fanatical. The falsehood of following Christ without suffering and self-denial proposed a more reasonable, less uncomfortable, and less embarrassing path. Yet the myth of the easy way, if it was not confronted, would draw my off the path becomng a man. Fortunately for me, Christ came and found me on the road I was going down, and He Himself confronted the danger that I did not even recognize.

Against every empty promise, Christ calls us into faith to help us live life to the full, to fully become who we are created to be, and this in the very face of all the evil of the world, even that in our own hearts. We are such that we only discover the truth about ourselves through the sincere gift of self for others - and God has willed that the world, with all its challenges and trials, be the place where we learn to give this gift. This means that the deepest joys of love are learned in the thorns and thistles, sweat and toil as we strive to lift each other up, to help one another thrive. Yes, every kind of ignorance befuddles us in this great task and weakness constantly undermines our every effort. Sometimes, we are so frustrated and confused that we act against our high calling, betraying everything that is good, noble and true. Yet, we are not without hope. This is why Christ has given Himself up for us - to save us from the way we betray ourselves, to teach us how to live by love and to give us the power with Him to do it. With Him, we are never alone, especially in the trials, hardships and self-denial that love demands. This is why saints, like the orthodox spiritual father St. Theophane the Recluse, direct us to "Throw out of your heads the idea that you can, through a comfortable life, become what you must be in Christ"

The wisdom of the saints helps me see how patient Christ is with me in the fear and vanity that would cause me to stumble. He walks with me just as He did the disciples on the Road to Emmaus. Patiently asking me questions, constantly explaining the Scriptures, graciously hearing my request to stay with me even in his full awareness of my unexamined vanity and lack of resolve. At every major crossroads in my life, He has never failed to reveal Himself in the Breaking of the Bread. So He guides every soul through the valley of death and prepares for them a banquet even in the face of all doubtful forces that would attempt to block the way. This Good Shepherd is Himself the Living Bread and His life bursts into us through the cup of salvation that He raised up for our sakes.

It is in the Eucharist - the great thanksgiving that He utters at the righthand of the Father - that we see the way, the truth and the life. To be present with faith when Christ joins our sacrifices and hardships to His own, this is where we learn the discipline of faith to which He has called us. As we dare approach this great mystery, we glimpse the very truth of who we are meant to become in His presence. In the prayers of the Mass, we come face to face with how His eternal Sonship chose to be manifest in his body, blood, and soul through all kinds of bitter betrayals, abandonments, humiliations, detractions, derisions, and death. In all this, He shows us that nothing can separate us from the Father's love - that the Father will has held nothing back, spared nothing, and given everything that we might come to the place where we belong, home with Him. To be the beloved of the Father, to live and move and have our being in the Sonship of Christ, this is the great mystery into which we are invited!

Simply to gaze on this Eucharistic mystery, this is to discover a wholly new kind of mutual recognition, an face to face, eye to eye: the eternal gaze of the Father and the Son, the ecclesial gaze of the Bridegroom and the Bride, the saving gaze of Christ and the soul. This is where I see the One who gazes on me not only with love, but also hope. Those hopefilled and lovesick eyes of the Eucharistic Christ beckon me back to Jerusalem, back to the Mount of his vulnerability, back to the Sepulcher of his powerlessness, back to the Upper Room and there to gather with the others who stand before the new day dawning in the East. It is only in this very same vulnerability and in powerlessness, that is the weakness and limitations felt only when we venture the gift of ourselves in love for the glory of God, that we can know, together with each other, his victory over sin and death in our own lives.

Not in what is comfortable, convenient or familiar: no, the mystery of Christian love goes far beyond such insipid limits. Marriage, parenthood, childhood, and all other kinds of holy friendship - He lifts all of these loves up and transforms them when we offer them to Him in faith. Only when I have exhausted myself in love, for love and by love, and nothing else is left - this is where the mystery of God begins, a glory no power in the heavens or on the earth or under the earth can hold back. By this faith, by all that this faith pours into my weakness, I must press on to this new day, not only for my own salvation, but for the salvation of those who are dear to me, those entrusted to me, those whom Christ has gathered in the Upper Room, who wait even now for a witness with the courage to cry out, "He is risen!"

(A personal photo of an Icon in the convent chapel of the Community of the Beatitudes in Emmaus, Israel)