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The Friendship of Christ, 12.VII: “Father, into Your hands I commend my spirit”

This is part of a read-along hosted by myself and MrsDarwin of DarwinCatholic. 

The main page is here.  

MrsDarwin's biographical sketch of the author, Robert Hugh Benson, is here.

My introductory post is here.

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And now we come to the last of the Seven Last Words from the Cross.    Benson takes “Father, into your hands I commend my Spirit” as a reflection upon the concept of the peace of Christ.  For the death of Christ is one picture of the Peace of Christ:  something to remember, when we at Mass hear the words “The peace of Christ be with you”; something to remember when, at every Mass, it comes time to sing Dona nobis pacem.  “Dona nobis mortem tuum” has not the same ring, and would be an incomplete notion of that Peace, but it is surely part thereof.

In the meditation upon peace, Benson pauses to warn us against Quietism, a class of heresy that I had to look up to be sure of.  Do read up on it yourself; I will summarize it as a sort of extreme end of a spectrum, one with a boundary that is to my eyes blurry:  where Abandonment to Divine Providence slips into a denial of agency whatsoever, where contemplation and striving for interior holiness precludes the possibility of good and holy acts. 

On the contrary! Interior peace, says Benson, is a prerequisite to the accomplishment of the objects of good acts; the attainment of interior peace is a signal that we are empowered to do good, not a signal that to do good is no longer required of us.

I believe what he has to say, but I think there must be more to it:  for I experience this message as somewhat paralyzing.  I do not possess interior peace, certainly not permanently; maybe just “not yet”; maybe I achieve it intermittently at best.  Anyway, whatever piece of the Peace of Christ I come to is imperfect and fleeting.  Does that mean that my activities are pointless, fruitless?  Ought I suspend activity (beyond what I’m clearly required to do as responses to my state of life) and concentrate my efforts on interior reform, or  maybe wait and pray until I find myself transformed?  Or is there sort of a oscillation, a learning from experience, regret and repentance giving way to renewal? 

I can’t count the times I have overstepped my competence, gotten ahead of my skis, and face-planted, trying to “do” Christianity.  Drawing back from that, contemplating more, competence/competing less, is the correction I have sought for the last few years.  And so I am grateful for Benson’s caution against Quietism, because I can easily see myself overcorrecting.  What I call retreating to seek Christ’s peace within might easily slide into avoidant behavior: fear of conflict, of discomfort, of making mistakes.  Still, not every conflict is specifically mine to take up.  We have to discern.

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Besides the death of Christ itself, the Peace of Christ is (says Benson) “a Peace... which, unlike other satisfying emotions, is wholly independent of external things.”

This immediately put me in mind of the Beatitude:  “Blessed are the meek” (in most English translations), “for they shall inherit the Earth.”  Here I have to apologize a bit in advance, for this is my favorite rant about Scripture translating:  I contend that English “meek” needs updating.  I am insufficiently expert to know exactly what’s the correct term, but the word in Bibles of other modern European languages connote not quite so much a  submission or submerging of the self, but a serene sailing, Benson’s “bird poised in the air”:  unruffled-ness, undisturbable, a “perfect response” to the currents and eddies that arrive.  Perhaps “mild” is a good updated English word, something with connotations of pleasant weather and of unbitter fruit.  Now, when I read the Beatitudes,  having once come to that bit in the Louis Segond: “Heureux les débonnaires” (literally de bon air, a weather metaphor), the image that leaps to mind is the storm-panicked disciples, and Christ stilling the waves.

The Peace of Christ is something undisturbable from the outside.  And yet, if the Peace of Christ is also in a sense the death of Christ, then it was the outside world that visited it upon Him.  Unless the death of Christ, the death we die with Him, the death of self, is exactly that serenity, the one that says always “The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh: blessed be the Lord.”

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The Seven Last Words are words which cost the Lord dearly; He had only so many breaths before exhaustion.  Each breath (according to our understanding of the physiology of crucifixion) required effort to generate an audible utterance, generated more suffering than silence; each word a part of the perfection of His Atonement.  They are, I believe, an exemplar of poetry rather than prose:  every word counts, not a word is there that was not intended, nothing is omitted without reason.  They are his last chances as recognizable Man to shape our understanding of Himself and what He has done for us, and yet they are so brief, so clipped, so rare, so dear. 

I think it is interesting to reflect upon each of the Seven Last Words and consider how our understanding of Christ and his Passion would be changed should he have left any of them out.

Take “It is finished,” which Cat has meditated upon here.   Where would we be without that assurance?  What doctrine might we have developed without it, where might the Church have wandered?  And yet He left us in some ambiguity:  Consummatum est without an explicit subject.  We have had to make something of “it,” to use out collective judgment, even to debate and dispute it, apparently in accord with His penultimate earthly will.

But I am here to reflect upon “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”  I could meditate on why He spoke this instead of nothing.  Instead I find myself thinking about something that—though it seems true—something he might have said, but chose not to say:  Friends, into your hands I commend my body.

He did not say this to them, and yet, the friends did receive His body, and cared for it the way they knew, with the resources they had.  Benson:  “this Body of His is to be laid in the cool rock tomb, with wrappings of soft linen, soaked in spices and myrrh...” It was His Friends who did this for him, unasked, uncommanded.

How difficult it is for us to notice when we have assumed something!  I have always assumed without thinking that it was His explicit will that His body be cared for, wrapped and perfumed and buried, by His friends:  that there be a tomb, that there be a stone.  The Resurrection perhaps we can take for granted.  The empty tomb itself is often identified with it.   And yet He seems not to have ordered it, not explicitly, certainly not here.  The friends perhaps had to figure out what to do with the Body of Christ without an instruction from Him. 

Having heard His last Word, they could trust that His Spirit had been commended to the Father.   Did they know what to do next—Nicodemus, Joseph, Mary Magdalene, John, the others? Did they have interior peace about it?  They were left with the Body yet unclaimed and nothing but its physical nature, no command but that of Time:  Time which, after the darkening of the sun and the rending of the veil, somehow kept rolling forward, bringing the fall of evening, the chilling of the flesh, the approach of that singular, terrifying Sabbath, that other peace of God that “passeth all understanding.”

Time, the Law, and Friendship.  They claimed His Body and loved it, and God took care of the rest.

The Friendship of Christ, Chapter 12.IV: "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?"

This is part of a read-along hosted by myself and MrsDarwin of DarwinCatholic. 

The main page is here.  

MrsDarwin's biographical sketch of the author, Robert Hugh Benson, is here.

My introductory post is here.

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For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way, yet without sin.  — Hebrews 4:15

 

Let's stipulate for a moment that the frequent rephrasing of the above quote is an accurate one:  He is like us in all things but sin.

Let's consider, too, some observations about suffering humans:  especially those whose suffering, like the crucified Christ's, comes at the hands of other humans.   

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One thing we know is that hurt people hurt people.  An abused child often, but not always, grows up to struggle with abusive impulses, teaches others  the same lessons they were taught long ago;  a child bullied by stronger children sometimes turns and finds a weaker victim; a person neglected as a child sometimes fearfully holds back needed support; a person whose trust was broken badly once refuses to trust again.  That sort of sin is mitigated by the obscurity and darkness generated by the sins they endured in nature, as well as by the shadows passed down in human nature itself.   In one sense none of us "know what we do," and that includes people who quite deliberately do terrible things in what would seem to be full knowledge; that universal bentness of our humanity is a sort of supernatural ignorance.  But also certain abuses appear to have a partial cause from older ones, so that a person's psychology can be darkened as well as their spirit.  And of course a human culture may itself pass down twisted notions of right and wrong, which we ought to be able to see through, but do not challenge.

When this is us, when we are hurt people who hurt people:  we are people who "know not what they do," in a sense, but who are not sinless, for Christ prayed "Father, forgive them."  

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Another thing we know is that hurt people ask difficult questions.  Hurt people want answers, and they look for them, and demand them.  Hurt people seek to make sense out of what seems to them senseless.  They come to God, or to God's representatives on earth (whether actual or self-styled) and say:  How come God has made it so that this can happen?  I do not understand.   Can you make it make sense?  And they ask it, sometimes, in ways that are shocking or impolite or subversive, or disturbingly cutting and precise.  What's worse, sometimes none of the answers satisfy them.  And sometimes there are no good answers at all.

Perhaps some of the time the hurt people's questioning is entangled with acting out, with hurting people, with sinning, in a way that makes us humans confuse them together, and judge the questioner imperfectly.  We do not see into hearts, after all.  But God sees.  And God made it clear by example that the questioning is not the sin.  For He himself asked the terrible question, the one we still cannot entirely make sense of, the one that we do not have a single satisfactory answer to (however many theories we deploy).  

My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?

He didn't simply point to an asker-of-this-question and say "Father, forgive him this asking of the terrible question."  No, he asked it himself.  He was suffering, and he asked that question that so many suffering people have asked.  He was like us, suffering, and he was without sin, and he suggested—out loud!—the absence of God, the reasonlessness of the world, the terror and darkness of a void.

When we meet people who are asking that same question, when we find ourselves asking it too, we must remember that "He was like us in all things but sin."   When people suffer, they need to make sense of it.   When Christ suffered, he asked the question.   

There are many ways to ask the question and to seek the answer.  It is possible to seek the answer through sin.  It is possible to first ask the question in all wounded sincerity, and then begin to seek, and for some of that seeking to be, well,a kind of wounded trying of all sorts of nature to see where it breaks. 

About such apparent sins, we must beg forgiveness, for ourselves and ("Father, forgive them") for others.  But we must never, never condemn the question of the sufferer, for Christ, suffering abuse, uttered the question Himself.

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Benson points out that many sufferers manage instead to avoid the question.  It's only when we expect God to be there; when we want him to be there; that we really, truly, and honestly would ask for the God who seems not to be there.   One of the reasons that the question is incomprehensible and even intolerable to us is that we "find our consolation in so much that is not God."  

If physical comforts are wanting to us, we find refuge in mental comfort; if mental comforts are wanting, we lean upon our friends.  Or, more usually, when the higher pleasures are withdrawn, we find relief, with scarcely an effort, in lower.  When religion fails us, we console ourselves with the arts; when love or ambition disappoint us, we plunge into physical pleasures; when the body refuses to respond, we take refuge in out indomitable pride; and when that in turn crumbles to nothing, we look to suicide and hell as a more tolerable environment.  There seems no depth to which we will not go, in our passionate determination to make ourselves tolerable to ourselves.

I would like to point out, too, that many of the God-substitutes that Benson lists here are undoubtedly good things:  the arts, friends, and the like.  Later in the same section Benson contrasts "religion" with "religiosity...a sort of professionalism"—I think that this implies that the outward actions of liturgy, the performance of piety, the reiteration of moral principles in argument and in theory, can itself be a refuge to which we flee from the terrible question whenever it rears up in our heart and threatens to enter our consciousness.   Nothing but God can be God Himself.  

There is certainly a risk that some of us who flee in more respectable directions... to our work or to the arts or to scholarship, for example... will look down our noses at those who flee to what Benson calls "lower" pleasures.  But flight it still is.  And we should recognize it even under its respectable form.

For Benson's point is that our model, Christ, our perfect example of man and God perfectly united, is able to ask, and is willing to ask.  The one who asks the terrible question is one who seeks truth instead of false consolation.   We mustn't be shocked by it, we mustn't try to quiet the askers.

Above all we mustn't spout a series of answers that by their nature will ever be incomplete, and then require the asker to be satisfied or face rejection.   

For  "the true happiness of man consists in this gradual approach to the Beatific Vision."  The terrible question, which arises almost everywhere there is suffering, has no satisfactory answers in any merely human language, and never will; it is only answered by the secure Presence and Vision at the end of all things.  

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More reflections, on this as well as on the next Word,  by Cat here.