Refining Fire.

Image © by Brian E. Faulkner

The Lenten Journey:
Refining Fire

Then he said to (his disciples): “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.  For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it.  What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit his very self?     Luke 9:23-25
 
It’s not easy to hand your life over to God, to deny yourself and take up your cross the way Luke describes. Truth is, such an idea cuts across the grain of our culture. We Americans value our independence above almost all else; the American way is to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and make it on our own. Which, of course, makes it unlikely that we’d ever consider ceding control of our destiny to a God we hardly know (especially when a vocal portion of our society denies his presence and denigrates his followers).  That is, until something happens to bring us up short: an illness or some other painful life's circumstance that seems to go on and on. 

​But that’s where we find God waiting.  Not at the end of the rainbow but at the end of ourselves. That’s where we find the Christ of the Cross beckoning:

For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.        - John 3:16 -

Image © by Brian Faulkner

These words can totally transform our lives. Because hidden within the good news of Christ is the promise of redemption, no matter how lost or worthless or off-course our lives may seem. Because through the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus, hope has been reborn … hope that offers new life to a world loaded down with sin and dashed dreams. 
 
During Lent, we are invited afresh to enter through Christ’s open door into the transformed life, but the transaction doesn’t come cheap.  We are asked, as Jesus was asked, to give our all – even to accept the possibility of additional seasons of suffering!  Suffering was Christ’s cross.  He chose to deny his divinity and suffer fully and completely as a human being, so much so that he experienced despair deep enough to make him sweat blood while praying in the garden at Gethsemane.
 
Suffering hurts. Sometimes it hurts like crazy, whether mental or physical.  Sickness, injury, just plain meanness or even confusion about which way to turn next can dash our hopes for a fulfilled life.  It can overwhelm to the point of distraction, so much so that we sometimes feel left by the roadside while everybody else zooms by in their shiny new cars on their way to whatever happens next in their clearly perfect lives.
 
Sometimes, it almost seems as if God has abandoned us, like so much spit in the sea -- no matter how much we think about him, pray to him or do things for him and his Church.  We can say we believe that God will rescue us from adversity and, at the same time, despair that he doesn’t. 
 
Here’s a story. 
 
It’s about a young woman named Agnes.  Early on, Agnes knew that God had a unique mission for her here on this Earth, and in time, she was gratified that things seemed to be going exactly that way.  She was led to a place to serve and set about doing what she believed God would have her do there. 
 
Agnes was a schoolteacher at first, then was called to work among the poor -- a “call” in the sense that she had a clear command from God to leave one thing and do another.  And “do” she did, exemplifying in her work what it means to know, love and serve God in this world.  But then she began to suffer through what Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross called the dark night of the soul, which, for Agnes, lasted the greater part of her ministry. Even so, she and others who shared her God-given vision brought both physical relief and the light of Christ to thousands of impoverished people born into a society that considered them little more than human refuse -- junk people.  
 
Despite a hollowness of spirit that stemmed from feeling that she had been forsaken by God, the Catholic nun the world came to revere as Mother Teresa persevered in her mission among the poor of Calcutta.  It’s hard to imagine the spiritual assault she suffered, the pain she endured.
 
Mother Mary Teresa died a thousand little deaths -- perhaps many times more -- in her private agony.  Yet, in God’s mercy, she at long last began to see her pain as “a small part of Jesus’ darkness and pain on earth.”  Her epiphany was the realization that she had been given the “deep joy” of sharing Christ’s suffering, including the anguish of what seemed like daily separation from her Beloved.  She shared her Lord’s Passion, climbed the slopes of Golgotha with him every day.  She helped shoulder his cross time after time after time and still was able to bless “the least of these” through her pain.  Day after day, this Saint of the Gutters acknowledged the certainty of God’s Grace and the certainty of his presence in her life, even though she couldn’t feel it.
 
We all have our private pains, our deep, enduring disappointments -- not to mention those little discouragements that nibble away at the edges of our lives.  We may despair loss of what society proclaims as “the good life” and instead suffer a bewildering blizzard of bills, health issues and relationship problems.  We are overcome by lack of opportunity, lack of fulfillment, lack of love. Or we may have “the good life” and wonder if that’s all there is!  
 
When we’re children (especially teens), we often feel inadequate, as if we’re the only person in the world who feels this way.  Then, as young adults, we sometimes think we know it all and can do no wrong!  We reassess as we grow older, of course, but our inadequacies can remain, lurking in the background -- as if to mock our abilities and accomplishments.  Suddenly, we’re astonished to see an old person looking back at us in the mirror!  Time is running out.  Our lives seem to have vanished with the morning fog.  We wonder where God is in all of this, because so much of what we had hoped for doesn’t seem to be happening. 
 
“Where are you?!” we shout to the sky.
 
We know God is there, yet there are moments, common to us all, when his presence fades.  Agnes didn’t see the Lord’s face for many years but she persisted in her work, knowing that he was there. “Though he slays me, yet shall I trust him …” is Job's retort to three friends who thought he’d be better off dead than continuing to suffer.
 
So here we are in the midst of Lent, those weeks on the Church calendar when we are privileged to participate with Christ in his passion, to walk with him … often stumbling … on our own path to the cross. We retrace the final steps of a man singular in history, a man wholly human and wholly God who is about to become wholly consumed in the fire of self-sacrifice.  Thus, it is in the immolation of the Christ that we find our own hope.  It is from the ashes of despair and hopelessness that new life is born in our lives, as the lilies once again show their faces to the warming sun.
 
Sometimes a backyard workshop or auto body shop will have lots of extra bits of metal left over -- the ends of steel rods, odd angle irons, pieces of fenders, hole-riven mufflers and other seemingly useless stuff, things that have been hammered and bent and worn and abandoned.  Ideally, it all gets melted down, poured into a mold and made into something useful. So it is that your new pocket knife or bed frame could once have been a bumper on somebody’s ’57 Chevy!
 
The smelting process reduces scrap to its basic elements. The dross rises to the top of the cauldron where it is skimmed off and thrown away.  The more this firing and skimming is repeated, the purer the product -- the way gold is refined.  The metal doesn’t get used up (or left out in the rain to rust). It’s transformed into something else. 
 
When Christ was crucified, it looked like he was used up.  But he rose from the grave.  His old life, the old order, had passed. That’s the way God works with us.  We are his raw material. In our willing sacrifice -- in effect nailing our selves to the cross with Christ, we suffer the death of our wants and desires, hopes and dreams and start becoming what God would have us be and do.  We hand over our difficulties and discouragements, too, even though we may be reluctant to submit, fearful to confess, afraid of repentance, uncertain about embracing trust.  Not to mention that it's all too human to think that we are innocent of grievous offense in the first place, so we why we should offer ourselves up at all? 
 
The answer, of course, is that we all are guilty; we are born into it.  There was only One true innocent, One who -- despite his own perfection -- submitted himself to a gruesome and agonizing death to absolve each of us of our sins.  As a single Lamb led to slaughter, God, in the person of his Son, burns away our guilt and leaves redemption in its place.  It happened in the blink of an eye to one of the thieves on the cross.  It happens to us in our time -- no more, no less a sinner than that criminal, a man who did not whine piteously of his innocence but acknowledged his guilt … and spoke of the Innocent hanging beside him. With one simple act, he stepped forward in faith, as Mother Teresa had to do in living out her Truth every day.  In order to truly live, we, too, must give ourselves up to Christ on the cross, knowing that we will not be burned up, but reborn.  Because Easter is coming, with a Light brilliant enough to penetrate and illuminate the ages.  
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"Our Lamb has conquered.  Let us follow him!"

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