Not alone

2 Lent B 2009
(Genesis 17: 1-7, 15-16; Ps 22: 22-30; Rom 4: 13-25; Mark 8: 31-38)


Years ago a young man entered a strict monastery not far from here. He was devout and filled with ideals, and he loved the life he found—the simple diet, the silence, the manual work, the hours of prayer in the church and the private meditation in his cell. He loved it, even after the first glow wore off and he realized he had just done everything that he was going to be doing for the rest of his life. Then three years went by and things just kept getting harder. Each day felt like an uphill climb. He just wanted a change, any change. His life seemed to stretch ahead of him like a bleak desert landscape, featureless and dry. Finally he went to the Abbot and said, “I can’t do this anymore.”

I think of that monk as I hear these readings. We’ve settled into our Lenten walk, and today we hear some straight stuff from Jesus as to what his own walk will be. Not exactly joy and delight—suffering, rejection, and death, and only then resurrection. Peter himself takes him on and, for his pains, gets called “Satan.”

Maybe Peter was scared at the dark, “emo” kind of things his teacher and friend was saying. Maybe in the tense politics of 1st century Palestine Peter knew that all that talk was dangerous. As usual, the Bible doesn’t give us Peter’s inner monologue. Instead, it leaves us with our own.

I had this text before me one night back in the early ‘80’s in the Philippines. The student community and I had decided to stay in the village where we were subject to paramilitary attacks and ambushes. During the silent meditation period late one afternoon, I was reading that part about “those who want to save their life will lose it” when a burst of automatic rifle fire went off a couple of hundred yards away. We sheltered frightened villagers that night, and I waited with the farmers holding their pathetic cultivating knives in the shadow of the chapel while the guerillas crept close enough to silence the crickets in the bushes. To this day, I do not know why they did not fire.

Several weeks later, like the monk with the abbot, I went to my superior and said “I can’t do this.”

Is this bad news, or good news? None of us can shoulder our personal cross alone. No one really “handles” their lives. No one can face their own burdens, their own vulnerabilities, their own challenges alone. We do not have to. We are not meant to. The Gospel is not about our being strong. The Gospel is about God being strong in us.

“I can’t do this anymore,” said the younger monk to the abbot. The abbot grinned, for he had been there before. So has everyone who has tried to follow a Gospel path, to follow Jesus amidst the stresses and challenges of their own lives and that of a world indifferent to the Gospel’s strange power. “Good,” replied the abbot. “Stop trying. Just keep showing up for stuff.” After thirteen years, the monk is still there.

Keep showing up—to our lives, to our faith, to our God. It’s not a magic formula, it does not make everything feel all right. But everything is somehow different. We let God be God when we let go of trying to get it clear and get it right and instead journey humbly with one another, listening, praying for the grace to love another day, pray another day, trust another day.

Old Abram in the desert had come a long way, and was tired and squinty-eyed from looking at the sun. Sarai was way beyond the stresses and changes of pregnancy and childbearing in the desert. But they were not done. They trusted in the one who spoke. New names, an old promise made new, new life and new strength to live it. When we let God be strong, we set free the strange power of the Gospel. We set free Christ’s power to transform us, transform the world.