Exposed


Dear Eugene,

Sharing with you words of Rowan Williams.  I don't think I can add to them.

"Christ is killed every day by the injuries that we cannot bear. He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows and our first emotion, our first reaction is relief. Christ who lifts responsibility from us, Christ who suffers for us, Christ who takes away our burden and our misery, who stands between us and the world’s dreadfulness, between us and the squalor of our lives, as he was once thought to stand between us and the wrath of his Father. Christ the substitute, Christ the surrogate, Christ who saves us the trouble of being crucified. God will forgive: that is his job; Christ will suffer: that is his.

 … And so Christ is killed every day by the injuries we refuse, by what we will not let ourselves feel and know, by the risks we refuse, the involvement we refuse.

 … Well, we are all realists to a greater or lesser degree, and there is therefore no avoiding the fact of our complicity in the death of Jesus. Like the apostles we evade and refuse and deny and escape when the cross becomes a serious possibility.

 Terror of involvement, fear of failure—of hurting as well as being hurt—the dread of having of powerlessness nakedly spelled out for us: all of this is the common coin of most of our lives. For beneath the humility of the person who believes he or she knows their limitations is the fear of those who have never found or felt their limitations. Only when we have traveled to those stony places of the spirit where we are forced to confront our helplessness and our failure can we be said to know our limitations, and then the knowledge is too late to be useful. We do not know what we can or cannot bear until we have risked the impossible and intolerable in our own lives.

 Christ bears what is unbearable, but we must first find it and know it to be unbearable. And it does not stop being ours when it becomes his. Only thus can we translate our complicity in the death of Christ into a communion in the death of Christ, a baptism in the death of Christ: by not refusing, by not escaping, by forgetting our realism and our reasonableness, by letting the heart speak freely, by exposing ourselves, by making ourselves vulnerable."

Yours, Alex

Comments

  1. KateDecember 13, 2018 at 12:52 PM

    Dear Eugene,

    “We do not know what we can or cannot bear until we have risked the impossible and intolerable in our own lives… Translate our complicity in the death of Christ into a communion in the death of Christ… by letting the heart speak freely, by exposing ourselves, by making ourselves vulnerable.”

    12 days ‘til Christmas in max exposure. Lights on necks of trees, garden reindeer among frost, my neighborhood in this small town is dreaming about all… but death - delirious in our genes, a teaser of time, presently more exposed than love.

    Why creep around death on Christmas? My kid shuns this shade of writing from me.

    But midnights in December are streaming towards the finale of Old Year, stitching up our chronic wounds to expose fresh scabs, new skin for living. Christmas is about death exposed – to unveil our true identities now transiently lacquered in all things sleek without slack in greed.

    As sung by Tony Bennett in The Good Life, 1962, let me die to my stoic, stubborn self & arise to candid exposures:

    “Mm, the good life lets you hide
    All the sadness you feel…
    So please be honest with yourself…
    It’s the good life to be free
    And explore the unknown
    Like the heartaches when you learn
    You must face them alone...
    Well, just wake up,
    Kiss the good life goodbye.”

    Life cannot begin to be of any good until we awake from the death of old exposed.

    Yours, Kate

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