Stumble and Fall
Sunday, March 31, 2019

Something in you dies when you bear the unbearable. And it is only in that dark night of the soul that you are prepared to see as God sees and to love as God loves. —Ram Das [1]

Sooner or later, if you are on any classic “spiritual schedule,” some event, person, death, idea, or relationship will enter your life with which you simply cannot cope using your present skill set, acquired knowledge, or willpower. Spiritually speaking, you will be led to the edge of your own private resources. At that point, you will stumble over a necessary “stumbling stone” (see Isaiah 8:14). You must “lose” at something, and then you begin to develop the art of losing. This is the only way that Life/Fate/God/Grace/Mystery can get you to change, let go of your egocentric preoccupations, and go on the further and larger journey.

We must stumble and fall, I am sorry to say. We must be out of the driver’s seat for a while, or we will never learn how to give up control to the Real Guide. It is the necessary pattern. Until we are led to the limits of our present game plan and find it to be insufficient, we will not search out or find our real Source. Alcoholics Anonymous calls it the Higher Power. Jesus calls this Ultimate Source the “living water” at the bottom of the well (see John 4:10-14).

The Gospels teach us that life is tragic but then graciously added that we can survive and will even grow from this tragedy. This is the great turnaround! It all depends on whether we are willing to see down as up or, as Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) put it, “where you stumble, there lies your treasure.” [2] Lady Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) said it even more poetically, and I paraphrase: “First there is the fall, and then we recover from the fall—and both are the mercy of God!” [3]

The Prayer of Abandonment by Brother Charles de Foucauld (1858–1916) expresses openness and intention to give up control to God in the middle of life, even before our physical death:

Father,
I abandon myself into your hands;
do with me what you will.
Whatever you may do, I thank you:
I am ready for all, I accept all.

Let only your will be done in me
and in all your creatures—
I wish no more than this, O Lord.

Into your hands I commend my soul:
I offer it to you with all the love of my heart,
for I love you, Lord, and so need to give myself,
to surrender myself into your hands without reserve,
and with boundless confidence,
for you are my Father. [4]

Gateway to Presence:
If you want to go deeper with today’s meditation, take note of what word or phrase stands out to you. Come back to that word or phrase throughout the day, being present to its impact and invitation.

Dying with Christ
Monday, April 1, 2019

My good friend and Franciscan colleague Sister Ilia Delio writes:

God is radically involved with the world, empowering the world toward fullness in love, but God is unable to bring about this fullness without the cooperation of humans. Human and divine cannot co-create unto the fullness of life without death as an integral part of life. Isolated, independent existence must be given up in order to enter into broader and potentially deeper levels of existence. Bonaventure [1217–1274] speaks of life in God as a “mystical death,” a dying into love: “Let us, then, die and enter into the darkness; let us impose silence upon our cares, our desires and our imaginings. With Christ Crucified let us pass out of this world to the Father.” [1] [2]

Contemplative prayer is one way to practice imposing “silence upon our cares, our desires and our imaginings.” Contemplative practice might be five or twenty minutes of “dying,” of letting go of the small mind in order to experience the big mind, of letting go of the false self in order to experience the True Self, of letting go of the illusion of our separation from God in order to experience our inherent union. Prayer is quite simply a profound experience of our core—who we are, as Paul says, “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3).

Delio continues:

Only by dying into God can we become one with God, letting go of everything that hinders us from God. Clare of Assisi [1194–1253] spoke of “the mirror of the cross” in which she saw in the tragic death of Jesus our own human capacity for violence and, yet, our great capacity for love. [3] Empty in itself, the mirror simply absorbs an image and returns it to the one who gives it. Discovering ourselves in the mirror of the cross can empower us to love beyond the needs of the ego or the need for self-gratification. We love despite our fragile flaws when we see ourselves loved by One greater than ourselves. In the mirror of the cross we see what it means to share in divine power. To find oneself in the mirror of the cross is to see the world not from the foot of the cross but from the cross itself. How we see is how we love, and what we love is what we become. [4]

True life comes only through many, many journeys of loss and regeneration wherein we gradually learn who God is for us in a very experiential way. Letting go is the nature of all true spirituality and transformation, summed up in the mythic phrase: “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.” Following Christ is a vocation to share the fate of God for the life of the world, not a requirement for going to heaven in the next world.

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