Advent Journal: If the Cross Comes

The cold breaks overnight, may I never forget to be grateful. Morning arrives gray but with a little mist. The river murmurs beyond the pasture, a language I love but never learned to speak.

Something bad is going to happen. I can feel it.

There was a phase in my study and practice when, had somebody said that to me, I would have responded instantly with, “well, something is going to happen, that’s true, but whether it’s good or bad is up to you. Are you looking with ego or the Holy Spirit?”

And then I would’ve launched into a combination theological lecture / psychological pep talk about the role interpretation plays in experience. Just look with the Holy Spirit!

I don’t do that anymore. Or I try not to, anyway.

Something bad is going to happen. I can feel it. In the back of my skull – near the atlas and axis vertebrae – there’s a pressure, like a storm front gathering. It’s hard to describe. There’s an emptiness in me – there has always been an emptiness in me – and sometimes it grows teeth and wants to eat.

There was a time when, had somebody said that to me, that way, I would have said, very dramatic language! Great image! And then gone off a longish soliloquy about how ego loves drama, uses it to keep the stakes high, and the pressure on, and there’s a better way, et cetera.

I don’t do that anymore.

I’ve learned that sometimes the Holy Spirit uses that kind of language in order to help me go deeper, so I can see the error, the pathology, more clearly, so that the letting go – which is all healing is, in the end – can be authentic and as close to total as possible. I’m not saying it has to work that way for you but there’s a reason you’re reading this. Yesterday I called it all a Derridean play of signs; today I just seen distant lights, like fireflies, all of us lost in the lonesome valley hefting out lanterns. I’m here – find me!

I carry a flake of hay to the horses, pause by the hemlocks to see if I can hear the cardinals waking up. A few flakes of snow spiral through the air.

More and more I don’t want the metaphysical arguments – am I a body, is the world real, how does God intervene, et cetera. I indulged those questions a long time. They’re fun and interesting. And certainly all that work became the rich turf Sawicki used to teach me how to see Jesus. But still. Something in the abstraction no longer appeals. I want to hold something; I want to be held.

But wait – aren’t we talking about letting go? About healing as letting go? What’s this “hold me” cry? Are we channeling John Denver all of a sudden? Rihanna featuring Mikky Ekko?

What is going on today? In the writing and in my mind? Why is my heart so quiet, as if hiding or disowned? What’s wrong?

Something bad is going to happen. I can feel it. I’m going to have to just take it again, because of who’s giving it, aren’t I. I don’t have a choice; it doesn’t matter how I define or explain or poeticize it. It’s going to happen; it’s going to be bad; it’s going to hurt. I’ve been here before; I know how it goes.

I sit quietly in the hay loft with coffee, neither writing nor praying. The room lightens slowly; the cat paws the door. I can hear passersby on Main Street.

The world is waking up.

I wrote yesterday that we can’t avoid the cross. The crucifix says something specific and true about love, and we have to face it. But what does it say? Does it have to do with what you give? Or the way in which you give it? The extent to which you give it?

We don’t talk about it a lot but a Cynic, contemporaneous with Jesus, said to his fellow Cynics, look, if the cross comes for you, then the cross comes. Accept it with the same equanimity as you do everything else.

That was how Cynics rolled – you didn’t get worked about the vicissitudes of life, you accepted them. Food, no food, shelter, no shelter. It was all the same. You reached a state of coherence in which there was neither resistance nor reaction, only relationship. Of course that balance applied to whatever beef the imperial class has with you, and whatever form of death they decided to deal.

The suggestion is, Jesus was saying something similar. He and his followers knew that some form of religio-political persecution – up to and including torture and death – was possible, even likely. Following Jesus is no joke, then or now. But his take was, look, maybe crucifixion happens, maybe not. Either way, it doesn’t change our work – loving, forgiving, feeding and healing. And we’re not alone. If one of us goes up on the tree, the others carry on. And you can see the wisdom of that, and you can let the wisdom of it calm you. Yeah, a bad thing might happen but it’s okay – it’s more than okay. Deeper than the personal harm and suffering is a love that will make this all okay. This work didn’t begin with Jesus and it sure as hell didn’t end with him. There’s something important in that – a coherence, a continuity, a communion.

You remember theold Buddhist story? The farmer’s horse runs away and everyone is like, oh, that’s too bad. The farmer says, maybe good, maybe bad. The next day the horse returns and everybody says, great news! To which the farmer says, maybe good and maybe bad. On and on it goes. It’s the “on and on” we want to notice. Life happens, change happens, and what all that means is . . . kind of beyond us. Not really the point? Remind me again there’s another way?

The writing goes slowly; morning begins before it’s finished. Here and there – between breakfast, phone calls, chores, meetings – I scribble and jot. Notes for later, sentences I want to remember. Something bad is going to happen. I can feel it. But I’m not afraid of it. And anyway, there’s work to do. I’m going to let the writing end here. Sometimes you have to let go. Sometimes you do.