Real Life

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

February 1, 2017

Real Life

I, along with most people, tend to look at problems and difficulties in life as interruptions and intrusions, not part of  “real” life.  But as C.S. Lewis reminded Arthur Greeves in a letter in 1943,

“The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own’, or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one day by day: what one calls one’s ‘real life’ is a phantom of one’s own imagination. This at least is what I see at moments of insight: but it’s hard to remember it all the time … Isn’t it hard to go on being patient, to go on supplying sympathy? One’s stock of love turns out, when the testing time comes, to be so very inadequate: I suppose it is well that one should be forced to discover the fact!  I find too (do you?) that hard days drive one back on Nature. I don’t mean walks . . . but little sights and sounds seen at windows in odd moments.”  (From The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Vol. II [London: Harper Collins, 2004])

I wonder whether the commonplace “God sends us difficulties” is a simple metaphor, a way of saying that whatever happens, is, and cannot be denied.  It is a way of encouraging acceptance of what you cannot change, no matter how hard.  It certainly is not in line with the Biblical (and Prayer Book) teaching that God “does not willingly afflict or grieve any of the children of men” (Lamentations 3:3; BCP, p. 828).  It is based in idea that since God is in charge of everything, what happens must be God’s will.  But that idea too is flawed if taken literally:  there are many times in scripture when God is not pleased with what happens. 

This conflict, I believe, is resolved in the cross.  Though we sometimes say that Jesus died on the cross “in accordance to God’s will,” few who say this would say that God put Jesus on the cross, that Jesus’ suffering was something that God willed and actively sought.  Jesus, as the Son of God and second person of the Holy Trinity, accepted the suffering of the cross, but this does not mean he desired it: witness his desperate prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane.   And when he says “thy will, not mine” he is not accusing God of wicked child abuse.  He is simply saying “help me accept the inevitable, to calmly suffer what I cannot change.”  Jesus on the Cross, indeed, God on the cross is a sign of God suffering the bad the world and other people can throw at us, right there along with us.  As the Eucharistic prayer says “you sent Jesus Christ, your only and eternal Son, to share our human nature, to live and die as one of us, to reconcile us to you, the God and Father of all.” 

This is one of the reasons I have of late become more and more moved by the devotion of merely looking upon the cross, especially a crucifix, with a representation of Jesus on the cross.  This is not because of relish in gore or over sentimentalized maudlin reflections on the sufferings of Jesus.  It is because I find solace in the idea of God on the cross, suffering alongside us pitiful creatures.  The story of the cross is bitter and horrible, but it ends in joy and bliss. 

And so will our own sufferings, these things that appear to be interruptions in our lives.  As Lewis notes, they are in fact our real lives.  If only we can accept them, patiently suffer with Jesus, persevere as possible in working for the Reign of God, and be perfect in our compassion with, if not our service to) others, they will end in joy.    

Grace and Peace. 

Fr. Tony+