All Saints by the Lake, Dorval
March 26, 2023
Jonathan Daniels (left) with fellow activists.
Today we get a little preview of Easter. We’ll hear the story of the Dry Bones again as we sit with our candles listening to all the old stories during the Great Vigil of Easter; and the story of the raising of Lazarus, of course, takes place just before the events of Holy Week, and prefigures Christ’s own resurrection.
Resurrection is, of course, the central, most far-fetched and simultaneously most essential claim that Christianity makes. Our faith looks at the misery and chaos of the world and insists that God, against all evidence, is working and is bringing good out of it all. The dry bones can live. Lazarus can come out of the tomb.
And so when we are engaged in discerning God’s will, perhaps our most reliable guide to choosing a course of action is: does it look like resurrection?
In order to discern that, of course, we have to learn what resurrection in fact looks like. There is no substitute for studying the scriptures, being in conversation with other faithful people, emulating the lives of the saints, and consciously training ourselves to recognize how new life manifests in the world (even the kind of resurrection that looks like failure by society’s normal standards).
And perhaps the most distressing thing about resurrection is that its prerequisite is death. Not necessarily the end of a human life; but in order for resurrection to happen, something has to die: an expectation, an unhealthy pattern, a toxic relationship, or even something that was good, perhaps good for a long time, but that no longer serves God’s purposes in the present moment.
One of the most fruitful metaphors I’ve ever found for how resurrection works is what I call the “theology of compost”. Dead things don’t have to be gone, or wasted. Instead, if carefully mingled together and properly exposed to air, they can become the most fertile ground for the new thing that is trying to grow.
Looking for resurrection, we befriend the cycle of death and rebirth and we learn not to be afraid of any portion of it.
This task of learning to recognize and embrace resurrection is not easy or straightforward, and it doesn’t happen overnight. In fact, it is a lifelong endeavor.
One tool that can be very helpful as we try to translate the hope of resurrection into practical decisions, is the concepts of “consolation” and “desolation” as articulated by the tradition of Ignatian spirituality. Ignatius himself lived in the sixteenth century, so these ideas go back at least that far.
Consolation and desolation can have many meanings, but in the context of discernment, they are essentially ways to identify and articulate the inchoate and sometimes inexplicable feelings that we have as we consider a course of action. “Consolation” could perhaps be best defined as “the peace that passes all understanding” – a mysterious feeling that God is close and all is well, despite what might objectively be difficult circumstances or significant challenges. Desolation is the opposite – the sense that something is wrong, that God is not present in a particular plan or idea, even if everything adds up and it seems eminently sensible on the face of it.
The seminarian Jonathan Myrick Daniels, as he considered returning to Selma, Alabama in the spring of 1965 to work with other activists against the Jim Crow regime, wrote in a letter to his sister: “Christians must learn a little better the way of the cross. Somehow this is where God and life and love are – and where triumphant.” Despite the hardships and dangers, Daniels felt deep consolation in his work in Selma.
Mere months later, Daniels was shot dead after pushing 17-year-old Ruby Sales out of the path of the bullet that killed him. By any worldly standards, this death was a tragedy. Yet in venerating Daniels as a saint, the Church declares that God was present and acting in both his life and his death, in his imitation of the Christ whom he followed; that the consolation he felt upon contemplating his return to Selma was, in fact, the movement of the Holy Spirit; and that the God who raised Lazarus, and who rose himself, has brought abundant life out of that tragedy (including the long, fruitful life and activist career of Ruby Sales).
Conversely, something can be worthwhile and laudable in every way, and still provoke desolation because it’s not our particular calling. Churches, I think, are particularly prone to these kinds of errors of discernment: we see that a project is a good thing to do, and so we think we ought to do it, without taking the time to see whether it is a good fit for our particular gifts, values, and personalities, and whether God is specifically calling us to this particular ministry. Thus we end up with a lot of small projects done badly, rather than one big project done well, and by ignoring the desolation beforehand, end up having to preside over many deaths of well-intentioned hopes.
This, then, is the task of Christian discernment: to familiarize ourselves with what resurrection looks like; to seek it, as individuals, congregations, and communities; and, when presented with multiple possibilities, to pay attention to consolation and desolation as we seek to decide which of them is our calling right now.
St. Paul writes in our Epistle reading from Romans today: “To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.” What Paul calls “setting the mind on the Spirit,” is what I’m talking about here: to look for God moving in the world and to go there, guided by our recognition of resurrection and our sense of consolation, regardless of whether it seems to be a good, safe, or logical decision “according to the flesh.”
Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, has written at length about discernment, and I want to quote him at length to conclude this morning:
“So what does discernment look like? I have to choose between a number of courses of action: well, what course of action more fully seems to resonate with the kind of life Christ lived and lives? What course of action opens up more possibilities for God to ‘come through’? These are not questions that will immediately yield an answer, but they are the raw material of reflection. What course of action might be slightly more ‘in tune’? What opens rather than closes the doors for God’s healing and reconciling and creating and forgiving work to go on? There’s no guarantee that in any situation there will be only one clear and compelling answer to such questions. But, if these are the questions we’re asking, the very process of reflecting and discerning is making space in ourselves for the life of Christ and the creative movement of God. … And so we shall have moved some way towards doing God’s will by leaving God some room and freedom to salvage our lives from whatever mess our decisions may bring with them.”
Thus, the Archbishop. We seek resurrection; we are guided by consolation; and we trust God to sort out the rest.
“To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.”
Amen.
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