Psalm 38 & Luke 18.9-14 – 7 November 2021
Neil Millar
‘In the beginning you weep’. It doesn’t sound a very promising start but this is what our tradition teaches when it comes to progress in the spiritual life. In the first canto of Dante’s epic 14th century poem Divine Comedy the pilgrim finds himself lost in a gran deserto. It’s the ‘same desert through which the children of Israel passed on their way to the Promised Land’, Belden Lane writes – a place of brokenness through which we’ve all passed (or will pass) on our journey from bondage to hope. In this bewildering darkness, Dante meets Virgil, who guides him through the corridors of hell and up the slopes of Mount Purgatory, where he is met by another wise one – sweet Beatrice – who guides him on to Paradise.
Dante’s writing is highly symbolic and his imagery is unique but the journey of growth he describes, this threefold pattern from mourning to insight to glory, is deeply resonant with our tradition’s teaching on spiritual formation. In the New Testament, St Paul implores believers to grow up in Christ – from childhood, to adolescence, to maturity. John writes similarly in his letters. Two centuries later, Origen of Alexandria appealed to three Old Testament books to highlight the same three stages. The book of Proverbs, all about right living, he connected with the initial purgative stage of faith, with the clearing of impediments to growth; Ecclesiastes, he linked with a second illuminative stage – with growth in wisdom and insight, and Song of Songs, with a third unitive stage – mystical abiding in Christ. Gregory of Nyssa (a contemporary of Evagrius), likened these stages to entering a moonlit desert, ascending a fog-covered mountain, and finally, to being enveloped in the dazzling darkness of a thick cloud. Bernard of Clairvaux used the imagery of three kisses given to one’s beloved – the penitent’s kiss on the feet; the seeker’s kiss on the hand; and the lover’s kiss on the mouth. Others speak of three conversions, and still others, of passing through three doors or rooms or deaths. Pseudo Dionysius equated the stages with different rings of the temple – the outer court, the place of sacrifice, he linked with purgation; the holy place with its golden lampstand, with illumination; and the holy of holies, the inner sanctum, with mystical union.
The imagery used to symbolise these stages varies c, but the underlying pattern is remarkably consistent. Over the next three Sundays, as our liturgical year draws to a close, I plan to say a little about each stage. Some of the language might seem a bit beyond our everyday experience but actually, all of us will recognise aspects of our experience in this wisdom. It helps us locate ourselves and make sense what we go through. So, this morning, purgation, the point at which faith begins to grow.
As the name suggests, purgation has to do with being cleansed and refined. In a broad sense, we’re purged of our sin, cleansed of those habits of mind and heart that dog and diminish our living. We enter into this experience when we get to the end of our various attempts at self-making (be we rebellious or good, naughty or nice) and come face to face with (wake up to) the truth of ourselves – with the ambiguity of our motives and the many (often subtle) ways we’ve deceived ourselves and others; with the infidelities and justifications that have shaped and deformed us. ‘In the beginning you weep’, the teachers say; appalled by who you are and have become.The way of purgation confronts us with that which is ‘unnerving, even grotesque in our lives’. For some, the awareness dawns slowly. For others, it comes with a sudden, shattering change in circumstances – a significant loss or failure or betrayal, for example. Either way, we are overwhelmed with distress. ‘My iniquities have gone over my head’, the psalmist writes, ‘they weigh like a burden too heavy for me …I am utterly spent, crushed; I groan because of the tumult of my heart’.
So too, the tax collector in the gospel is in this place. Gone, the pride and self-congratulation of the Pharisee; this man is broken. ‘But the tax collector stood at a distance and would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner”.’ In this stage of the journey the heart is pierced, punctured with contrition. Indeed, in older days they used to speak of compunction. It’s important to differentiate between this profound state of self-awareness and the kind of compulsive self-criticism or self-loathing that some of us may struggle with. True compunction isn’t neurotic. It’s more like catching a glimpse of how we’re blocked from loving – maybe we see how self-absorbed we so often are, perhaps precisely because of those well-worn habits of self-criticism.
As I mentioned, Gregory of Nyssa likened this phase of the journey to entering into a moonlit desert. A desert is a parched and arid landscape. In moon light, the shapes and shadows are strange and intimidating. Deserts ‘confront us with a vast horizontal edge, a horizon of emptiness into which we find ourselves absorbed and lost’, Belden Lane writes (1998:38). ‘The desert is intrinsically hostile to the ego, threatening to swallow it up in its endless expanse of nothingness.’ In this place we are stripped of pretence and reminded of things we’d rather ignore. Trudging the harsh high plains of the meseta in Spain on my first Camino, I was reminded of resentment that needed release if ever I was be free. I didn’t like what I felt, I wished it wasn’t there, but it was. The desert exposed it, and gradually, thankfully, in the desert I found relief.
Of all we confront in the time of purgation, it is fear that is primary; fear and the way it undermines our faith and freedom to love. ‘Fear may be aroused by love itself’, Laurence Freeman writes, ‘as we feel the terror of being possessed’, of ‘being known’ and seen through, of ‘giving ourselves’. There’s also the fear that we’re unlovable; fear of failure, inadequacy, sickness, suffering, death. ‘Fear is frightened even of itself’, he adds. In the desert of purgation, our fears inevitably surface and threaten. We’re tempted to run… if we stay and name and face them, we begin to see them for what they truly are – long shadows cast by shapes that in reality are much smaller.
This is why the stage of purgation is both hard and necessary. We’re not going to get anywhere until we get real. When we find ourselves in a time like this (and it can happen more than once) it can seem like a mistake, like things are falling apart … a regression in our growth. But actually, it’s a gift. ‘Talk of tears, penitence, and confession is hard to take nowadays’, Alan Jones writes in his book, Soul Making:
Such things are considered by some to be both unfashionable and unhealthy. In fact, they are neither. The gift of tears is concerned with living in and with the truth, and with the new life that the truth always brings. The tears are like the breaking of the waters of the womb before the birth of a child.
Tears are cleansing. They wash away the grime of our misperceptions… and help us to see with a clear eye. But we receive more than clarity with this gift. The will is also liberated for action… The two (clarity of vision and freedom of action) are brought together in the well-known dictum, ‘Purity of heart is to will one thing’. When we can see purely, we can also act freely. ‘Purity of heart’ begins to happen when a person is willing to be pierced through with the arrows of compunction. (Jones 1985:82)
I mentioned earlier that we enter the season of purgation when we get to the end of ourselves and our programs of self-making. At the same time, scripture suggests that God also has a hand in the process.
In Exodus 13, for example, just after the people of Israel have left Egypt, we read these words: ‘When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, although that was nearer; for God thought, “If the people face war, they may change their minds and return to Egypt.” So, God led the people by the roundabout way of the wilderness toward the Red Sea’ (17-18). In the Talmudic tradition, the meaning of this geographic reference has been much discussed. According to the rabbis, it hinges on how the Hebrew word kî is translated. It could just be saying that God chose not to lead the Israelites by the northern route ‘although’ (kî) it was shorter. Yet, kî can also mean ‘because’, and if this is the intended meaning here, then it suggests more provocatively that God decided against the shorter route because he wanted them to undertake a more difficult journey. In this reading, ‘God’s people are deliberately forced into the desert’, Lane writes, guided to take the more onerous route, ‘as an exacting exercise in radical faith’ (1998:44). ‘Perhaps others can go around the desert on the simpler route toward home’, he adds, ‘but the way of God’s people is always through it’.
The gospel of Mark supports this when it speaks of Jesus being driven or thrown into the wilderness (ekballo) by the Spirit (Mark 1:12). Jesus, like Israel before him, is compelled to take the hard way, going directly from his baptism into a time of testing. It seems this is the only way we can really break free of self-sufficiency, break through into a deeper and more generous love. The desert in Mark is a place of trial. It foreshadows the cross. And yet paradoxically, Jesus also finds solace there. And so too, his people. Remember, it’s in this place, (the wilderness), that five thousand hungry souls are fed, that a new community takes shape, formed in brokenness and grace. In this gospel, times of purgation are revealed by Jesus as opening into comfort, provision and new life. We find the nourishment and energy we need for the next stage of the journey. Amen.
References
Belden Lane (1998) The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality, Oxford University Press.
Alan Jones (1985) Soul Making: The Desert Way of Spirituality, Harper Collins, New York.
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