Psychological or spiritual development always requires a greater capacity in us for the toleration of anxiety and ambiguity. The capacity to accept this troubled state, abide it, and commit to life, is the moral measure of our maturity. James Hollis

What happens if we accept this challenge of stepping out of the known into the unknown? If lent is a reminder to have the courage to face into our own wilderness…

Last week Robert asked us what were we prepared to let go of… what our sacrifice can be will depend on what is at stake.

As some of you know I sometimes work with people on their last journey towards death and one time in a hospice someone told me he had lost his dignity… he was referring to having to have nurses shower him, and clean him. So I was able to remind him that we cannot lose what is truly ours, in this case what has to be sacrificed then is shame, not dignity, for human dignity is not dependent on being independent…

This circularity is present in RS Thomas poem Covenant: https://roundhousepoetrycircle.wordpress.com/2022/09/23/covenant/

…we are his penance
for having made us. He
suffers in us and we partake
      of his sufferings. 

I often speak of a sense of participation in the life of the divine, but its not so easy to recognise that we participate in the suffering of God even as we suffer. (Isaiah 63:9)

This is the Holy metaphor of the cross to which we must make our journey in Lent and it is important to allow in this sense of the divine in the human important to allow it to be in us…

When we feel trapped or stuck in some pattern we feel unable to get out of it can be excruciating, it can be excruciating, which literally means to be on a cross, for many years sometimes we can feel this way stuck and ultimately perhaps our only consolation may be that this is a human fate if we live within God, to participate of God’s sufferings…

to step into pure relation is not to disregard everything but to see everything in the thou [in relation], not to renounce the world but to establish it on it’s true basis.To look away from the world, or to stare at it, does not help a person to reach God; but who sees the world in God stands in God’s presence… To include nothing beside God but everything in him- this is full and complete relation. 

Martin Buber (with alterations) I and Thou 1923, Martino, 2010 p.78

In some way making the journey beyond ourselves helps us to take off the social masks ‘ masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within’ as James Balwin puts it. 

Living in God, entering this wilderness forces us out of roles we cannot live within and with courage we discover that we cannot lose what is not truly ours, not dignity, nor life – for in the life of God truly seen we inherit our true life. “Whoever tries to keep his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it.” 

Entering the wilderness is entering the true relation Buber speaks of and we do not go into the wilderness to disregard everything but to see everything, not to renounce the world but to establish it on its true basis.