Signposts

It’s mid-Lent, so here goes with a Lenten observation:

What Jesus said sputters away into well-intentioned meaninglessness unless you understand what he did.

Richard John Neuhaus helped me figure this out.

Let this blog post be a requiem of sorts to the man, who died Jan. 8.

Neuhaus wrote a gem of a book called, “Death on a Friday Afternoon” in which he meditated on the seven last words of Christ on the cross.

By “words,” he meant utterances, as in, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

I wonder what was Neuhaus’ disposition as he himself approached death, that “undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns.”

Jesus was not celebrating his own death as it approached. It seemed to fly in the face of all that he had taught.

The kingdom of God come to Earth? I’m about to be despicably betrayed by a close friend and crucified.

For nothing. The monumental injustice of it must have weighed on him.

Can anyone think of a greater travesty? Here was a brilliant, wise, compassionate man that healed people, inspired them, gave them hope, and what was his end?

To suffocate to death between two criminals in a public place.

Where is the kingdom of God now? A lot of hogwash.

As so Jesus uttered those searing words, said to be spoken on a grim Friday afternoon from the cross:

“My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

Indeed.

If this isn’t affirmation for every Christian stumbling and staggering through periods of doubt and depression, what is?

How to understand this?

For Neuhaus, Christ’s suffering and death was literally a cosmic battle against all the evil infecting the world.

The infection was raging. The human race was sore afflicted. Even creation itself was groaning.

Somebody had to suck out all the pain, take it on himself, exhaust it.

Justice demanded it.

But for it to work, the person taking the evil onto himself had to be pure and blameless. Had to be free of the infection.

And had to be God, in order to take ALL the evil out of the world.

A simple human being, like Sydney Carton at the end of Charles Dicken’s “A Tale of Two Cities,” could take a man’s place at the gallows and thereby redeem on a small scale.

Maximilian Kolbe, a Catholic priest in Auschwitz, could die of starvation with several Jews in an act of solidarity, thus giving them hope in their final anguished hours.

But to shoulder the whole wretched mountain of sin in the world?

Who else but God himself could do this?

Who else but God himself would do this?

As the Easter Vigil approaches, we Catholic Christians will relive the suffering of Christ. We will hear his lament.

And we will hear the summation in the “It is finished.”

“Into thy hands I commit my spirit.”

To be a Christian is to believe that the world changed radically at that moment, and that nothing – nothing at all – has been the same since.

What is the difference between joy and happiness?

I have pondered this question half my life. And a clear definition always slips my grasp.

A close friend asked me to clarify this recently, and off I went into the same meditation.

What, indeed, is the difference?

The word “happiness” isn’t used in Scripture, but the word “joy” appears often in the New Testament.

And in the strangest juxtapositions, as in “Consider it pure joy when you face trials of many kinds.”

By definition, you cannot be happy when you are suffering.

How then can you be joyful?

Here is an unscientific, halting, unacademic, non-expert definition.

Joy is the foretaste of God, a preview of the full renewal of the world, of the consummation of all things in Christ.

Occasionally, it bursts out in the present as indicated in the verse, “This is my commandment, that you love one another, that your joy be made full.”

Jesus gave this commandment to his followers because they were to manifest that love which is a breaking into the present of the total fulfillment which God has yet to complete in Christ.

Christians are to be the advance guard, if you will, of the full-blown kingdom of God come to earth.

Joy is the signpost which reads, “It is coming. In fact, it’s already happening.”

This, I think, is something that happiness doesn’t possess. Happiness is purely temporal. Here one minute, gone the next.

There is, of course,  a deeper way to define happiness that takes it beyond mere happenstance, and that is to tie it to the ethical nature of humankind.

Victor Frankl wisely said that if you pursue happiness directly, it will constantly evade you. But if you pursue a life of meaning first, without caring particularly about being upbeat, then happiness often arrives as a byproduct.

Think of the deep satisfaction of raising children, which involves all kinds of situations that aren’t happy in the least, but which, for those who love their children, are mostly transformed into a deep sense of satisfaction.

Even at its best, however, happiness is yet again still not joy.

Joy is greater, it is higher, it is stronger and it is quicker.

Joy is a momentary glimpse of the glory of God to come. Joy is anticipatory.

Here is a crucial difference: Joy is fully cognizant of all the suffering, fallenness and sadness of the world.

There are many references in the NT to idea that if you do not suffer with Christ, you cannot rejoice when he comes again.

The difference between joy and happiness is like the difference between putting everything you have into a race and merely jogging it.

It is like the difference between savoring a truly amazing wine and gulping down a mediocre one.

It is like the difference between yearning to see your beloved face-to-face and being satisfied with e-mailing them.

Joy is hard won. Hard purchased. Joy leaves you aching for more. It is filled with longing, yearning, reaching.

It is connected with refusing to be consoled with halfway pleasures, momentary stimulation, conditional comforts.

It brazenly dares to look for the renewal of the world, the arrival of a time when there will be no suffering, pain, evil or death.

Joy is an alien concept, I think, to those who have become “well adjusted.”

It is possible, as the Message bible says, to trade the “glory of God who holds the whole world in his hands for cheap figurines you can buy at any roadside stand.”

It is possible, and even tempting, to be satisfied with something less than joy, because joy challenges evil and spits it its face.

Christians stake their joy on some brazen claims.

As St. Paul said, if life as it presently exists is the end of the game, if Christ simply perished on a Roman cross, then Christians, with their joyful expectations of goodness thoroughly triumphant, are to be treated like the delusional lunatics they are.

When I think of happiness, I think of that soothing feeling you get after a good meal, a great glass of wine and good company.

It’s good, but it’s not good enough. The stomach will perish, and food along with it.

There are higher things, Paul said.

And as Jesus said to Martha, “Only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

If you can understand what Jesus is saying here, I think you are on the path to joy.

Which is to say that you are on the path to fulfillment and completion.

It’s tough to survive 4 o’clock on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon.

You know, that feeling of blankness and lostness that comes over you, and you wonder, who am I and what the hell am I doing here?

The real trick of life is to survive the mundane.

Go out of town for three weekends in  a row. One weekend, you see the new Griffith Observatory and marvel at the exhibits with a group call ChristiansHikingfortheLord.com. Fantastic.

The next weekend you spend in Bakersfield listening to bluegrass jams. Cool.

The third weekend you go snowcamping with the Sierra Club, a singular experience. What a blast.

Meanwhile, you are running from the mundane. You know it’s out there. Ordinary time. Chores and duties that simply must be done. They have no special stimulation. They aren’t wonderful, transcendent experiences.

They demand to be done.

You become aware of time: Inexorable, undramatic. Simply passing.

And you think: The majestic, transcendent freedom I experienced yesterday in Yosemite has evaporated into forced labor.

Is there a book called “How to be a slave and Love It”? And if you read it and followed it assiduously, would it  make you a happy, content slave?

Because we have all come to believe that there is a proper way to live every moment of life. I’m not talking about morality here.

This is not on the level of ethics.

This is on the level of aesthetics. How do I have a meaningful, life affirming experience all the time?

Is there a meaninful, life affirming way to do your laundry? I haven’t found it yet. Throw the damn clothes in the machine, slop in some soap, jam some quarters in the slot and get it done.

It’s a hell of a long way from going to the latest exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, or taking a class in Balkan dancing at the Ashkenaz in Berkeley, or camping on the rim of Yosemite Valley in the snow with El Capitan looming across from  you.

Dramatic. Iconic. Awesome. Stupendous. (A slightly weary search for superlatives)

But try to have the same experience doing laundry. It simply must be done, unless you want to descend into the misery of reeking homelessness.

You are enslaved to the need for clean clothes. It has you by the balls.

And yet, what if you saw somebody doing laundry in a movie?

Well, then, here we may have the correct way to do it. Notice the facial expressions. The studied carelessness. The contemplative stare. The smooth insertion of quarters. Or not- let’s say the angry insertion of quarters, the screamed obscenities as the actor flings his clothes violently about it a fit of petulant rage (though always done self-consciously)

Then you go do your laundry, and you think about every move you are making: Are you doing it well, like said actor?

Everything must be done well. You must laugh well, cry well, talk well, think well, suffer well.

It’s the tyranny of well.

True freedom would be to do your laundry unselfconsciously. Or better yet, do it with a bunch of other people who are doing theirs at the same time.

Then, the stupidity of trying to do everything in an aesthetically approved manner would probably explode.

Which is why when I do laundry, I’d much rather do it in a laundromat or a communal situation, because then I am absolved of the lone solitary pressure of doing it just so.

I can see that my fellow man hates doing laundry as much as I do.

And they see me. Without speaking, we comfort one another.

I might even enjoy doing my laundry, God forbid.

Or not. There really is no “approved” way of doing  laundry, just as there really is no aesthetically approved way of muddling through a thousand and one situations in life that we have to deal with.

You suck it up and get through it.

If you can survive 4 p.m. on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon without blowing your brains out, you can survive anything.