“. . . beyond all evil is the compassion of God.”
~ Abraham Heschel

“Granted, darkness, chaos, death and hell do appear, but not for a moment are they allowed to prevail …. What occurs in Mozart is rather a glorious upsetting of the balance, a turning in which the light rises and the shadows fall, though without disappearing, in which joy overtakes sorrow without extinguishing it, in which the Yes rings louder than the ever-present No.” ~ Karl Barth

Holding the Blessed Tension
Authentic, mature Christian spirituality — which means conscious, wholehearted living —  insists we hold the paradoxical mystery of dying and rising together in a blessed tension. It is THIS tension, THIS reality, and THIS mystery that we gather to embrace and engage in more willingly, courageously, and fully each month in H&H. We can only do this to the extent that we discover that the tension, counter-intuitively, is blessed.

Even though to live by faith means to trust that “all shall be well,” even a fifth-grader can see that in the dailiness of earthly life all is not well. But to be Christ-ened means consciously to practice holding the tension and to refuse either to float away into airy Pollyannaish naivete or to cave into pessimistic doomsaying defeatism. While on earth, one of the essential Christ-practices is captured in the perceptive words of Chief Bromden about R.P. McMurphy who is a Christ-figure in Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: “he won’t let the pain blot out the humor no more’n he’ll let the humor blot out the pain.” Since teaching this book to high school sophomores in the late 1970’s, this line has expressed for me a core truth about any authentic spirituality. When looking for spiritual practices that cultivate people of mature faith and spiritual depth, this ranks high on my list.

Just as the word sequence in Kerry Walter’s book title The Sacred Art of Dying and Living and in the subtitle of Scott Eberle’s book The Final Crossing: Learning to Die in Order to Live suggest dying has something essential and vital to teach us about living, so too wise guides throughout history counsel that cultivating those virtues and tending to those character traits “that enable us to live well not only make our living richly meaningful” but also “discipline us to ways of thinking and behaving that will stand us in good stead at life’s end.” (Walters, xviii)

That being said, it takes courage and companions to lean into hope. To hold the tension of opposites— living and dying, diminishment and flourishing, pain and humor— and to trust that it hides a blessing stronger than the tension it holds, is to trust that God is upsetting the balance, that joy is greater than sorrow, and that as the evangelical theologian Karl Barth heard in the Catholic Mozart’s music, the Yes rings louder than the ever-present No.

For this reason, I have always taken great solace in the fact, that in the liturgical calendar year the season of Easter which ends at Pentecost (50 days) is by design  longer, bigger, more than, the days of Lent which number 44. This is no accident. This simple, seemingly insignificant point is a symbol and reminder that death’s sting is not as great as the joy of life, that the Yes rings louder than the No, and that all shall be well.

The peace or disturbance of Christ ~
whichever you need most

╬ Dan