PING!
Posted on 02/26/2007 1:58:46 PM PST by GMMAC
We need to remember the lessons of Gethsemane
David Warren, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Bear up, gentle reader. Lent has begun, and now you are going to be served my annual Ash Wednesday sermon. There are still a lot of Roman Catholics in this town, and other Christians observing Lent, at least nominally: and my other readers are well-accustomed to looking over shoulders at our strange pre-modern rites. This is perhaps the oddest for them. The place of the penitential has been forcefully removed from Canadian public life, but some day may return. Meanwhile it remains the one season in the Christian calendar that no one has tried to commercialize.
The sense that "for our sins we have been afflicted" seems written into the human psyche. We have the instinct to celebrate national as well as personal triumphs; to wail and gnash when disaster befalls. These are natural sentiments that will find their place, and be expressed, whether elegantly or coarsely. Yet I think they are equally distant from the spirit of Lent.
My secular creed is drawn from Rudyard Kipling, and is succinctly reviewed in his If poem, wherein the applicable text reads: "If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same." It is a creed in which, plainly, wailing and gnashing of teeth is for savages. As likewise, hysteria at funerals, chauvinist displays, and expressions of hatred in the public square. Ladies and gentlemen don't do that sort of thing, and don't even need a religion to know better. Unmanly behaviour is "not British," if I might use an expression our Canadian ancestors understood, whether French, English, or whatever. For we all aspired to be "British" once, in the sense just given: it was something deeper than ethnicity.
There are sobering features in the season of Lent, in the 40 days and nights of Christ's wandering in the wilderness, and in commemorating a path that can only lead from Ash Wednesday, through Gethsemane. To the Christian view, that is earthly life. The fact of our own death is before us, and the reality of the Crucifixion can never be dismissed. We offer, "blood, toil, tears and sweat," together with the joy of salvation. Only through that portal, only in the knowledge that "we owe a death," can we glimpse an eternity that is not false. This is written in the very words of the Lord's Prayer, uttered daily by every Christian. In praying, "Thy will be done," we are inevitably praying for a good death. And not necessarily for a painless one.
Sometimes it seems even our own bishops have forgotten, that "the catholic truth" is entirely incompatible with the "happy-face" of pop doctrines. Even what we mean by the words "life" and "death" is incomprehensible, without heaven and hell. Baudelaire once said, "Everyone believes in God, but nobody loves Him; nobody believes in the devil, and yet his smell is everywhere." Except that belief in God has declined, this strikes me as a fair description of western man in late modernity.
Lent, in its penitential spirit, can make no sense except in terms wherein the reality of evil has been acknowledged -- not as some ancient myth, but as a present force working to our destruction. This was what was faced down in the garden of Gethsemane, where Christ began to lift upon himself the full weight of the sins of this world, the full horror not only of the evil that was done, in times past, but would be done, in times future. For the last time, he was tempted by the devil, and offered the "happy-face" of a life without suffering, of an earthly mission that might not involve the Cross; offered the intensely attractive lie of an easy way out. It is the side of the devil we find hardest to type-cast: the side that is offering that happy-face grin.
It is an offer that we, collectively, have bought, hook, line and sinker. It is an offer that we can only accept, on the assumption that someone else will take care of it, that someone else can pay. Penultimately, that Christ will pay. Ultimately, that we will nail Him.
Yet Lent is joyful. And we are specifically instructed, not to fast like the hypocrites, putting on a show. We will not do that, when we begin to feel the joy that comes, from buying into reality. For it is specifically in moments of "taking up our cross," that we begin to see what lies beyond it. Let us therefore fast, that we may find our joy.
David Warren's column appears Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday.
© The Ottawa Citizen 2007
PING!
Gethsemane was a brilliant song from Jesus Christ Superstar.
"offered the intensely attractive lie of an easy way out"
For whatever reason, God has chosen to foreclose the easy way out. He could grant it to us all, but chooses not to.
Excellent article!
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