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<p>When I was about to enter the seminary, in my early thirties, I was seeing a spiritual director who was a tough old bird, a former Dominican, sober in AA for years. He's the one who got me started on what we like to call around here the "inner work." And he had this phrase that he used to say over and over again that used to drive me crazy. He'd say, "Stay with the pain! Stay with the pain!" I had no idea what he was talking about at first and then stuff started coming up and I'd talk to him about it and he say, "Stay with the pain! Stay with the pain!" So I entered the seminary, and I was not at all ready for it, and I really hit bottom emotionally, I knew as soon as I got there that I did not have a vocation to the diocesan priesthood, and I hated the place, but that made all my stuff really start to come up, things I had never dealt with. I had a really wonderful spiritual director there, a Vincentian, who was a gentle holy man. And when things started to get really rough and I decided that I wanted to leave after the first year, he said to me, "Maybe you should stay with the pain." And I said, "Did you just say, 'Stay with the pain'? 'Cuz if you did I'm gonna walk right outta here." They were both right. What I've learned along the way about myself and I think it applies to human nature in general is that so much of our sinful behavior, acting out behavior, which is quite often really addictive compulsive behavior is about two things: augmenting pleasure, but even augmenting pleasure is not a pure motive––it's really about avoiding pain. And the two biggest pains, in my mind, that I think we are trying to avoid are reality and, especially, the reality of death.</p>
<p>I have always been really captivated by this image that we hear today from the Book of Numbers, that the only way the Israelites could be healed is to gaze at the bronze serpent, to look at what bit them. In other words, they had to stay with the pain. We human beings generally don't want to look at the pain, at the darkness, we don't want to feel our wounds, and so we cover them over, with alcohol and drugs, perhaps, but those are only the most obvious palliatives. We could cover the pain over with any kind of thing we ingest to ease our pain, or with constant work, or with TV or Internet or any other kind of distraction. We could hide in somebody else's arms, in someone else's affection or esteem and never have to face our own solitude or stand on our own two feet. But I suppose this is exactly what the ascetical demand of the spiritual life is first and foremost: if you are going to make any progress here, you gotta stay with the pain, face it head on, grieve, wail, scream to high heaven in anguish––but you gotta stay with the pain. And I think the biggest step is the first one of all––it may not seem like such a big thing: it's something like acceptance. And again, acceptance of two things: reality and death, or maybe the reality of death.</p>
<p>There was a great line from the novelist James Carrol in his book <span style="text-decoration: underline;">A Terrible Beauty</span>, "When I turned thirty I realized that the world was a lot harsher place than I thought it was... and so was I!" This may be for may of us the gateway to this deeper reality, to be able to face life on life's terms and suffer the pain of our fantasies and illusions dying. "This is not what I want life to be like! This is not the world that I want!" And so we grieve, wail, scream to high heaven in anguish––but stay with the pain until we reach the point of acceptance; <em>then</em> we can move forward. And next we might find along the way that we really don't like <em>ourselves</em> very much either. "This is not who I want to be! I want to be ___________. (Fill in the blank.)" The first step is to accept myself as I am. This is a very important step in the spiritual life. And then, as the author of the <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Cloud of Unknowing</span> says, we "offer your blind and naked being to the naked being of God." There is a death there, a death of our illusions, that must necessarily come before our birth to Reality, and the real beauty it really contains.</p>
<p>But the biggest hurtle of course is death itself. I have heard it argued rather convincingly that all our sins at their root are actually a fear of death, and a staving off of death. I steal to shore up my wealth, to stave off death. I augment pleasure to keep away pain, which is really death. At the end of the wonderful movie "Moonstruck," the woman whose husband has been cheating on her and has been going around asking every man she could, "Why do men fool around?" finally gets an answer from the idiot of the movie. He says, "Fear of death?" And that's what we really stare at when we stare at this serpent on the cross––our fear of death, our fear of annihilation. And so in John 3 Jesus himself does a <em>midrash</em> on the Numbers reading when he says, "Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so the Son of Man will be lifted up." This is amazing: Jesus becomes death, he becomes sin––he becomes the serpent! You gotta look at what bit you. You gotta stay with the pain. The ultimate point of the cross, which is to say the ultimate meaning of the Resurrection, seems to be this: Our real self, <em>hidden with Christ in God,</em> like Jesus' own self, cannot be annihilated! If we stay with the pain, if we empty ourselves of all that is not God, of all that is keeping us from reality, if we stop protecting ourselves from what hurts, <em>if we have died with him, we will rise with him</em>. Death might hurt a little, but it won't kill you.</p>
<p>This is all about eternal life, yes, but eternal life is not just about the body dying and the soul going to heaven. There are two other places where we experience this dying and rising all the time: in love and in prayer. I don't know anything about love––except for that wonderful aphorism of Mother Teresa, "If we love until it hurts in the end we will discover that there's no more hurt, only more love"––; but I've read a lot about prayer, so let me end with this. <em>We can have the mind of Christ!–</em>–Christ-consciousness; and Paul tells us the formula for it today in this luminous Philippians Canticle, and it too is a form of dying, the dying of emptying–<em>kenosis</em>, which our master Romuald urges us to do as well. Emptying of what? Back to the beginning: empty ourselves even of everything we fantasized about the world and ourselves being, and even of everything that we wished God would be, as Jesus did on the cross, grieving, wailing, screaming to high heaven in anguish, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" That may be why the author of the Cloud talks about "the naked being of God." And what is the promise of that emptying? Resurrection, and more: Christ's consciousness. Really, those are the same thing, resurrection-consciousness.</p>
<p>This is from Fr. John Main:</p>
<p>...to enter into Christ's consciousness, to open to it fully is to pass beyond all limitations imposed on us by our thought patterns, our cultural patterns, our capacity for delusion and fantasy; to open to Christ's consciousness is to travel beyond all that into the mystery of his unlimited life... everyone of us not only has this call but has this capacity to transcend the limitations we impose on ourselves by illusion, by desire. To enter into eternal life by opening our human consciousness to the human consciousness of Jesus is to enter <em>now, in this life,</em> into unlimited life, unlimited peace, unlimited joy: a peace that is way beyond all understanding..."</p>
<p>...if we but stay with the pain, gaze at the cross, put on the mind of Christ, empty ourselves completely and sit waiting, content with the grace of God.</p>
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