AWAKE AT LAST, I AM WITH YOU STILL

Abhishiktananda writes in Saccidananda that one of the best phrases to describe Jesus’ resurrection is from Psalm 139:18, the old Latin entrance antiphon for the Liturgy of Easter Sunday: Resurrexi, et adhuc tecum sum: posuisti super me manum tuam; “When I awake, I am with you still. Your right hand holds me fast.” He uses this to describe Jesus’ awakening after the advaitin experience of Good Friday and Holy Saturday, his total dissolution of self, but also refers it to the resurrection itself. When Jesus awoke from the sleep of the grave, he was still there in some wonderful new way, and God was there too. A new I-Thou relationship. His death, his loss of self had not been annihilation. “Awake at last, I am with you still! Your right hand holds me fast.”

Three images come to my mind when I think this.

I know a woman who was in the grips of a severe addiction to prescription drugs. And she was finally hitting bottom, it had gotten as bad as it could get. She was trying to kick, and her sponsor had told her, “One day at a time.” She was sitting at the kitchen table and she said that she didn’t know how she was even going to make it one more minute let alone a day. She put her head down on the table and she cried and cried; and when she looked up she saw on the clock that ten minutes has passed. And she said to herself, “I got more than a minute, maybe I can make it whole hour.” And starting there, one minute at a time, she began her sobriety. “Awake at last, I am with you still. Your right hand holds me fast.”

I know a man who was ordained a priest, and immediately after his ordination he met a woman and fell madly in love with her, and spent the next year, his first year of ordination, in living hell, second guessing his decision, in the moment when he was supposed to be rejoicing in the culmination of years of training, what he and his family had been planning for for years, he was in the depths of despair and depression, embarrassed, humiliated and barely functioning. It took a full year when he finally had the strength to cut off all contact with the woman in question, and one day, he said, he was praying before the Blessed Sacrament and he realized that the crisis had passed, it was over, and he was functioning as a priest with ease and joy. “Awake at last, I am with you still. Your right hand holds me fast.”

And then there is our brother Romuald who passed a little over two weeks ago. I saw him in the hospital just after he found out that this was it, that this was the final phase of his illness, that he was now going to come home to die. And he described to me what his death was going to be like, and he said, “Isn’t that nice? There’s not going to be too much pain!” And he said, I will never forget, “I can’t wait to go and see Abba.” “When I awake, I will be with you still. Your right hand holds me fast.”

Yesterday we celebrated Holy Saturday, traditionally in the church the day we remember that Jesus descended into hell. We must remember that hell is not just a place––hell is a state of being, a state of being separated from God. Do you remember Jesus’ last words on the cross? “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” That was the beginning of his descent into hell. Jesus went so far into human misery so as to feel what we humans feel at times––in hell, that is, totally separated from God, as if there were no reason to live, no life, no love, no light, no hope. The great theologian Hans Urs van Balthasar writes that because of Jesus’ descent to hell, the netherworlds now belong to Jesus; there is light even in hell, in that place called hell, but more especially in that state called hell, and in all our little hells when we feel totally powerless and separated from God. And when he awoke, he was still there and so was his Father. Death had not been annihilation. Not even hell can separate us from the love of God.

We are meant to remember this day and this event when we go through our personal hells. The dying we have to do is not always the dramatic ones as I listed above or the final one. What is even more afraid to die than our body is our ego or, as we sometimes call it, our false self, that self that we have constructed for the world, the self that the world has constructed of us; the self of our petty crimes and compulsivities, the self that avoids pain and increases pleasure, the self that puts self ahead of others. The death we have to die is every time we choose not to act out in anger; every time we choose peace instead of the violence of our petty sense of justice; the death we have to die is every time we don’t pick up the phone and get in touch with that person we just think we can’t live with out even though we know the relationship is killing us; the death we have to die is accepting the inevitability of growing older and falling apart gracefully; the death we have to die may mean walking away from the bar, our friends who are getting high, just pushing away from the table from that one more indulgence in a heart stopping dessert, or turning off the television when you know it’s time to pray. It’s very practical, and may not be very dramatic; they are all little deaths that prepare us for the total gift of ourselves to God. And we think we are going to die if we have to go without this or that, and we go through hell going through the withdrawal from this relationship or that drug––but we don’t. When we wake, we are still there, and God is there too. “Your right hand has held me fast.”

The cave that we have to enter, the tomb that we have to enter isn’t any other place than the tomb of our own heart. This is where we have to go to die, over and over again. The Good News is that what we will find there is that there is a light behind our deepest darkness, that there is something deeper than our pain. St Paul says, “the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Spirit living in us” (Rm. 5:5). That Spirit, that love is the same Spirit, the same love that raised Jesus from the dead. What we find in that cave of our heart, after we have died whatever death we have been called to die, is the strength to rise; we find that we are still alive and God is still there; what we find is that there is light behind our darkness. “What can separate us from the love of God?” Paul asks. Nothing! When we wake from out of our darkness, when we have endured our own private hells, we will be happy to find that we are still alive and God is still with us!

It’s significant for me that when Jesus brought Lazarus back from the dead it was Jesus’ voice from outside the grave calling him out and telling them to roll away the stone. But in the case of Jesus no one has to roll away the stone, no one has to do anything from the outside: the power was on the inside, the light from inside that cave blasted out of the tomb. And so with us! Because God’s love has been poured into our hearts, in the cave of our hearts there is a light that can blow the stone away that keeps us closed in our graves. When we go through our hells, we will find out that Jesus has already been there, and he has left something for us––he left the white garment that he was wrapped in, and do you know what that white garment was? That was our Baptismal garment, and when we wrap ourselves in it, we receive the Holy Spirit through our dying with Jesus, and the love of God is poured into our hearts so that, as Paul tells us, when we die with the Lord we will live with the Lord, and when we endure with the Lord we will reign with the Lord, and if the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in us––and it does––then we too can and will rise from the dead, over and over. And when we wake up from our deaths, we will find that we are still alive and God is there with us.

What can separate us from the love of God? Nothing. God is behind our darkness, the light is inside of our tombs; Jesus blows the stone away from the entrance from the inside out with the power of the Holy Spirit who has been poured into our hearts. If we endure with him, we shall reign; if we die with him we shall live. And when we wake we will find that we are still alive and God is there too.

cyprian 16 april 06