Acts 6:1-7 1 Peter 2:4-9 John 14:1-12
I spent a good part of the past two years at Prinknash Abbey near Gloucester in England. They are a small community now, living in a quirky old building with a very interesting architecture and a very complicated history. In it there is a hall, which also serves as a chapter room and forms part of the library. On one of the bookshelves, in a prominent place, someone put a large-format picture book, cover up. The cover is shiny but very dark. It's a painting of a nun in a black habit with a black veil on her head. Only two things shine out brightly: the nun's face and the word “trust” written in large letters directly beneath it. The layout of the house is such that almost wherever you go, you must pass through this hall. And there she always was, this nun shouting “trust!” at me, many times each day. Even in the semi-darkness of an early morning or late in the evening, I could still see where she was and knew exactly what she had to say to me. I never opened the book itself, but the nun in question was Sr Faustina, so I imagine it had something to do with Divine Mercy. Yet this one word “trust” proved to be enough, in fact sometimes it was all I could take. It became a lifeline of sorts, my spiritual life hanged on it.
It is interesting to see then that both in the second reading and in the Gospel passage which we have just heard, the Greek verb normally translated as “to believe” is consistently rendered as “to trust”. In itself, this is hardly surprising, as the word “often stands for a relationship of trust in and commitment to someone” [TH on 1P], but still quite striking.
“The Lord is the living stone, rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to him,” writes St Peter in his letter, “set yourselves close to him so that you too (…) may be living stones making a spiritual house. As scripture says: (…) the man who rests his trust on it will not be disappointed”. In fact, the last part literally reads “and the man who puts his trust in Him will not be put to shame”. The cornerstone is Christ and the mortar which binds us to him as living stones seems to be trust precisely. And in the passage from the Gospel, Our Lord himself admonishes us: “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God still, and trust in me”.
It doesn't come naturally to us to think of a person in such “solid” terms, as “a stone”, and of trust as such a strong binding material. I've heard at least one good homily on this theme here, so I'm not going to dwell on it. But trust is hard to establish and easy to destroy. Personal relationships are ultimately very fragile. We are like Thomas, we'd rather know the destination and all the stages leading up to it, we want a map. Or like Philip, we harbour an illusion that we can build on experience – just show us God, let us experience the bliss of Heaven for a while, and then we will be satisfied, and then we will be able to put up with anything down here on earth. That's probably why something completely immaterial – a set of ideas, a philosophy, religion, or simply some sort of a moral code – seems like a better starting point, a better cornerstone to build one's life around. And there are worse things than that, ready-made identities forced on us by ideologies, political agendas and by aggressive marketing.
The culture in which we live doesn't help us here. The default answer to almost any problem (let alone to the overall lack of meaning, suffering, sadness, guilt or just utter confusion) is to deny it, or to legislate against it, or to medicate it or to distract oneself from it. And fair enough, sometimes some of these solutions are helpful. But if that's always the answer, then we almost never experience our default, normal state. This is the worldly version of “do not let your hearts be troubled”. Literally, do everything in your power to banish trouble from your life. “We live in times of an excess of positivity”, observed one contemporary philosopher (not a Christian, as far as I know), “and the result is an epidemic of clinical depression” [cf. Byung-Chul Han].
In Prinknash, apart from Sr Faustina shouting “trust!” at me, I also had Fr Stephen as a spiritual guide. He would almost invariably give me a version of the ultimate monastic advice, going back to the Desert Fathers: “go to your cell, shut the door and stay there, and the cell will teach you everything”. Nothing about how we should always be joyful as Christians, that things will get better if you try harder, if you pray more, if you have more devotion. No. Feeling sad? Go to your cell and sit with it for half an hour. Feeling guilty? Face it. A failure? Good. Confused? Welcome to the human race. In other words, whatever happens, don't run away from yourself.
This may sound brutal, but in fact he was simply pulling me back down to Planet Earth. And the first piece of good news is that it's not so bad down here, we can easily take it most of the time and continuous contact with the ground makes us humbler. But the real Good News is that God calls us precisely out of this “darkness” and no other “into his wonderful light”, as St Peter put it. We will never hear Him calling apart from this “place”.
“There are many rooms in my Father's house,” says the Lord ahead of His Passion, “I am going now to prepare a place for you, and (…) I shall return to take you with me.” Jesus himself is God's house, of course. There are as many rooms in it as there are relationships of trust between Him and us. Each one is unique and as solid as we let it be.
“For in times of old, heaven was utterly inaccessible to mortals,” wrote St Cyril of Alexandria, “But Christ was the first who consecrated for us the means of access to himself and granted to flesh a way of entrance into heaven. (…) For Christ did not ascend on high in order to present himself before the presence of God the Father. He always was and is and will be continually in the Father. (…) Rather, he who of old was the Word, with no part or lot in the human nature, has now ascended in human form, so that he may appear in heaven in a strange and unusual manner (…) and in this way transfer the glory of adoption through himself to the entire human race. (…) He has presented himself therefore as man to the Father on our behalf, so that he may restore us again, as it were, to behold the Father's face.”
DSP