John the Baptist had promised that Someone would come to reverse things - Someone who would baptize us with fire and water- wash us clean and even burn our sins away. At last, Someone who would restore our lost innocence. That Someone, that Fire is here among us. It is Christ Jesus our Lord. And we hear the echo of the Exsultet. It is after all, what we sing about at the Easter Vigil- ‘the power of this night restores lost innocence, humbles earthly pride.’ Easter night, when the wounded Savior rises in quiet majesty. Someone at last who understands us from the inside and knows our misery. Someone who looks into our hearts, and does not judge by appearances, Christ Jesus our Lord who through his dying and rising has reversed everything. For when God refuses to resist pain and suffering, everything gets turned upside down.
God’s
reign has begun, the kingdom- not a neat and tidy world, but a world of messy
dynamic beauty, beauty wrought out of struggle and pain. The very messy beauty
of life when Jesus is preferred above all else, he who restores our lost
innocence; not a facile, tawdry beauty but a terribly expensive beauty wrought
out of acceptance of differences, reconciliation of opposites, the tension of
the terrible truth of my holiness reconciled with my unremitting tendencies
toward sin. The truth of who I am, the truth about the Body of Christ that we
are together- differences, ambiguities, bad and good patiently, exquisitely
juxtaposed, blended and accepted and made one in Christ. Our truth- neither
monsters nor lambs but something better more beautiful wrought out of patient
acceptance. What I want to eliminate in myself or in my brother now accepted in
humility and with longing for Christ’s healing and peace. He who is our Beauty,
our Hope, our innocence restored, He who has covered our sins, forgotten and
forgiven them, Beauty Himself who is forever scarred and wounded, holes in his
heart, hands, his feet, thorn scars on his brows. His cruel death has
reconciled all that separated us from him from one another from our deepest most authentic selves. A very new beauty-filled reality - not a world of all or nothing, but a world of both and. The world, the kingdom where we are wounded and beautiful like Jesus, who
has reconciled all things in himself making peace through the blood of his
painful cross, the blood of his Fire.
Photograph by Brother Brian. Meditation by one of our monks.