Learning to be larger than life

Monday, June 5, 2023      

Memorial of Saint Boniface, Bishop and Martyr

(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)

Learning to be larger than life

My sweet Jesus, look with mercy on my soul … this is not a prayer of the proud, but of someone aware of their shortcomings, aware that they cannot do without the help and the love and the mercy of God.

So they seized him and killed him, and threw him out of the vineyard. What then will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come, put the tenants to death, and give the vineyard to others.

Jesus is talking about himself. He knows his listeners want to get rid of him and get back to their religion and their rituals. He tells this story anyway.

Richard Rohr says that somehow the “larger than life” people he has met have “all died before they died, and thus they are larger than death.” That is, they have realized the truth that they “cannot do” on their own. That truth is made more real than real when the circumstances of their lives collapse around them. I think of an apartment building in Davenport, Iowa which collapsed on Memorial Day. A week later three people living there have still not been found. Then I think of Turkey’s earthquake, and the seemingly endless war in Ukraine.

Collapse.

I can no longer do.

I call out to God and pray without ceasing.

And even after my life is rebuilt, if it is, my much more constant refrain is “my sweet Jesus, look with mercy on my soul.”

Of course my home may not collapse around me. That is rare. What is certain is that my life itself will turn out to be not just short, but shallow. The accomplishments I’m so proud of – in my case my writing, my counseling, my reading, my my my … as I live day by day I want to continue doing these things but with a stiff arm holding back my pride in them.

Can I even do this? Rohr’s idea of it being “larger than life” makes sense. It takes ego down step by step into its basement, and then God lifts me away from the clammy dark bricks and into the light. I feel lighter than ever now, I rest on God’s arm and his angel’s wing.

If this takes death of any kind, bring it on. Words do not express. Tobit’s story works at it.

I sprang to my feet, leaving my dinner untouched, and I carried the dead man from the street and put him in one of the rooms, so that I might bury him after sunset. I washed myself and ate my food in sorrow. I wept. Then at sunset I went out, dug a grave, and buried him.

Most all of us do not have the tools to deal with this. We have not been taught. Rohr is optimistic, I think, about the past but accurate about the present …

Throughout most of history, the journey through death into life was taught in sacred space and ritual form, which clarified, distilled, and shortened the process. Today, many people don’t learn how to move past their fear of diminishment, even when it stares them down or gently invites them. This lack of preparation for the “pass over,” the absence of training in grief work and letting go, and our failure to entrust ourselves to a bigger life, have contributed to our culture’s spiritual crisis.  All great spirituality is about letting go.

Each time I learn to let go of what I thought was necessary for my own happiness, I invariably find myself in a larger place, a larger space, a deeper union, a greater joy. I’m sorry I can’t prove that to you ahead of time. We only know it after the fact.

In the last season of my life, I can truthfully say, “What have I ever lost by dying? What have I ever lost by losing?” I have fallen upward again and again.

Detachment can come before death. Let it come.

(Tobit 1, Psalm 112, Revelation 1, Mark 12)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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