{"id":2154,"date":"2019-03-10T11:00:39","date_gmt":"2019-03-10T16:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=2154"},"modified":"2021-02-22T15:04:37","modified_gmt":"2021-02-22T20:04:37","slug":"2154","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2019\/03\/10\/2154\/","title":{"rendered":"The Dark Night of the Soul and St. John of the Cross"},"content":{"rendered":"

Click here to listen to the entire service<\/a><\/p>\n

Luke 4: 1-13<\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to listen to the sermon\u00a0only<\/a><\/p>\n

Frontispiece<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Five days ago here at Marsh Chapel about 1,000 students and others presented themselves for ashes, Ash Wednesday.\u00a0 Our hard working Marsh Chaplains and team served 430 or so.\u00a0 The Chapel also hosted three Catholic services and the weekly contemporary Theological School service, wherein ashes were given.\u00a0 Hence, about 1,000.\u00a0 In the last few years, Ash Wednesday has begun to catch up with Easter and Christmas in active young adult participation.<\/p>\n

Why?<\/p>\n

My middle name of late is \u2018I don\u2019t know\u2019, which I don\u2019t.\u00a0 One of our chaplains preaches an Ash Wednesday sermon every year, \u2018the ashes are not magic ashes\u2019.\u00a0 But they draw.\u00a0 The touch draws.\u00a0 The solemnity, too. The whisper of mortality at the fountain of youth.\u00a0 The strange, numinous, yet public pause.\u00a0 The flesh of it all.<\/p>\n

There is perhaps another cause or reason.\u00a0 Here, mid-winter, is an encounter with antiquity.\u00a0 For two millennia women and men have been preparing for a holy Lent.\u00a0 For two millennia women and men have stopped to remember, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.\u00a0 As our English chorister read it some years ago, Thou art DUST and to DUST though shalt return.<\/em>\u00a0 Is this not subliminally why, in part, we are here this morning, too?\u00a0 For two millennia women and men have listened to readings from Holy Writ.\u00a0 For two millennia women and men have received Jesus in cup and bread.\u00a0 For two millennia, come Sunday, there have been choirs and preachers and prayers and candles and quiet.\u00a0 The architecture of our gothic nave, with an origin nearly a millennium ago, speaks to us so.\u00a0 Our long tall, yes traditioned, stained glass captures places and people from longer ago.\u00a0 Our habits of liturgy, stand and sit, our habits of liturgy, sing and give, our habits of liturgy, bow and kneel, our habits of liturgy, our body language, give us a jarring encounter with antiquity.\u00a0 For once, every seven days, we are not jailed and stuck in the shallow shallows of the twenty first century.\u00a0 We are liberated to time travel, to get out and see the past, and perhaps, now and then, to hear something good and learn something new.\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Luke<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/strong>It is the season of Lent, and again, come this first Sunday in Lent, we meet Jesus in the wilderness.\u00a0 There He resists.\u00a0 In the time honored tradition of a three part story, we are given a lesson about making and keeping human life\u2014human.\u00a0 Here, as in our other gospels, the Lord faces and masters the various temptations which we also know.\u00a0 They include a kind of will to power, and a sort of pride, and a type of avarice.\u00a0 We come to church with some experience of temptation and resistance.\u00a0 As the song writer says, \u2018good experience comes from seasoned judgment–which comes from bad experience\u2019.<\/p>\n

In many communities, including our own, the sun rises this morning, this Lenten morning, on experience of loss and hurt.\u00a0 This morning there are homes and families who have suddenly known unexpected loss.\u00a0 This morning there are friends and groups of friends who have been faced with mortal danger.\u00a0 At one breakfast table, a wife now sits alone, for the first time on a Sunday in 60 years.\u00a0 At another breakfast table, a family gathers for the first time, in a long time, and missing a member.\u00a0 It would help us to remember just how short our words do fall in trying to describe the depth of these moments.\u00a0 Our words arrive only at the shoreline, at the margin of things.\u00a0 Beyond this we practice prayer, a kind of sitting silent before God.<\/p>\n

Our immediate community here along the Charles River today mourns unexpected losses.\u00a0 Along with the scripture and the music, amid the hymns and prayers of our worship, there walks also among us today, by the mind\u2019s farther roads, a recognition of loss.\u00a0 There is some shock to loss.\u00a0\u00a0 There is a kind of fear that comes with loss.\u00a0 There is, often later, an honest anger.\u00a0 There is some numbness.\u00a0 There is a real, and good, desire to do something helpful.\u00a0 There are questions, numerous and important.\u00a0 And there is the one haunting question, too, why?<\/p>\n

We do not know why these things happen. We hurt, and grieve.\u00a0 In the bones.\u00a0 At the deeper levels, we just do not know, and for an academic <\/em>community committed to knowing, and knowing more, and more, this means wandering in a serious wilderness.\u00a0 Give us an equation to solve.\u00a0 Show us a biography that needs writing.\u00a0 Provide us with an experiment.\u00a0 Happily we would organize a committee, or develop a proposal, or phone a list of donors.\u00a0 But loss, unexpected and unfair, is tragic.\u00a0 The tragic sense of life, el sentimiento trajico de la vida, <\/em>takes us out into wilderness, where we learn, with Jesus, to resist.\u00a0 Faith is resistance. Faith is the power to withstand what we cannot understand.<\/p>\n

We are in worship this morning to attest to something.\u00a0 Faith is the power to withstand what we cannot understand.\u00a0 Worship is the practice of faith by which we learn to withstand what we cannot understand.\u00a0 God is the presence, force, truth, and love Who alone deserves worship, and worship is the practice of the faith by which we learn to withstand what we cannot understand.\u00a0 Worship prepares us to resist.\u00a0 So we see Jesus again in the wilderness.\u00a0 To resist all that makes human life inhuman.\u00a0 So here you are, come lent, come Sunday, come 11am, today again to walk in the wild, in the wilderness.<\/p>\n

The Marsh Lenten Sermon Series<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Our Lenten Series, beginning today, will engage in conversation with St. John of the Cross.\u00a0 From 2007-2016, Lent by Lent, we identified a theological conversation partner for the Lenten sermons, broadly speaking, out of the Calvinist tradition.\u00a0 In this decade, we turn to the Catholic tradition.\u00a0\u00a0 With Calvin we encountered the chief resource for others we engaged over ten years\u2014voices <\/em>like those of Jonathan Edwards (2015), Paul of Tarsus (2014), Marilyn Robinson (2013), Jacques Ellul (2012), Dietrich Bonhoeffer (a Lutheran cousin, (2011), Karl Barth (2010), and Gabriel Vahanian (2007), and themes<\/em> like Atonement (2009) and Decision (2008).\u00a0 In this decade, beginning with Lent 2017, the Marsh pulpit, a traditionally Methodist one, turns left, not right, toward Rome not Geneva, and we will preach with, and learn from the Roman Catholic tradition, so important in the last 200 years in New England, and some of its great divines including Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Ignatius of Loyola, Erasmus, Hans Kung, Karl Rahner, and others, one per year.\u00a0 Perhaps you will suggest a name or two, not from Geneva, but from Rome?\u00a0 For those who recall, even if dimly, the vigor and excitement of Vatican II, there may well be other names to add to the list.\u00a0 We began with Henri Nouwen in 2017, and continued with Thomas Merton in 2018.\u00a0 We turn this Lent to St. John of the Cross.\u00a0 You may remember how much Merton loved St. John of the Cross, from last year.\u00a0 If not, as we start, listen to Merton on Lent:<\/p>\n

Merton<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cAsh Wednesday is for people who know that it means for their soul to be logged with these icy waters: all of us are such people, if only we can realize it. \u00a0There is confidence everywhere in Ash Wednesday, yet that does not mean unmixed and untroubled security. \u00a0The confidence of the Christian is always a confidence despite darkness and risk, in the presence of peril, with every evidence of possible disaster\u2026\u00a0 Once again, Lent is not just a time for squaring conscious saccounts: but\u00a0for realizing what we had perhaps not seen before. \u00a0The light of Lent is given us to help us with this realization.\u00a0 Nevertheless, the liturgy of Ash Wednesday is not focused on the sinfulness of the penitent but on the mercy of God. \u00a0The question of sinfulness is raised precisely because this is a day of mercy, and the just do not need a savior.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Thomas Merton<\/em>
\nSan Juan de la Cruz<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Let us then start our 2019 lenten Marsh Chapel tour of a part of antiquity.<\/p>\n

St. John of the Cross was born in Old Castile,\u00a0 Spain, in 1542, and is one of the great Catholic, great Christian, great religious mystics.\u00a0 He came from a troubled, poor family of weavers, with perhaps some Jewish ancestry.\u00a0 Out of desperate poverty, his single mother placed him in an orphanage.\u00a0 He later studied in Salamanca, and was known there for long mid night prayers, endless silence, fasting, and self-mortification and solitude. In 1567 he was ordained priest, and went home by custom to celebrate his first mass in Medina, and there had his life reformed in an unexpected encounter with Theresa of Avila, who signed him up and signed him on to help her develop her reformed, descalced (that is, shoe-less), primitive rule new Carmelite order.<\/p>\n

\u2018Carmel\u2019 in Hebrew means garden, and the Scriptural reference of course is to 1 Kings and Elijah, on Mt. Carmel.\u00a0 John adored the Bible.\u00a0 Much of his young adulthood was consumed in spiritual direction and the hearing of confessions among the nuns (here nuns not nones), the religious committed to Santa Theresa de Avila, and to the endless ecclesiastical intrigues, contentions, and outright feuds involved in running, or starting, or reforming anything religious, including a religious order.\u00a0 Such a mirror from the past has been spiritually helpful, this winter, as many of us face a winter of denominational discontents.\u00a0 St. John was a man, like Zaccheus of old, of small stature, under 5 feet in height.<\/p>\n

A most dramatic event in his younger adulthood came as a consequence of these administrative disputations, when he was arrested and then imprisoned in the Alcazar, the castle, in Toledo.\u00a0 There he was rudely treated, nearly starved, and after nine months escaped, scaling down the walls of the castle just above the river Tagus.\u00a0 It makes a dramatic narrative, and ends with his reception, his protection by and hiding out with the Carmelite nuns again.\u00a0 Now St. John is known, today, if he is at all, today, by single phrase, \u2018the dark night of the soul\u2019, \u2018the dark night of the soul\u2019.\u00a0 Unfair of course it is to anyone to remember them by one phrase.\u00a0 Yet John of the Cross is so recalled.\u00a0 He is our spelunking guide, our patrol leader through the caves of darkness, the hours, especially wee morning hours, of despair, the wilderness, the wilderness, the wilderness, the wilderness, which our Lord, sursum corda, endured, tamed and blessed, see Luke 4.\u00a0 Think of John in the dark, nine months, in the Toledo castle.\u00a0 Think of him in escape, on a moonless night.\u00a0 Think of him, stumbling through the penumbruos streets, lurking in the vestibule of the nunnery for safety.\u00a0 Then think of him translating that pedestrian dark night into the poetic dark night of the soul.<\/p>\n

In his beatification in the 17th<\/sup> century, about 40 years after his death, it was remembered that he heard, in his prison despair, in Toledo, the voice of a young man singing a simple love song, Muerome de amores, Carillo.\u00a0 ?Que Hare?\u2014que te mueras, alaide.\u00a0 <\/em>\u2018I am dying of love, dearest.\u00a0 What shall I do?\u00a0 Die\u2019.\u00a0 Of a sudden, somehow, in the heart of darkness, San Juan de la Cruz was transported into ecstacy, the song of love becoming the song of death, and life.\u00a0 The simple voice of a love poem gave the heart of his mystical encounter, transported of course to the love of God.\u00a0 This becomes his poetic, spiritual, prayerful, mystical pattern.<\/p>\n

Is this not the Lenten gospel, for you?\u00a0 Your wilderness, your wandering, your wasteland\u2014see, hear\u2014is the landscape of love, the landscape of longing for love, love personal, love human, love spiritual, love divine all loves excelling.\u00a0 Quien no sabe de penas no sabe cosas buenas.\u00a0 Quien no sabe de penas no sabe cosas buenas.\u00a0 <\/em>\u2018Whoever does not know hurt does not know good things either\u2019. (San Juan de la Cruz).<\/p>\n

This lent we shall see by the dark light, the dark night, the dark night of the soul.<\/p>\n

While life\u2019s dark maze I tread<\/em><\/p>\n

And griefs around me spread<\/em><\/p>\n

Be thou my guide<\/em><\/p>\n

Bid darkness turn to day<\/em><\/p>\n

Wipe sorrow\u2019s tears away<\/em><\/p>\n

Nor let me ever stray<\/em><\/p>\n

From thee aside<\/em><\/p>\n

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Click here to listen to the entire service Luke 4: 1-13 Click here to listen to the sermon\u00a0only Frontispiece Five days ago here at Marsh Chapel about 1,000 students and others presented themselves for ashes, Ash Wednesday.\u00a0 Our hard working Marsh Chaplains and team served 430 or so.\u00a0 The Chapel also hosted three Catholic services […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2679,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[42,22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2154"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2679"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2154"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2218,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2154\/revisions\/2218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}