Of Hellscapes and Healing

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on Trinity Sunday by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.

In a recent column for The Atlantic, crossword editor Caleb Madison drew my attention to a word that seems to be on everyone’s lips these days: “hellscape.” The earliest usage Madison could track down was in a poem published in the 1918 edition of the San Francisco newspaper The Argonaut, by Lieutenant G.F. Grogan to describe the horrors of trench warfare. A couple decades later, Madison notes, the word returns to describe the paintings of Jan van Eyck and Hieronymous Bosch, and to grope towards language for the dizzying unsayableness World War II and the Vietnam War. If you’ve been paying attention–and even if you’ve been trying to not pay attention–these past weeks and months, “hellscape” is about the only word you can use to describe a world that has erupted in racist violence in Buffalo, the slaughter of innocents in Uvalde, TX, subsequent mass shootings, the worst drought in 1200 years in California… and, oh yeah, a Global Pandemic. “Hellscape” seems an apt moniker for the seeming forsakenness of this moment. A sign of the times, perhaps, that Michelle and I re-watched Coppola’s Apocalypse Now on our 21st wedding anniversary last week. Somehow a journey with Captain Willard to meet Colonel Kurtz in the Heart of Darkness seemed entirely appropriate. What kind of world is this?

Perhaps the least helpful thing–spiritually, psychologically, theologically–would be, in the face of such unmitigated horror, to embark upon a cold-blooded exposition of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity–how it is that Christians, in Nicholas Lash’s words, believe, “three ways in one God.” But remember the Trinity is not just some abstract theological proposition delivered from on high. It’s the result of prayerful communal reflection upon the life of Jesus by faithful monotheistic Jews who knew that to worship anything but the living God was idolatry. Nevertheless, they found themselves moved, drawn, compelled to worship God in the person and work of Jesus and experienced the bewildering and astonishing sanctifying work of the boundary-crossing spirit in their community. What we now call the doctrine of the Trinity is the result of the conversation that emerged from the community’s encounter with God in God’s transcendence, the community’s encounter with God incarnate in the person of Jesus, and the community’s encounter with God present and active in the continued sanctifying action of the Holy Spirit as One God.

In his book Fruits and Gifts of the Spirit, the Trappist monk and founder of the Centering Prayer movement Thomas Keating, writes,

The fundamental theological principle of the spiritual journey is the Divine Indwelling. The Trinity is present within us as the source of our being at every level. Each level of our being–from the most physical to the most spiritual–is sustained by the divine presence…. The Divine Indwelling of the Holy Trinity is a truth of faith that is easily forgotten or avoided. Yet it is one on which a radical personal conversion depends.

The Divine Indwelling–that God has made God’s home among mortals, that God’s love has been poured into our hearts free, unmerited, unearned, and undeserved by the Holy Spirit–is no prophylactic against the difficulties of this present time. Faith is not a means of escape from suffering, but a way of holding the chances and changes of this life in such a way that what seems lost, hopeless, all too eli eli lama sabachthani while the world casts lots and hurls its scornful curses, is somehow navigable, workable, grace-soaked. There's a way where previously there was no way. Bread in the desert. Surprised passage through neck-high waters. Refreshment in a dry well with no need for a bucket. A healing pool right here, stirring with the spirit’s healing love, in the midst of our paralyzed, numb, stuckness. “Do you want to be made well?”

I remember when I first started praying the Daily Office it took a couple months of singing Canticle 13 before I got curious about the context of the Song of the Three Young Men. At first blush, it sounds to cynical, world-weary 21st century ears like people performing slavish obeisance to a rather tiresomely patriarchal Father-figure God sitting on, you guessed it, a throne. Until, that is, you recognize just who these three young men actually are. These are the three fellows–Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego–who refuse to Nebuchadrezzar’s command to worship an idol and are bound and tossed into a fiery furnace for their defiance. The story is gruesome and graphic–”Now the king’s servants who threw them in did not cease feeding the furnace fires with naphtha, pitch, tow, and brush. And the flame streamed out above the furnace forty-nine cubits.”

If you consult your cubits to feet calculator (the wonder of the internet allows for such things) you’ll find that the flames rose to about 75 feet. The blaze rages with such intensity that even people on the outside of the furnace got burned. What we would call euphemistically “collateral damage.” But the story continues,  “But the angel of the Lord came down into the furnace to be with Azari′ah and his companions, and drove the fiery flame out of the furnace, and made the midst of the furnace like a moist whistling wind, so that the fire did not touch them at all or hurt or trouble them.” A moist whistling wind in the midst of a naphtha, pitch, tow, and brush conflagration. Cool and moist as in the beginning of creation. Cool and moist as in the Garden where a forsaken Mary encounters her Risen Lord whom she mistakes for the gardener. 

King Nebuchadnezzar is first perplexed, and then enraged, exclaiming to his counselors, “Was it not three men we threw into the fire?” “True, O king.” “But I see four men unbound, walking in the middle of the fire, and they are not hurt; and the fourth has the appearance of a god.” It’s from the depths of that furnace that our Canticle emerges. Cool, moist, windy praise from the midst of flames. A fourth, unbound and walking, with the appearance of a God. A literal hellscape suddenly navigable. There, even there, the peace and freedom, the unshakable security of having nowhere to lay one’s head, voiced as praise. Glory to you. Glory to you. Glory to you.

See, Trinity Sunday, and the doctrine of the Divine Indwelling, remind us that God is always with us, available, standing at the door and knocking, regardless of our circumstances. In good times and in bad. In the Heart of Darkness and on the shimmering mountaintop. In the most extraordinary of circumstances and poking its gracious, interrupting, nose into the midst of what we often dismiss as the mundane reality of daily life. We tend to think that we have to acquire an experience of God in the same way we acquire everything else in our lives–by striving, by effort, by accumulating knowledge and ideas, by doing it well–or if you’re me perfectly while keeping everyone happy at the same time. We’re so used to thinking that happiness is outside ourselves, so used to assuming we’re empty and need to be filled, that it never occurs to us that the peace of God has been here–in the depths of the heart–all along just waiting to be recognized, embraced,  and enjoyed. Our healing, renewal, and transfiguration, our journey into ever deeper putting on the mind of Christ is just a pause away.

There’s an old story that points us to the wrong-headedness of this whole outward pursuit. After God creates humankind, God calls an angel and asks, “I’ve finished except for one thing: the mystery of life. Where shall you hide it?” “How’s about outer space?” “No,” God replies, “Hubble Telescope.” “How ‘bout on the moon?” “Nope. Neil Armstrong” “At the bottom of the ocean?” “Naw. Jacques Cousteau. I know. I’ll hide it where they’ll never think to look–within them! They’ll never look there!”

And why don’t we think to look there? Because we assume deficiency and lack amd existential loneliness. We assume God is an object “out there” we need to acquire. Absent the awareness that the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, we run off in search of substitute forms of happiness that never quite satisfy. We search outwardly–in substances, relationships, supposedly more ideal circumstances, in strategies of power, control, and violence–while the peace and happiness we already are goes unacknowledged. 

If we as individuals, as a community, as a species, lived in awareness and appreciation of the reality of the Divine Indwelling in ourselves, others, and God’s creation, it would be a markedly different world. People who know themselves to be temples of the Holy Spirit don’t need much stuff. The energy they previously expended on acquiring something to complete them is now freed up to be the love they already are for others. People who live as expressions of the Divine Indwelling don’t walk into grocery stores with assault rifles. They walk gently on the earth.They uphold the dignity of every human being. They witness against everything that is not the shape love takes when it comes into the world as beloved community. 

And all it takes is the willingness to drop all efforts to gain and grasp and earn and do, and simply be with God in heart. To let God do God ‘s healing work in you. Thoughts come and go. That’s fine. Let them come and go. Rest in, surrender to, the love that is who you are. Even in this furnace-like hellscape there’s a moist whistling wind refreshing us, renewing us, breathing an unshakeable and indestructible peace. Know this peace. Be this peace. And breath this same moist whistling windy peace out on others, all others, without exception.