Lying Down in the Ditch and Depending on God

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Fifth Sunday After Pentecost by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean and Rector.

As Thomas Keating–the Trappist monk and teacher of prayer–was nearing the end of his long, and fruitful life, I noticed a striking change in the tenor of his talks. Keating was Abbot of St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts as Vatican II was unfolding had a reputation as a bit of a strict task-master. A strict task-master in a monastic order whose very name–Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (OCSO)--called for strictness, discipline, and rigor. Indeed, as Abbot, Fr. Thomas was known for chasing more men out of St. Joseph’s than he admitted in! But as he advanced in years, and was spending more and more time at the monastery in Snowmass, CO where he “retired,” his favorite themes to which he returned again and again were powerlessness, poverty, and littleness. This tall, rail thin, rather imposing tough guy abbot started writing and speaking about St. Thérèse of Liseux and the way of the Little Flower.

Thérèse, you might recall, was a young French girl who got permission from Pope Leo XIII himself to enter the convent at age fifteen. She entered in 1888 and died just nine years later from tuberculosis. She was beatified in 1923, canonized in 1925, and named a Doctor of the Church by John Paul II–the youngest person ever, and only the fourth woman. What attracted Fr. Thomas to Thérèse’s “Little Way” I wonder? How did a strict, stern, regimented abbot get cracked open by a little French girl’s rather florid and somewhat overheated devotional prose? In a word: elevators.

Elevators were relatively new in Thérèse’s day, and found mostly in the homes of only the very wealthy, but they fascinated her. She writes:

We live in the age of inventions now, and the wealthy no longer have to take the trouble to climb the stairs; they take an elevator. That is what I must find, an elevator to take me straight up to Jesus, because I am too little to climb the steep stairway of perfection. So, I searched the Scripture for some hint of my desired elevator, until I came upon these words from the lips of Eternal Wisdom: “Whosoever is a little one, let him come to Me” (Prov: 9:4). I went closer to God, feeling sure I was on the right path, but as I wanted to know what He would do to a “little one,” I continued my search. This is what I found: “You shall be carried at the breasts and upon the knees, as one whom the mother caresseth, so I will comfort you” (Is 66: 12-13). My heart had never been moved by such tender and consoling words before!

What if, I wonder, we hear the parable of the Good Samaritan not as another in a long line of exhortations to wind ourselves up and earn our salvation by good works, but as a call first of all to recognize our utter dependence on God for everything, simply everything? What if the parable is asking us to become little like Thérèse was little–dependent, reliant, child-like, left for dead in a ditch at the side of the road and in need of God’s saving grace who comes to us in the face of a cast out stranger? 

In another place, Thérèse writes of what this “little way” looks like in practice. As a Carmelite, she was in an order renowned for its staggering depth of spiritual reflection–St. John of the Cross and St. Theresa of Avila are both Doctors of the Church. St. Edith Stein was a student of Husserl and Heidegger before she entered. But Thérèse struggled to make sense of those dusty, learned tomes.

Sometimes, when I read spiritual treatises in which perfection is shown with a thousand obstacles, surrounded by a crowd of illusions, my poor little mind quickly tires. I close the learned book which is breaking my head and drying up my heart, and I take up Holy Scripture. Then all seems luminous to me; a single word uncovers for my soul infinite horizons; perfection seems simple; I see that it is enough to recognize one's nothingness and to abandon oneself, like a child, into God's arms. Leaving to great souls, to great minds, the beautiful books I cannot understand, I rejoice to be little because only children, and those who are like them, will be admitted to the heavenly banquet.

Perfection, for Thérèse, is not the successful performance of good deeds, but the work of God’s unconditional love in the soul that recognizes the paucity of own efforts, that contents itself with its own nothingness (“I can do nothing on my own,” says our Lord), that abandons itself into God’s arms. No wonder the fundamental disposition of prayer and life is a simple, surrendered, “Here I am” of general loving attentiveness to God.

Can we hear how different this is to how we normally think of our life? We live in an age and a culture that places the self and its efforts at the center of everything. We like to think of ourselves as “in control” and “in charge”--masters of our own fate and captains of our own ship. Weakness, poverty, dependence, reliance, powerlessness are–let’s face it–dirty words to the American mind. We avoid these hallmarks of Thérèse’s “Little Way” like the plague. We avoid the ditch and the recognition that we are “dead in our sins,” and like the Priest and the Levite we cross to the other side of the road. On a deeper level, this parable shows us just how allergic we are to recognizing our dependence, neediness, and littleness. The Priest and Levite, like me, and like you, are just as ditch-tossed and left for dead as the man who fell into the hands of robbers. But we don’t like seeing that, acknowledging that, and embracing that, so we look away, busy ourselves, and cross swiftly to the sunny side of the street.

But the sunny side of the street isn’t really that sunny. It’s rather like the commercial that used to run on what used to be called television where a man is working late at ESPN Sportscenter when the lights dim and go out. He gets up, goes into the basement and opens the door to a small room. There Lance Armstrong is toweling off on a stationary bicycle. “Oh, I didn’t know there was anyone here,” says Armstrong as he resumes peddling and the lights flicker back on. The sunny side of the street–life with our self, and our efforts at the center of it all–is an endless Peloton hell of constant effort, achievement. And not even Lance Armstrong (with the help of all those steroids) can do it forever. We’re used, aren’t we, to looking down our noses at the Priest and Levite and like to suppose we’re not like them. But when we see the one in the ditch as ourself—our true self that is utterly dependent on the bought and paid for healthcare, take my animal, and stay as long as you need deluge free grace of God’s unconditional love—we have to acknowledge that we’re a lot more like the Priest and the Levite a lot of the time.

We like the sunny side of the street a lot more than that shady ditch of lostness and death. But to follow Jesus means we take up his cross–that we die a death like his that we might be raised to a life like his. And I don’t think I need to tell you that the ego doesn’t like this one bit! As the late, great, Episcopal theologian Sallie McFague writes of this parable, 

We  are not being called to be perfect givers; rather, we are being told that we are to be total receivers. Instead of being the powerful ones, the ones who can give and give and give, first we must dispossess ourselves of everything that constitutes control over our lives…. We must enter into a lifelong journey of becoming radically open (“dead” to ourselves, so to speak) so that we can serve as a channel for God’s love, not our own.

All the metaphors and stories from the past few weeks–nowhere to lay your head, setting off without bag, staff, sandals, being left for dead in a ditch at the side of the road–point to this radical dependence on God for everything. Our Lance Armstrong life of frantic peddling slowly comes undone in love and we find ourselves re-sourced in the inexhaustible energy of God working through us. When we leave the sunny side of the street and lie down in the dark ditch of needy reliance we find a light shining brighter than anything we can muster on our own. An inextinguishable light that neither waxes nor wanes. That isn’t born and doesn’t die. It’s not us yet we are not separate from it. A deathless prodigal love whose only desire is to draw us to itself, to touch us, heal us, transfigure us that we might shine as bearers of that same light for others.

“My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness,” writes St. Paul to the Corinthians who didn’t like this weakness any more than we do. And this power born of powerlessness is  indeed what Fr. Thomas came to embody more and more perfectly in his later years as his physical (and indeed mental) strength began to dwindle. His imposingly tall frame began to stoop a bit. He seemed always to be cinching his belt a notch tighter and pushing his glasses up on his nose. Even in warm weather he sported a beanie to keep himself warm. And he’d wander a bit in his usually unerringly eloquent speech–sometimes following a digression that never seemed to reach its intended end: It died in a ditch. But right there, unmistakably shining forth in the midst of all that weakness, that shadiness, that ditchniess, was a power, a brightness, a gentle loving presence not of “Thomas,” but of Christ in Thomas who lived. It reminds me of Thérèse’s elevator prayer. “Thine Arms, then, O Jesus, are the lift which must raise me up even unto Heaven. To get there I need not grow. On the contrary, I must remain little, I must become still less.” 

One of my kids–I won’t say whom–was heard to say to another of the kids–”Get lost! Go die in a ditch!” That might just be the wisest thing I’ve ever heard. Out of the mouths of babes! What a Good Samaritan.