Becoming Little

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

I don’t know how many of you remember when Charlie Sheen was in the news a decade or so ago. He gave a series of unhinged and largely incoherent interviews while his life, his relationships, and his hit sit-com (“Two and a Half Men”) were coming apart in which he proudly proclaimed that he was “winning.” Surrounded by adult film stars and other hangers-on he stood astride the balcony of his Hollywood mansion telling everyone he was a powerful “Warlock,” an “Adonis,” who drank “tiger’s blood.” The tabloids loved it, of course, and it made for great ratings on the celebrity gossip t.v. shows. But it was heart-breakingly painful to watch someone come apart so completely and so publicly all the while proclaiming that he was “winning.” If that’s “winning,” I’ll take losing every time and twice on Sunday.

Interestingly, ten years later, Sheen would describe this tumultuous time in his life not just as a “meltdown,” but also as a “meltforward,” and “meltsomewhere.” It reminded me of my priest friend Mary who likes to say that in the spiritual life a breakdown is often a breakup. Sometimes, if we have the patience and humility to look, to get curious and inquire into these apparent failures, these times of chaos and breakdown, these times where our weakness and powerlessness and ability to control the world come to the fore, we might just get a glimpse of the power of God made perfect in human weakness.

Thomas Keating, in his exploration of the spirituality of the twelve steps, which he called the most profound spiritual movement of the 20th century, has this to say about the gift of powerlessness—

To be powerless means to be absolutely helpless. In other words, you can’t do anything under your own steam, will power, or any amount of strategy. You’re hooked, overwhelmed, wiped out. This, oddly enough, is the best disposition for beginning the spiritual journey. Why is that? Because the deeper one’s awareness of one’s powerlessness and the more desperate, the more willing one is to reach out.

Sometimes it takes the complete collapse of all the ways we have tried  by our efforts, our will, our strategies for getting what we innocently think will make us happy, for us to discover that we are created by love, in love, and for love, and that that freely given love is always available when we stop pronouncing ourselves Sheen-style winners and embrace our lost coin/lost sheep life in desperate need of God’s saving grace.

Paul, of course, before his Damascus Road experience, was a prototypical “winner.” You remember that list in his Letter to the Philippians–

If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.

He’d ticked every box. His spiritual bona fides were impeccable and  firmly established. And yet, Paul’s life was single-mindedly dedicated to persecuting God in the name of loving God–handing out stones and checking cloaks at the stoning of Stephen. All those apparent gains, Paul came to see, were in fact losses, hindrances, things that got in the way of him knowing Christ Jesus as his Lord. Only when Paul was blinded–vulnerable, helpless, unable to even feed himself, dependent on the spirit-prompted ministrations of the stranger Ananias–did he open to a power greater than himself and find himself rooted and grounded in the birthless, deathless, love of God. An amazing shift takes place in Paul’s consciousness–from being a blameless, righteous, “winner” to being the foremost of all sinners–a blasphemer, a persecutor, a man of violence touched by the overflowing grace and mercy of Christ Jesus and used to spread the Good News. Paul with those winner scales fallen from his eyes was, in short, a “loser!” A lost coin. A lost sheep.

There’s talk in addiction counseling circles sometimes of “raising rock bottom.” Instead of waiting for the addict to hit “rock bottom,” counselors intervene earlier in the cycle and encourage the person to admit that they are powerless over their addiction and turn their will over to God. It seems to me that the spiritual life aims at the same thing. It raises rock bottom so that we come to know the toxicity of our “winning ways” (for ourselves and others) and learn to cultivate the pliable disposition Jesus speaks of in the first beatitude of the Sermon on the Mount: blessed are the poor in spirit. The poor in spirit are those who’ve left their bankrupt winning ways with their efforts at the center of everything behind, and opened to, consented to, God’s presence and action in their life. Not my winning will, but your will—which to my winning ways looks like losing—be done.

The parables of the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin immediately precede the parable of the Prodigal Son. They are trying to habituate us to the upside-down world of the Gospel where loss is gain, weakness is power, and barrenness the necessary precondition to fruitfulness beyond human ken. One thing these parables are not about, is repentance as some kind of human work–something we have to do in order for God to deign to love us. As Robert Capon writes, 

These parables of lostness… are emphatically not stories designed to convince is that if we will wind ourselves up to some acceptable level of moral and/or spiritual improvement, God will then forgive us; rather they are parables of about God’s determination to move before we do–in short to make lostness and death the only tickets we need to the Supper of the Lamb.

I don’t know about you, but Paul’s Pharisaical perfection, his impeccable bloodline pedigree, his meticulous efforts, are way out of my league. Not only do I not have the energy to do all that anymore, but even if I did I’m confident I wouldn’t be able to do any of it correctly. It is abundantly clear that there is simply no way for me, by my own efforts, to earn my way to holiness. And thanks be to God for the easy yoke, the light burden of surrendering to love and letting God do in me what God has been doing all along.

Sometime in the no last six months–I think when Dave was dying and we were all recovering from another bout of Covid–a parishioner left a shrink-wrapped icon of St. Thérèse of Liseux on my desk. She’s been looking at me for a while now. Throughout the day I  find myself held in the terrifying child-like gaze of the LIttle Flower. If I could be said to have ever had a spiritual experience, it came during a silent retreat twenty-some-odd years ago where Thérèse’s phrase–“everything is a grace” wouldn’t let me go. At the beginning of the retreat I was grumpy. Restless. Distracted. Achy from the endless rounds of seated silent prayer that seemed an utter waste of time. Bored and mildly outraged at my work assignment–sanding the wooden steps of the deck in hundred degree heat with a scrap of flimsy sandpaper. And the food was vegetarian–which left me perpetually hungry and, yes, quite gassy. 

But into that whole situation came the Little Flower’s saying: “Everything is a grace.” “Yeah, right. Easy for you to say, Thérèse!” I muttered to myself (did I mention that I was muttering to myself this whole time?) Except it wasn’t easy for Thérèse to say. The “little way” of St. Thérèse was proclaimed and dictated to her sister Carmelites while in the throes of a slow and painful death from tuberculosis at the tender age of 24. So I decided just to allow for the possibility that “everything is a grace,” might have something to show me. So I just gave up. Let the mystics have their stinking union with God! I became a loser instead of trying to make the retreat another entry in the “win” column, and made peace with the reality that the whole thing was a great big loss according to my measure of things. And suffice it to say that after that everything changed. The rest of the week flew by. Where prayer was a grinding effort before, it was now a joyful delight of Jesus praying me. I forgot how long I’d been at the retreat or when it was set to end. I started to actually enjoy the meticulous simplicity of  my work of sanding, and discovered that while vegetarian pales next to a good rib-eye with a fully-loaded baked potato (extra bacon), it ain’t half bad.

Thérèse of Liseux’s “little way” is the polar opposite of heroic spiritual athleticism and perfectionism that we recognize in the pre-Damascus Road Paul. Thérèse’s “little way” is the way of the empty hand, the empty hand ready to receive God’s loving mercy. It makes its home in lostness, and renounces any attempts to self-improve one’s way to holiness. For Thérèse, sanctification is God’s work in us, and it’s our joy to simply remain little, last, lost, and least and consent to that loving, healing work in us–”being receptive, and completely, widely open to the saving, caring and nurturing love of God’s maternal heart.” 

When she first entered the convent, Thérèse wanted to be a saint, or a martyr–preferably both at once! She writes, “I always wanted to be a saint, but alas! I’ve always noticed, whenever I compared myself with the saints, that between them and me there is the same difference that exists between a mountain whose summit is lost in the clouds and an obscure grain of sand.” But with her discovery of the “little way,” Thérèse realized she couldn’t save herself and didn’t have to. She came to accept being saved and sanctified and surrendered to herself with absolute trust to the God who offers each of us God’s gratuitous, overflowing love.

The Pharisees’ only mistake, my only mistake, Thérèse’s only mistake when she first entered Carmel was to think that holiness springs from our own effort. Presuming oneself a winner, “found” and therefore not in need of God’s saving grace is all that keeps us on the outside of the Banquet looking in and harrumphing about the grain of sand riff-raff inside having a joyful time. Maybe, just maybe, I can take that icon of Thérèse out of its shrink wrap. Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to get lost and there in our littleness be found. Maybe, just maybe, we can now hear Thérèse’s words: “I don’t need to grow up; on the contrary I must remain little and become ever more so!”