Overflowing Cup

I entered the novitiate of a religious order when I was in my seventeenth year. I stayed for another twenty. The nerve of my youth I gave to a contingent set-up claiming the name of Christ. It was written in my genetic and cultural code that I would do this, a perfect storm of my own most profound senses and the particular formation that only a wounded human being who happens to be your mother can give. Life saved me. It popped the rivets of my world. It was like sitting down at a desk, and the whole thing, desk and chair, collapsing underneath you. There were no two pieces left together. The only reasonable thing was to walk away.

I then became the director of a homeless shelter in London’s East End. After that I came to America and did a Ph.D.

Where was God? I thought she was in the religious life and the priesthood, but no, not there. I looked for her among the homeless, but she moved on. I sought her in thought, and only found scratches on a desert sand. The Divine Lover is dark and mysterious. She is never missing but rarely seen. It’s like trying to catch sunlight in a cup. The moment you take it inside the sunshine’s gone. Or play the shell game with the Spirit. If you say she’s under that shell and lift it up, she’s gone!

God has disappeared from every closed system I was ever in, ecclesiastic, social service, academic. But like a deer in your back yard if you’re quiet and patient she’ll turn up. Shaking morning dewdrops from her flanks. Or a sometime walk on the beach: lo, every shell is filled with God!

But it’s not simply a matter of God being elusive, a willow-the-wisp, in some happy mystical sense. It’s that God is actively popping the seams of all the closed systems, in Christ. That’s the point. I haven’t gone on this wacky pilgrimage across the face of the world just to come up with a reheated Hinduism.

All our systems are sick with violence and Jesus is in the slow but relentless process of breaking them down, so, yes, they can be open to the infinite Spirit. A broken cup in the sunshine has a beauty all its own.

Today I think I’ll go out and find a shard of some pot or cup. It’ll be a sacrament for me.

Tony