Finding my Glasses on my Face: At the Corner of Fourth and Walmart, Suffering Speaks.

Silent suffering--either prayerful or dissociated (or both, in their season)--is the core of Christ's wisdom teaching. We've said it previously--only by silence can you empathize with Christ's silence, only in prayer can you know Christ's prayer. But the stakes get higher, even, than that: only in suffering itself does the Fatherhood of God become believable. This was what the Centurion witnessed at the foot of the Cross when, on the basis of Christ's passion alone he said "truly this man was God's son." It's not secret wisdom accessible to a privileged few, not accomplished by work.  Experience is the key of knowledge.  Suffering imprisons us all, in measures unique to each of us, but the power of the keys is in our own hands. [bxA]

What begins on the Mount of the Transfiguration was finished on Golgatha, and it ascends and descends on the Son of Man.  If you're reading this, you might be familiar with Thomas Merton's "Fourth and Walnut" epiphany.  At that particular corner in Louisville, Kentucky, the monk experienced an opening of the mind.  It made him see those around him differently.  "There is," he wrote, "no way of telling people that they are all walking around, shining like the sun."  This is high-end monastic teaching--keep it in mind.  We'll return to it later.

Someone once said "We tell our kids to love Jesus, but we don't teach them to make Jesus' journey."  The fact is, deification has long been a roadmap for "change of mind and heart" by which our "triune brains" come to echo and embody "God in three persons."  To demonstrate this, focusing on the new testament particularly, let's look at the way Christ is presented.

Christ is a prayer event.  Paul's blinding realization said "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting," and it attached the name "Christ" to the phenomenon of contemplation.  When the name "apostle" detached from the "beginning to end following of Christ," when "Christ as altered state of consciousness" became an accepted part of orthodoxy, it made prayer a starting point for all apostolic teaching.  As the saying goes "lex orandi, lex credendi."

Christ is a concentration event. We go from many concerns to one.  The apostles wanted to build three tents, but after the cloud and the fear, they were left with Christ alone.  The adulterous woman committed many sins, but once none were left to condemn her, Christ alone remained.  Martha was worried about many things, but there was need of only one.  

Christ is an awareness event: We, by becoming Christ, become all the paradoxes: everything and nothing, causeless cause, becoming a true self by giving up a false one.  Christ is the one whose second touch allows us to look intently at the shadow side of all sorts of opposites, the one who added only persecutions to apostolic recompense.  Desperate, overloaded people, rightly or wrongly, place blame: overcome by anxiety, blinded by supposedly divine mandate, they vent attachment, craving and ego by murdering prophets and messiahs alike.  When God himself incarnates in such a scapegoat, requiring students to become like the teacher is terrible and difficult curriculum. 

Christ is an acceptance event: "Always carrying in the body the death of Christ, so that the life of Christ may be made known in our mortal bodies also" The sacraments already attune us to both pain and bliss, aversion and attraction. We learn when to set our face like flint, and when to say "into your hands I commend my spirit."  In the end, all sensation is equally revelatory: meanwhile, Christ is the new name for equanimity.

Christ is an identity event: He is before all else that is, the first born of the dead.  Clothed and in his right mind, Legion discovered his true identity in Christ's presence.  This happens only on the other side of unknowing, when the voices are silenced that say "I know who you are, the holy one of God" and we hear ourselves say, instead, "I believe, help my unbelief."  In terms of identity, what Paul said is true. "I live, but not I, Christ lives in me." Jesus said, "before Abraham was, I am."  The Teacher is, indeed, the oneness who comes before all others, ourselves especially.

Christ is a motivational event: he is why we continue to interact with objects of desire after we've ceased wanting them. He is why "working for wages we've ceased to care about" matters. Because they make life with the PEOPLE we care about possible. One side of things is: there are wonderful people out there--wives, brothers, friends--who are worth suffering for.  The other side of things is: people's shadow will emerge in desperate situations.  You and I may well become scapegoats, mirrors to reflect their emerging attachments and to purify our own.  The energy for "one step at a time" may escape us, but that is precisely when "the Christ within" takes over.  We need only move the body. 

Whether Christ shines like the sun at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, I do not know: God knows.  But I know a man in Christ who experienced him at "Fourth and Walmart."  After several hours of chanting "Jesus, mercy" under his breath, he travelled to the massive grocery chain to buy a simple supper for himself and his wife.  Standing in line at the self check out, body still humming with vibrations of the Jesus prayer, this man heard "You are seeing people, but they look like trees.  You are the one who needs two touches from Jesus.  You don't get to see people until you see their suffering."  There is no way of telling yourself that you're just one of many anonymous assholes struggling to afford groceries and barely holding it together emotionally.  Some truths cannot be accepted with the mind alone, but only once they've vibrated like prayer through nervous systems at loose ends with themselves.

Listen, it comes down to this.  People are sinful because they're desperate and trapped--because even the bodies they're born in are decaying; because even when hustle is endless, basic survival needs may go unsufficed.  We might make light of it and say "we find ourselves in a pickle" but that's only to avoid weeping.  For all flesh that lives on the face of the earth, stress finds a release valve in sinful condemnation.  I am not exempt, you are not exempt from that: others may condemn us this week, but we'll forget ourselves and, by next Tuesday, be calling for their crucifixion in turn.  

Each of us capable of misplacing our glasses, while they sit on the bridge of our own nose.  So perhaps it's also true that "No one can say 'truly this was God's son' who has yet to find the lance that pierced Christ's side in their own hand." Egos can bear neither the burden of being a scapegoat nor the honest view of their own blame placing.  But there is one within whom we do not know--our own humble self, the Christ--and he has already given his back to what we would back away from.  Jesus, mercy: only in the name of Christ can any of us stand and walk.