Take up your cross and follow Me ... to Starbuck's?!?

Book 1, Chapter 2

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_{“There is no moment at which god does not present himself under the guise of some suffering, some consolation or some duty.” (Page 18)}

It is essential that the believer understand the constant attention of God under which he lives. One of the most persistent images of God and his relationship to his people is that of the good shepherd keeping watch over his flock. (See John 10, Psalm 95, Matthew 9, Luke 15, John 21, for example.)

The shepherds of Palestine knew their animals sometimes for years, as the sheep from these areas were kept for their wool rather than their meat. The shepherds were the flock’s protectors, guides, feeders and shelterers. If the shepherd was away, the flock was in peril. There was never a moment when a sheep was safely independent from the care of the shepherd.

It must be the Christian’s understanding that God is constantly, compassionately present. Only then can we recognize the will of God in the trials that we endure. Joseph saw through the many insulting events in his life – the jealousy and poor treatment of his brothers, his being sold into slavery, the false accusation from Potiphar’s wife that landed him in prison for years – as the hand of God in disguise.

“As for you, you meant evil against me,” he told his brothers, “but God meant it for good.” Genesis 50:20

It is extremely difficult to say this out loud about life, and mean it.

To come to this understanding, Joseph had to realize that God had been faithfully present to him disguised as adversity. “But Yahweh was with Joseph,” the Bible says of Joseph’s time in jail. “He showed him faithful love and made him popular with the chief gaoler” (Genesis 39:21). Only through faith can one know, intuitively, that God is at work in ways that are not obvious. In Father C’s words, these disguises of the Lord come in the form of consolation, duty or suffering.

I only like one of the above: Consolation. The other two, duty and suffering, are not only hardships, but current Christian culture has all but insisted that God is definitely not present in them. Even if it is not spoken aloud, it is a common tenet that, if God is good, and I know God, then my life should be good. “Good” here is taken to mean comfortable, easy, prosperous, and disease-free with little or no tension.

During the last half of the 20^th Century, North American Christianity has come to equate faith in God with self-help. Our faith is standing in the same line as oxygen bars, health clubs, ionized air, therapeutic massage, aroma therapy and tap water purifiers. Prosperity is promised to the righteous, and suffering to those lacking faith. Trendy American theology would have us take up our cross daily and follow Jesus into a Starbuck’s.

Thus, it has become very difficult to convince the believing community that God addresses himself to us through suffering. We might believe suffering produces patience and steadfastness (from James 1, and Romans 5), but I suspect that we have looked upon this as we would maggots cleansing a wound. It is far more difficult, and far more foreign to us to find God present and speaking to us in our affliction. We are more apt to believe that we are suffering because we are not in God’s will, rather than the fact that hardship will sometimes come our way when we are smack dab in the middle of it.

Also, we do not readily associate the responsibilities of our ordinary life as being very spiritual. “Duty,” says Father C, is one of the disguises that God uses to express his will in our lives. One’s job, or chores, and all the responsibilities that come with family life and generally being a person on the planet are the things that make up duty.

It is possible for the believer to see all of these things as being remarkably unreligious, and therefore of no value in the scheme of things when it comes to the inner life and the walk with God. These secular aspects make up a great deal of life for most of us. Even among the Cistercian monks at Holy Trinity Abbey in Huntsville, Utah, their day is made up of cleaning, cooking, dusting, mending, laundry, maintenance, office work, accounting, plus what work they can do associated with their property.

Living under St. Benedict’s Rule, the monk’s day is made up of three general thrusts: Work, Study and Prayer. For “work,” read “duty.” It is also an emphasis in monastic living that each of these things is sacred of itself. The division between the sacred and the secular, which most of us have been told by our culture is a valid separation, does not exist in the mind of the monk, nor really does it exist in the mind of a believer who has caught this notion of the sacred ordinary – the reality that God is involved in our lives in every moment, and not just the expressly religious or the ecstatic ones.

_{“All that occurs within us, around us and by our means covers and hides his divine action … at every occurance we should say dominus est. ‘it is the lord.’” (Page 18, 19) (See john 21:7)}