This is the third article in the series “Spiritual Challenges.” In the first article, “Lessons From a Bowl of Jello,” I presented my opinion that one cause of the turmoil after Vatican II is that we had not let ourselves be deeply healed and “converted from good to best.” In the second article, “The Justifying Power of Mercy,” I showed that Jesus, in the sacrament of reconciliation, offers us the total healing of divinization.
In this article, I bring us face to face with the question: Do we also want to be transformed? Do we want to let ourselves be healed?
Years ago, I heard a conference by a scripture scholar about the man at the pool of Beth-zatha.[1] This is the account in the Gospel of John of a man who had been sick for thirty-eight years, waiting among a multitude of other sufferers for the chance to be healed. All I remember of the conference was that, when Jesus came up to this man and asked him, “Do you want to be made well?” the man did not directly answer the question. Instead, he gave an explanation of why that had never happened, why he had never been healed. This anomaly stuck in my mind.
When one stops to think of it, Jesus’s question is an odd one to ask anyone who is sick. I spoke with a hospital chaplain, and he said he would never ask such a question to someone who is suffering. We instinctively assume that anyone who is sick or suffering does want to get well, and we try to encourage them to believe that this will happen. A positive attitude is important in any effort toward recovery.
This is easily understood when a person who has enjoyed good health suddenly falls sick or has a serious accident. The memory of their good health is still vibrant. They know that being healthy is normal and that their present condition of debility and pain is not what they really are meant to live. The desire to regain their health is imperative.
But what about someone who has never known good health, or who has been sick for so long that the memory of it has faded? I heard about a girl who was born blind but who, as a teenager, had an operation and suddenly gained her sight. It sounds like a wonderful experience, but for her it was a terrible shock. She had always lived in darkness and had never known colors. Now, every time she opened her eyes, colors assaulted and invaded her! It was traumatic! She never had the chance that a baby has for her eyes gradually to come to focus. For her, seeing was a physical attack. Her parents of course were delighted and offered to have her bedroom repainted any color she wanted. She said she wanted the walls to be painted black, and they were horrified, so they compromised on dark green. For her, black was a safe and familiar color. Other colors pulled her into an unknown world.
Being healed makes a difference in the way we live, especially if we have been sick our whole life. Being healed will demand changes in how I respond to things, to people, to events. I will need to take responsibility in areas where I could not do so before. Being healed is far more than just losing my weaknesses. It is being invested with strengths I know nothing about because I have never had them. Being healed can be frightening!
This is true not only on the physical plane, but also on the moral and spiritual planes. “O Lord, make me chaste, but not yet!” prayed Augustine.[2] He knew that living a virtuous life would make demands on him, demands that he approved intellectually, but that he realized that he was not ready to undertake. Our sins and weaknesses are familiar to us, and shedding them can be a daunting invitation, no matter how much we believe that holiness is of value.
C.S. Lewis illustrates this vividly in The Great Divorce. This book presents the imaginary visit of various spirits of the dead (Lewis describes them as “Ghosts”) from a dreary, grey city up to the very edge of heaven. There, each Ghost is met by a citizen of heaven, often a relative or friend, who explains where they are and urges them to undertake the trek to the glorious mountains visible in the far distance. They are free to choose to go, or to return to the dreariness below.
One of the Ghosts has just turned back to return to hell, when he is accosted by an Angel who asks him if he is leaving so soon. The Ghost, who carries a little lizard on his shoulder, explains that he understands that the lizard is out of place up there and that he cannot stay in that beautiful place as long as it is with him. The lizard is continually whispering in his ear, and the Angel asks the Ghost if he would like him to silence it. The Ghost eagerly accepts, but then steps back when the Angel, a being of light and fire, makes it clear that the only way to silence the lizard is to kill it. The Ghost refuses that solution and presents, one after another, various other solutions that would allow him to keep the lizard. Each of these solutions is shown to be impossible there on the edge of heaven. There is no place there for the lizard. The Angel must kill it.
At this point the lizard speaks more loudly, warning the Ghost against the Angel. “’Be careful,’ it said. ‘He can do what he says. He can kill me. One fatal word from you and he will! Then you’ll be without me for ever and ever. It’s not natural. How could you live? You’d only be a sort of ghost, not a real man as you are now. He doesn’t understand. He’s only a cold, bloodless, abstract thing. It may be natural for him, but it isn’t for us. Yes, yes, I know that there are no real pleasures now, only dreams. But aren’t they better than nothing? And I’ll be so good. I admit I’ve sometimes gone too far in the past, but I promise I won’t do it again. I’ll give you nothing but really nice dreams – all sweet and fresh and almost innocent. You might say, quite innocent.’”[3]
Thus do our sins beguile us. They persuade us that they are part of us, what we naturally are, in fact, what we truly are. They try to convince us that we will be irretrievably diminished if we no longer commit them. We will be less than ourselves. They fill our vision with the memories of what we have enjoyed under their influence, and these memories, together with the fears of future emptiness, blind us to the glimpse of what we are truly meant to be in God’s sight.
This subtle – and at times, not so subtle – persuasion can be very difficult to resist. For some of us, only a greater suffering than what we presently experience can drive us to change, can make hope a goad to action. Matt Talbot was an alcoholic by the time he was 16. He spent all the money he could get from working and even by theft to buy himself a drink. He sponged on his friends for drinks. The turning point came when he was 28 and found that he had no money for a drink, no job to buy one, and neither his friends nor the local taverns would give him a single drink. At that moment, he could not get any lower. He had nowhere else to go but upward with the power of grace. He is now Venerable Matt Talbot and his cause for beatification and canonization is moving forward as many people snared in various addictions find hope and support in him.
It is a pity that sometimes God has to let us sink to the bottom before we accept to be lifted up. There is a saying attributed to St. Bernard of Clairvaux, “There are more who convert from evil to good, than there are who convert from good to best.” Mediocrity is a spiritual quagmire. Like the Ghost in Lewis’s story, we can find many reasons to remain as we are: not bad enough for damnation – we don’t want that – but not good enough for holiness.
Pope Francis has said much about gossip, and this is an excellent example of the kind of “little” sin that we can so easily excuse in ourselves. Yet gossip, so apparently innocent, can quickly lead to detraction and slander: declaring to others someone’s real or imaginary faults. This is especially dangerous to spiritual persons who are zealous about religion. One spiritual author writing to a religious said bluntly: “I can only say of this detraction born of zeal that, on deliberate consideration, I would rather see you break your vow of chastity than become a backbiter under such a pretext, for you would at once repent and be conscious of your guilt in the former case but in the latter you would never amend or be aware of it. The name of zeal that you would give it would so blind you that ‘seeing, you would not see, and hearing, you would not understand’.”[4]
Unfortunately, such zeal is all too obvious in the Church today. It is a great pity, for it keeps those who hold onto it from “converting from good to best.” What this “best” can be we can only dimly glimpse in a mirror, but C. S. Lewis gives us a slight illustration in his book. Of all the Ghosts we meet there on the outskirts of heaven, all but one turn back to the dreariness of hell. Like Matt Talbot, the Ghost with the lizard realized that “It would be better to be dead than to live with this creature” and he gives the Angel permission to kill it. “’Damn and blast you! Go on, can’t you? Get it over. Do what you like,’ bellowed the Ghost; but ended, whimpering, ‘God help me. God help me.”’[5]
The Angel took the lizard, twisted and broke it and threw the pieces on the ground. The Ghost thought he, too, had died, but then, like fire licking and then engulfing a piece of paper, he became real, solid and shiningly glorious. The lizard changed into a magnificent stallion, vibrantly alive! The former Ghost, now truly a man, kissed the feet of the Angel, leaped on the stallion, and the two of them were soon lost from sight as they headed toward the towering mountains of heaven.
Matt Talbot faced the reality that his dependance on alcohol ruled his life. He accepted to be healed and to have that dependance transformed into the dependance on God’s grace. Like the Ghost in Lewis book, he found that what had kept him bound in hell, now that it was handed over to grace and transformed, was the very thing to carry him to heaven.
Notes
[1] Jn, chap. 5
[2] St. Augustine, “Confessions” 8, 7
[3] C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, chap. 11
[4] Francisco de Osuna, “The Third Spiritual Alphabet,” Treatise 22
[5] The Great Divorce, idem
Sr. Gabriela of the Incarnation, O.C.D. (Sr. Gabriela Hicks) was born in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, in the Gold Rush country of California, which she remembers as heaven on earth for a child! She lived a number of years in Europe, and then entered the Discalced Carmelite Monastery in Flemington, New Jersey, where she has been a member for forty years. www.flemingtoncarmel.org.
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