Go and See #4

Love and Fear

Note: If you are new to this series, please see the Preface for background.

****

The rain streaks through the dark heat and splashes the clotheslines on the terrace of the monastery while I sit with Brother David beneath the overhanging roof near the stone basins that the brothers use for their laundry.

Brother David is a lean, sharp-chinned Kenyan with an infectious humor. “I can be very chatty. You will see,” he says, mimicking his hand in a talking mouth, on the first day I meet him. Tomorrow he will teach me to wash my clothes by hand, but tonight we listen to the patter of rain and talk about our faith.

I ask Brother David about his relationship with the saints.

“Like who am I on?”

“Yeah.”

He has recently developed a close relationship with St. Joseph, Jesus’s earthly father, because of Joseph’s gift for silence. We know him only through his actions in the Gospels. “I like to talk,” Brother David says, smiling. “But you learn so much more if you listen.”

A few years ago, St. Joseph helped Brother David in an unexpected way.

Usually after ten years in Missionaries of the Poor, brothers take their “final vows,” a commitment to spend the rest of their lives in the order. It’s a public declaration that cannot be revoked without a special release from Rome. But when the time came for Brother David, he balked. He delayed the decision and took temporary vows for another three years. Then a fourth year at the MOP mission in the Jamaican mountains. Still, he could not decide what to do. He returned home to Kenya, took off his habit, and considered abandoning his life as a brother.

In the depths of his agony, he prayed a month-long novena to St. Joseph, and it was only then, in the silence of those thirty days, that he received the grace he needed...

“Did you have one specific fear?” I ask Brother David, now several years removed from making his final vows.

“I couldn’t imagine being in MOP for the rest of my life, growing old like this.” He humps his spine, leans on an imaginary cane, and pretends to walk. I laugh at his pantomime, but hidden somewhere beneath my laughter, deep down, is a similar fear that goes something like this:

So I’m following God today…but what about tomorrow?

Jesus cautions us from worrying about tomorrow. Today, He says, has enough problems of its own. Seek first the kingdom of God in this present moment and He will provide for our futures. But sometimes I still worry about tomorrow and whether it will find me following my Lord.

****

Before joining MOP, Brother Gerald knew the pleasures of the world while working at a petrol station in Kenya. “I’ve tasted money. These other brothers, they’ve never tasted money,” he says over dinner one night. His gregarious smile and booming laughter make me feel at home at the long wooden table of brothers from across the globe.

He’s right about the money, I think, seeing as many of the brothers, especially those from India, join the order when they are sixteen or seventeen.

Brother Gerald felt drawn to a more sacrificial life, but like most of us, he was afraid to leave what was familiar. He volunteered with the youth at his local parish and visited the sick in the hospital, but kept a boundary between himself and the downtrodden. It is one thing to feed the poor; it is quite another to become poor along with them.

It was a night on the town, of all things, that gave Brother Gerald the courage he needed to leave behind his nets and become a fisher of men.

One Saturday night, he went out in the city with a friend. It was a three hour bus ride from their town, and they did not return home until the early morning. The bus they boarded, however, was charging three times the normal fare. Brother Gerald felt this was extortion. He angrily got off the bus, and even when his friend offered to pay for him, he refused on principle. He would rather wait, he insisted—much to his friend’s irritation. Eventually another bus came along, this one charging a normal fare, and they were, once more, on their way. A short distance down the road, however, they caught sight of a blaze. There had a been an accident, a large one. Drawing closer, they saw the flaming skeleton of a bus…

When Brother Gerald saw the scorched remains of the bus he had been riding a short time before and realized that all of its passengers were dead while he went on living, I’m not sure what changed inside of him. Perhaps he saw the face of God or heard a still small voice calling out to him, telling him what to do or where to go, but more than likely, he experienced what we all do on those rare, grace-filled occasions when tragedy rouses us from the stupor of our daily lives and gives us a sudden and terrifying appreciation for how much we depend on the hand of Providence in every moment of our lives.

Soon after that night, Brother Gerald called MOP and left Kenya behind.

****

Fear must have played a role in Brother Gerald picking up the phone—the startling epiphany of how little control he exerted over his own fate would have scared even an atheist into momentary prayer—but fear has not kept him in Jamaica.

He has stayed out of love.

“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear,” John writes in one of his epistles, and elsewhere he tells us that “God is love.” Only through an encounter with love—with the living God—do we gain the courage to pray not just in foxholes but in the light. Only love can unbind the fear in our hearts.

****

“It’s easy to take a vow of poverty when you have nothing,” one brother says to me on my trip. “But for you in America…”

This remark makes me think of the rich young ruler.

“Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me,” Jesus says, but the ruler is saddened by this command. He does not want to give up his wealth, but why not? Is he afraid that God will not provide for his daily needs? That he will be cold and hungry and shamed by his destitution? That people will look at him with scorn while he wanders through villages begging for food? God provides for the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, and yet this young man doubts that God will take care of him. Perhaps he fears the existential crisis that will follow if he gives up everything for God and still has doubts. This is a personal fear of mine. I’ll carry my cross joyfully just so long as God guarantees that I won’t have to wrestle with my own will, that I’ll have total and blissful surrender from my anxieties; I’ll carry my cross just so long as we can skip the agony of Gethsemane.

Oscar Wilde, of all people, writing from his cell at Reading Gaol, offers an interesting observation on the story of the rich young ruler: “It is not the state of the poor that [Christ] is thinking but of the soul of the young man, the lovely soul that wealth was marring.”¹ Jesus sees how this man’s wealth is a way to keep God at arm’s length and deludes him into a sense of self-sufficiency; so Jesus tells him to sell everything, not so much for the sake of the poor, but so that the scales might fall from the young man’s eyes and that he might see the true purpose and joy of life as that of following Christ.

Wilde’s life, a complicated tangle of sin and pride and rebellion (which happens to be the story of us all), bears a strange testament to the rich young ruler. It was only from the poverty of Reading Gaol, only after squandering his wealth and being stripped of his reputation and conceit, that Wilde began to contemplate the life of Christ. Through the loss of temporal wealth he began his search for eternal riches.

Jesus does not call everyone to sell their possessions and become itinerant beggars, but he does call all of us to sacrifice anything that blinds us from the revelation of our spiritual poverty. How poor we really are without his grace in our heart! And so we must turn away from the illusion of independence and lay our lives at his feet, saying, “Here I am, Lord. Take my life, my possessions, my relationships, and do what you will with them.”

I know my lasting and complete joy will come through the imitation of Christ, that he has shown me the path to perfection, yet I, like the rich young ruler, am afraid when I survey the road ahead. I am not encouraged but terrified by St. John the Cross’s exhortation: “Would that man come at last to see that it is quite impossible to reach the thicket of the riches and wisdom of God except by first entering the thicket of much suffering, in such a way that the soul finds there its consolation and desire. The soul that longs for divine wisdom chooses first, and in truth, to enter the thicket of the cross.”

God calls each of us to pick up our cross not for his sake, but ours, and this embodies the uniquely Christian gamble. We deny ourselves not to annihilate desire but fulfill it, and sacrifice all we hold dear so as to claim the dearest possession of all.

****

I take heart in knowing that even those who have given up everything to follow God think of turning back; that Peter, the rock of Christ’s church, denied his Lord; that Moses was afraid to do as God commanded and speak to the assembly of Israelites.

But we are not without an Advocate.

In our weaknesses, we must believe that God will show His strength, and in our fears, we must cling to the words of Jesus, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

****

1. De Profundis by Oscar Wilde