DARTON - LONGMAN + TODD, 2006

Nature

For many days now I have carefully watched the developing dawn from the two windows of my room - my perch - at the comer of the top floor of the monastery. Along the full length of my eastern horizon there stands high the wall of the Cascades, the uneven black line along which the light slowly comes on. Each day is magnificent, unique, and if I think in a certain direction, terrifying. For of so many millions of days in this place, how relatively few have been viewed and pondered by a man? What, then, is their beauty for?
On the eastern wall of my cell is the icon of Christ. I try to pray to him as this is happening, to pray to him as the Lord, as the Word through whom all things were made. (John 1:3; Col. 1:16) In the logic of such faith each of the millions of days is his creation, his doing. But my question becomes then even stronger. Why was Christ creating days like these countless times before this one in which I seek him in prayer? When that question strikes, I lose him; he vanishes; it seems impossible. Can Christian faith really be? This is my terror, my sadness, my confusion. I stand all alone before this spectacle, deeply aware of its beauty, but I understand so little.
At length the bell rings and calls me to Lauds - the precise, definite, historical psalms of Lauds, prayed in the hour of Jesus of Nazareth's death and resurrection, which does not pass away. What has this to do with the dawn still developing beyond the church walls, another of the nearly infinite number of dawns? I do not know. I do not find the connection. I throw the psalms up in the direction of the eastern sky. I paste them up against the gorgeous colors of the vault. Under them all is a prayer something to the effect of, "If it is you, O Christ, then show me how it is you!"

Ninetythree

When he was 93 years old and not far from death, Father Martin said to me, "It's no good waiting for ever." He meant that he was ready to get on with it, ready to die. Shortly after, he looked up and, reflecting on time stretching itself out in the way that it does, he said, "I came to love you more and more." Then turning back to the prospect of his death, he said, "It's like being thrown out of a plane in the dead of night. You have no idea where you'll land. All you can do is receive the sacraments and hope for the best."

First we must consent to the nothingness of our existence. Then we can enjoy every presence which appears before us. Doing this, the nothingness is gradually transformed into an overflowing everything. Thus can I live at every moment the unspeakable wonder of creation ex nihilo.

In a parish church in a suburb of Krakow there are beautiful icons by Jerzy Nowosielski of the 14 stations of the cross telling the story of Jesus' walk to Calvary. Numbers 12, 13, and 14 end in the sanctuary and are part of its decoration. They are much larger than the others. There is a small but certain resurrection in the top right hand comer as a finish. In virtually all of the scenes Christ is pictured with the other two who were to be crucified with him. He is always clothed in a long red robe, while the other two are naked except for a thin white loin cloth. Seeing all three of them in station after station delivers a very strong sense of Christ's solidarity with the condemned. When Jesus is stripped of his garments, all three are lined up virtually naked against a wall that resembles the wall at Auschwitz against which prisoners were shot. In the fourteenth station, where Jesus is laid in the tomb, his ribs and stomach have the outline of crosses. His body is nearly black, but these crosses glow with a faint, deep red light, as if the mystery of the resurrection were beginning slowly to work its way through him. It is just above this that the much smaller scene of resurrection is placed - in a different realm.

The church is cared for by Franciscans, and so between the station which shows lots of motion in hoisting the three condemned onto their crosses and the big crucifixion which dominates the sanctuary, there is an icon of St. Francis with his stigmata, and in bright red, the many winged seraph, covered with multiple eyes. Francis' participation in the mystery of the cross is inserted between Jesus and the two others that die with him.