To Make Ourselves Nothing

 

Sermon preached by Dn. James Wilcox on Sunday, September 15, 2024

In his magnificent book The New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton writes the following:

“In dying on the Cross, Christ manifested the holiness of God in apparent contradiction with itself… If, then, we want to seek some way of being holy, we must first of all renounce our own way and our own wisdom. We must “empty ourselves” as He did. We must “deny ourselves” and in some sense make ourselves “nothing” in order that we may live not so much in ourselves, as in Him… We must live by the strength of an apparent emptiness that is always truly empty and yet never fails to support us at every moment. This is holiness.” (1)

To truly find the presence of God within ourselves, in other words — to discover a presence that is always there, and always has been — we must enter into a process of letting go.

When we hear the words found in today’s Gospel lesson, that those who wish to follow after Jesus, must deny themselves and take up their cross, I tend think many of us aren’t quite sure what to do with this text. What does it mean, after all, to take up one’s Cross? In this day and age when people are no longer executed on crosses, as they were during the era of the Roman Empire, what does it mean to take up an instrument of torture and death for the sake of finding our life, as Jesus tells us!? Modern Christian interpretations of this passage, unfortunately, are a bit reductionistic, and in some cases have come to mean little more than boldly proclaiming one’s Christian faith and standing in opposition to modern culture. The number of times I’ve heard Christians complain how they are being persecuted for their faith in this country is a bit maddening.

The taking up our cross is not about how loud we can boast our Christianity. It is not about how counter-cultural we can become. It not even about how “Orthodox” we can fashion ourselves. Long beards, fancy vestments or cassocks, after all, are mere outward displays, and few who bear them demonstrate the self-denial mentioned in today’s Gospel passage. If the goal of the Christian life is union with God, we must first understand that God is truly found within. God is always ever-present. We simply need to discover this illuminating presence that is already there. Know that God suffers from no passions, and has no attachments. And therefore to find God in our inmost depths, we must learn to, likewise, to rid ourselves of our own attachments. This is part of the process of denying oneself and taking up the Cross; ridding ourselves of our selfish ambition, our ego. These are the things that form our attachments.

“What is the prayer of a detached heart?” asks the great 13th mystic Meister Eckhart. “A detached heart,” he writes,

desires nothing at all, nor has it anything it wants to get rid of… its prayer consists of nothing but being uniform with God. That is all its prayer… On earth, this entrance [to the heart] is nothing but pure detachment, and when the detachment reaches its climax, it becomes ignorant with knowing, loveless with loving, and dark with enlightenment.” (2)

In other words, to find God within, we must let go of our fears, and detach from all the things we believe will save us. Once we have learned to do this - to truly let go — we can discover deep permeating presence of the divine within. This is when we can take up the words of the Apostle Paul in today’s Epistle Reading: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (3)

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1) Thomas Merton, The New Seeds of Contemplation (New York, New York: New Directions Publishing, 1961), 62.

2) “On Detachment,” Yale University, accessed Sept 14, 2024, https://german.yale.edu/sites/default/files/meister_eckhart_on_detachment.pdf .

3) Galatians 2:20