Second Sunday in Lent
O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious
to all who have gone astray from your ways, and bring them
again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and
hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus Christ
your Son; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

"If the first Sunday in Lent is about temptation then the second is about the call to faith." That is how I began my last blog post about this collect. And re-reading it I think that it is true. This Sunday is about Abraham and his righteousness in both Old Testament and Epistle readings. We see Abraham move his family on the promise of an unseen God. We see him trust in the rather ridiculous promise from a worldly standpoint that he and his barren wife would have children. And we see his willingness to sacrifice that same son without question to a God who seems cruel and capricious. And parallels are drawn between Abraham and Jesus...Jesus as the perfection of that sacrificial attitude. Jesus, willing to go to an even darker place than Abraham...to the gates of Hell itself. Clearly this "unchangeable truth" isn't something easy or always pleasant.

But I think what interests me this time around in this collect is the first petition. Be gracious....That phrase has such medieval connotations now. Kings are gracious. Ladies are gracious. You can have gracious manners. But the collect is aiming at something much deeper than that. For in the wording is an understanding that we do indeed have no power in ourselves to remain steady on our path. We may have the best intentions in the world but those intentions curl around on themselves so easily and we find ourselves doing the very thing we vowed not to do. We have "undulations" in C. S. Lewis's phrase from The Screwtape Letters. We have spiritual mood swings that make it nearly impossible for us to stay on the unbelievably demanding course that God asks of us. The situation would be completely hopeless is not for Grace. Because at the time we need it, help is always available. It's only a breath away, if we only open ourselves to it.

Grace is an utterly mysterious and equally utterly palpable force in our lives. I am more and more convinced that absolutely nothing in my life comes to me but for it. It's hard to remember this in the moment. When I have a really good class with my students I can inwardly crow about what a gifted teacher I am...but those gifts are just that...gifts. Such as I have, they are not mine but rather bestowed on my by my God. Indeed, one of the things that we discover if we try contemplative prayer is how rare true contemplation is...and how mysteriously bestowed upon us it is. And yet Grace is around us....ever present. We are literally swimming in a sea of Grace, in which God is continually bathing us. If we can get outside ourselves and the circumstances of our day to day lives we can see this. But for most of this it is hard to live like this continually. I know for myself, the best I can get is to feel blest on a sunny morning as I'm walking to work. But let a car fail to yield to me when I'm crossing the street, and all that splendid grace becomes instantly invisible.

The grace of seeing our failings is just as mysterious, even if at the time it feels less beautiful than contemplation or joy. But it is just as much a gift of God. Compunction, the ability to feel the full weight of our sins and of the ways we have failed and strayed from our intentions, and from God's intentions for us, is a grace just as everything else is. It can be deeply painful, seeing ourselves and all of our myriad inner contradictions all at once. The Russian esoteric thinker G.I. Gurdjieff said that without preparation, a man would go mad if he saw all his inner contradictions at once. So we are equipped with inner "buffers" which allow us to function quite well, without real self-knowledge. And when we are ready, appropriate forces from outside give us the strength and ability to see some of these inner contradictions clearly, which allows us the opportunity to amend our lives. I believe that what Gurdjieff was describing was akin to compunction, which can only come about through the grace of God. Left to our own devices, we would never see the shocking totality of our inner landscape and would lull ourselves into a false sense of our own virtuousness. Thank God that we are not left to that and that with Grace, God allows us to grow and mature as people of faith.

 

So yes...this week's collect is a call to radical faith...not faith triumphant or militant, but radical trust. But these is also an acknowledgement that we cannot find this faith, or stick to it, by ourselves. It takes openness to Grace for this to happen. But just as contemplation, or joy or all the good things God gives us are only a breath away...so too with compunction. If we ask...we shall receive. We just need to be prepared to receive what we ask for.