A few weeks ago I ordered "Julia of Norwich: A Contemplative Biography." Amy Frykholm's new biography of St. Julian of Norwich, to whom I occasionally refer (because I think I'm hilarious when I do this sort of thing) as "Saint Julie the Sandwich." I deliberately saved it for this trip and began it shortly after the plane lifted off. In it, Frykholm offers a gripping account of how Julian turned to an Augustinian friar to help her sort through the visions she received during her near-fatal illness. One of the good father's first acts was to teach her the ancient Christian art of lectio divina or "sacred reading," the slow mulling of a single text of Scripture.
It has been a long while since I've deliberately engaged in lectio and I thought that might be a good practice for this short-term mission trip. Accordingly, as I read the Gospel from the morning office on Monday, I tried to be open to a particularly gripping passage. I happened upon Matthew 26.38 from the Gethsemane narrative, where Jesus tells the disciples, "My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death: tarry ye here, and watch with me." (It's even more gripping in Spanish, which reads something like, "I have the soul filled with sadness and mortal anguish.") Somehow it reminded me of King Claudius' line in "Hamlet," where he tells his queen, "My soul is full of discord and dismay" (Act 4/Scene 1). Of course, Claudius is grief-stricken because of the consequences of his own evil actions; Jesus' grief, by contrast, comes from his calling to take on himself everyone else's tangled web of sin.
It got me to thinking of the story of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and how, as she road a train across India, she found herself suddenly gripped with Jesus' fifth word from the cross, "I thirst." For her, it became the basis of a lifetime calling. She understood Jesus to be speaking directly to her of his thirst for souls, and particularly the souls of the poor. That kind of story has a long history, amounting almost to a Christian trope. St. Anthony of Thebes went to church and heard, "Go and sell all that you have," and it moved him to launch the movement of the desert fathers. St. Francis sat in church and heard the words of Christ about taking nothing on one's missionary journey; that order became the basis for the Franciscan revolution. Spurgeon heard a bad sermon on the great text, "Look to me and be ye saved," and his subsequent ministry never strayed far from the priceless but free salvation bought by Christ.
Well, I'm not claiming to be Mother Teresa, let alone Spurgeon, but that gospel reading leaped out at me. I imagined my Lord telling me that the suffering of these Burmese refugees is his own suffering, and that he brought me here this week not to accomplish any dramatic deliverance for them but simply to be the eyes of Christ, to be the reality that God is not blind to this tragedy. God may not work a miracle for these people; he didn't for his son. But he stayed his mighty hand in that case because salvation could only be accomplished at that terrible price. Thus I still don't think I'm here to do some great thing; it will be enough if I manage to stay awake, to force myself to sit in English as a Second Language classes six hours each day, and to play with sweaty kids in a trashy park for a couple of more, and refuse to close my eyes, to sleep either literally or spiritually.
So that's what I did today. I watched a bunch of Burmese children scale trees and fences as if they were living in a jungle instead of a housing project. I listened as an old man struggled to form the alphabet and spell simple words. Maybe I kept my eyes open; maybe I refused to stop thinking about everything I can't do much about. And maybe that is what Christ brought me here to do.
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