Chapel of the Apostles, April 18, 2001

When I first got notice that today was my assignment for the semester, my initial reaction was, “There’s a real kiss-your-sister situation.” (Please forgive the now very un PC metaphor, but I could not come up with a substitute, escept for the original tie game.) The high drama has begun on Palm/Passion Sunday, and tomorrow we begin the intensity of the Triduum, the three holiest days of the year. But meanwhile, we just wait. Just like Jesus had to.

Digging into the propers, I came smack up against Judas, whichever Gospel I chose, and found that we are really at the heart of the story. The is the great drama of love, death, and betrayal; it is especially keen in John because he makes it so clear betrayal is not just by Judas, but also by Peter, and in some sense all the men and women disciples, in different ways. And finally, by us, too. And in John the two betrayals surround a reiteration of love as the great commandment. Judas and Peter were both Jesus’ friends, disciples, converts. As are we. Ah, Holy Jesus, I it was denied thee. I crucified thee.

There is an initial sense in which we come to believe this “I crucified thee,” the traditional evangelical sense that Jesus died for me, for my sins, as well as for those of the whole world. We all crucified Jesus, me among the “we all.” This is common material to the first conversions many of us have experienced. And it is true. But I want to take this occasion to go deeper.

In my own work in spiritual theology, I have come to appreciate what Alan Jones and others have helped us see ­ that for many Christians, perhaps all potentially ­ there is not just one conversion, but a series, which can be grouped into three major types, replicating the experience of the first disciples.

In the first conversion, the one we know best, we are called away from our fishing boats to become Jesus disciples. For later generations, this would come to mean accepting Jesus as our personal savior ­ that he died for me as an individual as well as all of us together.

But we are also called to a second conversion in which we experience the apostolic betray

als at the time of the Crucifixion, as well as the devastation of the loss of the Jesus we had known. There is further, a third conversion, when at the Ascension, we must let go even of the risen Christ, and walk on our own now adult feet back to Jerusalem to be witnesses, and to await the empowering of the Spirit for mission ­ a further loss and greater gain.

What I want to reflect on today is “Second Conversion” with its themes of betrayal, loss, and falling apart. As Alan Jones unpacks it, this conversion comes whenever the first blush of enthusiasm of my first conversion wears off. I continue to rejoice in the new life I have been given in Jesus, but increasingly I notice I am not living up to it as I should, despite the ongoing reality of grace. It is a longer struggle than I thought. If my grosser sins have pretty well disappeared, the little. niggling, besetting sins, are, well, so damned besetting.

Perfection seems farther off than ever. Jesus, who seemed so close at first, even seems to have withdrawn a bit. For the first time, I feel sand in my shoes ­I am entering the desert for the first time as a Christian. Accustomed means of prayer and devotion dry up on me. The dark night of the senses begins to descend. I sense at increasing depth my full betrayal of my Master and friend, and I feel a bit betrayed by him, just as perhaps Judas did. Like Judas, I may try to force his hand with what amounts to further betrayal, though dressed as piety. Or, perhaps my experience is not so much like Judas and Peter, but like the women, a deepening sense of my own powerlessness and God’s seeming inaction in the face of suffering and injustice.

In either case, soon real darkness and desolation descend, and I am back where I thought I would never be, in the pit. Ever-deeper layers of betrayal lead to falling apart. The darkness and dryness reveal that I and my faith have been only a House of Cards, as C. S. Lewis discovered in his deep grief at his wife’s death. He, like Peter and the Magdalene got through this; Judas did not. Therein lies the tale.

As Alan Jones points out, to Christians of great fervor and maturity this second conversion, this darkness and desert, can come as a deep shock, especially if the Church has neglected its task of teaching that this will happen, that it is indeed a sign of spiritual growth. Worst of all, is when the Church enables the denial by teaching that all such experience is a kind of backsliding.

Without accurate teaching at this point, people are tempted by three false solutions. The first is simply giving up (Judas in his suicide is the supreme example). More commonly, folks just decide the Christian life did not pan out for them, and drift away from the Church, and from God, sometimes never to return. They are dis-couraged. The second false solution is worse yet, as we try to go to one more renewal conference, one more Ultreya, one more mass, one more retreat, anything to recapture the early fervor and recreate religious experience in ourselves. As Thomas Merton points out in his last and fiercest book, Contemplative Prayer, when we start trying to create or recreate religious experience in ourselves or others, we have entered a path leading to complete moral and psychic degeneration.

Worst of all is the third option ­ in order not to be thought a backslider by our community, and unable to make IT happen in ourselves, we begin to fake it, to counterfeit fervor, devotion, and closeness to God in the presence of others. We become real hypocrites, Marjoe Gortners. So, Judas’s response was not the worst. Beyond Luke’s “Father forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing” we come to need a deeper mercy — “Father, they know exactly what they are doing. Forgive them anyway.”

There is wisdom about what to do here. Surrender, but not by throwing yourself into despair. Live, not in optimism, but in hope, by living faithfully with spiritual disciplines but pared to a minimum ­ Daily Office, Eucharist, works of charity, but with no struggle to be anywhere but where God seems to have put us, in the depths of the pit, feeling only the absence of God, waiting God out, just like in the middle of Holy Week. Oddly, it is not like depression, which needs a different treatment, because in a dark night the rest of our lives is going pretty well ­ we are still functional.

But the only way to get through the desert is to cross it one step at a time, and to live there as long as the crossing takes. Neither rainbows on guitars nor the sweetest incense with Gregorian chant will shorten the journey by a single instant. And always, we must face the depths of our own betrayal and powerlessness, and let go in the frightening falling apart into the arms of an absent God, which desert and darkness require if we are to survive and learn not to die chasing mirages.

Finally, we come to what Graham Greene described as the paradoxical signs of the true believer, so different from happy-face Christian ­ the divided mind, the uneasy conscience, and the abiding sense of personal failure even in the face of real growth and accomplishment. Ah, Holy Jesus, I it was denied thee. I crucified thee.

Finally we move through Good Friday into Holy Saturday — what follows second conversion is usually a long period of illumination or transfiguration, all things including myself now aflame with the light of that divine energy which is the light of glory, the Tabor light, the Paschal light. This kind of life is dominated by very different rhythms from those of purgation and discipling which followed my first conversion ­ as I am called not to a lesser, but a deeper faithfulness, beyond servanthood to friendship.

I am now called to be a friend of God, one by whom not just “such a one as Jesus”, but precisely Jesus, was willing to be betrayed and for whom to give his life. And I discover that I will also lay down my own life for my friends, if need be, and now, gladly. I know there is a final darkness, a further desert ahead, the dark night of the soul, which will be even worse. I have no illusions about it, but somehow I am able to let that be until I get there, and enjoy the sunshine in the meantime. But I do not forget. There is still sand in my shoes from the last time.

Ah, Holy Jesus, I it was. I am Judas, I am Peter, I am the Marys. From up on your cross, the difference even between me and Judas and Hitler is not worth bothering with. Both because I am not enough better to bother with, and they not worse enough to be any less forgiven. For you have not lost one of the sheep given into your care. Not even in the desert, not in the darkness, not in the betrayal, not in the powerlessness, not in the desolation.

Ah, Holy Jesus, help me to let go of all else and cling only to your cross, where I and all the happy beggars belong, as the light of glory breaks forth from earth’s darkest moment.

And so we wait.