The Space of Life

Willem immediately understood what he heard. The sentences were few and simple but it was only later that night that their significance began to well up in his heart overflowing into his body and mind. It was as though knowledge or perhaps truth or whatever it is that words can carry actually had weight to it. It pressed him down on the rustled sheets of his bed. Then as though his nose were too heavy to be held upright his head slowly fell to his left and turned towards the window where he caught the light the moon. The moonlight held his gaze and he lay there motionless drifting away from what he was coming to realize. A slight kink in his neck broke the trance and he tilted his head slightly to stretch it out. With his head now facing the window at a new angle the moon somehow looked different. Willem sat up in bed and broke the silence by something between a laugh and sigh. The window was open at an angle and the moon that he saw was only a reflection. . . . The moon was not there. He took heart and almost allowed a smile. What he thought he had was no longer his. His life was not his own. His life was at the mercy of . . . what? He wondered what exactly was holding him together?

Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

In taking the narrow way . . . there is room only for self-denial, and the Cross, which is the staff by which one may reach one’s goal, and whereby the road is greatly lightened and made easy. . . . For if anyone resolves to submit themselves to carrying this cross – that is to say, if they resolve to desire in truth to meet trials and to bear them in all things for God’s sake, they will find in them all great relief and sweetness that they may travel upon this road, detached from all things and desiring nothing. However, if they desire to possess anything – whether it come from God or from any other source – with any feeling of attachment, they have not stripped and denied themselves in all things; and thus they will be unable to walk along this narrow path. . . . I would then convince spiritual persons that this road to God consists not in a multiplicity of meditations nor in ways or methods of such . . . but that it consists only in the one thing that is needful, which is the ability to deny oneself truly, according to that which is without and that which is within.
- St. John of the Cross

Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

And so we enter the tight and constricted space with the jagged pressures of distress and chaos. But once inside there is the promise of transformation, the sweetness of the Cross described above. And in time our breathing that was once anxious and short in this tight space will grow deeper and more relaxed and the space that felt so confining will take on the smooth and supportive contours of a mother’s womb waiting to birth new life.
- Sermon August 5th