Easter Tuesday: Living Under Enemy Occupation in the Light of Victory

Why Seek Ye the Living in the Place of the Dead - Howard Pyle

I've been posting this one since waaaay back in 2007. It is still as valid now and I, personally, need the  reminder.

Now think of the cross and resurrection of Jesus as breaking the power of sin. But if the power of sin, death and evil has been broken, how can we make sense of the fact that it still continues to plague us? Human history and Christian experience tell us of a constant struggle against sin and evil in our own lives, even as Christians. There is a real danger, it would seem, that talking about "the victory of faith" will become nothing more than empty words, masking a contradiction between faith and experience. How can we handle this problem?

A helpful way of understanding this difficulty was developed by a group of distinguished writers, such as C.S. Lewis in England and Anders Nygren in Sweden. They noticed important parallels between the new Testament and the situation during the Second World War. The victory won over sin through the death of Christ was like the liberation of an occupied country from Nazi rule. We need to allow our imaginations to take in the sinister and menacing idea of an occupying power. Life has to be lived under the shadow of this foreign presence. And part of the poignancy of the situation is its utter hopelessness. Nothing can be done about it. No one can defeat it.

Then comes the electrifying news. There has been a far-off battle. And somehow, it has turned the tide of the war. A new phase has developed, and the occupying power is in disarray. Its backbone has been broken. In the course of time, the Nazis will be driven out of every corner of Europe. But they are still present in the occupied country.

In one sense, the situation has not changed, but in another, more important sense, the situation has changed totally. The scent of victory and liberation is in the air. A total change in the psychological climate results. I remember once meeting a man who had been held prisoner in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Singapore. He told me of the astonishing change in the camp atmosphere which came about when one of the prisoners (who owned a shortwave radio) learned of the collapse of the Japanese war effort in the middle of 1945. Although all in the camp still remained prisoners, they knew that their enemy had been beaten. It would only be a matter of time before they were released. And those prisoners, I was told, began to laugh and cry, as if they were free already.

... And so with us now. In one sense, victory has not come; in another, it has. The resurrection declares in advance of the event God's total victory over all evil and oppressive forces -- such as death, evil and sin. Their backbone has been broken, and we may begin to live now in the light of that victory, knowing that the long night of their oppression will end.

Alister E. McGrath, quoted in Bread and Wine: Readings For Lent And Easter

This is a point of view that hadn't occurred to me. I especially like it for those times when the world is too much with us and the cynicism of modern times begins to get us down. The deciding battle is over, the victory won, but there remain all the small skirmishes (which are not at all small to those caught up in them ... like us) that go on afterwards in any war. By virtue of simply being human and alive we are caught up in the skirmishes of resistance to the enemy occupation. Even when fighting, though, we know ...

The strife is o'er the battle done;
Now is the Victor's triumph won:
Now be the song of praise begun: Alleluia!

It Was the Lord Who Turned

This reflection on Peter's denial of Christ three times before cock crow resonates all the more after last Sunday's reading of the parable of the prodigal son. I especially like the commentary on the two kinds of sorrow for sin.

... But the real lesson in Peter's life is one of repentance. his fall is a lesson in sin that requires no teacher, but his repentance is a great lesson in salvation. And it is this great lesson that contains the only true spiritual meaning to those who have personally made Peter's discovery -- that they have betrayed our God.

What then can we learn from Peter's turning around? First, it was not Peter who turned. It was the Lord who turned and looked at Pater. When the cock crew, that might have kept Peter from falling further. But he was just in the very act of sin. And when a person is in the thick of his sin his last thought is to throw down his arms and repent. So Peter never thought of turning, but the Lord turned. And when Peter would rather have looked anywhere else than at the Lord, the Lord looked at Peter. This scarce-noticed fact is the only sermon needed to anyone who sins -- that the Lord turns first.

For this reason it is important to distinguish between two kinds of sorrow for sin. The one has to do with feeling sorry over some wrong or sin we have committed. This feeling seems to provide a sort of guarantee that we are not disposed to do the same wrong again, and that our better self is still alive enough to enter its protest against the sin our lower self has done. And we count this feeling of reproach which treads so closely upon the act, as a sort of compensation or atonement for the wrong.

In this kind of sorrow, however, there is no real repentance, no true sorrow for sin. It is merely wounded self-love. It is a sorrow over weakness,over the fact that when we were put to the test we found to our chagrin we had failed. But this chagrin is what we are apt to mistake for repentance. This is nothing but wounded price -- sorrow that we did not do better, that we were not so good as we and others thought. It is just as if Peter turned and looked upon Peter. ...

All this is to say that there is a vast difference between divine and human sorrow. Human sorrow is us turning and looking upon ourselves. True, there is nothing wrong in turning and looking at oneself -- only there is a danger. We can miss the most authentic experience of life in the imitation. For genuine repentance consists of feeling deeply our human helplessness, of knowing how God comes to us when we are completely broken.

In the end, it is God looking into the sinner's face that matters. ...

Bread and Wine: Readings For Lent And Easter

Attachment to Sin

We all have them, however much we may not like to think about it. Recently, having read the first four chapters of St. Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle, my friend Marcia and I have had frequent conversations about Teresa's insistence that our souls are so glorious and immense that if we could see them clearly then we would understand just what damage sin does to us.

Cathy from Recovering Dissident Catholic and I have been having a little chat via comments boxes about the need to be aware of the damage done by venial sin. Indeed, this is often a problem for me. I attribute it to my entirely secular background, perhaps wrongly. I know venial sins are a problem but have trouble getting all worked up over them. When it is time for confession I am usually brought to it by having to ask the Holy Spirit to show me what is a problem. Thankfully (though I always regret it), He always comes through, usually immediately. I then have one problem after another with a hasty temper or some other thing I have managed to forget about. And off I go to the confessional ...

God seems to have been working on me lately through books (no surprise there, right?). Having read Inferno (a Dante-lite of sorts) I was brought to a new awareness of venial sin in my own life. Darwin's Lenten series on Dante's Divine Comedy has also been of immense help in keeping these sins before my eyes. Unlike some friends who have a problem with feeling guilty and letting go of sins, I suffer (and I use "suffer" advisedly) from the opposite problem of feeling as if my sins are so small that they seem as if they don't really matter. I know intellectually that this is not the case, however, knowing is not the same as feeling which is often what sends me to confession. Hence, these constant reminders are very good indeed for me.

This post was prompted by reading Adoro te Devote's recounting of a dream. Reading it from the outside the meaning seemed crystal clear and I again was sent back to considering my own soul. The images are vivid and disturbing (though not gory or unnecessarily disturbing) and just what I need to keep in mind. Her comments about complacency hit home as if she'd been aiming for a target on my forehead.

I woke up then, shuddering, wondering why I had been so complacent in that dream?

I often pray the rosary on my way to work, and that morning, as I prayed, the images from that dream pulverized me...and so I let the images come, praying all the while, asking God what I was supposed to gain from this?

And He answered.

Go read the whole thing at Adoro te Devote. Confession anyone? I'll be in line next Saturday for sure.