23. A Pathway to Holiness
23
A Pathway to Holiness
The wildernesses spoken of in the Bible were usually very barren places, but God can change that. He can make streams in the desert, springs in the valley, and furnish tables in the wilderness. The wilderness of loneliness is a place where charity may blossom. “Fill up the emptiness of your heart with love for God and your neighbor,” wrote Edith Stein, whose love made even a concentration camp a place of joy.
Those whose lives have had the deepest spiritual impact in the world are those who have suffered. In God’s mysterious providence, the Cross and the crown, suffering and glory, are linked. History is replete with stories of martyrdom, beginning with Stephen who, as the rocks rained on him from the angry crowd, fell on his knees and prayed for the rock-throwers. God did not save him from death, but his death impressed a fanatical bystander who later turned into an apostle. Beethoven, deprived of the one faculty which would seem indispensable to a musician, his hearing, went on to write even greater symphonies.
This book will not be read by great martyrs or composers, yet their stories should put heart into us. Our own diminishments, in God’s sovereign ordering of all things for His glory and our good, are not only the prerequisites to our own joy, but may also be the means of enriching the lives of others.
A story of such diminishment and enrichment comes to me from a girl in her twenties. It begins in the usual way—she met “a very special young man.” Both were dedicated to God, longing to know and serve and please Him. They worked at the same job, went to the same church, and when they were attracted to each other, agreed on strict physical restraint. The attraction increased, they spoke of the possibility of marriage, Christian counselors encouraged them to marry, but he could not come to a decision. After what seemed to the girl more than a reasonable length of time for a man to make up his mind, they parted. He was lost to her, “probably forever.”
Combined with this “loss” is the string of disappointments, the emptiness of aloneness, his absence, and the temptation to cry WHY? I have tried to live life without skipping a beat and trust God with the questions and pain, leaving my burdens at the Cross.
And what has happened? Not the miracle of an instant change of feelings, but the miracle of life out of death—the transformation of one woman’s diminishment into the enrichment of others. In working with the youth group in her church, even on days when she felt she had nothing whatever to give them because of her own wounds,
The things I’ve heard come out of my mouth in the last few weeks I know were sent from above! He promises to heal the brokenhearted, and I cling to those promises now!
Love, it seems, creates good—by drawing good out of any situation through suffering. The suffering itself thereby becomes a pathway to holiness. St. Paul writes to his beloved Corinthians:
The all-merciful Father, the God whose consolation never fails us . . . comforts us in all our troubles, so that we in turn may be able to comfort others in any trouble of theirs and to share with them the consolation we ourselves receive from God. As Christ’s cup of suffering overflows, and we suffer with him, so also through Christ our consolation overflows. If distress be our lot, it is the price we pay for your consolation, for your salvation; if our lot be consolation, it is to help us to bring you comfort, and strength to face with fortitude the same sufferings we now endure.
2 Corinthians 1:3–6 NEB
Out of suffering comes holiness—in these forms: comfort, consolation, the fellowship of Christ’s suffering, salvation, strength, fortitude, endurance. This is what is meant by redemptive suffering. The greater the measure allotted to us, the greater is our material for sacrifice. As we make it a joyful offering to God, our potential is enhanced for becoming “instruments of His peace”—being “broken bread and poured-out wine,” overflowing with consolation for the lonely and the suffering of the world.
Do we want to be servants to one another in love? Let God turn even our loneliness into power to serve. Let Him free us from ourselves in order that we may become the servants of others. As the basis of our union with Christ is His sacrificial love for us, so the basis of our union with others is that same sort of love—the love that forgets itself and its own troubles and lays itself down.
It would be preposterous for me to pretend that I know very much about this by practice. I do not. In the first place, in the scale of human sufferings my own do not appear to me to have been great. In the second place, every fresh vision of the Love of God and every reading of the Love Chapter, 1 Corinthians 13, show me how far I am from the daily practice of that kind of love.
So although I write of things of which I know only a little by experience, even a very little draws back the curtain enough to reveal to me that God meant just what He said. He promises
garlands instead of ashes, oil of gladness instead of mourners’ tears, a garment of splendour for a heavy heart. . . . And so, because shame in double measure and jeers and insults have been my people’s lot, they shall receive in their own land a double measure of wealth, and everlasting joy shall be theirs.
Isaiah 61:3, 7 NEB
The Scriptures abound with these exchanges, for instance: pine trees instead of camel thorn, myrtles for briars, blessings for curses, dancing for laments, joy for sackcloth, pastures for wilderness, light for darkness, God’s guidance for our confusion, the filling of our own needs when we fill others’, the kingdom of heaven in place of poverty, comfort for mourning, satisfaction for hunger and thirst, rewards in heaven for persecutions on earth, an imperishable body in place of a perishable one, power in place of weakness, glory for humiliation, immortality for mortality, a resplendent body for a vile one, and—the culmination of all—life out of death.
In the seventeenth century George Herbert wrote this dialogue between Christian and Death:
Christian
Alas, poore Death! where is thy glorie?
Where is thy famous force, thy ancient sting?
Death
Alas, poore mortall, void of storie!
Go spell and reade how I have killed thy King.
Christian
Poore Death! and who was hurt thereby?
Thy curse being laid on Him makes thee accurst.
Death
Let losers talk, yet thou shalt die;
These arms shall crush thee.
Christian
Spare not, do thy worst:
I shall be one day better than before;
Thou so much worse, that thou shalt be no more.1
“Better than before.” The Lord has come to wipe away tears, the Bible tells us, and we may take that to mean He has come to dispel loneliness. He will dispel it—as soon as He can, not before. The tears, the loneliness, the pains of this life are a part of the process He is at work on. If we understand that, we need never be bitter about it. It will one day be exchanged for wholeness. This is why we can sing, even about death, as Herbert did: Spare not, do thy worst.