Looks like I’m closing Lent ’24 with a blog too…miracles do happen. Most of this blog is material copied from the transcript of a video posted for training in the Apprenticeship in the Spiritual Exercises taught by Br. Brian Hohmeier, OCL. It was for people, including myself, taking the training to accompany folk wanting to do the St. Ignatian Spiritual Exercises / prayer retreat. Take that into consideration as you read it. I’ve received Brian’s blessing to post it with direct quotes in italics. Let me know what you think. 

It might be helpful to explain that St. Ignatius originally intended for this prayer retreat to be done in 30 days with the meditations divided into 4 weeks.  Nowadays the most common way of going through the Exercises is a “retreat in daily life,” also known as the 19th Annotation, which involves an eight-month program of prayer and meetings with a spiritual director, following St. Ignatius’s pattern of meditation, contemplation, and scripture reading. So the weeks are referred to as movements … 4 of them plus some opening weeks of orientation and preparation. 

In this training video Brian begins by reminding us students that the Spiritual Exercises help us be present to Jesus as Jesus has been present to us in the context of this story in which God has such love for God’s creation that God entered into it, right into the middle of its disorder and dysfunction and darkness, courageously united Godself to it in the Incarnation of Jesus and took on its weakness and its poverty, in order to tend its wounds and suffer its violence and take on its death and, only through this, give it life and restore it to relationship with God. 

And over this journey, the primary dynamic, the absolutely most important movement and grace we can desire through all of this, is love—that we would come to fall in love with Christ because in love we find our freedom, and in freedom we find our healing. 

And if we come to the Exercises wanting to know what it is God is inviting us to, the only thing that matters, we find in the end, are the responses that we make freely from love. 

But here, as we enter and move through Movement 3, that love actually isn’t pointing us to any chosen response or discerned resolution but rather only to an experience what we can call a “mystical identification” with Christ in his humanness, in a space of suffering in which we find him present to our own suffering and in which he invites us to be present to, to witness, to love him in his own suffering. It’s a place where we become one with him because he’s no longer the completely otherworldly mysterious alien superhuman inconceivable God made flesh; he’s the Man of Sorrows, fully human, fully human, like me, almost too much like me. How can I not understand him? How can I not know him? How can I not love him in that humanness. And this is the journey we take in Movement 3, seeing Christ’s vulnerability in the Last Supper and his agony in the Garden and his loneliness in the trial and in the act of being crucified and lifted up on the Cross. 

Through all of this, we are beckoned, we’re desired, we’re called just to remain with him. 

And yet in the midst of all this, it’s Matthew 27:45 that we find Jesus on the cross and we read these words: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” which could cause us to ask, Did God abandon Jesus? There’s a lot of theology we can unpack here, …and Brian says that he believes this is a critical question for us to be aware of at a critical moment in the retreat for ourselves and retreatants. What follows spoke to my soul and spoke to the questions I had ignored for many years. Questions my Mom reminded me of in her Good Friday text to our family…the prime motivation to write this blog.

For many of us in the West, we may have been taught, maybe in theological sermons, maybe through hymns, that because Christ takes on sin in the moment of the crucifixion, God the Father turns away or hides His face from him. And this, the idea goes, is why Christ would of course cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” But I (Brian) think that there are severe, severe theological and biblical or exegetical issues with this. And even more immediately, I want to draw our awareness to the disjunction or the dissonance between the story we’ve been journeying in, a story about God’s presence to all aspects in all parts of ourselves in this work of ongoing creation that embraces and works with and creatively interweaves our disorder into a redeemed creation, between this picture and the picture of a God who, when things are at their ugliest, withdrew from Jesus at the very moment we most identify with him. I mean, is this the “mystical identification” we’ve been setting people up for, if they’ve allowed themselves to receive that invitation to just remain with Jesus, to enter that darkness because Christ their love is there and that’s enough, only to find that when Christ is most human, most like them, God leaves the room? Are they becoming united in love to a Jesus that God then abandons? I want to be absolutely unequivocally clear in saying no. I believe God did not abandon or turn away from Christ, not for a solitary moment. 

I think this idea that the Father turns away from Christ, which we can actually say is a relatively new idea within the larger landscape of Church history doesn’t make sense in the larger story—and not just the story of the gospels but that told through the whole of scripture, shaped by the gospels and what it shows us, what it performs for us, about how God loves, how God is willing to love. 

Read Psalm 22 in conjunction with this scene. Because when we allow Christ to signal us to Psalm 22 (that’s what he’s doing in reading that verse out of Psalm 22—this was a pretty common way to cite a passage of Scripture in Jesus’s context, since they didn’t have verse numbers at this point, you just give the first lines and it signals the rest of the passage), here’s actually what we hear from the rest of the psalm as it continues. It goes: 

“But You, O Lord, do not be far away. Oh my help, come quickly to my aid. Deliver my soul from the sword, my life from the power of the dog. Save me from the mouth of the lion, from the horns of the wild oxen, You have rescued me. I will tell of your name to my brothers and sisters. In the midst of the congregation I will praise You. You who fear the Lord, praise Him. All you offspring of Jacob, glorify Him. Stand in awe of him all you offspring of Israel.” 

This is the same psalm from which Jesus quotes or recites “Why have you forsaken me?”—a little later, this the psalm says: 

“From You comes my praise in the great congregation. My vows I will pay before those who fear Him. The poor shall eat and be satisfied. Those who seek Him shall praise the Lord. May your hearts live forever!” 

Friends, I (Brian) think this is so, so important. It’s so important for us to get; it’s so important for our retreatants to get if they don’t. There is no abandonment in God. 

Instead, what Matthew shows us, what it uses Psalm 22 to show us, is that in the most despairing experience, when it feels like God has abandoned us, has turned God’s face from us, there is a reality underneath that, running deeper than that, that can hold us fast, that God does not turn away, does not shrink from us, doesn’t blink, but indeed is working, is accomplishing something in us as God hears our cries—which means God is present to us. 

And if God could bear to see the Son suffer, how much more can God withstand our suffering. If God could bear to be present in the face of all the sin and all the violence of the world heaped upon Christ in a single moment, how much more can God look upon us, in our sin, in our disorder and still love us? And finally, if we allow ourselves to become mystically united with Christ in suffering, we are right there in that place that God would not abandon, consequently united with the Father, who never abandons him, who looks on him and loves him. 

Yes the prophet Habakkuk did indeed write: 

“I will stand at my watchpost, and station myself on the rampart; I will keep watch to see what he will say to me, and what he will answer concerning my complaint.” 

I won’t deny that that is in our Bible. But Habakkuk finishes that same thought, that same verse, as complaint to God, saying: 

“Though the fig tree does not blossom, and no fruit is on the vines; though the produce of the olive fails, and the fields yield no food; though the flock is cut off from the fold, and there is no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will exult in the God of my salvation. God, the Lord, is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, and makes me tread upon the heights.” 

This is the Gospel. God’s eyes are not too pure to behold evil but, instead, by looking on us in love, God purifies. And God will not look away from the one God loves. Friends, this is everything. It truly is. So Brian encourages his students to hold this conviction for our retreatants, that we can carry it for them. 

And, in good spiritual director fashion he concludes, if this is something that we don’t believe, then let’s spend some time with that. No judgement or criticism just a desire to be open to what Love is thinking of and exploring why we think the way we do and our experience of that. When I first heard Brian his words spoke to my heart and soul. It was somehow comforting to hear him making sense of questions about the crucifixion that I ignored whenever they came up. His thoughts are in contrast to much of what I was taught and read (see McCall) and are more consistent with my present understanding of the Love that created and sustains the universe. What exactly happened that day on Golgotha is still mostly mystery to me … despite the theologians, hymnodists and preachers having it all figured out. The one thing that isn’t mystery is the love of Creator that I experience AND it is mystery (o those spiritual paradoxes) Like Steve Bell sings “O Love what are you thinking of…that you are mindful of us.”

In our course work for that week Brian also included a scholarly reflection on Jesus “cry of dereliction” by Thomas H. McCall, “Was The Trinity Broken?” in Forsaken: The Trinity and the Cross, and Why It Matters, pp. 13-29. To over simplify McCall’s work, this chapter is a great summary of the modern understanding of the opening words of Psalm 22 which Jesus spoke on the cross. McCall quotes some of my favourite writers and commentators including Jürgen Moltmann, William Lane, Leon Morris. Then McCall contrasts that understanding with older Church teachings and gives a better understanding (IMHO) of why the opening words of Psalm 22 were put in Jesus’s mouth by Matthew and Mark.

Blessings on us all as we sit in this liminal Saturday…contemplating the dark.