Lectio
“Our life and our death is with our neighbour. If we gain our brother, we have gained God, but if we scandalise our brother, we have sinned against Christ.”
— Abba Anthony, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers
Meditatio
A life full of deep resentment separates us from God, our neighbors, and even ourselves. Anger is a natural, and often immediate response to injustice, whether perceived or real, but the persistent clinging to that anger leaves us isolated, angry, and cordoned off in darkness from both Spirit and our spiritual brothers and sisters. This self-imposed alienation from Other and other is the threshold to suffering, the place from which we no longer recognize God in God, God in neighbor, or God in ourselves. And, as Thomas Merton says, “To be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy.”
And yet resentments will crop up, like weeds in the garden of our soul, crowding out that which is beautiful and stealing nourishment from that which God is watering, feeding, and growing within us by his light and love — the light and love of God’s very self planted in and as our deepest, truest selves. Resentments are fundamentally a denial of our own God-given godly nature, as well as that same godly nature in others. They are the decision to reject the living water, the bread of life, and the light of the Lord for ourselves and to withhold it from others. They trample on the seed of the Word planted in our hearts and allow weeds, rocks, and thorns to overtake the divine soil from which love longs to grow forth.
But we do not have to bear the burden of our resentments alone, nor does God want us to. When we grow weary of their weight and tired of their cost — exhausted by our self-imposed suffering and suffocation — we need only turn to the Lord who promises us relief and tell him what we want, not because he doesn’t know, but because he affords us the grace and dignity, like he did with blind Bartimaeus, of asking instead of imposing. And by taking his yoke upon us, he will gather up both the wheat and the weeds in our garden, sorting what is useful and nourishing from what is to be collected and burned in his merciful grace.
Through the refiner’s fire, those things which block the light, love, and Spirit of Christ from being revealed in and through us begin to be consumed. While this process is neither easy nor pleasant, for we cling to our resentments even as they scorch the very flesh that tries to contain them, it is necessary and it is healing. Although love is the goal and God its source, pain is often our motivation for letting go of the false idols that obstruct our vision. And as the ash of what we have released rises and floats away, our vision clears and we begin to see God in God, God in our neighbors, and God in ourselves, and we cease being hostile strangers and become, again, a community of love — all subsumed by and emerging from All.
Oratio
let me go
let me be free
I do not want this anger
anymore
I want love
I want to be me
not a servant to hatred
anymore
open my eyes
I want to see
the light of love in you and me
forevermore
Contemplatio
What pain do you cling to because you are afraid of the light that letting go might reveal?
Related Scripture
“Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses.” — Mark 11:25 (NRSVCE)
For Further Reading
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like Hollowed Out by Love: Suffering as Purification, which traces a related movement of purification through the Desert Fathers — approaching from the angle of compunction and grief rather than resentment, and exploring how being emptied by suffering prepares us to receive what has been there all along.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity.
Wrestling With God.
Returning To Love.
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