Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

Some of you may know that I’m a great fan of Thomas Merton’s selection of sayings from the 4th century desert Mothers and Fathers called The Wisdom of the Desert. It changed my life. Before reading it, I was at least nominally a Christian: after reading it, I had a new and different understanding of what Christianity was, and I found myself a convert. Needless to say, I highly recommend it!

One of my favorite selections is Saying 62: “If you see a young monk by his own will climbing up into heaven, take him by the foot and throw him to the ground, because what he is doing is not good for him.” When I first read it decades ago, it really puzzled me. I wondered: why shouldn’t we climb up to heaven? Isn’t that what prayer and discipline and devotion are about? Isn't that what God wants us to do?

It took a bit for me to realize: No! That’s not what prayer and discipline and devotion are about. Far from it! And climbing to heaven by our own will is pointless and impossible, folly and futility: our works do not produce the righteousness of God, our works do not earn us a place in heaven or give us access to the heavenlies. Grace does that. God’s grace draws us to heaven, which is to say, to an ever-deepening communion of love with God and with the community of God’s beloved, God’s saints; to the City whose Lord and Light and Life is Love. The life of faith, including prayer, discipline and devotion, is the life of allowing ourselves to be opened out by the Spirit of God to the Spirit’s grace, from which grace spring our good works—the works God does through us and in which we participate by grace—and by which grace we are drawn into heaven. This is why, if we find ourselves climbing to heaven by our own will, it is actually grace to be grasped by the foot and thrown to the ground.

In our Office Reading this morning, we read about the fall of the Tower of Babel, and ever since reading (and finally understanding!) Saying 62, I have only ever been able to read the story of the Tower of Babel as a story of God’s exceptional and overwhelming grace.

But, you might think to yourself, wasn’t it a good thing that we were all united, all one people, all speaking the same language, all working together to accomplish seemingly impossible things? Well…not really. Not if our “oneness” comes from a united opposition to grace, to love; not if our “oneness” is hegemonic and monolithic and so wickedly imperial and imperialistic that we think we can storm and colonize heaven; not if all our great accomplishments and impossible works, however apparently magnificent, are funded by pride and wickedness and are incapable of goodness. In these terms, the fall of Babel is indeed a tremendous grace!

It’s also a grace in that it teaches us about something in which God apparently delights…and that’s difference! God delights in diversity, not monolithic sameness! And God gifts us with difference and diversity in order to show us something about real oneness: we’re really one not when our differences are erased, but when we love—when our love for each other sees and rejoices in the diversity with which we’ve been gifted. That’s the real oneness of love; that’s why, when we call the Church One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic, we understand the Oneness of the church to be grounded not in our own efforts towards a totalizing sameness that could only ever be oppressive, but in Jesus Christ who is Love incarnate, and through whom comes every good and perfect gift. The Oneness of the Church flows from its union in love and of love with Love who is Christ; in the union of time and eternity, finite and infinite, mortal and immortal, creature and Creator. In this way, the Church, the fellowship of grace, is God’s answer to the Tower of Babel!

Dear Friend, so much in our world will encourage us to climb every ladder we can to gain some heaven or other. And my prayer for all of us today is that we can manage to remember that heaven isn’t a thing to be gained: it’s a thing we’re given by grace; a relationship into which we’re invited by Love. And if we need to be pulled off some ladders in order to remember, I pray we may come to recognize the grace that brings us back to earth, even as it unites us to the heaven we seek.

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+