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I struggle after Christ, and straggle far behind him. I lean in to hear the moans issuing from him as he presses forward, bleeding, sweating, carrying the rough and ragged wood, and to glean from them some wisdom, to learn from them his love. I hear his sighs, and harsh, sharp breaths, and see his slipping hands and weighted gait, his swollen eyes, and his aching fingers. And in all of this, I hear and see and smell the bloody, endless Gospel.
The Gospel doesn’t promise the sense of YHWH’s presence or wonder at the created world, or tears at his death, or cries at his resurrection. The Gospel promises no feelings, no senses, really no nothing in the here and now but peace — and peace is not a feeling. YHWH doesn’t offer to us peaceful feelings or consolation or tranquility and happiness, but really, honest peace — an end to the war we wage with him, a conclusion and surrender to our struggle against him. For this, the greatest gift we can ever be given — the gates of hell stormed, our shackles broken, our swords beaten down — he asks of us everything, and into that promise, with that obligation, we have been baptized.
The Gospel is not weepy feelings or being thrust to your knees at YHWH’s immensity — it is the total commitment of the total person to total love, to love and serve him with your whole heart, whole mind, and whole soul. Our baptism compels and commits us to take that Gospel seriously, every word of it, and realize that Christ meant all of those crazy and unreasonable things he said, and to live according to it. Oh, the Gospel, it is a terrifying thing, and it makes me nervous, and makes me uncomfortable, and fills me with fear and trepidation — and I can’t turn away from it.
Because I believe in YHWH and because I believe in Christ, because I say “credo,” I can’t just ignore the Gospel. I can’t look at the uncomfortable parts, at the unreasonable things Yeshua demands, and say ‘Well, I don’t like it, so I’m not going to believe it.’ I don’t like the Holocaust, either, but it happened, it’s real, and to deny it would be lunacy, as I’m sure we all agree. So, if I believe in the incarnation of the Son of God, it follows I must follow the Gospel, no matter how nuts it may to me seem.
I don’t know how many of you have really delved into it, really tried to take it seriously, so I’ll be frank; the Gospel of Christ is not by any stretch of the imagination an easy or a fun thing, and it stretches far beyond being a nice person, a good citizen, a proponent of democracy, and an opponent of abortion. And yet, that’s the gospel I hear all over the place — God Bless America! I honest wonder how people can devote themselves to studying the Scriptures and come away from it without a firm commitment to the poor and the outcast, or at least a waffling discomfort about it. How can someone read the parable of the sheep and the goats and not wonder why they themselves haven’t been feeding the hungry and visiting the imprisoned, or the parable of the sower of seeds, and not wonder if they themselves are seed sown among thorns?
Where are our prophets and wild men? Why doesn’t Christianity look any different from secular Western life? Too many times I’ve been told to lay down my burdens, without being given anything to pick up. I’ve been told what Christians believe, but not how they live.
Why aren’t all of us Mother Theresa? Why is she somehow an exception? If we are Christians — shouldn’t we all be living like Christ himself?
My original intention for Saint Superman was to chronicle my postulant year as a Capuchin Franciscan, for which I had been preparing when I opened up this little place. I’d been in talks with them for a long time, and had made a couple of trips up to see their houses and meet the Friars and was really terribly attracted to the whole business. More than anything, the simplicity of the call was a giant plus; here was a way to escape my own skin and live empty and in service, rather than just trying to get ahead and buy new gadgets. Here, here at last was my opportunity to begin living the Gospel and not just listening to it.
I’ll be the first to admit that I was definitely waiting on holiness, rather than going after it tooth and nail, but the Capuchin lifestyle held such vigorous wonder, wept and dripped with the Spirit so full that I couldn’t help but get excited at the prospect and believed, believed so surely, that I was called there.
But I wasn’t. It was a punch to the gut when Br. Miguel informed me that the Capuchins had reservations about my entrance, and were asking me to defer application until after college. I had been entertaining my own doubts — a girl — but it was nothing I didn’t believe could be overcome. I know how to make big decisions. I was sure of that.
A few of the brothers I had met were…reticent about me due to their perception of me as being overly critical. Not that I was criticizing them; oh, no, not at all. I had been caught, as it were, discussing the artistic merits of a large, garish painting in the dining hall. I have never been one for religious schlock, and I found it to be so. This did not bode well for me, apparently.
As all of this progresses, a project I’ve been working on, a comic book (natch!) called Sanctuary: Hope is Not Yet Lost silently and subtly moves forward. A musing on exactly the issues I want this blog to address — vocation, purpose, meaning, identity, family, and God — it has been buoyed up and pushed forward. Begun in the summer of 2006, my team and I had raised money for a small print run, which attracted the attention of a local businessman/comic-lover named Brett Carreras, and inspired him to finance a sizable printing, and send us to conventions, and help us seek out distribution, which we’ve now obtained.
I’ve spent a year wondering where God wants me to be and what God wants me to do, and is it possible he’s shown me all along? Could it be this kung-fu superhero comic about the meaning of life?
