Strong Weakness

Photograph by George Angus

“God is not found in the soul by adding anything

but by a process of subtraction.”

                                                                                         Meister Eckhart

This past week we’ve started renovating the kitchen. It has been very hard work, ironically not so much renovating but taking down, breaking open, stripping. This morning I stand in the empty shell and look at all the patched cracks, the open rafters, all the wiring and pipes exposed and I ask Matilda: “Will it ever look better again?” “It will,” she says, “ you know that you often have to break to restore.”

I find it no mere coincidence that right now I am busy reading T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets as part of our Living School material. In the fourth section or “movement” of  the second Quartet I came across this line: “And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.”

Breaking, stripping, entering darkness, vulnerability, weakness – all elements of the soil from which new growth sprouts. It is a rule of the spiritual life and lies at the heart of Christianity.

“While Jews clamor for miraculous demonstrations and Greeks go in for philosophical wisdom, we go right on proclaiming Christ, the Crucified. Jews treat this like an anti-miracle--and Greeks pass it off as absurd. But to us who are personally called by God himself - both Jews and Greeks - Christ is God's ultimate miracle and wisdom all wrapped up in one. Human wisdom is so tinny, so impotent, next to the seeming absurdity of God. Human strength can't begin to compete with God's "weakness." (1 Cor 1:22 – 25, The Message)

It saddens me to see how so much of current religion does everything in its power to avoid these very “weakness” elements. The latter is often regarded as sin, attacks from evil and the focus is much more on a clamor for miraculous demonstrations and current cultural wisdom.

Matthew Fox writes in his book “Original Blessing”:

“Religion too has become very light-oriented in the West. The religion of Positivism is almost all light. And the sentimental hymns that ignore the dark or reduce it anthropomorphically to human sin and therefore to salvation contribute to the excessive lightning of our world.

What price have we paid as a people for all this light? We have become afraid of the dark. Afraid of no light. Of silence, therefore. Of image-lessness. We whore after more – more images, more light, more profits, more goodies. And, if [Meister] Eckhart is correct about the power of subtraction versus the power of addition, our souls in the process shrivel up. For growth of the human person takes place in the dark. Under ground. In subterranean passages. There, where ‘no image has ever reached the soul’s foundation,’ God alone works. A light-oriented spirituality is superficial, surface-like, lacking as it does the deep, dark roots that nourish and surprise and ground the large tree.”

I must confess, when starting with the renovations on Monday, I never expected that it would lead to theological thoughts a week later. Hopefully the end result where the kitchen itself is concerned will surprise me just as much.

George