April 9 – Our Best Option

Here in Cor Unum, there is a primary consideration, an optimal choice, a best-case scenario in every event which might well bear the motto: Stay Dead!

Are we not seated with Christ in heavenly places (Colossians 3:1, 2)? Indeed, we are, and those who are dead to sin and alive to God will be those who most faithfully occupy that seat.

Let us examine that which monastics rehearse each day: our nature tends but to evil. It shuns the glory of God and chooses lethargy, selfishness, pride, stubbornness, depression and guile. The monastic soul is examined daily and found wanting. If no offenses shimmer to the surface, there are always the little judgments it bears against the offenses of others!

That same cloistered soul comes to the given and resurrected Body and the Blood of Jesus Christ every day, in order that forgiveness, justification, and redemption would sustain it in hope and growth. The only effective way to live this life, this blossoming, fruit-bearing life, is to abide in the soil, a little dead kernel that can see not much further than the husk dissolving around it.

We mistake, in part, when we consider that WE are the kernels fallen into the earth and that WE are dying with asperity. No, it will ever be our trust that HE died well and died fully and died in our place and died according to the pleasure and will of the Father that prevails. We do not die any more righteously than we live, but we may choose to abide alone, without the husks of pride and guile and every other armor we have used as covering.

As Paul counted the best of his life as dung for the heap, life sprouts when we begin to gain Jesus, being found of Him, having no righteousness of our own, stretching up toward the beam of His faith, for we are faithless, dead, having for power to stretch, His resurrection life. We choose the fellowship of His suffering, and we hope to be made conformable to His death, knowing more certainly as time goes by that He lived a perfect death. He had no plans, no hopes, no doing, no vision of His own but to surrender to the will of His beloved Father.


"No Plans"
photo by Kerry