give peace in our time

From Rouault's "Miserere" | Plate 57: Obéissant jusqu'à la mort et à la mort de la croix (Obedient unto the death, even death on the cross)

“Give peace in our time, O Lord. Because there is none other that fighteth for us, but only thou, O God.”

We gather in the small chapel with the stained glass windows to pray the evening liturgy. There are no kneelers, so our flesh kisses the stone floor and goes numb. At that level, eyes are placed just below the columns of glass that overlook the altar. At that level, eyes are placed just below the central image woven into the glass: our Lord Christ, crucified.

Today, I think about Somalia and famine. Today, when we read the appointed psalm, I think about my friends in closed Asian countries, who flee from village to village, who hide Bibles in the lining of their coats, who have been imprisoned. Today, I think about the children who live across the street from me, just over the highway, who will go hungry tonight, and I wish I could know their faces.

When we come to the line about peace in our time, I cannot speak. I weep. A few tears stain the prayerbook, I rock back on my knees and feel them recoil at the hardness of the stone floor, and I lift up my eyes to that central image, to our crucified God, and I am overwhelmed by Beauty and Truth and Love.

I think it was Pascal who once said, “Christ will be in agony until the end of the world.”

I look into the face of the stained glass Christ, His hands stretched wide upon a tree, and there I see the mystery of our Faith, the deepest beauty that the world will ever know.

I am made uncomfortable by this cross. To think that God died, that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was pierced, bled, suffered. There are too many questions. There are too many troubling things. I rush to Easter, haste the days to Sunday morning, give a quick nod to the death of God, and sing the great Easter hymns without tear, wound, or grief.

But God died. If I accept the fullness of the Gospel, I must accept this too.

The Face in that stained glass window, the Face of God—so very dead—stares out at me. It asks me what I believe.

I blink the blur from my eyes.

“Know you not,” St. Paul writes, “that you were baptized into His death?”

I am reminded often that God’s time is not our time. Not in the sense that some make it, who pluck a verse from the Psalms, which is clearly a metaphor, and turn it into a rubric for measuring days in Heaven. I mean more the mystery of Faith, what Melito of Sardis wrote when he asked of God if it was because of the lambs or because of the Lamb who was to come that God passed His hand over the firstborns of those faithful Israelites that first Passover.

As I look to that stained glass, as I feel the pain grow in my knees, I wonder if the cross of Christ is only a single act in history. Or, do arms stretched wide across that tree span the whole of this cosmic timeline, does the atoning blood of Saviour reach back to repentant Adam and forward to whenever this great symphony will be drawn to its final note?

I think of Somalia. Can He reach that far?

Paul also said of us that we “suffer with Him, so that we might be glorified with Him.” There is so much hope built into that last phrase, so much certainty in the one that comes before.

Into His death we have been baptized. It is Christ alone who is the firstborn of the resurrection. We, the world, still await this joy. And as I behold the crucified God, look into His Face, I find a strange understanding.

The cross with Christ still upon it stands in this trembling place we call cosmos and cries out its indictment against the hostile evil of this world. It cries out for Somalia, it cries out for persecuted Christians, it cries out for the children across the street.

I blink, the sun breaks behind the clouds outside, light slips through the Face.

Our crucified Christ bleeds still. Not in any sense of historical time, but in the fullness of God’s time. Somehow, in a timeline that words fail to explain, Adam was forgiven and purchased by blood yet to be spilled and yet already spilled.

For with pierced hands, Christ stands in the void between what is and what should be. For though He has been raised and sits at the right hand of the Father, His work on the cross goes on, until every evil has been blotted out.

I find myself praying like Habakkuk. “How long, O Lord, will I cry violence and You do nothing?”

I hear Holy Ghost whisper an answer from the Face. “Take up your cross, follow Me.”

A sob catches in my throat, like a claw my hand grips the wood of the pew in front of me, tries to hold onto something that seems real.

But what is more real than this?

Why do I hasten past His cross? Why do I not look into the eyes of Love, look upon the hands that formed me from dust and are now pierced for me?

It is this Christ who is my Saviour, the crucified God. He is the one who hears my prayer for Somalia, for Asia, for the children across the street.

And I realize that all my definitions of beauty, in the face of the Face, must change.

And I remember. I kneel, I sob, I grip, and I remember: Christ saved by knowing. Each pain, each cry, each agony.

Christ will be in agony until the end of the world, for the world will be in agony until He returns.

In this cold chapel as the light pours in, I pray for Somalia, for Asia, for the children across the street.

I look into that Face, the Face of the crucified God, I feel my knees moan with the pain of pressing into cold stone, and I ask for my cross. I find there the strength to grieve for the brokenness of our cosmos, to make the sign of the cross upon myself, and to surrender to this absurd mystery of faith, that it is into His death I have been baptized, to be in agony with Him, too.

One day at peace. One day.

“Give peace in our time, O Lord. Because there is none other that fighteth for us, but only thou, O God.”