Good Friday 2023
Some years ago, I was introduced to the thought of the psychotherapist Ernesto Spinelli. Spinelli had a keen sense of the inter-relatedness of human life – that our relationships with one another are the very stuff of existence. He understood very well that we are our relationships, that we exist in relationship or not at all, and that we see everything in the world, especially ourselves, in light of those relationships. It is our relationships that fashion our very sense of the world, and how we exist in the world.
However, if this be the case, then an inevitable uncertainty about life begins to emerge because I can never fully know with complete and final certainty what and how others will be, or even how “I” will be in any given set of circumstances. And so, we hear ourselves say, “I never thought I would act like that,” or “She seemed to turn into someone I did not know,” or “Recent events convince me that I just can’t make sense of things any longer.”
We live with unmistakable uncertainty. This is the source of so much of our anxiety. There is no way out of anxiety. Anxiety is always at the very heart of human existence. Yet, such radical anxiety can work in two ways: it can be debilitating and disruptive, generating feelings of despair, confusion and bewilderment; or it can be such as to re-awaken or enhance our connectedness to being alive and serve as that arousing source of creativity because it is precisely the experience of uncertainty that sets us to explore new alternatives, and that establishes within us the drive for curiosity so that we might see things in a new way. Thus, for Spinelli it was only through our acceptance of uncertainty, that we can grow into a real sense of certainty.
For Spinelli, in every certainty there is a profound uncertainty, and in every uncertainty there is a profound certainty. And so, we are caught up in a constant movement in our life between certainty and uncertainty, uncertainty and certainty. Living with this paradox is for Spinelli the art of life. Without our engagement of this radical tension we become more and more rigid in our life, less and less able to deal with the inevitable changing circumstances of life. When we enter the tension then life becomes full of colour and possibility for us.
This way of understanding ourselves resonates with what we are celebrating today.
The Cross is the place where both uncertainty and certainty coalesce. In remembering the Cross we recall the radical uncertainty of Jesus in his passion, his own confusion, bewilderment and profound sense of abandonment. We recall the crucifixion of certainty in his own passionate journey.
In so doing, we are mindful, though, of the uncertainly of every human heart in the face of death – and not just in the face of death but in the face of the world’s unpredictability. This is why the Cross speaks to us all in such a profound way, and why we gather in such a number on every Good Friday. We intuit that is not only Jesus who hangs on the Cross, but that we hang there also, stripped of the illusion about certainty in life, and exposed to the full force of uncertainty about our life and about our world. Thus, in casting our eyes on the Cross we hold the world’s uncertainty and our own uncertainty with such unmistakable honesty. We live the insight that all the certainties we have constructed about ourselves, about others, and about the world are in the end dissolved into the one certainty we have: that life is uncertain.
In every certainty there is an uncertainty. But in every uncertainty there arises a certainty. Is this not what we celebrate also as we gaze on the Cross. In his own profound anxiety, Jesus stretches forth into a radical new possibility occasioned by that one certainty in his own uncertainty – the Father’s love. It is his surrender into this embrace when all else would have denied its certainty that opens up for the world its deepest healing and affirmation. One of us, Christ Jesus, in his uncertainty, surrenders into that one certainty at the heart of the world, and thus forever transforms our anxiety into possibility.
As Pope Benedict wrote, “This is the world’s one true liturgy.” In other words, there can be no form of worship more perfect than this, than that surrender of Jesus in the depth of the world’s anxious uncertainty into the certainty of God’s embrace given us pure possibility.
If this be the liturgy of the heart of Jesus, then is it not ours also? In all that strips away and crucifies the illusion of our own certainty about life, and in our own radical uncertainty, we too are called to surrender in hope and trust into God’s acceptance and embrace of us then our own anxiety becomes possibility. And in our own dying to certainty, we rise in the midst of uncertainty to a new way of living.
