When the World Trembles
Michiel Peeters - The Grave of Staying Where the Heart is Met.
As always, let us try to imagine the scene described in the Gospel. The Lord was with his disciples in Jerusalem, walking in the square of the magnificent Second Temple, renovated by Herod the Great, which was still being further embellished. Full of admiration, the disciples point out to each other the beauty and richness of the building.
And Jesus says, “All that you see here—the days will come when there will not be left a stone upon another stone that will not be thrown down.” The Lord was certainly not a typical spoilsport of other people’s admiration or joy. When he points out the transience of all things, from the greatest and seemingly most solid building to the speck of dust that is man, it is not to make his audience despondent, but to enable them, from a profoundly realistic desire, to recognize what remains and to build on that.
Jesus speaks openly about the end of the world—all things are temporary—a dramatic end that is foreshadowed by the finiteness of even the most magnificent human life and of everything we build our lives on, insofar as it is not God.
For his disciples, things will be even more dramatic. People will persecute you, “seize you,” you’ll be betrayed even by “relatives and friends, and some of you will be put to death. You will be hated by all because of my name.” This is because when a person becomes profoundly religious, when one lives one’s dependence on the Mystery alone, he or she no longer obeys the logic of power, and power cannot tolerate that.
However, says the Lord, do not be afraid, for “not a hair on your head will be destroyed.” It is an image the Lord uses regularly: “You cannot make a single hair white or black” (Matt 5:36); “The hairs of your head have all been counted” (Luke 12:7). A hair on your head can fall out just like that; you cannot make it black or white yourself. You do not know or even care exactly how many hairs you have, but God knows and cares. No one is as much of a father as that.
Our consistency is not in how they treat us, in what happens in the world, not even in the Temple or the Church, the most important, visible, and tangible sign of God-with-us, but only in the Mystery that knows every hair on our head, and that will ensure that nothing of us is lost.
Finally, Jesus says, “By your perseverance you will secure your lives.” In Greek, it says, literally: “In your ‘staying,’ gain your souls!” I think this is clearer.
The Lord encourages us to “gain our souls,” that is, to become ourselves, to grow in humanity, to become the protagonists of our own lives. How? By staying. Not by doing this or that, performing this or that. By staying. Staying where? Staying with what? With that which corresponds with our hearts. Have you experienced a correspondence?
Then stay, even if the world perishes. Stay because of what you have experienced. We can only stay because of something present, something we have experienced already and that remains present. It is not reasonable to marry someone because of your image of how he or she will be. You can reasonably marry someone because of what you have come to know about that person in your experience. The same is true for staying with Christ. It can only be reasonable because of what you have already experienced with that presence, in that presence.
Then, by staying there, “in your staying,” in time, you will become yourself, you will preserve your life, you will gain it, you will live, even if the world perishes.
