The Impossible Possibility of Faith: Bearing the Cross that Feels Light

A particularly important (and beautiful) passage from Rowan Williams' Silence & Honeycakes, which I'm re-reading with friends this Lent.

Jesus says in Matthew 11:30 that his yoke is easy...but we can hardly forget that he also tells us to pick up and carry the cross. To see - to feel - the cross as a light load is the impossible possibility of faith: letting our best-loved pictures of ourselves and our achievements die, trying to live without the protections we are used to, feels like hell, most of the time. But the real hell is never to be able to rest from the labours of self-defence. It is only very slowly indeed that we come to see why the bearing of the cross is a deliverance, not a sentence; why the desert fathers and mothers could combine relentless penance with confidence and compassion.

A friend shared the following video with me the other day, and it powerfully captures what Williams calls resting from the labors of self-defense. Crucially, Christians are called to recognize the ways our labors of self-defense often take the shape of violence toward our neighbors. In other words, I think it is a profound mistake to hear Manning's words as purely private. To confess self-defense is to confess how we daily embody our mistrust of God in our relationships one another and others. There is such truth and mercy in the Lord's Prayer when the petition for daily bread, trusting God for the "just enough for today" (à la manna in the wilderness), is immediately followed by a petition for forgiveness.