For enquiries regarding the Sydney Community or to speak with a priest, please contact:

Rev. Lisa Devine 0401 367 808

REGULAR SERVICES
Please refer to the programme.

Services & events are held at:

The Christian Community
8 Montague Street
BALMAIN NSW 2041
christiancommunity.sydney@gmail.com

Management Committee:

The Management Committee of the Sydney Congregation contact:

John Shaw Ph. (02) 47573731

Gospel Readings: HERE

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FEBRUARY - MARCH - APRIL 2010

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Reflections on Passion Tide

Neurologist Oliver Sacks fell down a mountain, running away from a white bull. The euphoria of being saved after hours of dragging himself and his damaged leg through harsh terrain accompanied only by the ravings of his mind was followed by an utterly unexpected and surprising journey into the dark night of the soul. Faced with the possibility of long term incapacitation, the loss of his career and the inability to control the course of events he felt himself sinking. “The abyss engulfed me.”  He describes the abyss as a chasm, an infinite rift, in reality into which he fell out of space and time, off the map, into a state where he had to relinquish all the powers he normally commanded, his science, his self-respect, his mind. He says: “the sense of excommunication was extreme. I maintained an affable and amenable surface, while nourishing an inward and secret despair.” Many of us will know exactly what he means. Outwardly, socially he had to try to be an adult but inwardly, spiritually he had to become childlike and relinquish all his “adult, masculine enterprise and activity”. His soul gesture was one of intense extreme passivity, of waiting. “I had to be still and wait in the darkness, to feel it as holy, the darkness of God, and not simply as blindness and bereftness (though it entailed blindness and bereftness).”  In this stillness where reason failed him he turned “secretly, half-sceptically, hesitantly, yearningly”” to the mystics and to the Bible where the mysterious return to life and light was described again and again. He held these to him, “hugged” them through the waiting. “I had to wait, to be still – for He was awaiting me.”

Every year during Passiontide we choose this path into the dark night of the soul. It belongs to the Christian path of the year.  After the light and grace of Epiphany we take a breath during the weeks of Trinity before beginning the journey towards the cross.  Deep in our heart there burns the flame of faith that will carry us through – the impossible faith as Oliver Sacks calls it. For him after three days of “hideous and unspeakable hell” when there was nothing else left this flame ignited.

The night was “no longer abominable and dark but radiant, secretly, with a light above sense – and with this, a curious paradoxical joy.” It was still night but now there was hope in the darkness.  His dark night of the soul had taken away all hope, humbled him horribly as he puts it and then returned hope a thousandfold transformed. He borrows the words of St John of the Cross to describe his experience:
“In the happy night, in secret, where none saw me,
Nor I beheld aught.  Without light or guide, save that which burned in my heart.
This light guided me. More surely than the noonday to the place where He was awaiting me...
There is no darkness, no torment strong enough to hold us from this meeting. As we walk towards the cross we know that the flame in our hearts will not fail us in the darkest hour and hold close to us the knowledge that : He waits for each of us.
Oliver Sacks, A Leg to Stand On, 1984; London, Picador 1991

Lisa Devine