In the light of today’s readings and the suffering of the world and those around us, the task looks harder still. How can I, how can we, do anything to engage with this reality? 

I’d like to offer to you some insight from a strand of Christian thought known as Creation Spirituality. In this tradition there are four paths, or more accurately, a fourfold path:  

These personal moments of awareness of God give us joy and the energy to look outward and towards others. 

Awe and wonder belong to the Via Positiva. The times when we stand on a mountain-top as the mist rolls back to reveal the beauty of the valley below, or when we are amazed by the tiny detail in a bud about to open at the first sign of spring, these are times when we connect with God as Creator. All of this goes back to the original blessing God pronounced when he looked at all that his hands had made and said “it is very good!” 

But our lives don’t always feel like mountain-top experiences and the trees can seem empty and bare against the cold winter skies. This way lies the Via Negativa. 

If the Via Positiva began with the awareness of God, the Via Negativa begins with the sense of God’s absence. It takes us through pain, grief, mourning and emptiness. Walking its path helps us make our trust more real and teaches us about letting go and being able to remain in the places of darkness. 

I’m very aware that lots of us are walking that path at the moment, and not by choice. Many of our lives are, at present, touched by bereavement and the loss of those close to us. Others may be enduring painful circumstances that pierce our hearts. Our minds may be full of painful questioning. Sometimes we may even wonder whether God is there or whether he hears us. But it is in these places of the most profound desolation that God is especially present.  

We’re approaching the middle of Lent, the time of year when we connect with Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness. Through that desert experience, Jesus discovered new depths in his relationship and dependence on his Father.  

In a few Fridays’ time, we’ll wait with Jesus as he cries out, “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?” Jesus takes that unanswered question to the very depths of hell; the furthest place possible from God’s loving presence. Yet in those depths resurrection happens, bringing the transforming presence of God into the place where God was most absent. 

I’d like us at this point to watch a short clip from the movie Pay It Forward in which a young boy, Trevor, who having been challenged in class to “think of an idea to change our world – and put it into action”, comes eye to eye with absolute desolation. 

As we walk the Via Negativa, we come face to face with our wounds and our brokenness. This is the way of repentance. One of our prayers of confession says “We have wounded your love and have marred your image in us.” If we confess our sins, it is because we believe that “God is faithful and just and will forgive all our wrongs” and restore us to newness of life.  

The Via Negativa helps us to deepen our understanding of confession and therefore of God’s forgiveness. Rather than rush through our prayers, we walk more slowly through the landscape of our lives, meet head-on “those things of which we are most afraid”, and call out to God for his mercy and forgiveness. 

One of the confessions used by the Iona Community says

“We confess that our lives and the life of the world are broken by our sin.” Where the Via Positiva focuses on the original blessing, voiced by God at the dawn of creation, the Via Negativa points us to the damage we have done to God’s creation and challenges us about our role in that damage. Where the Via Positiva connects to the beauty of the ‘God seed’ planted within each of us, the Via Negativa points to how we have polluted the soil God meant to nourish it.

I’d like us now to hear the Gospel reading. As Enid reads for us, I’d like us to listen to Jesus and discern where we have met him “in the least of these.” 

We’ve explored two parts of the pathway, Via Positiva and Via Negativa, the second two grow out of the first pair, as God calls us from observation to participation. 

The Via Creativa grows out of the Via Positiva and calls us to become participants with God in his creativity. It is a joyful path as we communicate God’s blessing and presence to others. We grow and flourish as we use the gifts God has given to affirm and value the giftedness of others. We start to understand our gifts as having been entrusted to us for the service of others and our creativity makes sense in the bigger picture. 

The Via Transformativa, in turn, grows out of the Via Negativa and is possibly the most challenging of the paths to walk. 

The Via Transformativa asks: 

There are two ways to answer these questions. We might react at a surface level and busy ourselves trying to sort other people’s problems out or become activists campaigning for change. But any efforts we make to change the world outside us will come to nothing unless we respond to the challenge of Christ’s call and allow the world within us to be opened to transformation. 

These questions connect to the heart of our two readings this morning. From Exodus, we read of Shiphrah and Puah, the two childless midwives who risk their lives by disobeying Pharaoh to save the lives of a generation of boys. The two women act out of a profound belief in the sanctity of life, even when they have been unable to conceive. God transforms their barrenness into blessing. 

Rather than being a simple story of who’s in and who’s out on the day of judgement, our Gospel reading contains the key to our understanding of how Jesus opens up to us, in his very person, the Via Transformativa.