A Christmas Reflection: Refried Beans, with Garlic

Recently I’ve been listening to the audiobook, American Dirt, by Jeanine Cummings. My brother and sister-in-law recommended it so strongly that I was compelled to order it right away. I knew it would be a difficult hearing but nothing in my experience could have prepared me for the coming journey.

American Dirt is 12 hours of unrelenting nail-biting. It opens with Lydia and her eight-year-old son Luca hidden in a bathroom while 16 members of their family, including Lydia’s husband, mother, and sister and her children, are gunned down by the cartel during her niece’s fifteenth birthday party. Over the last few weeks I have followed their harrowing journey to el norte to escape promised death by the local hefe; a revenge killing for the article that Lydia’s journalist husband had published about the cartel that controlled Acapulco.

 

Hours after listening to the heavily accented narration of the audiobook all my thoughts have a Spanish accent. Even as I write this the words flow through a tunnel of Spanish that makes the English words sound thick and bulky. After the accent that drapes the words like an elegant coat in my brain falls away, my own dull inner voice emerging, I know that more than just my inner thoughts have been altered. I cannot unhear what I have heard. I cannot unsee the extreme and calculated violence. I cannot un-feel my empathetic sadness for their losses, their rape, their constant need to remind themselves that traveling on the top of a cargo train is not normal. I cannot untie the knot in my stomach.

 

This week I cooked refried beans and ate them with tortillas and avocado to be in solidarity with Lydia and Luca and the children that are their companions; the children who have assisted and saved them and whom they have defended and nurtured. Once Lydia recalls a happier time in her life, before she could have imagined the slaughter of her family, cooking dinner and remembering she was out of garlic. She lamented that dinner would be bland. Now each time I chop and smell garlic cooking in the pan I think of this imagined moment in this imaginary life and I am grateful that my dinner will carry the depth of a moment far beyond the flavor imparted. When the migrants are hungry and are fed by way of the kindness of strangers I imagine I would feed them. But when they are hidden and protected from capture I wonder if I would hide them. I would like to think I would. Lydia reveals through her own actions that no matter who you are or what you think you would do; you don’t actually know what you would do under profound and life-threatening circumstances. I pray to God to help me to be the kind of person who would risk my life to save the life of another. When the women in the story gather together to pray the rosary I imagine the beads between my fingers and I mouth the words of my own prayer on their behalf. I feel the relief of falling into the arms of God, momentarily still, momentarily calm, momentarily safe. I wish they would pray more often so I would feel better. 

 

My brother said that while he was listening to the story he was “so worried about those folks” that he had to stop listening. I too have been relieved when my car comes to the end of its journey and I can take a rest from listening to the heart-stopping story so that I can breathe again. He said he often had to remind himself that they weren’t actual people. But the fact that the story is fictional does not give me any relief because the story is based on a collective truth for countless thousands of people, each with their own stories of fleeing persecution, captivity, rape, slavery, torture, and slaughter. It is a story so deeply woven into the fabric of the Latino experience that I am keenly aware that there is no part of this fiction that is not true. 

 

Stories have this kind of power; to transmit authentic human experience by way of a fabricated tableau of imagined situations; the line between true events and truth is sometimes so very thin that it evaporates entirely leaving behind the realization that the effort to determine truth from fiction was always a false choice. There is no part of Lydia and Luca’s story I would want to live, and yet by hearing their story, the collective story of their people, of their nation, I am living it too. With every passing mile, they and every reader who follows them to and across the dessert experiences something on the other side of empathy: transformation.

 

Early in Lydia and Luca’s escape their lives depend on the assistance of a missionary couple. The couple have devoted their lives to bringing groups of youth from the United States into Mexico to expose them to a kind of religious freedom previously unknown to them. In Mexico the piety of religious life is as much a part of everyday rituals as is wearing clothes. The people speak openly of God and God’s blessings. The people pray and cross themselves for this and that. The people remember and bless the dearly departed each time their names are spoken. The people pray before eating. The acts of daily life are marked by blessing, ritual and ceremony. This kind of open religious expression as a social norm is largely unknown in America. It is a foreign concept to most Americans born into a secular society in which religious affiliation, and even more so religious expression, is becoming more foreign all the time. 

 

While secularization had already made deep in-roads decades ago, the exception was Christmas. I recall the Christmas Eves of my youth: attending elegant parties in the grand homes of my southern hometown followed by the pilgrimage to the church for the midnight service where hundreds crowded in to hear the Nativity story. For many this annual obligation afforded them the only experience of the Gospel they would receive. I recall my father preaching earnestly and faithfully to the full church though I cannot recall a single word. But the story of Jesus’ birth remains clear and unchanged: the story of Mary’s visitation and she and Joseph’s pilgrimage to safety, from the start and all the while guided, protected, and aided by angels and dreams, the quiet birth taking place in a barn, mother and child surrounded by farm animals, the huge star shining brightly in the sky hailing a new King and the coming of a kingdom, a kingdom in which the lion and the lamb lie down together and swords are beaten into plows, the summoning of those who were awake and alert and watching for the sign – the shepherds in their fields watching over their flocks, the wisdom teachers of the East carrying the spiritual gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. There are many stories in the great canon of sacred text we call the bible, but during this holy week, the beginning of Christmastide, it seems to me that if this is the only story one should ever hear from Christiandom, and for many it is, then it is a sufficient proclamation. It is a story sufficient to lead us to the other side of empathy, into transformation; a changed heart and an open mind. This story of God coming into the world has the power to compel us to pray: Here I am Lord, an agent of change, an agent of good will, an ambassador of the good news. 

 

The coming of.... us

I have been thinking a lot lately about the coming of Christ.  To be more precise, I have been thinking about the phrase the coming of…. I think most everyone is anticipating the coming of something right now. We are looking for what is coming in response to what is now. So for many of us the coming of is something like this…. 

The coming of a vaccine…. The coming of the end the pandemic…. The coming of a new administration… the coming of a new baby… the coming of a new year… the coming of a new friendship…. The coming of a new semester… the coming of a new house… the coming of recovery from illness… the coming of a new day… the coming of night…. the coming of a new job.... the coming of a new pet… the coming of a storm… the coming of the sun… the coming of the holidays… 

All our days are filled with the coming of….

 

The theme of Advent is the anticipatory waiting for, the coming of Christ. We first understand this as the coming of the messiah child born into human experience. But Advent also anticipates the coming again of Christ; the return of Jesus, in our own time and place.

 

In my experience, there are a few basic responses to the promise of the second coming: 

 

1) There are those who think of Jesus’s coming in purely physical terms – pulling from biblical imagery – Jesus seated on a cloud descending to earth, in the same way they imagine the son Jesus, immortally youthful and literally seated at the right hand of the elderly, fatherly image of God. 

 

2) There are those who simply don’t believe it. Many very deeply spiritual people who are quite devoted to the religious life and have an authentic and meaningful sense of piety stop short at the notion of Christ’s return, at least in the way it has been described and taught over the centuries. The imagery of Jesus riding in on a cloud fails them utterly. Not to mention the fact that Mark’s urgent call to prepare anticipates the immediate return of Jesus…. And yet for the last 2000 years Jesus has failed to appear. The hurried expectation has long-since lost its urgency. 

 

3) There are those who possess a vague sense of understanding, even longing, for the coming again of Jesus…. but it is elusive and fleeting, inexplicable, non-specific, ethereal and non-local. 

 

While none of these feels completely satisfying, neither are they failings. Each is a human interpretation and attempt to understand to mentally process a spiritual event; not a temporal event but a cosmic event. The coming of Christ is occurring on the spiritual plane which is both hidden and at the same time accessible to us and may in fact be manifesting on the physical plane in some way that we do not yet fully recognize or appreciate. 

 

Let us again be reminded of the words of Teilhard de Chardin, paraphrased: We are not humans having profound but occasional spiritual experiences, we are spiritual beings experiencing human life on the physical plane. This is the key, in my estimation, of understanding the coming of the Christ. 

 

Because we are so completely rooted in the physical experience and quite unaware of the spiritual realm we interpret, and define, and limit our imaginings to that of the physical world. In limiting the boundaries of our spiritual experience we in turn limit our human potential. We are spiritual beings here on planet earth for the experience of being human, perhaps to deepen our relationship with the divine, but the physical plane is not our home – it is a temporary state of being. We are however, most of us, a stranger to our true home, our true nature and our minds try to work out how spiritual events can be seen through the narrow lens of human understanding. But we cannot. So we must either understand our limitations and be satisfied with the assurance of the promise of Jesus’ return, or, engage in an effort to expand our awareness of our spiritual natures. 

 

This is the work of religious life, ultimately, to approach an awareness of our two natures co-existing both on the human and spiritual planes simultaneously. On the spiritual plane all physical limitations fall away… water becomes wine, a man born blind receives sight, the mere touch of Jesus’ clothing brings healing, the angels converse, assure, protect and relay information, Jesus calls Peter to walk on water, dreams carry divine instruction, aged and barren women become pregnant, a virgin conceives a child, the dead are raised, and on and on. In the spiritual realm all things are possible. In the spiritual realm there is no suffering. In the spiritual realm those who have gone before are reunited to one another and we can sense their near presence, their eternal wisdom - these are our ancestors, the saints in light. In the spiritual realm the divine essence of Jesus is fully present and accessible – as the Holy Spirit. In the spiritual realm life does not end but is changed, it is eternal. 

 

Jesus spent his life revealing to us our true nature as spiritual beings and the potential goodness of human life upon that realization. Until we catch this wave of awareness, with its expanded - more than panoramic - vision, trying to reconcile spiritual events within the confines of human experience is like trying to move a camel through the eye of a needle. 

 

When Jesus taught us to pray he said, quite plainly, “thy kingdom come.” It is not coming, it has come. We are the ones who insist on the kingdom’s seemingly eternal coming-ness – its off in the distance-ness – its just out of reach-ness. But Jesus made clear its present-ness, its now-ness, its accessibility in this moment-ness. If we can focus, meditate, sit with, contemplate these three words: …thy kingdom come… we might, at some point be able to see the coming of…. in a new light. 

The truth of our situation, the reality of our expansive being-ness, opens the door of understanding that forever alters the way in which we live as humans; the way we live together as humans; the way we live as spiritual beings ever so briefly on this rock fixed to a sun with a single moon; this planet a mere grain of rice in a cosmic soup bowl of divine broth. There are many moons and billions of planets, countless stars and galaxies, and millions of universes; the vastness of the cosmos is beyond our imagination, but it is not beyond our awareness of it. To imagine is to see as humans see; to be aware is to see with the eye of the soul.  Do not then look for Christ using your human senses, nor with your imagination, but rather with your awareness. 

Now is the coming of…. us. It is us breaking free of the bondage of our limitations, us breaking out of the constraints of our limited understanding, us realizing the fullness and completeness and accessibility of divine love, us realizing our boundless potential. It is us coming to God.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then I was blind, now I see

This week St. James bible study class dove headlong into the Gospel of Mark. We began with what is also the gospel reading for worship today; the opening lines of the first chapter. 

 

To understand a gospel it is essential to have a firm grasp on its overarching theme. For instance, Luke begins… it seemed good to me… to write you an orderly account, most excellent Theophilus, that [you might have deeper knowledge] of those things in which you were instructed….. Luke seeks to call us into deeper relationship by way of deeper knowledge of the divine made known in Jesus.

 

Matthew’s theme is the radical reorientation of our lives toward the spiritual realm of the kingdom and the gospel spares no effort in leading us to a fuller understanding…. The kingdom of Heaven is like leaven, a mustard seed, treasure hidden in a field, a merchant seeking beautiful pearls…

 

John is complex and mystical, it calls us to see beyond the physical manifestation of signs, that is, the miracles Jesus performed, to focus on the truth to which the signs point… that the revealing of divine nature serves to transform us… In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…. 

 

Mark, from the outset calls us to repent and return to God in preparation for what is coming. The Gospel opens with the call of the prophet, John, proclaiming the prophecy of Isaiah: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight…. Prophecy upon prophecy… and the purpose of prophecy is the call to return to the divine.

 

Mark is calling his listeners into action, with urgency, to elicit within them, within us, a change of heart. The evangelist calls us to prepare by way of returning in confident expectation, with the sure and certain knowledge of Jesus’s return. This is the theme of Mark: confess, return, anticipate.

 

Having taken this plunge into Mark I have been intentionally looking for opportunities for self-examination, confession and reorientation; to find an opening to hear and see divine action, not only in my life, but to see it in the world. 

 

It didn't take long before I stumbled upon a six-part podcast entitled, “How can we see?” It features two of my favorite theologians: Richard Rohr and Brian McLauren. Rohr is an author, teacher and priest of the Franciscan order whose name is synonymous with post-modern Christianity. Brian McLauren is a pastor, author and teacher, self-described as a former evangelical fundamentalist; his name is synonymous with the emergent church movement. Also included is a third voice, a feminine voice, and therefore a necessary voice: Jacqui Lewis, pastor of the oldest Presbyterian church in the country, adds depth, care, and a spectrum of colorful images to this probing and challenging conversation.

 

This podcast relates directly to the actions of confession and returning through the identification and acknowledgement of our personal biases. These biases, many completely unknown to us, create enormous blind spots in our understanding of ourselves, our neighbors and our world. Our blind spots are the missing bits within the mythological stories we have created about ourselves. The substantive parts of our personal mythologies are made up of our experiences, memories and the influential people in our lives. Unconsciously and daily we protect the story we label: My life. Our ego is continuously on the defensive ensuring that we move through “our life” undisturbed and unthreatened. This creates a limited and well-protected worldview that does not reflect the totality of the diversity of human life nor the totality of the depth and breathe of human experience. And we are generally unaware of this. We don’t know what we don’t know.

 

In the podcast Richard Rohr recites a Latin phrase which creates the foundation for McLauren’s list of biases. The phrase is this: “Whatever is received is received according to the manner of the receiver.” What does this mean? Well, it means that what we perceive and understand about our world is completely dependent on how our experiences and individual influences have shaped our worldview. Jacqui Lewis remarked reflectively, “We are not looking for the story that will change our lives, we are looking for the story that confirms our lives.”

 

I have heard that when the white men came to the shores of the indigenous peoples they could not see their boats moored several hundred yards offshore because they did not have a framework of history or understanding to interpret what was actually visible. It was not until the medicine men “read” the strange pattern of waves that were breaking on the shoreline and confirmed that something new and never before seen was breaking into their reality that the ships became visible. 

 

McLauren listed the following as biases common to most all of us. You can listen to the podcast I forwarded to you yesterday to hear McLauren explain each of these in detail. In this moment I just want you to get a sense of them. They include: confirmation bias, complexity bias, community bias, complimentary bias, contact bias, conservative/liberal bias, consciousness bias, competency bias, confidence bais, comfort/complacency/convenience bias, catastrophe bias and cash bias. 

 

It is important for us is to realize it that our personal reality is shaped largely by our biases. These biases determine who we associate with, the church we attend or don’t attend, the God we envision, the work we do, the people we vote for, the family we get along with and the family we avoid, the friends we hang out with and the people who are invisible to us, the causes we support, the ideologies we reject, the music we like and the books we read, and on and on.  Some biases can be helpful and protect us; they can help us make good decisions about our well-being. But many cause great suffering. Consider the story of parents who rejected their queer child when he came out. Unable to bear the judgment and rejection of his family he committed suicide. There are a number of biases at play here. All of them cause suffering. 

Biases call us away from a loving and unbiased God. It is helpful to know our biases, to understand how they work in our lives because to do so helps us to a develop a willful vulnerability and a more open heart.

 

When I heard McLauren’s list of biases I recognized each of them operating in my life, creating a kind of blindness. Jesus said, you have eyes and yet you cannot see. To have our biases revealed to us, to confess to having them – knowingly or unknowingly, and to do so without judgment is to grow into Christ consciousness. The growing is the returning to the divine. Confession, returning and anticipating – this is the hope of Mark’s gospel. This is the deep desire of God – that we might see the kingdom in its fullness, where it exists here and now, our blinders laid aside, and live joyfully within it.  

Hear, O Israel...

This post is the written summary of a homily given at St. James Episcopal Church on October 11, 2020. It refers to the parable in Matthew 22:1-14 - the last of a triad of parables - known as The Great Banquet. The parable should not be taken in isolation, as it was not told in isolation. It is a summary of the metanarrative of the entire canon of Christian sacred texts including the whole of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament: The story of a distracted and stubborn people being continually called home by a faithful and patient Triune God. Therefore, I recommend that before you move into this reflection you first read Matthew 21:23-22:46 which forms a complete unit. In this way you will have the advantage of understanding for yourself how this parable upon which the Church meditates on this particular Sunday drives home Jesus's indictment of the religious establishment of which he was a part. This indictment was also intended for his own followers upon whom he charged the development of a reformed Judaism (later Christianity) that would be, unchecked and unguarded, just as vulnerable to the temptations of the temporal.

Despite our 21st century obsession with the individual - this parable is not about our personal salvation. Rather, it is an indictment of a failed system - of a failed religious institution. We tend to look at the failure of institutions in practical terms; loss of financial feasibility or a state of failed health in which the cancer of corruption has become so widespread, so pervasive and so profound a system is no longer able to function effectively. There are many examples of failing institutions in our world today - educational systems, governmental bodies, health systems, etc. But the institutional life of the Jewish temple, the Pharisaic Jews of Jesus' day did not fail necessarily in this way, but rather it failed in its fidelity to God. It failed to adhere to the Shema. Let us refresh our Jewish memory. The Shema in Jesus time was this: 

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deut. 4:6-9) 

The resulting corrupt nature of the religious institution Jesus dealt with was but the symptom of a far greater "sin" (missing the mark) - that of losing heart for God. 

When the Church, as an institution, and specifically, the congregations that are within it - fall away from God - fail in their fidelity to adhere to Jesus's carrying forward of the Shema (known to Christians as the Great Commandment) then the church loses its heart and thus its ability to assist the people in the process of awakening. Individuals cannot realize a radical reorientation of their life while remaining concerned with the preservation of anything temporal. There is no greater failing for the Church as a whole or for any individual parish. But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea. (Matt. 18:6) - Jesus is speaking to the failed religious institution of his day. 

The dire warning intended for religious bodies in this set of three parables holds within it a personal element in that individuals are the fabric out of which all human systems are made and have life. Therefore we are warned, in our own time and place, to hold our religious institutions to the highest standard - so that they continue to call people into a radical reorientation of life. If the people are not awakening to the knowledge of their higher selves they cannot be in the world but not of it - they only know how to be of the world - fully and completely identified with every temporal element of the physical plane - oblivious to a life of freedom and peace. As one of my teachers says: You are so free you can choose bondage... and you often do. But you don't have to.

When we read the Gospel of Matthew, the parables in particular, with this perspective in mind, we understand that as member of the body of Christ we are called daily to attend to the intimate relationship we have with the one Triune God... to write the name of God on our heart a thousand times a day... to hold a space for the Spirit to make itself known to us.... to feel our eternal nature tied to the eternalness of the divine. This we do first. And from this place of connection we are far more open to loving our neighbor, all our relations, not with the conditional love the world has trained into us, but the love of the divine. We cannot offer others what we do not yet know.  "So your first job is to work on yourself. The greatest thing you can do for another human being is to get your own house in order and find your true spiritual heart." (Ram Dass)

When we attend to our own spiritual well-being it enriches the whole Christian community. The things we care about shift. The attachments we hold to things that are passing away, pass away of their own accord. We experience a kind of freedom, at least some of the time. We feel joy, at least some of the time. And our houses of worship become expressions of peace.

Higher hanging fruit

This post is a reflection on one of the vineyard parables in the Gospel of Matthew, 21:33-46. This line in particular: "Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom."  Those for whom this warning is intended take caution: "When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them." Jesus is no longer speaking to the crowds of the Galilean countryside, he is in Jerusalem and his audience is thick with those of the Jewish authority who oppose him. 

In both the accounts of Mark and Matthew, Jesus is direct conflict with the head of the serpent, as it were. In Matthew the conflict is covered in chapters 21 and 22 which form a single unit. To observe it in its entirety in the format of a dramatic reading would be breath-taking.

The corresponding text in Mark is as follows. Note in particular Jesus' response to the "teacher of the law" when he "answered wisely":

 

One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?” “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”“Well said, teacher,” the man replied. “You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”  Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.

 

"....you are not far from the kingdom of God...."  The teaching is clear: there is nothing in all of religious life that is more important then these two commandments and they are are directly related to the kingdom. And religious bodies who pursue interests divergent from these commandments, in whom the fruits of the kingdom are absent, will be abandoned. 

 

While the Church now clearly understands supersessionism (Christianity as a replacement for Judaism which is understood in the light of the Gospels as a failed religion) as heresy, it is important to be faithful to the text in Matthew. That is to say, Matthew may well have envisioned that Judaism would indeed fade into the shadow of the growing sect of Christianity. Perhaps he did believe that God would take the kingdom from those he understood as so corrupt and incapable of fidelity to the Law, so undeserving of the privilege of bearing the Law, or that it would collapse from the weight of its own hypocrisy. We don’t actually know what Matthew believed.

 

But we do know the essence of this teaching: Regardless of the religious outer garment, those who create lives and institutional life based solely upon on these two commandments upon which all the rest of the law hangs are those who have access to the kingdom.

 

Let’s unpack that a bit.

 

Below I present some of my understandings of the Kingdom. They may not fit into your understanding or perceptions. I have no need to be right here. I simply offer a way of looking at the Kingdom so that it is accessible at some level and not perpetually out of reach.

 

I perceive that the Kingdom as a direction, not a destination.

I perceive that the Kingdom is a state we enter into, a kind of energetic flow into which we may merge and are carried, not a place we go or end up after we die should we be judged worthy.

I perceive that the Kingdom and the promise of eternal life are one in the same; accessible on the physical plane prior to death as well as continued after death.

I perceive that access to the Kingdom is wholly dependent on one’s openness to the development of higher consciousness or the experience of gradual awakening; to see beyond the forms of the physical plane and to enter into a reality defined by love – the likes of which cannot be fully experienced while tied to the attachments of the physical life.

I perceive the Kingdom as a something to attend to intentionally but not to force; that which one falls into gently that is matched perfectly with a corresponding falling away of worldly concerns folding into an encroaching, enveloping open-heartedness to everyone and everything in the whole of the cosmos.

And I perceive that one who awakens to the kingdom, or said another way, to Christ's consciousness or higher consciousness, begins quite naturally to live a life rich with the fruit of the kingdom: kindness, generosity, gentleness, responding in love in all circumstances and a marked lack of reactivity, antagonism, egotism, greed, fear of scarcity, fear of the future, fear of loss, the need to be right, etc. 

One of the marked signs of a life that is moving in the direction of the kingdom, that is merging into the flow of a higher consciousness, lives in a way that is in the world, but not of it. And it is a constant challenge for Christians to be wary of the trappings of the institution, to not fall into the trap of religious materialism, the fate of the pharisees. The danger is old, it was part of the Church's establishment.

 

In a recent entry in his long-running blog Fr. Richard Rohr (https://cac.org/freedom-in-the-desert-2020-09-29/) begins:

 

When Christianity became the established religion of the Roman Empire, something remarkable and strange took place. A whole set of people began to flock to the margins of the Empire to pursue God. They went to the deserts of Palestine, Cappadocia, Syria, and Egypt. This is the emergence of the ones we now call in a collective way the Desert Fathers and Mothers. These individuals in the desert sought to reflect more deeply on the Mystery of God and God’s will through work, prayer, and study of the Scriptures.

 

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) describes their movement this way:

 

Society—which meant pagan society, limited by the horizons and prospects of life “in this world”—was regarded by them as a shipwreck from which each single individual had to swim for their life. . . . These were people who believed that to let oneself drift along, passively accepting the tenets and values of what they knew as society, was purely and simply a disaster. The fact that the Emperor was now Christian and that the “world” was coming to know the Cross as a sign of temporal power only strengthened them in their resolve.* 

 

The faithful adherents of the two commandments upon which all else hangs, regardless of their religious affiliation, have had at their core a keen and healthy sense of suspicion around “passively accepting the tenets and values of … society [culture].”  I would add to that a healthy sense of caution around religious materialism as well. In other words, it is recommendable to hold loosely to the trappings of the church but hold fast to the teachings of Jesus upon which the very existence of the church is based. It is a bit like trying to speak about truth. It is corrupted the minute the first word is uttered.

In "Covid times" the church is grappling with many things. A recent article from the Church of England predicts the survival of the church - but its certain transformation as a result of the present cultural and existential crises. Perhaps, as existing trends quicken toward their destination we will move closer to the kingdom. Perhaps with every perceived loss of the familiar we will move deeper into Christ consciousness. Time will tell, and we will know by the fruit that is produced. 

*Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert: Sayings from the Desert Fathers of the Fourth Century (New Directions: 1970, ©1960) 3. Note: Minor edits made to incorporate gender-inclusive language.

The most unlikely teacher

In the last few weeks I have been enjoying Richard Rohr’s blog. (https://mail.google.com/mail/u/2/#inbox/FMfcgxwHNVzNbBGVLVJHfcWLHQFzrCQf) Rohr is a Catholic monk who has authored several books and is nearly as well known in secular circles as in the religious world. In one of his blogs this week he includes the following quotes from environmentalist and author Bill McKibben to support his discussion regarding “restraint” as a spiritual practice.  McKibben writes:

“The most curious of all…lives are the human ones, because we can destroy, but also because we can decide not to destroy. The turtle does what she does, and magnificently. She can’t not do it, though, any more than the beaver can decide to take a break from building dams or the bee from making honey. But if the bird’s special gift is flight, ours is the possibility of restraint. We’re the only creature who can decide not to do something we’re capable of doing. That’s our superpower, even if we exercise it too rarely.”

The lock down period of the last two months has been an exercise of our “superpower,” restraint. There are many things we normally do in our day to day lives that we have chosen not to do, and in many cases were not permitted to do. We sacrificed some of our liberty, our coming and going in the world, to stay put, to stand still, to sit and wait. We limited our movements and our social activity, even with our families; some were quarantined for weeks within the same house. Mothers and fathers separated themselves from their children and from each other. Adult children were and still are separated from aged parents in convalescent care. Many worked from home or alone in empty offices. The well were restrained from the bedsides of the ill, even the dying. 

In exercising our restraint many of us have made some observations. In the NT clergy meeting this week with Bishop Audrey I tried to describe the vacuum I had been experiencing in my own life as the last few weeks have dragged on; the nearly indescribable interior hole that no amount of activity could fill; the constant feeling that something was missing - like you feel when you head to the grocery store and realize you’ve forgotten your list. Audrey remarked that not only could she relate but she was hearing a similar description by clergy all over the diocese. Bishop Jose’s (Diocese of Western NC) Youtube parody (https://www.diocesewnc.org/post/quarantine-with-bishop-jos%C3%A9-episode-1) of his quarantine experience, though humorous, points to this; to the void that can’t be filled, even with the pictures of the people you normally work with on the back of their chairs as you alone conduct a meeting as Bishop Jose attempted to do. During the book study group meeting on Wednesday night Nancy Dart shared this poem she had found on the Sage-ing website (https://www.sage-ing.org/covid19-resources/). For me it puts words, at least in part, to what I stammered to describe to my colleagues and to what Bishop Jose and every other humorous Coronavirus Youtube parody attempts to portray on a deeper level. 

The following poem was written by Sarah Bourns:

We’ve All Been Exposed

We’ve all been exposed.

Not necessarily to the virus

(maybe…who even knows).

We’ve all been exposed BY the virus.

Corona is exposing us.

Exposing our weak sides.

Exposing our dark sides.

Exposing what normally lays far beneath the surface of our souls,

hidden by the invisible masks we wear.

Now exposed by the paper masks we can’t hide far enough behind.

Corona is exposing our addiction to comfort.

Our obsession with control.

Our compulsion to hoard.

Our protection of self.

Corona is peeling back our layers.

Tearing down our walls.

Revealing our illusions.

Leveling our best-laid plans.

Corona is exposing the gods we worship:

Our health, Our hurry

Our sense of security

Our favorite lies, Our secret lusts

Our misplaced trust.

Corona is calling everything into question:

What is the church without a building?

What is my worth without an income?

How do we plan without certainty?

How do we love despite risk?

Corona is exposing me.

My mindless numbing

My endless scrolling

My careless words

My fragile nerves.

We’ve all been exposed.

Our junk laid bare.

Our fears made known.

The band-aid torn.

The masquerade done.

So what now? What’s left?

Clean hands,  Clear eyes

Tender hearts.

What Corona reveals, God can heal.

I know several people whose lives have not been really affected by the two month shut-down. They worked throughout in jobs that were not anymore stressful then before the pandemic and life was pretty much as it had been, except for their longer hair. I’m glad for them. But I’m also sorry for them in a way. And here’s why: In Chinese medicine everything has equal but opposite sides - left and right, top and bottom, front and back. So while the front of the virus is everything you are hearing on the news and the difficulty and inconvenience of exercising of our “superpower” of restraint, then the back side is all the learnings from having experienced it; the gifts of restraint, the gifts of discomfort, fear, anxiety, and from loss. A friend of mine refers to the virus as a teacher. That names the true nature of the back side. To know that everything that happens to us in this life has a front side and an opposite back side is a spiritual teaching. What has been the front side, the challenging side, of Covid19 for you, just you… not the country, not the economy, not your neighbor… but for you? And what is the back side of the virus - what is this teacher revealing to you about you? 

Sarah Bourn’s poem includes both the front and back sides. She ends it with, What Corona reveals, God can heal…., leaving us to focus on the back side. Is there anything that the restraint of the last two months has made visible? Is there anything that needs to be healed? Do you have a desire to grow beyond where you are? Do you want to see the world through the eyes of God; the eyes that see the perfection and balance in all things? Do you want to live out of the fullest and highest expression of yourself and not the same old patterns that run your life? Then pray for these things. There is a time for restraint and this is not it. This is the time for letting the unwanted revealed parts of us fall away and shift into the highest and best parts of ourselves. We have been given a small window of opportunity for spiritual growth and this unlikely teacher, Covid19, is showing us the way. 

The ego grieves while the spirit rejoices

I had just turned on the car radio. It was set to the dial of NPR. A story was being told. A young girl and her family went to visit her grandfather who is in the hospital. When the family surrounds the bed of the old man someone says, “Luna made you an apple pie.” The old man looked at the young girl and smiled. Luna, the young girl who is telling the story, says that in his smile came a flood of memories as she recalled all the times she had made apple pie with her grandfather. The hospital smelled like medicine and cleaners and felt sterile. But around the sickbed of her grandfather the smell of the freshly baked pie made it feel warm and familiar. 

I had not been intending to listen to NPR. I was listening to another story, a book on CD. I was at the end of the story, the last chapter of disc 38. I had been listening to this story in my car for three months. I was on a quick errand into town, 10 minutes there, 10 minutes back - just enough time to hear the last chapter of the last disc. It was a fictional story, "1Q84," in which the moon appeared differently in different dimensions indicating how thin the veil was between one world and the next. In each dimension most things were the same, but some things were not the same, like the number of moons in the night sky. But the point was that the characters were the same in every dimension. The outer forms of the world changed, sometimes there were two moons, sometimes the one, old familiar moon, but the characters remain unchanged. More importantly, as is the point of this 38 disc story, the bonds of love remained ever-strong in every dimension. 

It seemed an odd synchronicity that as I was trying to finish a story about two lovers moving through dimensions distinguished by the number of moons in the sky I would be interrupted by a short story about a girl named Luna, a name that means “moon.” Had her name not been Luna I would not have listened. But what are the chances? At the end of the 38th disc it had come down to a single moon hanging peacefully in the sky. But before I could learn that the end of that story was about the permanence of love, I was interrupted by a three minute story about the permanence of love, told by someone whose name was “moon.” The veil is very thin. 

However, for the disciples there is no thin veil. They only understand Jesus in his physical form. All they know is that Jesus is going to go away. His body will die and he will no longer be with them. They speak to him anticipating the loss of him. They grieve openly as they look to a future without him.  He has not left them yet. But he tells them that he will be leaving them in one form, the physical form, but will remain with them in another form, in spiritual form. 

Commentator John Shea makes an important distinction: “The scenario is not: Jesus is going to God and when they die, they will go to God and be reunited with him. The scenario is: once [Jesus] has died and is no longer physically with them, he will not be gone. He will be present to them, in and through the Spirit, in the depth of their own beings. They are not being encouraged to hope for life after death. They are being instructed in a consciousness change, to become aware of spiritual presence without physical manifestation.”  Each day, as we experiences loss in our world, personally and collectively, we are being instructed in a consciousness change. We are being taught to become aware of spiritual presence without physical manifestation. And even further, to see physical manifestations as extensions of the Holy Spirit.

“The ego grieves what it has lost while the spirit rejoices over what it has found.”  Eckart Tolle, who recited this saying in one of his lectures, apologized for not knowing the author but then said it didn’t really matter who said it because it all comes from the same source, the same consciousness regardless of the author. He was not dismissing the importance of citing authorship, but merely getting to a greater truth about collective consciousness. The disciples could no more fathom this level of understanding then go to the moon. The are consumed with grieving what they perceive they are losing. They have not yet become awakened. They do not yet understand that Love cannot cease to be. They can only see the physical world and its manifestations and its corresponding limitations. They cannot see beyond the temporal world of forms. They have been taught that when the physical life ends it is over, all ties are severed, all bonds broken. Jesus is instructing them now to go beyond the physical world they know and trust in the world of the Spirit - the kingdom of God - that concerns itself not with physical manifestations but rather the creative force behind the manifestations of form. When they know this their spirits will rejoice over what they have found. When we know this our spirits will rejoice also. 

Over the last several weeks it has become clear that our older cat, Blackie, will soon leave his body. Sometimes it feels very sad, especially when he appears to be uncomfortable. He eats little and sleeps most of the time. He has a strong bond with his long-time human companion. His companion cares lovingly for him to make his way out of this world as peaceful as possible. There are many prayers for assistance, as there is for any transition, any birth into new life, any transition from one manifestation of love into another; from the physical into the spiritual. As I watch this cat’s once strong and sleek body become thin and frail I recite to myself this verse from the Upanishads:

[The] caterpillar, having come to the end of one blade of grass, draws itself together and reaches out for the next…

The Spirit is always active and never at rest. It reaches out from one manifestation of itself to create another, from the physical to the spiritual. Life as we know it, in all its physical forms is a series of transforming manifestations or expressions of Love, expressions of the Divine. 

Shea continues: “On the spiritual level, the relational flow is a wild ride…. the Creator Spirit [is] continuously present in the created spirits - sustaining them in existence and filling them with its life. The reality of this communion is eternal, and therefore it is not subject to losses associated with time. It is a dance that survives death.”  

Jesus’s words, “I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you,” makes no sense to the one who sees the manifestations of the world as all that there is. But to the one who sees the manifestations of the world as expressions of Love, the essence, the being of God, all in all, then physical death is, and can only be, the gateway to a continuance of life that is not the same, but eternal, nonetheless. Love cannot be separated from itself. Love, a perfect and holy manifestation that exists beyond the physical plane can be realized, recalled and brought into the present moment with just a simple thought, a memory, a smiling face, the smell of apple pie, or the sight of the moon situated in a tiny sector of a vast and incomprehensible universe. 

Called into Flight

There are two significant learnings from a weekly bible group studying the Gospel of Matthew that I lead which can and should be applied to John 14, verse 6, in particular.  

“Jesus said to [Thomas], ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’”

The first is that Matthew was not used apologetically, that is, as a proof of Jesus’ identity, a tool for evangelism -to grow the church, but rather was used by an existing worshipping community as a testimony as to what had been already experienced, both in the physical sense but also existentially. It is a collection of stories, events and sayings that attests to Jesus’ identity, life and mission meant to shape the worshipping community hearing it.

The second learning was that any study of the Gospels must first address the meaning of the text within the context of the first century church and not the one we know 2000 years later. The configuration of church as we know it would not be recognizable to the people of these first Christ-centered communities to which the Gospels are addressed.

Gail O’Day, who is considered a leading scholar on John’s Gospel, wrote on chapter 14, v. 6-7 (‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’ in particular): “It is important to try to hear this joyous, world-changing theological affirmation in the first-century context of the Fourth Gospel. This is not, as is the case in the 20th century, the sweeping claim of a majority world religion, but it is the conviction of a religious minority in the ancient Mediterranean world (emphasis mine). It is the conviction of a religious group who had discovered that its understanding of the truth of God carries with it a great price. This conviction has led them into conflict with the Judaism that previous had been their sole religious home, and so they have had to carve out a new religious home for themselves, a home grounded in the incarnation. It is possible to hear an element of defiance in the proclamation… a determination to hold to this experience and knowledge of God against all opposition and all pressure to believe otherwise.”

O’Day goes on to say: “It is a dangerous and destructive anachronism to cite John 14: 6-7 as the final arbiter in discussions of the relative merits of different religions’ experiences and understanding of God. The Fourth Gospel is not concerned with the fate, for example, of Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists, nor with the superiority or inferiority of Judaism and Christianity as they are configured in the modern world. These verses are the confessional celebration of a particular faith community, convinced of the truth and life it has received in the incarnation. The Fourth Evangelist’s primary concern was the clarification and celebration of what it means to believe in Jesus…. John 14:6 can thus be read as the core claim of Christian identity; what distinguishes Christians from people’s of other faiths is the conviction given expression [in Jesus’ saying …’I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’]. It is, indeed, through Jesus that Christians have access to their God.” (Gail O’Day, The New Interpreter’s Bible, p. 744-5)

The first century believers who had experienced God, who had seen the face of the beloved one in the face of Jesus could not un-see what they had seen, they could not go back to a way of life that was prescribed by the Judaism of their time. They knew too much, had seen too much, understood too much and there was no going back. Just like you. You have known too much. You have seen too much. You have understood too much and for you, and for me, there is no going back. Theologian John Shea says, “The more our minds entertain larger truths about God, the more we are personally and existentially in a relationship of trust.” (John Shea, Gospel of Matthew, p. 185.) 

Rumi, the renown Sufi poet and saint of the 12th century, expresses our individual and collective forward movement in relationship with God in this well known poem:

“The way of love is not a subtle argument.

The door there is devastation.

Birds make great sky-circles of their freedom.

How do they learn it?

They fall, and falling, they're given wings.”

The verses of John 14 may be seen as the feathers on the new wings of a young bird separated from its mother, falling from its nest. Turning over and over again in a free-fall the new wings begin to catch air. Each feather extending out from the bone and skin of the bird and lying close and neatly together begin to form a sail, and eventually work to right the animal who can then glide on an air current. And from its lowest point having fallen so far it can then soar to the highest regions of the sky and look broadly at the world. This bird sees itself, not as a thing apart from the world, but simply a thing of the world. It is a creature with a viewpoint about the world that encompasses all that is below it.  The creatures on the ground also have a viewpoint. Instead of wings they have fins to swim, others have padded feet to walk upon the soft earth, or hairy, sticky appendages that adhere to things enabling them to walk up walls, still others have smooth, tough skin for slithering across the ground and hiding under rocks. And beyond these things there are all manner of expressions of life having every possible viewpoint and experience of the manifestations, the incarnations of the divine.

Each of us has a viewpoint of the incarnate Christ, each capturing the variations of the Spirit within the boundaries of our experience. And sometimes, like Thomas, when we are perplexed, when our hearts are troubled, we think we do not know the way forward.

In these unsettling times of the present pandemic it can feel as if the ground below our feet is shifting day to day. Many things we took for granted are no longer as they were. For many health concerns have given way to economic devastation. For others economic concerns have given way to catastrophic health crises. Jobs and money have evaporated. Thousands who lived a month ago are gone from us now. It is hard to know which way to turn, where to go from here.

Jesus, however, assures us that, in fact, we do know the way forward; to surrender to the fall. To be given wings. To find freedom through devastation. To die to death and to enter into a new life, with new sight, new knowledge, a new way of living - this is the way of Love. It has been said that no one ever awakened spiritually having never experiencing crisis. It is through crisis and insecurity that Jesus leads us - in and through and all the way to the other side. 

Reflecting of John 14:1-14, John Shea writes:

“[Jesus] is the way into the many dimensions of the house of love… when I ponder the combination of divine immanence that suffuses all creation and divine transcendence that stretches beyond it… to surrender to this reality is to let the wind carry me…and calm[s] the heart.” (Ibid., p. 185)

Those who fall are given wings to make great sky-circles of freedom. Jesus calls us into flight.