Apr 142014
 

During Holy Week, it isn’t uncommon for Christians to take time in reading, meditation, prayer, or dialogue to reflect on the themes of the coming Easter celebration.  For most Christians, Easter is a time to celebrate the physical resurrection of Jesus as proof of God’s love for humanity.  We often speak of everything that led up to it — all the betrayal, physical suffering, and emotional anguish suffered by Jesus — as if those things are just necessary plot elements in an elaborate melodrama written by God.  It’s as if they merely point to that one moment when the laws of nature seem to be overruled so that Jesus can rise from the dead, all with the single purpose of bolstering our hope that we don’t have to fear death.

Excuse me, please, but I find this perspective on Holy Week to be a little vain.  To me, it is heavily interwoven with our desires to hold onto our own self-concepts, to avoid the reality that all things must pass, and thus try to maintain the many illusions that we create for own comfort.  In other words, we can too easily focus on the Resurrection because what we really want from God is a promise of a glorious immortality.   We hope to be delivered into some idealized state of perfection in which we will never have to experience radical change again, and then we can spend all eternity feeling completely satisfied with ourselves.

So, let’s consider an alternative to this way of thinking about the Passion of Jesus.  Let’s deeply consider two moments that many of us find powerfully compelling and hard to reconcile with the notion that the Passion is merely prelude to the Resurrection.  The first is the time Jesus spent in Gethsemane, so desperately fearful about what was ahead of him that Luke says an angel came to give him courage!  Even after the angel appeared, Jesus was still so distraught that he was sweating blood as he prayed.  Does this sound like the behavior of someone who knew it was all going to conclude in a glorious supernatural event?!  Even the miracle of an angelic appearance didn’t snap Jesus out of his horrible dread.  The second moment of this nature is when he was crying out on the cross, feeling abandoned by God.  Once again, we should stop to seriously and prayerfully reflect upon whether or not this is something that would be said by a human being so thoroughly united with God that he knew all things.  No, Jesus obviously doesn’t have complete confidence that he will be resurrected to a life after death the way it is later portrayed by some of the gospel writers.  These moments show us that Jesus was far more like us than many of us want to believe.  He was a human being confronting the facts of his suffering and death, and he was miserable and afraid because of it.

Of what benefit is this view of the Passion?  The short answer is that the story of Jesus is thus an even more meaningful example to us of acceptance, faith, and love.  It wasn’t foreknowledge of his resurrection that carried Jesus through his ordeal, but rather it was his commitment to what he felt in his heart was worthy of sacrificing everything, including his own existence.  What was it that was so worthy of such sacrifice (literally meaning “to make sacred”)?  This is a question we will revisit.

It may well be that the author of the earliest gospel, Mark, recognized that this story of willing self-sacrifice was not only an important part of the story, but that it was the most important.  After all, the original version of Mark ends with 16:1-8, and thus all we have is an empty tomb, a young man only claiming that Jesus will appear again, and the three women running away in fear.  We are left with a lot of unanswered questions, and Mark therefore evokes both our instinctive fear of the unknown as well as our equally deep-rooted hope.  How fitting this is!  And it is especially fitting for those of us who, like the three women, don’t have the benefit of actually seeing Jesus risen in the flesh.

This is where we can return to that question about self-sacrifice.   For you, what is worth the sacrifice of everything, even your own life, with no promise at all that there would be anything but oblivion afterward?  Surely there are many answers people might offer, but consider for a moment the possibility that they all come down to love in some form — love of family, of friends, of country, of humanity, of freedom, of truth, or, perhaps ultimately, of love itself.

Let’s follow that question with these:  How am I willing and unwilling to make such sacrifices?  How am I avoiding or entering into the darkest unknowns love points toward?  More specifically, how am I letting go of my treasured notions about myself in order to be more completely and wholly devoted to love?  How am I putting a narrow love of self above a more expansive and inclusive love?

If you’re like me, you encounter lots of different “voices” in yourself when you turn within to meditate and pray with such questions.  One voice is critical, judgmental, and unforgiving.  Another voice is accepting, comforting, and encouraging.  Another is defensive, fragile, and desperate. Still another is disinterested, apathetic, and indifferent.  Yet another is tempting, seductive, and self-indulgent.  And there may be others.  From what I can tell, this is all very ordinarily human, and we are all challenged to deal with a complex reality of mixed and muddied attitudes, motives, and intentions.  Penetrating just a little behind these veils reveals that we are mysteries to ourselves, and thus brings into question our pretense of certainty and deep conviction about many things, not the least being our religious beliefs.  Just this little bit of honest self-awareness can be terribly uncomfortable, at least at first, and so it can be seen as a significant step in taking up the cross of Jesus and beginning the work of sacrificing our illusions.

Embracing the mysteries of life, both those within and without, leads back to the very questions that have driven many of us into religion, even if we weren’t fully aware of them.  This can be frightening because it forces us into some degree of confrontation with the truth that we don’t really know everything that we want to know, or even think we should know.  It forces us to, in some way, admit that we have uncertainties and doubts about many things that we would rather be able to take for granted.  In fact, many of us have been raised with religious admonitions that such uncertainties and doubts are unacceptable, even evil.  But Jesus himself experienced them!  Unless we are willing to say part of Jesus was unacceptable and evil, then we have to rethink the notion that uncertainties and doubts have no place in our faith.

Logically, faith cannot exist without uncertainty and doubt.  Where there is complete and undeniable certainty, there is no room left for faith.  Faith is therefore not the opposite of doubt, not the cessation of uncertainty, but rather it is an ongoing response to doubt and uncertainty.   Yet faith isn’t merely the choice of one possible answer among many, but is instead a deep conviction about and commitment to something that we feel in our hearts is worthy of our devotion even in the face of the most threatening uncertainties, like those suffered by Jesus, and worse.  The aim of penetrating into our doubts and uncertainties is therefore not to abandon faith, but to refine it, making it increasingly focused upon the one thing that is most worthy of devotion.

Suppose I speak in the languages of human beings and of angels. If I don’t have love, I am only a loud gong or a noisy cymbal.  Suppose I have the gift of prophecy. Suppose I can understand all the secret things of God and know everything about him. And suppose I have enough faith to move mountains. If I don’t have love, I am nothing at all.  Suppose I give everything I have to poor people. And suppose I give my body to be burned. If I don’t have love, I get nothing at all. 1 Corinthians 13:1-3

Now we see only a dim likeness of things. It is as if we were seeing them in a mirror. But someday we will see clearly. We will see face to face. What I know now is not complete. But someday I will know completely, just as God knows me completely.  The three most important things to have are faith, hope and love. But the greatest of them is love.  1 Corinthians 13:12-13

Despite what many preachers would have us believe, we don’t need to be obsessed with the promise of resurrection in order to live our faith well.  In actuality, if our faith is like that of Jesus, we love more freely simply because how we express love right here and right now is what matters most to us.  This isn’t a path of works alone, doing good things because that’s what is expected of us.  It is a path in which unconditional love increasingly becomes the driving force of our lives, shaping our faith, hopes, and our works in its own way.

O Mysterious One we know as Love Itself, help us in every moment to willingly give all for love, to make every moment sacred with love, to greet our doubts and uncertainties with faith in love, to seek the changes love begets as the continual rebirth we most desire. Amen.

Agape

Nov 132012
 

First, it is no longer because…

…I’d be afraid of eternal hellfire if I weren’t a Christian. I just don’t believe that’s how things work.  It is impossible for me to believe in a supreme god so cruel and narrow-minded that he/she/it would create billions of human beings to be born into circumstances making it impossible to choose Christianity, or any other belief system, as the only way to eternal bliss.  While we might be free to create our own living hell to the degree that we choose the illusion of separation from the One, I do not believe that choice is available to us as a limited-time offer.  As I understand it, God’s love must be infinite, and so we have all eternity to welcome it and thus realize our oneness with God and each other.  However any of our beliefs and understandings might be mistaken, and our actions misguided, I completely trust God to be endlessly merciful and patient with understanding each of us even better than we understand ourselves.

…I’m too afraid of following a different path from many of my loved ones. While I know that some of my Christian friends and family members would be disappointed and in fear for my soul if I disavowed Christianity, I also know that others would not.  All the human acceptance, belonging, and companionship I could ever need would still be available to me, and I know that those hurt or frightened by my choice would be okay.  Furthermore, there is a limit to how far I am willing to go in accommodating the prejudices of even my dearest loved ones, and for everyone’s sake one thing I will not do is pretend to hold religious beliefs that don’t make sense to me or resonate with the still small voice in my heart.

…I judge other religions as inferior, misguided, or evil. As a Christian, I believe we all share equally in the Logos, the Word that is one with God and through which all that is has come to be.  As I understand it, when Jesus says things such as, “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6),  he is speaking on behalf of the universal Logos, not of himself as the historical man, Jesus of Nazareth. Every philosophy, religion, spiritual tradition, every art and every science, is a manifestation of the Logos expressing and experiencing Itself through us.  In keeping with this, I do not believe the Christian Bible, in any version, is the one, true, inerrant, perfect and complete word of God, or even the best collection of revelation and wisdom available to all humanity.  There is no ‘best one’ for all humanity, but only a ‘best’ for each of us if we are so moved by the Spirit to discover for ourselves.  Finally, to me Christianity is not a religious team competing against other religious teams.  I will not cheer “Yay!” for ‘our side’ and “Boo!” for ‘their side.’  There is only one side, and it is all of us, believers of every faith and non-believers alike, each responding to the mysteries of our existence in the best way we can.

Each of those motivations has, at one time in my life or another, been part of why I called myself a Christian.  I’m thankful for the Divine Grace and Infinite Love that has freed me from them.

I am a Christian because…

…I was born into a Christian world. The sounds of Christianity were entering my consciousness before I left my mother’s womb.  All the other sensations of Christianity have been flooding into me ever since I was born.  My abilities to think, to speak, to sing, to recognize my feelings, to experience trust, hope, and love, to identify one person as family, another as friend, and another as neighbor or community member, all of these developments in my consciousness occurred in a Christian environment.  The stories of the Bible were like family legends.  Jesus was a beloved member of the family we all hoped to finally meet face-to-face, and his Father was our Heavenly Father whom we trusted to guide and protect us.  In time, I would even come to embrace his mother as The Mother.  I know that all of this means I am virtually hardwired to experience and express myself as a Christian. Therefore, all the deepest insights into my own psyche, both conscious and subconscious, all the highest realizations of the spirit animating my life in this world, all the most powerful acts of love I can participate in, cannot help but be interwoven with the emblems, stories, and rituals of Christianity.  Every piece of it is a path back through my psychological inner child to the spiritual child that is a spark of the Divine. The same is true of any other religion for those who are born to it.

…Christianity is my religious home. I have had my rebellion and have made my quest into the larger world of religions and philosophies.  I have enjoyed and benefited from what I have found.  Some of those things will always be with me, and others I will return to from time to time.  Yet, like the prodigal son, I also discovered that home is indeed where the heart is, and my heart is enfolded by Christianity.  It is the religion in which I find it most natural to express my spiritual awe, gratitude, and love of life.  Despite what I previously said about not being too afraid to be different from many of my loved ones, the fact remains that Christianity is interwoven with most of my closest relationships.  It is the common language of spirit we speak with each other, and I no longer see it as a barrier between me and the people of other faiths.  I’m deeply grateful for all these things, and no longer see any compelling reason to reject Christianity as my religious home.  Home is where the heart is.

…I don’t need to practice a different religion. I have found that Christianity offers everything I want and need in a religion.  Where I once judged it inferior in some ways to other religions, I have come to see that this was primarily because my own perspective was so narrow, shallow, and poorly informed, and because my immediate religious environment was so limited. Both the worldly and the mystical wisdom of our scriptures and early fathers and mothers becomes clearer with each passing year. Even as the history of our religion has many examples of very human shortcomings and atrocities, I nonetheless see the cup of this tradition overflowing with intelligence, creativity, grace, peace, joy, and love. The poetry, visual art, music, and ceremonies of Christianity are beautiful to me.  They inspire me to contemplate the transcendent and they move me to feel intimacy and kinship with all creation.  The Church offers me countless opportunities, encouragement, support, and role models for service to others.  What else could I possibly need?  Perhaps a different perspective is needed from time to time, but one perspective needs to already be in place in order for another to be different, and I no longer feel that being a Christian prohibits me from seeing differently.

Maranatha

Agape

Jun 152012
 

It seems to me that understanding what we really mean by “faith” is one of the most important exercises in being a Christian.  It also seems that for most Christians faith is defined in terms of assent to specific theological ideas.  Said more bluntly, our predominant contemporary approach to faith is the practice of proclaiming and otherwise acting as if particular doctrines about God and Jesus are facts, no matter what we truly think and feel. We can call this dogmatic faith, because it is doctrinaire in its attitudes and also because it is largely an attempt to have faith in the doctrines rather than in our personal relationships with God.  As a central part of dogmatic faith, many of us have been trained to resist, conceal, and deny what we truly think and feel, especially if it includes any disagreement, doubt, or uncertainty about doctrine.  The self-conflict that naturally results from such a practice is sometimes even touted as praiseworthy internal warfare against demonic deception.  In effect, we’re taught that faith means an active distrust of our own hearts and minds.  Is this what Jesus and his earliest followers intended?  Is this what God wants?  I have strong faith that the answer to both of those questions is a resounding “no.” In an effort to loosen some of the chains of dogmatic faith, this post looks carefully at the meaning of faith in early Christianity, shows how it connects with mysticism, and explores some implications for our religious life.

Faith Defined

When we look at the ancient Hebrew and Greek words for faith, we find not only a greater breadth of meaning than dogmatism but also a very different emphasis.  In the Tanakh, a key Hebrew word translated into English as “faith” is emunah, which more specifically connotes an active trust and confidence in someone or something.  In the New Testament, the words relating to faith and belief are the Greek pistis (noun) or pisteuo (verb), which similarly connote trust, fidelity, and reliance.  Among other places, pistis appears in what may be the most commonly cited Christian scripture to define faith, Hebrews 11:1:

“Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see.” NLT

This little statement is a concise yet penetrating revelation about the intimate relationship of faith and hope.  Hope is the anticipation of something we desire, and as such it has both emotional and intellectual components. The intellectual aspect is an idea of what we want to happen, and the emotional aspect is a positive feeling that it will happen.  Faith is therefore specifically identified as the root, source, or power behind that positive feeling in hope.  With faith as a prerequisite, hope cannot be contingent upon what a person should feel or think.  No matter how clear a vision might be for what we think we should hope, if the personal emotional conviction is not also there, then there is no real faith behind it, and thus there is no real hope. Pretended hope is faithless, and thus isn’t hope at all.  Hope is a deeply personal experience that isn’t a matter of choosing one option over others because someone else encourages it; that is merely consent at best.  Hope can certainly be influenced by others, and even shared in common with others, but each person’s hope must be her or his own, driven by his or her own faith.

Along those lines, note that this verse doesn’t say faith is confidence specifically in church doctrine, in what we hear from the pulpit, or even in scripture.  In fact, the second clause clearly specifies that faith is about unseen things.  Doctrines, preachers, and scriptures can all point toward things that we cannot see, but they themselves are seen, and thus they are not the ultimate objects of our faith, our greatest trust, confidence, or reliance.  This observation is supported by taking the full context of Hebrews 11,  in which all the examples cited for great faith – including Able, Enoch, Noah, Sarah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and Moses – are credited for acting upon their own very personal and immediate experiences of God’s call, for acting upon their hope in serving the Divine, and not for their submission to religious authorities and doctrines.  Some of these examples further reveal that faith cannot be equated with the positive emotional aspect of hope.  With Noah, for example, while his faith in the purpose of the ark may have been positive, his faith in the coming deluge would have been sorrowful.

In this view, we can see that faith is deep trust and powerful conviction connected to one’s personal awareness of God. It is not a particular feeling, not just a function of emotion, but instead the presence of something else that stirs emotional responses in us.  It is not a matter of choice, not merely a derivative of conscious reasoning, but rather a power that rises up from the spirit within us to direct our reasoning and choices. If faith isn’t simply the product of conscious processes like thinking and feeling, it must come from some other place.  In psychological terms, we would say that faith rises up from the unconscious, perhaps intuitively or even instinctively, and as such it bears a striking resemblance to what we mean by the word will.  In terms of Christian spirituality, the New Testament consistently says faith is a gift from God.  Some Christians understand this to mean that one either has faith or does not, depending on Divine intervention.  On the other hand, some of us believe that all people have received faith from God, but for one reason or another not everyone experiences it as consciously directed toward God. It might instead be directed toward science, nature, humanity, love, happiness, peace, power, life itself, or any number of other things. My experience suggests that everyone has a deep compelling conviction that something is most worthy of their trust and allegiance, and faith is therefore an inherent guiding function in human beings.  Again, this is not unlike how we speak of the will.

Faith and Authenticity

Each of us has our own faith, just as each of us has our own sensations.  We can no more give our faith to someone else, or take someone else’s faith into ourselves, than we can see through each others eyes, hear through each others ears, or smell through each others noses.  We can describe those experiences to each other, we can describe how we have been affected by them, and we can even lead each other into situations that will produce very similar experiences, but the experiences themselves are nontransferable.  Faith is like this in that the conviction that something or someone is trustworthy happens internally, as do the thoughts and feelings connected with that conviction.  In effect, we cannot simply adopt someone else’s beliefs as our own.  Even if we trust someone else’s ideas and conclusions more than our own, we must first have faith in our own ability to make that judgment, and our own faith in the other person is still our own faith.  It is therefore inescapable that all decisions start with faith in one’s own ability to make those decisions, even if it seems to mean turning all ensuing decisions over to someone else.  Every acceptance of someone else’s choice is thus a response to our own faith.  The really important questions are therefore about the degree to which we are responding authentically to our faith, acknowledging and honoring the fact that its source and presence is within ourselves.

Let’s ask some of those questions in the context of three very basic ideas we Christians share about God:

1. God is the source of all truth and love.
2. God’s supreme will is for truth and love to reign above all.
3. Our love for God should be done with all that we are.

If this is all true, and my faith tells me it is, then which better honors God – fully accepting our responsibility for what we think and feel, or trying to pretend it can be turned over to someone else, or to a church or a book?  Is it even possible for us to genuinely believe that God expects us to lie to ourselves about what we really think and feel?  Can we come to any reasonable conclusion that our salvation is determined by trying to force ourselves to believe, or pretend to believe, a particular set of theological notions?  And if that is indeed the way one defines a faith necessary for salvation, then how is that not actually a path of works to try earning God’s unmerited grace?

I suspect that somewhere in each of us is the very natural hope, and thus the faith, that God really does want us to love God with all of our heart, soul, and mind, just as Jesus said.  To me, this must mean that God wants our complete authenticity, including our doubts and uncertainties, and definitely not our disingenuous conformity to doctrine or tradition.  I suspect that denying what we truly think and feel is therefore more about fear of human judgment and punishment than it is about pleasing God, although the religious training many of us have received can make it difficult to know the difference.

Faith and Scripture

While faith itself may be innate, the mind driven by faith must focus that energy upon something.  Yet the mind makes mistakes for all sorts of reasons, including poor information and faulty logic.  The mind stimulated by faith therefore benefits from having reference points and guidelines that have been tested by time.  Likewise, we benefit from guidelines on how to manage the very powerful feelings stimulated by faith.  These are the purposes of the Bible in Christianity.  Even though there was no New Testament as we know it for many generations of early Christians, and it has only been in the last few hundred years that most Christians have been able to read the Bible for themselves, it has become central to making Christianity the unique religion that it is. Yet the Bible is neither the religion itself nor the supreme object of our faith, and it is certainly not a manual for an inauthentic “fake it ’til you make it” imitation of faith.

If we rely upon the Bible as a central aid in loving God with all our heart and mind, we have a responsibility to develop the deepest and clearest possible understanding of its meanings.  For many of us, dogmatic faith has insisted that understanding the Bible is simply a matter of regarding it as a perfectly complete, plainspoken, and inerrant dictation from God.  For others of us, this approach requires far too much confidence in the human beings who wrote, edited, compiled, and translated the works in the Bible, no matter how inspired they were.  When we look at the history of the Bible, we clearly see it has been and still is subject to the same human shortcomings and follies as other literature.  We therefore cannot claim to know exactly what Jesus said, what was and was not put into his mouth by the writers of the gospels. Supposing we did know that much, we still couldn’t honestly be so certain of precisely what he or they meant that we could exclude all other possibilities; there are just too many complicating factors. Very few of us are qualified to know how translation into our own native language skews the meanings we gather from the Bible, and those who are qualified can and do come to stalemates where one possibility is as valid as another.  The greatest Biblical scholars cannot say with complete certainty when Jesus was and wasn’t speaking in some degree of metaphor, and they cannot avoid being confronted with passages that conflict with each other in different ways. Even the attempt to read something as literally as possible sometimes leads to radically different understandings.  With all of these observations, it is quite reasonable to conclude that we are all actually interpreting everything in the Bible, whether we realize it or not.  Furthermore, when faced with various passages that seem to conflict with each other, making decisions about which ones are closer to the truth as we understand it automatically makes everyone a “cafeteria Christian” to some extent.

But with all the different possible directions to look for meanings, how do we know which ones to pursue?  This is where faith always steps in for each of us.  The nourishment we select from the buffet of possibilities is determined by our faith, how each of our hearts and minds are moved by our own trust and conviction in what is true.  Referring back to Hebrews 11:1, we can see that paying attention to our hopes is an important part of the process.  Being honest with ourselves about what we hope a scripture means can help us look more directly into what our faith is telling us about the truth of ourselves and our relationships with God. Of course, this doesn’t mean that we won’t misunderstand and make mistakes, but it does mean that they will at least be honest misunderstandings and mistakes.  That’s not only as it should be, it’s the only way it can be if we are going to be as authentic as possible, and thus it would seem that God would expect as much.  Furthermore, we don’t need to have answers for everything but we should admit (at least to ourselves) when there are some things that we simply do not believe.   Some people say that in such cases we must suspend our own disbelief and place our trust in doctrine.  But we should ask how it honors the God of Truth to try filling the gap of doubt with someone else’s thoughts, especially when the “still small voice” in one’s heart is speaking otherwise.  It seems to me that sometimes faith requires us to wrestle with the angels.

Conclusion: Mystical Faith

Referring back to “Faith Defined,” we once again consider the figures cited as examples of faith, and especially what the Bible says about their relationships with God.   We consistently find that they communed directly with God: They heard God, they spoke with God, they walked with God, and they even argued with God.  In the end, they all served what they best understood to be God’s will no matter what anyone else thought, said, or did.  Their immediate personal relationships with God are emphasized as central to their faith, and not their relationships with scriptures, doctrines, religious institutions, or any other mediating entities.  Those secondary things certainly played important roles at various times, but none were ever more important to our exemplars than the voice of the Spirit speaking through their own trust in God, their confidence in their personal relationships with God, and their convictions about what would best serve God.  In short, their faith was exceptionally authentic, and it was also exceptionally mystical.

What made their faith mystical is that it was unmediated.  Because mystics are concerned with the fullest possible realization of unity with God, we seek to commune directly with God.  The mystical way is as literal as it can be in reading and responding to the call to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength.  We turn inward to open the Holy of Holies, the place of God’s immediate presence in our own beings, and we do so trusting that God wants our authentic love more than anything else.  So it is that we strive to quietly lay our hearts and minds bare before God, respectfully avoiding, at least before God, the pretense of beliefs we do not actually hold.  We are confident that the hopes arising in and from these moments are evidence of our faith being formed by God’s infinite wisdom and love.  Yet, because turning inward also makes us more profoundly aware of our humanity, we understand that we can err in the thinking, the management of emotions, and the actions driven by the energy of our faith.  We understand that there are consequences for such errors, but we trust that the loss of Divine Grace will never be one of them. We also hope to learn through those consequences, and thus follow our faith into greater experiences and expressions of love.

With this deep awareness and acceptance of our own humanity, we realize that faith, the voice of the Spirit, can lead individuals and groups in somewhat different directions. It is therefore easier for us to welcome and love others with beliefs different from our own, and especially in matters of theological doctrine.  In fact, our faith leads us to open our arms wider to embrace and celebrate the differences, not only the similarities, arising from all people’s relationships with The One who is Truth, Life, and Love Itself, and thus evolve together into greater fulfillment of the prayer, “Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.”

Maranatha

Agape

Apr 112012
 

I confess that I have often been a foolishly proud mystic.  In the wizardry of my physical and intellectual prime, I believed that through my studies of psychology and philosophy, through my spiritual practices, and aided by the grace of God, I had left behind many ordinary human troubles, and so much of my own past.  I would read these words of Paul and think I knew exactly where he was coming from because I believed I had already come and gone from there too:

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.  1 Corinthians 13:11

And I must have put on a pretty convincing act!  I have received lots of praise for my seeming equanimity, wisdom, integrity, and self-confidence mixed with humility.  It’s not that there isn’t any truth to those appearances, but rather that there has certainly been more of a façade than I’ve been willing to admit to myself, let alone to others.  Even so, I’m quite sure I have often been more transparent to others than I realized, and that they knew I wasn’t as genuinely comfortable in my own skin as I wanted to seem.

Some of you, dear readers, will know what I mean when I say how very tired I am of finding myself trapped in old patterns of thought, feeling and behavior. If it hasn’t yet happened, the time may come when you know what it is like to look in the mirror and see a wounded, bewildered, incompetent, and insecure little child looking back at you through weary eyes under a furrowed and wrinkling brow.  At the relative midpoint of 50 years, I am awestruck by my own inability to be the “grown-up” I have wanted to be.  In fact, it often seems that I don’t manage life as well as I used to do, or as well as I thought I did, and so it is that these other words from Paul frequently ring in my ears:

For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.  Romans 7:18b-19

In my darkest moments it has been easy to fall into the despair and nihilism voiced by the Preacher of Ecclesiastes:

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher; vanity of vanities, all is vanity. … And I applied my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also was a striving after wind. For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.  Ecclesiastes 1:2, 17-18

I prefer the older translations’ use of the word “vanity” to the “meaninglessness” in some newer translations.  “Vanity” better communicates the intellectual and moral hubris that the author of Ecclesiastes perceives in himself.   This great lover of wisdom, traditionally held to be King Solomon, understands that everything he has done in the name of wisdom has delivered him to this very moment of realizing just how unwise he really is, and how much suffering he has generated in his conceit.

It can be so tempting to see this unmasking as a regression, a failing and falling back from previous excellence, or a “curse” of the mind and ego-defenses not being quite as sharp as they once were.  Yet I sense that there is more to this process than the inevitable fall of a house of cards.  It feels providential, and so the words of King Hezekiah seem fitting:

But what can I say?   He [God] has spoken to me, and he himself has done this. I will walk humbly all my years because of this anguish of my soul.  Isaiah 38:15

It is therefore not only conceit that has brought me to such moments, for I see that I have actually been asking for it in countless ways; “asking for it” in the colloquial sense of ignorantly inviting the natural consequences of my actions, but also asking for it in a very literal sense.  After all, seeking wisdom and understanding through meditation and prayer must mean that my own foolishness and ignorance will increasingly be revealed, at least to me.  Yet I don’t think it is only me that witnesses this baring of my soul, because as I become less able to keep up the old façade it more easily cracks and crumbles before others.   And so, as with King Hezekiah, the public embarrassment and private shame of my ego is a constant prodding toward a more genuine humility.

One of the interesting things about this humbling, if not humiliation, is that, despite all the fatigue, grief, and disappointment, it brings a great sense of gratitude and relief.   It is impossible for me to be completely honest with myself about my shortcomings without also seeing how fortunate I am to have not made even more suffering for myself and others.   I can’t begin to count the number of serious traumas and tragedies that have been narrowly missed, and I am so thankful for this with regard to others, especially those most dear to me. That relief is amplified by the freedom in not feeling so compelled to keep up the old façade.

While I often sense a divine grace in this good fortune, as a mystic I am also graced with having come to know that God holds none of my weakness and folly against me.   Without merit, I have been immersed in a baptism of Light and experienced communion with the One Love in which we all live and move and have our being.  To continue in the words of King Hezekiah:

Lord, by such things people live; and my spirit finds life in them too.  You restored me to health and let me live.  Surely it was for my benefit that I suffered such anguish.  In your love you kept me from the pit of destruction; you have put all my sins behind your back. Isaiah 38:16-17

My sins may not yet be finally behind my back, but I know that the memory of them offers not only pain, but also a reminder that my own wisdom and understanding, no matter how inspired, will never be perfect as I have at times secretly fantasized.  Perhaps more importantly, such self-awareness stimulates my compassion for those who struggle in similar ways.

God, please help me proceed in humble gratitude and continue leaning on faith, hope and, above all, Love. Amen.

Agape

 

 

Dec 222011
 

In this Advent season I imagine what it would be like to be Mary and Joseph, with long days and nights on the road to Bethlehem where the Divine Child would be born to them.  Both of them know who and what this Child is, and surely both must experience long periods of silence in which they ponder their worthiness and ability to answer such a profound call.

I have thus found myself ruminating on my own backsliding and hypocrisy, all the ways I have failed to nurture the Christ Child within me. I remember the ways I have not served Love with as much truth, beauty, and justice as I might.  I revisit so many ways I have missed the mark.   Sometimes I give myself a pretty hard time about this sort of thing, yet over the years I have increasingly come to realize that it’s not very helpful, that it’s even harmful, to continually disparage and punish myself for being human.  In my experience, the intolerance of our own humanity is intimately linked to our intolerance of humanity in general.  I’ve also found lurking behind that intolerance is an irrational expectation that I, others, and life itself, should be “perfect” in some vaguely imagined way, a way that I think so many of our utopian myths try to portray.

Reflections like these have often put me in the position of seeing the human mind as a kind of dweller between worlds and perhaps a simultaneous denizen of both, which I will for convenience call the “ideal” and the “actual.”  The ideal world is the one we envision as the way things “ought to be,” the Eden to which we would return, or the Heavenly Jerusalem that we would hasten to call down upon us.  That world has no lack of compassion, kindness, beauty, creativity, and joy, and there is nothing to interfere with them.  The actual world is this one we know through our senses, where all that ideal goodness seems to go hand in hand with selfishness, cruelty, ugliness, destruction, and pain.  It may be that our laws and moral codes have arisen out of our consciousness of this dichotomy and with the aim of restraining and redirecting those negative principles so that the experience of life can more closely approach the ideal.  Yet, despite all our laws and codes, the negative principles still assert themselves, and often more within our own hearts, minds, and behavior than within the natural world around us.

One of the things I find so fascinating about all of this is how quickly we can embrace the negative principles as justifiable when we perceive that someone or something else is interfering with the manifestation of my Eden!   Living this way means being intolerant toward those I judge as intolerant, incompassionate toward those I judge as incompassionate, impatient toward those I judge as impatient, unforgiving toward those I judge as unforgiving, self-righteous toward those I judge as self-righteous, hostile toward those I judge as hostile, condescending toward those I judge as condescending, unfair toward those I judge as unfair, selfish toward those I judge as selfish, lazy toward those I judge as lazy, and so on.  Attitudes and behaviors like these are often easily justifiable when living only according to the letter of our laws and moral codes.  If someone else dares to act in a way that threatens my peace as I imagine I should experience it, then I feel justified in attacking their peace if not totally destroying it.   You know what I mean – “peacekeeping force.”  Ironically, embracing this attitude automatically robs both the other and me of peace even more!

So why do I do this?  Is it that temporarily sacrificing the good in order to destroy what I judge as evil is not only acceptable but actually necessary?  Or is it that behind all the arguments there is simply a lack of faith that good, that Love, is indeed stronger and that in the end all the sacrifices it asks of me are worthwhile?

In this season of Advent I see this spiritual struggle as one of the things, if not the very thing, that Jesus was born to address.  According to the narrative of the Bible, it seems to be the chief spiritual dilemma of Israel at the time.  Perhaps it is always at the core of the human experience.  In any case, unlike some philosophers and preachers, Jesus doesn’t tell me to deny the reality of either the ideal world (Heaven) or the actual world (Earth, or simply “the world”) as a way to try escaping this struggle.  In fact, at this moment I see this as the cross he says I take up if I am his follower.  He urges me to live as though the dominion of Heaven were coming at any moment, and he teaches me to live in such a way as to make the ideal more present and active here and now.  He was, in my clearest understanding, teaching me about a way of life, both internal and external, as a way to respond to this struggle.

What is that way of life?  In short, it is loving God and our neighbors, who are God’s children here in the actual world.

Yet how should I love?  How am I to know what is the most loving thing to do in any situation?  Where am I to turn when the way is unclear?  Jesus says to first seek the dominion of Heaven, the Ideal, by which I take him to mean I should first open my heart to the authority of divine inspiration, also called the Holy Spirit.  Paul echoes this when he says:

In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit intercedes for us through wordless groans. And the one who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God. Romans 8:26-27

And yet I am not always able to clearly and accurately discern the call of the Spirit, so what then?  In these times I can fall back on the example and teachings of Jesus.  During his sermon on the mount, Jesus laid out some powerful examples of the fruits, the kinds of attitudes and behaviors, people bring forth when they are following the call of the Spirit and living in accordance with the will of God:

Blessed are the poor in spirit,those who mourn,the meek,those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, …the merciful,the pure in heart,the peacemakers….

You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.

You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighborand hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. Matthew 5:3-9, 38-45

Paul later suggests these qualities as evidence of letting Love live more fully in and through us:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.  It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.  1st Corinthians 13:4-7

If you are like me, deep down you know the truth of these teachings, yet you also realize how very hard they can be to actually apply.  Trusting the Spirit, trusting Love, in other words really having faith in them, means subjecting myself to some huge risks here in this world.  It means the possibility of losing all my comforts and luxuries, my liberties, maybe even the necessities for my very life in this world.  After all, look at what happened to Jesus and to Paul.  More recently, look at what happened to Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.  It’s no wonder that anyone who truly lives this way is regarded by most of the world as a fool or a crazy person.  It’s no wonder that I see Jesus looking directly into my eyes when he says, “Oh you of little faith….” (Matthew 8:26, 14:31, 16:8)

I’m thankful that God understands and forgives the weakness of my faith even more than I do.  I’m thankful that a little over 2,000 years ago the world received an innocent Child who would grow to inspire us to love above all else.  And I am thankful that this Child can be reborn in me over and over again, no matter how many times I betray him.

Maranatha!

Merry Christmas!

Agape