I Corinthians 4: 10-13: We’re the Messiah’s misfits. You might be sure of yourselves, but we live in the midst of frailties and uncertainties. You might be well-thought-of by others, but we’re mostly kicked around. Much of the time we don’t have enough to eat, we wear patched and threadbare clothes, we get doors slammed in our faces, and we pick up odd jobs anywhere we can to eke out a living. When they call us names, we say, “God bless you.” When they spread rumors about us, we put in a good word for them. We’re treated like garbage, potato peelings from the culture’s kitchen. And it’s not getting any better because we’ve become fools for Christ.
Psalm: 78:1-7: Hear my teaching, O my people; incline your ears to the words of my mouth. I will open my mouth in a parable; I will declare the mysteries of ancient times. That which we have heard and known and what our forefathers have told us, we will not hide from their children. We will recount to generations to come the praiseworthy deeds and the power of the Lord, and the wonderful works he has done. God gave his decrees to Jacob and established a law for Israel, which he commanded them to teach their children; That the generations to come might know, and the children yet unborn; that they in their turn might tell it to their children; So that they might put their trust in God, and not forget the deeds of God but keep his commandments.
Matthew 25:1-13: Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten bridesmaids took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them; but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. As the bridegroom was delayed, all of them became drowsy and slept. But at midnight there was a shout, “Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.” Then all those bridesmaids got up and trimmed their lamps. The foolish said to the wise, “Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.” But the wise replied, “No! there will not be enough for you and for us; you had better go to the dealers and buy some for yourselves.” And while they went to buy it, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went with him into the wedding banquet; and the door was shut. 11Later the other bridesmaids came also, saying, “Lord, lord, open to us.” But he replied, “Truly I tell you, I do not know you.” Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.
For the word of God in scripture, for the word of God within us, for the word of God among us: Thanks be to God!
This week has been complicated for me – maybe for you, too – complicated yet clarifying. Earlier this week I wrote that: “Awaiting election updates from Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia, reminded of what it felt like to sit anxiously in a hospital waiting room as loved ones kept it together anticipating word from their attending surgeon.”
As the emptiness drags on after opening embraces and prayers, the shared silences that started naturally soon turned awkward. Even oppressive. So, like mist on a cold, country field, random stories of the heart would start to rise from often the most unlikely member of the family. A tenderness would be spoken. Real albeit incongruous laughs would erupt, too breaking down the tension in the room. And, in the Spirit's own mysterious time, what began as brittle became incrementally more supple. A few hours in, some would even fall asleep. Others drummed and paced - especially men used to "fixing" a problem that was now beyond control - while the unofficial mother hen slipped away quietly to bring back baked goods and coffee. Over and over, I saw this rhythm ripple through waiting rooms all across America until the facts on the ground were disclosed, owned, and digested. Then a whole new cycle of uncertainty moving towards trust would show up and capture us as we tentatively worked at finding our new place of balance once again.
I continued to observe that: Late on November 3rd Joe Biden came on TV to urge patience and trust while Donald Trump threw emotional gasoline upon our worst fears and prejudices. Both candidates continued to embody their pre-election dispositions: one was inclusive and calm, the other unhinged and mean-spirited. The Trump camp insisted - especially as votes rolled in from key battle ground states - that the election was being stolen by fraud as votes were manufactured in the dead of night and manipulated by partisan poll workers. As the anxiety and anticipation ground on, America continued to resemble that surgical waiting room after the doc has spoken to the family about a prognosis. Personally and professionally, when this happens, I’ve seen some of the family become unmoored – the ones who are addicted to drama and need all things to be about them – would dominate the room with their wailing. Others would hunker down in quiet discomfort, trying to grasp what the consequences might mean in both the short and long term. But most would simply stand in front of the surgeon like a deer in the headlights, hearing part of what was being said, but still fundamentally confused. After the doc left, these precious souls would turn to one another and cry, "What did she say? What did he mean? Is this good or bad?" I am of the opinion that there's no interrupting this essential dance with uncertainty and grief. It must be incarnated - and only later can we unpack what is real and what is not.
And that’s where things stood for three long days. In my household, we regularly checked CNN to get updates, parsing each notification for hidden clues as to the eventual outcome, and prayerfully steeling our hearts for still more uncertainty. John King and his Magic Board became my new hero. Updates flashed on my smart phone from the NY Times 8 or 10 times each hour. And an odd, inner stillness took hold that lasted until the President spoke at 6:30 pm on Thursday night. In what was his most horrifying, shameful, and incendiary speech among too many others, he rambled and lied. With every sentence he told a nervous nation that our democratic institutions were being manipulated by malicious, marauding political partisans hellbent on stealing his victory by manufacturing Biden votes, destroying Republican ballots, and counting dead bodies as live voters. Without ONCE offering any factual evidence – because there IS none – he smeared the integrity of public servants risking their lives to count tens of thousands of our legal mail-in ballots during what has become the worst phase of the contagion.
Lashing out at his political opponents in a dispirited rant, the President of the United States spewed hatred alongside of a dark and ugly fear that can only be described as Shakespearean manner. In 35 seconds, some of the major television networks unplugged this craven monologue, ironically choosing to air the game show Jeopardy rather than broadcast more deceit. Cable news covered the bombast until it closed – and then zeroed in on a tragic man slinking silently out of the White House briefing room. Like many others, I was aghast. Stunned and sickened before realizing I was sobbing. The television screen became silent for a few seconds. And then CNN news anchor, Jake Tapper, refocused the nation’s still reeling attention after this vulgar verbal assault saying:
What a sad night for the United States of America to hear their president say that, to falsely accuse people of trying to steal the election, to try to attack democracy that way with his feast of falsehoods. Lie after lie after lie about the election being stolen… it's time for some Republican lawmakers to find their spine and talk to the president about what he needs to do for the good of the country.
Like millions of others, I was rattled watching this display of treason, struggling to catch my breath, and trembling with tears. And this is where the complications of the week came clarifying for me. For even though there’s been NO vigorous Republican rebukes of this man’s degrading lies – NO plans to intervene for the sake of the nation or our emotionally crippled commander-in-chief – and NO signs that those living under the spell of Trump’s mania are willing or even able to consider claiming common ground after this melee eventually ends… I believe that God’s love commands us to find way to heal this breach. For as much as I mistrust and even fear many of those who voted for the most vile and dishonest leader I’ve known – 70 million people who have been willing to endorse, encourage, and entrust their futures to an autocrat with fascist inclinations – deep in my heart I believe that we must find ways NOT to demonize one another as we search in the wilderness TOGETHER for ways to repair and rebuild our failing state.
Before the election was called for President-Elect Biden, I read in The Atlantic words that made me hurt all over again. Tom Nichols wrote: “Nearly half of the voters in the USA have seen Trump in all of his splendor—his infantile tirades, his disastrous and lethal policies, his contempt for democracy in all its forms—and they decided that they wanted more of it.” I worry about this. I am bewildered by it as well. But I refuse to conclude that this is the end of the story. It is part of the truth, but not its totality as Nicholas would have us believe when he adds:
His voters can no longer hide behind excuses about the corruption of Hillary Clinton or their willingness to take a chance on an unproven political novice. They cannot feign ignorance about how Trump would rule. They know – and have embraced him. Sadly, the voters who said in 2016 that they chose Trump because they thought he was “just like them” turned out to be right. Now, by picking him again, those voters are showing that they are just like him: angry, spoiled, racially resentful, aggrieved, and willing to die rather than ever admit that they were wrong. It’s clear now that far too many of these voters don’t care about policy, decency, or saving our democracy. They care about power. Although Trump appears to have received a small uptick in votes from Black men and Latinos, the overwhelming share of his supporters are white. The politics of cultural resentment, this obsession with white anxiety, are so intense that voters are determined not only to preserve minority rule but to leave a dangerous sociopath in the Oval Office. Even the candidacy of a man who was both a political centrist and a decent human being could not over-come this sullen commitment to authoritarianism.
(https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/large-portion-electorate-chose-sociopath/616994/)
Those words are too smug, too dismissive, too narrowly self-righteous to be useful at this moment in time. And yet I am glad I read them because they speak to the foolishness of the Christ I seek to serve. They remind me that there is NO escaping our shared hypocrisy when it comes to the way of Jesus and how we construct public policy or private discrimination.
Jesus is unambiguous in his call to love our neighbors and our enemies as ourselves. So I think the Rev. Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault gets it right when she writes, “We ALL live with this terrible, heart-breaking hypocrisy... We ALL wrestle with how to spiritually die to ourselves before we actually greet the grave. And we ALL wonder how to bridge the gap between what we believe and what we actually do?” (The Wisdom Jesus, p. 40) This disconnect is the reason we have prayers of individual and corporate confession. It is why we set aside liturgical seasons like Advent and Lent to help us come clean about the chasm between our belief and behavior. And it is the paradoxical key to opening our hearts to the grace of God that is stronger than our sins, mightier than our moral timidity, and foundational for healing the soul of individuals and a nation.
But there’s nothing automatic about this healing. That would be cheap grace. When we’re honest we know that left to ourselves we are unable to love or forgive those who have consciously conspired with destruction and evil. And if social justice is what grace looks like in public, as Cornel West likes to say, we also know we are clueless by ourselves when it comes to singing the Lord’s NEW song while we sit by the waters of Babylon and weep?
As I write this Franklyn Graham and his brand of Christian warriors are refusing to accept the irrefutable logic of mathematics. They prefer the animus of a holy war rather than the shared humility of God’s habitat for humanity. Van Jones broke down in tears of relief and gratitude to God on CNN Saturday morning feeling for the first time in years that “he might finally be able to freely breathe again as a Black American” even as those on the other side pumped out more conspiracy theories to fuel the fires of mistrust and FOX New forbade its personalities from using the words President elect in the same sentence as Joe Biden. The NY Times nailed it stating: “As the nation confronts a pandemic and an economic crisis, it’s also facing down a crisis of consensus.”
We know that 96% of those who voted said in an Associated Press survey that bridging our national division must be a priority – what eludes us is the wisdom and will to make it so. No wonder I kept hearing what Jesus told his friends after teaching them that it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for some of us to get over our fears and privilege and embrace the values of grace in public. In a shocked voice they yelped: “Well, then, who can be saved and made whole?” Do you recall his reply? “YOU can NOT make it happen; with individuals, it is impossible, but with GOD ALL things are possible.” The old gospel hymn wasn’t kidding: it’s NOT my sister, NOR my brother, but it’s ME, O Lord, standing in the need of prayer.” A few years back I heard the Americana artist, David Bromberg, add: “NOT the deacon nor the preacher, but it’s me O Lord, standing in the need of prayer. NOT the rabbi nor the mullah but it’s ME, O Lord, standing in the need of prayer.”
To be a fool for Christ, a misfit for the Messiah like St. Paul said, is to know and accept in humility that by ourselves we cannot incarnate or enact the healing love and grace of God that we ALL want and need. By ourselves, that is impossible, and we often become exactly what we hate trying to force it into being. But with God… and that is probably why I’ve been so keen of late to focus our attention on the wisdom way of Celtic spirituality. It’s one of the paths the Western Church once knew how to use in integrating the inward and outward journey of our faith’s foolishness. They insisted that while we live and move and have our being by grace, we must also practice opening our hearts, minds, and souls to the presence and power of God so that we are healed from the inside out.
For a few hundred years, before being forced into the doctrinal absolutes of the Roman Empire, the ancient Celtic Church freely incorporated spiritual disciplines, the wisdom of the seasons, and even regional insights into their spirituality – and they did so with playful verve and tender-hearted creativity. This was true for much of the early church for a few hundred years in the beginning, too. There was a distinctively Middle Eastern flavor to Syrian congregations and those living in the Levant. The was a Greek and Eastern European aroma to faith communities in that incorporated the agricultural feasts and time-tested folk wisdom of that world into the liturgical celebrations, too.
And believers in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, areas that never or rarely encountered the demands of the Roman Empire and its state religion, explored a spirituality influenced in part by the Desert Mothers and Fathers of the 4th century as well as the first word of God found in creation. Without romanticizing or sentimentalizing the Celts (as too often happens) we can appreciate the fact that they crafted a more egalitarian way of being faithful than that of the Empire that included: both male and female leadership; a commitment to individual confession; a porous monastic culture that welcomed guests and the wider region into the life of the community rather than maintaining a rigid cloister; and a balanced and ordered life that included study and worship, acts of compassion alongside prayer that was broader than the deep silence and liturgical prayers required by Rome. That’s an inadequate summary of the Celtic Church, I know, but perhaps it paints a simple picture of how the Christian faith was once free to incorporate local truths and practices into their observances before Rome insisted upon a strict uniformity of form, belief, and discipline.
The late Jesuit scholar, Fr. Raymond Brown, a leader in the modern study of the gospel according to St. John, notes that for nearly six or seven hundred years after the early disciples lived and founded churches in the Middle East, seven distinctive types of churches thrived in the region. They had differing and sometimes competing theologies and liturgies. Some were Gentile congregations, others allowed Jews only, while still others celebrated a hybrid community of inclusivity as Jews, Gentiles, and non-traditional spiritual seekers became the Living Body of Christ together. There were churches open to women serving as leaders and some that were hierarchical and run by men only.
Fr. Ray researched the apostolic churches loyal to Peter, Paul, James, and John, those with a loyalty to Rome and those who looked to Antioch, Ephesus, and Jerusalem for inspiration. It was a heterodox world of diversity, yet ALL accepted one another at the holy table of the Lord’s Supper. Given the divisions we know today that strikes me as remarkable. For they genuinely practiced no distinction when it came to the Eucharist. Sadly, that charism was lost when Roman uniformity became normative by about the year 1000 CE and grew worse when the Orthodox and Catholics split and worse still after the Protestant Reformation.
For a season in time, however, diversity guided these Middle Eastern congregations and reigned within those of the Celtic lands, too. One of the insights the Celts carried to the West from the monastic desert was a distinction between metanoia as strictly moral repentance – the doctrinal truth of the Mother Church in Rome – and a more creative emphasis on metanoia as the practice of acquiring a larger – meta – mind. We might name this as both/and or paradoxical thinking, seeing with the heart, or thinking from within the vastness of God’s grace so that we can hold both joy and sorrow together in balance. Practically this meant that believers in the Celtic realm accepted spiritual homework and training as essential for the healing of grace. In time, however, the insistence on human discipline and diversity of emphasis caused trouble with Rome. This conflict is personified in the differences between two theologians: Pelagius of Ireland and Augustine of Rome. Pelagius, whose real name was Morgan (not the Latin nick name “one from across the sea” used by Rome), taught that God’s grace and human initiative were both necessary for an individual to die to self so that God could renew them by love from the inside out. “Pelagius maintained that it was possible for people to embark on the path of Jesus – what is called theosis or divinization meaning to grow more and more like Christ – by cultivating the divine image within through prayer, silence, compassion and sharing. Such,” writes Cynthia Bourgeault, “was the whole point of our earthly pilgrimage he said.” This horrified Augustine. You see:
Augustine was driven by a counterproposal, that which became the doctrine of Original Sin, and eventually carried the day in Rome. Augustine maintained that drawing close to God was totally impossible for human beings because human nature is so irreparably corrupt that salvation is only possible through an extraordinary infusion of grace mediated only through Jesus and specifically within the church… In this, Jesus was no longer the teacher of spiritual wisdom but the mediator between God and humanity. Further, the spiritual journey was reframed from a quest for intimacy with God and growing into God’s likeness to a rescue operation from sin. (The Wisdom Way of Knowing, pp. 16-17)
Bourgeault argues that when Augustine’s emphasis on sin became normative, banishing the Celtic wisdom of embracing well-established human, spiritual practices – practices that were regarded by the world as not only possible, but the whole point of spirituality, namely, the transformation of the person into a more complete and whole being formed in the image of God – what was once universally true was now theologically off limits to Christians in the West. It was a crushing defeat (for the true way of Jesus) the consequences of which are still being played out among us.” (The Wisdom Way of Knowing, pp. 17-18)
Today the wisdom of contemporary Celtic spiritual communities like Iona, Corrymela, and Northumbria is reconnecting Western Christians with the practices of acquiring that larger mind – metanoia – so that we give up obsessing on sin and human depravity and get down to living by grace. An affirmation from Iona is illustrative: “With the whole church we affirm that we are made in God’s image, befriend-ed by Christ, and empowered by the Spirit. With people everywhere we affirm God’s goodness at the heart of humanity planted more deeply than all that is wrong. And with all creation we celebrate the miracle and wonder of life, the unfolding purposes of God that are for ever at work in ourselves and the world.” (The Wisdom Jesus, Bourgeault, p. 41)
This was and is the central message of Jesus – it’s what the Kingdom of Heaven is all about – and it is one of the ways we learn to live beyond our inner divisions and embrace the totality of creation: the good, the bad, the ugly. It is how each of us can learn to love our neighbors and enemies more honestly while still standing firm against injustice. And it helps us with a uniquely Trinitarian group teaching tools that offer us a vision of what life lived within the foolishness of God’s kingdom would be like. Specifically, they use: 1) the Sermon on the Mount; 2) the outward parables of tenderness; and 3) the inward and challenging stories of metanoia and renewal. These three clusters of insights from Jesus become a Celtic catechism – and today’s gospel is one of the hard stories. (see Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus, pp. 1-53)
Scattered throughout the four gospels… are the teachings of Jesus that absolutely refuse to be shoehorned into the “nice Jesus” mold we keep trying to contain him within. One of the thorniest is the parable in Matthew 25 about the wise and foolish bridesmaids. People who try to reconcile this story with what they generally take to be the teachings of Jesus are left completely stumped. After all, they insist, if Jesus is about sharing, wouldn’t it have been nice if the five ladies who had their oil chose to share it with their friends? How in the world do you make this fit with the ‘blessed are the merciful’ of the fourth beatitude? (Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus, p. 51)
The Biblical scholars that I trust have come to see this story – and those like it – working on a different level than the tender parables for they use completely different and highly challenging metaphors. “These hard teachings are exclusively about inner transformation, not outward actions, and make sense only within the framework” of metanoia – acquiring a larger and transformed mind and vision. (Bourgeault, p. 52) "Simply stated, the reason why the five women who have the oil can’t share it is because “the oil symbolizes that which must be individually created through your own conscious striving. Nobody can give it to you; no body can take it away.” Like another gospel hymn says: “You’ve got to walk that lonesome valley all by yourself. Ain’t nobody here can walk it for you – you got to walk it by yourself.”
Again, I think Bourgeault’s caveat is essential when she tells us the clue here is the word wise. “The five bridesmaids with the oil have acquired nondual consciousness – paradoxical thinking – they see life as both/and – something that can’t possibly be shared with their sisters even if they wanted to.” They have learned to embrace the hard but transformative work on the inward disciplines – and there are other hard teachings that tell us much the same thing such as: ‘Whoever comes to me and does not hate mother or father, wife and children, brother and sister and even life itself, cannot be my disciple’ in Luke 14:25. Or ‘Who among you who intends to build a tower does not first sit down and estimate the cost to see whether or not you have enough resources to complete the task’ in Luke 14:29.
My sense is that these hard teaching of Jesus offer us different insights – his inward spiritual instruction – which is distinctive from his outward and tender messages. They are what we must do within – die to self and empty out our fears and anger – so that God’s grace and peace can take up more room in our hearts. Peterson got this in his reworking of the opening Beatitude in Matthew 5: “How happy you will – how blessed you are – when you are at the end of your rope. For with less of you within there is more room for God and God’s love.” St. Paul experienced and then taught much the same thing when he crafted Romans 12:
So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for God. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. Do not be conformed to the ways of this world but let yourself be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what God wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
The practices, disciplines, and spiritual tools of the extended Celtic Advent are intended to be tools to help us practice letting go - emptying ourselves incrementally over 40 days – so that we might be filled with more grace. This has been called a lesser or little fast, a wisdom school into the way of Jesus, that shows us where to find the light in the darkness and trust beyond our fear and anger.
Traditionally, the Celts considered Christ during Advent as a child, as an inner guide, and as a cosmic presence. I’m currently working on an Advent calendar that I hope to have ready in a few days that can be a shared resource into these reflections. (Given the recent postal cut-back my resources have been lost somewhere in transit.) Once I get this completed, I will also share with you some suggestions for ordering our prayers, entering the silence, and sharing small acts of tenderness beyond ourselves and homes.
There will be candles to light, chants to be sung and a way to use the ancient monastic O Antiphons during the week before Christmas, too. During a time when we must spend even MORE time in solitude, one of the ways we can be a part of the healing of this nation is to ground ourselves more deeply in grace. The Celtics insisted that whenever we interrupt our regular behaviors and habits, and fill that space with the foolishness of our faith, we learn that change is possible. Their Advent practices are bathed in tenderness – this is NOT a hard fast – but one shaped by the Christ Child.
And in this moment of anxiety and challenge to accept what I cannot change while opening my heart to what God can transform and heal… rings true in my heart. I believe that Advent could not have come at a better moment – and invite you to join me on the journey if you are able.
As the emptiness drags on after opening embraces and prayers, the shared silences that started naturally soon turned awkward. Even oppressive. So, like mist on a cold, country field, random stories of the heart would start to rise from often the most unlikely member of the family. A tenderness would be spoken. Real albeit incongruous laughs would erupt, too breaking down the tension in the room. And, in the Spirit's own mysterious time, what began as brittle became incrementally more supple. A few hours in, some would even fall asleep. Others drummed and paced - especially men used to "fixing" a problem that was now beyond control - while the unofficial mother hen slipped away quietly to bring back baked goods and coffee. Over and over, I saw this rhythm ripple through waiting rooms all across America until the facts on the ground were disclosed, owned, and digested. Then a whole new cycle of uncertainty moving towards trust would show up and capture us as we tentatively worked at finding our new place of balance once again.
I continued to observe that: Late on November 3rd Joe Biden came on TV to urge patience and trust while Donald Trump threw emotional gasoline upon our worst fears and prejudices. Both candidates continued to embody their pre-election dispositions: one was inclusive and calm, the other unhinged and mean-spirited. The Trump camp insisted - especially as votes rolled in from key battle ground states - that the election was being stolen by fraud as votes were manufactured in the dead of night and manipulated by partisan poll workers. As the anxiety and anticipation ground on, America continued to resemble that surgical waiting room after the doc has spoken to the family about a prognosis. Personally and professionally, when this happens, I’ve seen some of the family become unmoored – the ones who are addicted to drama and need all things to be about them – would dominate the room with their wailing. Others would hunker down in quiet discomfort, trying to grasp what the consequences might mean in both the short and long term. But most would simply stand in front of the surgeon like a deer in the headlights, hearing part of what was being said, but still fundamentally confused. After the doc left, these precious souls would turn to one another and cry, "What did she say? What did he mean? Is this good or bad?" I am of the opinion that there's no interrupting this essential dance with uncertainty and grief. It must be incarnated - and only later can we unpack what is real and what is not.
And that’s where things stood for three long days. In my household, we regularly checked CNN to get updates, parsing each notification for hidden clues as to the eventual outcome, and prayerfully steeling our hearts for still more uncertainty. John King and his Magic Board became my new hero. Updates flashed on my smart phone from the NY Times 8 or 10 times each hour. And an odd, inner stillness took hold that lasted until the President spoke at 6:30 pm on Thursday night. In what was his most horrifying, shameful, and incendiary speech among too many others, he rambled and lied. With every sentence he told a nervous nation that our democratic institutions were being manipulated by malicious, marauding political partisans hellbent on stealing his victory by manufacturing Biden votes, destroying Republican ballots, and counting dead bodies as live voters. Without ONCE offering any factual evidence – because there IS none – he smeared the integrity of public servants risking their lives to count tens of thousands of our legal mail-in ballots during what has become the worst phase of the contagion.
Lashing out at his political opponents in a dispirited rant, the President of the United States spewed hatred alongside of a dark and ugly fear that can only be described as Shakespearean manner. In 35 seconds, some of the major television networks unplugged this craven monologue, ironically choosing to air the game show Jeopardy rather than broadcast more deceit. Cable news covered the bombast until it closed – and then zeroed in on a tragic man slinking silently out of the White House briefing room. Like many others, I was aghast. Stunned and sickened before realizing I was sobbing. The television screen became silent for a few seconds. And then CNN news anchor, Jake Tapper, refocused the nation’s still reeling attention after this vulgar verbal assault saying:
What a sad night for the United States of America to hear their president say that, to falsely accuse people of trying to steal the election, to try to attack democracy that way with his feast of falsehoods. Lie after lie after lie about the election being stolen… it's time for some Republican lawmakers to find their spine and talk to the president about what he needs to do for the good of the country.
Like millions of others, I was rattled watching this display of treason, struggling to catch my breath, and trembling with tears. And this is where the complications of the week came clarifying for me. For even though there’s been NO vigorous Republican rebukes of this man’s degrading lies – NO plans to intervene for the sake of the nation or our emotionally crippled commander-in-chief – and NO signs that those living under the spell of Trump’s mania are willing or even able to consider claiming common ground after this melee eventually ends… I believe that God’s love commands us to find way to heal this breach. For as much as I mistrust and even fear many of those who voted for the most vile and dishonest leader I’ve known – 70 million people who have been willing to endorse, encourage, and entrust their futures to an autocrat with fascist inclinations – deep in my heart I believe that we must find ways NOT to demonize one another as we search in the wilderness TOGETHER for ways to repair and rebuild our failing state.
Before the election was called for President-Elect Biden, I read in The Atlantic words that made me hurt all over again. Tom Nichols wrote: “Nearly half of the voters in the USA have seen Trump in all of his splendor—his infantile tirades, his disastrous and lethal policies, his contempt for democracy in all its forms—and they decided that they wanted more of it.” I worry about this. I am bewildered by it as well. But I refuse to conclude that this is the end of the story. It is part of the truth, but not its totality as Nicholas would have us believe when he adds:
His voters can no longer hide behind excuses about the corruption of Hillary Clinton or their willingness to take a chance on an unproven political novice. They cannot feign ignorance about how Trump would rule. They know – and have embraced him. Sadly, the voters who said in 2016 that they chose Trump because they thought he was “just like them” turned out to be right. Now, by picking him again, those voters are showing that they are just like him: angry, spoiled, racially resentful, aggrieved, and willing to die rather than ever admit that they were wrong. It’s clear now that far too many of these voters don’t care about policy, decency, or saving our democracy. They care about power. Although Trump appears to have received a small uptick in votes from Black men and Latinos, the overwhelming share of his supporters are white. The politics of cultural resentment, this obsession with white anxiety, are so intense that voters are determined not only to preserve minority rule but to leave a dangerous sociopath in the Oval Office. Even the candidacy of a man who was both a political centrist and a decent human being could not over-come this sullen commitment to authoritarianism.
(https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/large-portion-electorate-chose-sociopath/616994/)
Those words are too smug, too dismissive, too narrowly self-righteous to be useful at this moment in time. And yet I am glad I read them because they speak to the foolishness of the Christ I seek to serve. They remind me that there is NO escaping our shared hypocrisy when it comes to the way of Jesus and how we construct public policy or private discrimination.
Jesus is unambiguous in his call to love our neighbors and our enemies as ourselves. So I think the Rev. Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault gets it right when she writes, “We ALL live with this terrible, heart-breaking hypocrisy... We ALL wrestle with how to spiritually die to ourselves before we actually greet the grave. And we ALL wonder how to bridge the gap between what we believe and what we actually do?” (The Wisdom Jesus, p. 40) This disconnect is the reason we have prayers of individual and corporate confession. It is why we set aside liturgical seasons like Advent and Lent to help us come clean about the chasm between our belief and behavior. And it is the paradoxical key to opening our hearts to the grace of God that is stronger than our sins, mightier than our moral timidity, and foundational for healing the soul of individuals and a nation.
But there’s nothing automatic about this healing. That would be cheap grace. When we’re honest we know that left to ourselves we are unable to love or forgive those who have consciously conspired with destruction and evil. And if social justice is what grace looks like in public, as Cornel West likes to say, we also know we are clueless by ourselves when it comes to singing the Lord’s NEW song while we sit by the waters of Babylon and weep?
As I write this Franklyn Graham and his brand of Christian warriors are refusing to accept the irrefutable logic of mathematics. They prefer the animus of a holy war rather than the shared humility of God’s habitat for humanity. Van Jones broke down in tears of relief and gratitude to God on CNN Saturday morning feeling for the first time in years that “he might finally be able to freely breathe again as a Black American” even as those on the other side pumped out more conspiracy theories to fuel the fires of mistrust and FOX New forbade its personalities from using the words President elect in the same sentence as Joe Biden. The NY Times nailed it stating: “As the nation confronts a pandemic and an economic crisis, it’s also facing down a crisis of consensus.”
We know that 96% of those who voted said in an Associated Press survey that bridging our national division must be a priority – what eludes us is the wisdom and will to make it so. No wonder I kept hearing what Jesus told his friends after teaching them that it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for some of us to get over our fears and privilege and embrace the values of grace in public. In a shocked voice they yelped: “Well, then, who can be saved and made whole?” Do you recall his reply? “YOU can NOT make it happen; with individuals, it is impossible, but with GOD ALL things are possible.” The old gospel hymn wasn’t kidding: it’s NOT my sister, NOR my brother, but it’s ME, O Lord, standing in the need of prayer.” A few years back I heard the Americana artist, David Bromberg, add: “NOT the deacon nor the preacher, but it’s me O Lord, standing in the need of prayer. NOT the rabbi nor the mullah but it’s ME, O Lord, standing in the need of prayer.”
To be a fool for Christ, a misfit for the Messiah like St. Paul said, is to know and accept in humility that by ourselves we cannot incarnate or enact the healing love and grace of God that we ALL want and need. By ourselves, that is impossible, and we often become exactly what we hate trying to force it into being. But with God… and that is probably why I’ve been so keen of late to focus our attention on the wisdom way of Celtic spirituality. It’s one of the paths the Western Church once knew how to use in integrating the inward and outward journey of our faith’s foolishness. They insisted that while we live and move and have our being by grace, we must also practice opening our hearts, minds, and souls to the presence and power of God so that we are healed from the inside out.
For a few hundred years, before being forced into the doctrinal absolutes of the Roman Empire, the ancient Celtic Church freely incorporated spiritual disciplines, the wisdom of the seasons, and even regional insights into their spirituality – and they did so with playful verve and tender-hearted creativity. This was true for much of the early church for a few hundred years in the beginning, too. There was a distinctively Middle Eastern flavor to Syrian congregations and those living in the Levant. The was a Greek and Eastern European aroma to faith communities in that incorporated the agricultural feasts and time-tested folk wisdom of that world into the liturgical celebrations, too.
And believers in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, areas that never or rarely encountered the demands of the Roman Empire and its state religion, explored a spirituality influenced in part by the Desert Mothers and Fathers of the 4th century as well as the first word of God found in creation. Without romanticizing or sentimentalizing the Celts (as too often happens) we can appreciate the fact that they crafted a more egalitarian way of being faithful than that of the Empire that included: both male and female leadership; a commitment to individual confession; a porous monastic culture that welcomed guests and the wider region into the life of the community rather than maintaining a rigid cloister; and a balanced and ordered life that included study and worship, acts of compassion alongside prayer that was broader than the deep silence and liturgical prayers required by Rome. That’s an inadequate summary of the Celtic Church, I know, but perhaps it paints a simple picture of how the Christian faith was once free to incorporate local truths and practices into their observances before Rome insisted upon a strict uniformity of form, belief, and discipline.
The late Jesuit scholar, Fr. Raymond Brown, a leader in the modern study of the gospel according to St. John, notes that for nearly six or seven hundred years after the early disciples lived and founded churches in the Middle East, seven distinctive types of churches thrived in the region. They had differing and sometimes competing theologies and liturgies. Some were Gentile congregations, others allowed Jews only, while still others celebrated a hybrid community of inclusivity as Jews, Gentiles, and non-traditional spiritual seekers became the Living Body of Christ together. There were churches open to women serving as leaders and some that were hierarchical and run by men only.
Fr. Ray researched the apostolic churches loyal to Peter, Paul, James, and John, those with a loyalty to Rome and those who looked to Antioch, Ephesus, and Jerusalem for inspiration. It was a heterodox world of diversity, yet ALL accepted one another at the holy table of the Lord’s Supper. Given the divisions we know today that strikes me as remarkable. For they genuinely practiced no distinction when it came to the Eucharist. Sadly, that charism was lost when Roman uniformity became normative by about the year 1000 CE and grew worse when the Orthodox and Catholics split and worse still after the Protestant Reformation.
For a season in time, however, diversity guided these Middle Eastern congregations and reigned within those of the Celtic lands, too. One of the insights the Celts carried to the West from the monastic desert was a distinction between metanoia as strictly moral repentance – the doctrinal truth of the Mother Church in Rome – and a more creative emphasis on metanoia as the practice of acquiring a larger – meta – mind. We might name this as both/and or paradoxical thinking, seeing with the heart, or thinking from within the vastness of God’s grace so that we can hold both joy and sorrow together in balance. Practically this meant that believers in the Celtic realm accepted spiritual homework and training as essential for the healing of grace. In time, however, the insistence on human discipline and diversity of emphasis caused trouble with Rome. This conflict is personified in the differences between two theologians: Pelagius of Ireland and Augustine of Rome. Pelagius, whose real name was Morgan (not the Latin nick name “one from across the sea” used by Rome), taught that God’s grace and human initiative were both necessary for an individual to die to self so that God could renew them by love from the inside out. “Pelagius maintained that it was possible for people to embark on the path of Jesus – what is called theosis or divinization meaning to grow more and more like Christ – by cultivating the divine image within through prayer, silence, compassion and sharing. Such,” writes Cynthia Bourgeault, “was the whole point of our earthly pilgrimage he said.” This horrified Augustine. You see:
Augustine was driven by a counterproposal, that which became the doctrine of Original Sin, and eventually carried the day in Rome. Augustine maintained that drawing close to God was totally impossible for human beings because human nature is so irreparably corrupt that salvation is only possible through an extraordinary infusion of grace mediated only through Jesus and specifically within the church… In this, Jesus was no longer the teacher of spiritual wisdom but the mediator between God and humanity. Further, the spiritual journey was reframed from a quest for intimacy with God and growing into God’s likeness to a rescue operation from sin. (The Wisdom Way of Knowing, pp. 16-17)
Bourgeault argues that when Augustine’s emphasis on sin became normative, banishing the Celtic wisdom of embracing well-established human, spiritual practices – practices that were regarded by the world as not only possible, but the whole point of spirituality, namely, the transformation of the person into a more complete and whole being formed in the image of God – what was once universally true was now theologically off limits to Christians in the West. It was a crushing defeat (for the true way of Jesus) the consequences of which are still being played out among us.” (The Wisdom Way of Knowing, pp. 17-18)
Today the wisdom of contemporary Celtic spiritual communities like Iona, Corrymela, and Northumbria is reconnecting Western Christians with the practices of acquiring that larger mind – metanoia – so that we give up obsessing on sin and human depravity and get down to living by grace. An affirmation from Iona is illustrative: “With the whole church we affirm that we are made in God’s image, befriend-ed by Christ, and empowered by the Spirit. With people everywhere we affirm God’s goodness at the heart of humanity planted more deeply than all that is wrong. And with all creation we celebrate the miracle and wonder of life, the unfolding purposes of God that are for ever at work in ourselves and the world.” (The Wisdom Jesus, Bourgeault, p. 41)
This was and is the central message of Jesus – it’s what the Kingdom of Heaven is all about – and it is one of the ways we learn to live beyond our inner divisions and embrace the totality of creation: the good, the bad, the ugly. It is how each of us can learn to love our neighbors and enemies more honestly while still standing firm against injustice. And it helps us with a uniquely Trinitarian group teaching tools that offer us a vision of what life lived within the foolishness of God’s kingdom would be like. Specifically, they use: 1) the Sermon on the Mount; 2) the outward parables of tenderness; and 3) the inward and challenging stories of metanoia and renewal. These three clusters of insights from Jesus become a Celtic catechism – and today’s gospel is one of the hard stories. (see Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus, pp. 1-53)
Scattered throughout the four gospels… are the teachings of Jesus that absolutely refuse to be shoehorned into the “nice Jesus” mold we keep trying to contain him within. One of the thorniest is the parable in Matthew 25 about the wise and foolish bridesmaids. People who try to reconcile this story with what they generally take to be the teachings of Jesus are left completely stumped. After all, they insist, if Jesus is about sharing, wouldn’t it have been nice if the five ladies who had their oil chose to share it with their friends? How in the world do you make this fit with the ‘blessed are the merciful’ of the fourth beatitude? (Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus, p. 51)
The Biblical scholars that I trust have come to see this story – and those like it – working on a different level than the tender parables for they use completely different and highly challenging metaphors. “These hard teachings are exclusively about inner transformation, not outward actions, and make sense only within the framework” of metanoia – acquiring a larger and transformed mind and vision. (Bourgeault, p. 52) "Simply stated, the reason why the five women who have the oil can’t share it is because “the oil symbolizes that which must be individually created through your own conscious striving. Nobody can give it to you; no body can take it away.” Like another gospel hymn says: “You’ve got to walk that lonesome valley all by yourself. Ain’t nobody here can walk it for you – you got to walk it by yourself.”
Again, I think Bourgeault’s caveat is essential when she tells us the clue here is the word wise. “The five bridesmaids with the oil have acquired nondual consciousness – paradoxical thinking – they see life as both/and – something that can’t possibly be shared with their sisters even if they wanted to.” They have learned to embrace the hard but transformative work on the inward disciplines – and there are other hard teachings that tell us much the same thing such as: ‘Whoever comes to me and does not hate mother or father, wife and children, brother and sister and even life itself, cannot be my disciple’ in Luke 14:25. Or ‘Who among you who intends to build a tower does not first sit down and estimate the cost to see whether or not you have enough resources to complete the task’ in Luke 14:29.
My sense is that these hard teaching of Jesus offer us different insights – his inward spiritual instruction – which is distinctive from his outward and tender messages. They are what we must do within – die to self and empty out our fears and anger – so that God’s grace and peace can take up more room in our hearts. Peterson got this in his reworking of the opening Beatitude in Matthew 5: “How happy you will – how blessed you are – when you are at the end of your rope. For with less of you within there is more room for God and God’s love.” St. Paul experienced and then taught much the same thing when he crafted Romans 12:
So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for God. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. Do not be conformed to the ways of this world but let yourself be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what God wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
The practices, disciplines, and spiritual tools of the extended Celtic Advent are intended to be tools to help us practice letting go - emptying ourselves incrementally over 40 days – so that we might be filled with more grace. This has been called a lesser or little fast, a wisdom school into the way of Jesus, that shows us where to find the light in the darkness and trust beyond our fear and anger.
Traditionally, the Celts considered Christ during Advent as a child, as an inner guide, and as a cosmic presence. I’m currently working on an Advent calendar that I hope to have ready in a few days that can be a shared resource into these reflections. (Given the recent postal cut-back my resources have been lost somewhere in transit.) Once I get this completed, I will also share with you some suggestions for ordering our prayers, entering the silence, and sharing small acts of tenderness beyond ourselves and homes.
There will be candles to light, chants to be sung and a way to use the ancient monastic O Antiphons during the week before Christmas, too. During a time when we must spend even MORE time in solitude, one of the ways we can be a part of the healing of this nation is to ground ourselves more deeply in grace. The Celtics insisted that whenever we interrupt our regular behaviors and habits, and fill that space with the foolishness of our faith, we learn that change is possible. Their Advent practices are bathed in tenderness – this is NOT a hard fast – but one shaped by the Christ Child.
And in this moment of anxiety and challenge to accept what I cannot change while opening my heart to what God can transform and heal… rings true in my heart. I believe that Advent could not have come at a better moment – and invite you to join me on the journey if you are able.
https://fb.watch/1DRpLtW9uu/
No comments:
Post a Comment