a new commandment to love... NOW

This week I was awakened again to a curious cultural paradox of my life – you might even call it a social or spiritual schizophrenia of sorts – where I am living a quiet, simple, nearly monastic life of gardening, writing, music-making, spiritual direction, and caring for those I love while whole clusters of people, as well as the flora and fauna, water, air, and cultures of creation must endure repeated acts of violence, trauma, chaos, and suffering. The merciless slaughter of people of color by a young, white, male domestic terrorist in Buffalo and the relentless carnage of the war in Uk-raine are just the tip of a vicious iceberg that includes a million lives lost to covid in the USA, our national addiction to drugs and mindless distractions, the harrowing loneliness and emotional trauma our young people have endured during the pandemic to say nothing of our political descent into fear, tribalism, and hatred.

This dilemma is timeless in some ways as walking by faith not sight has always
meant trusting a love at work among us that is greater than the obvious; but it is also uniquely modern quest, too as 21st century mystics and contemplatives seek ways to balance solitude with compassion in the digital age. When religious communities once lived solely within the confines of the cloister – and the flow of information moved among us at the speed of the seasons – establishing a well-ordered practice of work and prayer – ora y labora as the Benedictines say – was less complicated. In rela-tive isolation, we could maintain a measure of hospitality with the world, “unburdened by strange diets, esoteric devotions, or damaging denials of self.” As Sr. Joan Chittister suggests, “the true monastic walked through life with a barefooted soul, alert, aware, grateful, and only partially at home.” Today, however, and for most of the 20th and 21st centuries, people of prayer must learn to live into a reality that sees, hears, feels, tastes, and smells the celebrations as well as the lament-ations of creation without the protection of the cloister and without clear guidelines for balancing our contemplation with necessary social action.

With so much sensory data breaking our hearts open every day by the enormity of the world’s pain, you see, it’s no wonder so many feel overwhelmed, impotent, and despairing. I once heard Krista Tippett, the host of On Being, quip to her guest that she thought global technology could bring us back to a small is beautiful perspective: “We can now see the suffering and need all over the world in real time and respond instantly” she said. To which her guest ironically replied: well, maybe before adding:

Today we can look at an Iraqi or Ukrainian children, for example, whose agony wounds us and compels us to want to do something, yet because that child is NOT right there in front of you, you must confront your incapacity for action because what is really in front of you is an image and NOT the child herself. If that child was in front of you, you could take her in your arms. So, we must figure out how to live into a world where the imagination, the virtual, the long distance, sees things far away while they appear as close. But you can’t touch them. They’re close to the imagination, but they’re not close to our flesh and blood.

For the past five years, I’ve been learning at L’Arche what the late Thomas Merton – monastic, author, and activist – told Jim Forrest, a young peace activist during the war in Vietnam about just this quandary. The key to faithful living now Merton wrote is proximity – embracing the limitations of being small and even powerless – while managing our imaginations so that we do: “NOT depend on the hope of results.” Merton wrote:

When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work for peace, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be endured, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, as you yourself mention in passing, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.

This seems to be the wisdom consistently celebrated by contemporary

contemplative activists of every spiritual hue: embrace a simple but well-practiced rhythm of engagement, solitude and pray-erful reflection before returning to the fray; and, stay connected to real people who are close by. Let ideology and measurable results go and be like Jesus who kept asking his friend: “Peter, do you love me?” Small acts of tender love shared locally is how we reclaim balance and focus. I suspect that’s why I’ve been knocked out by this Leonard Cohen song. Its prescient lyrics and melancholic melody feels to me like our struggle to ground ourselves in small, local acts of love as we train our imaginations with simple, quiet prayer all bathed in love. Cohen calls it: “Almost Like the Blues.”

I saw some people starving, there was murder, there was rape
Their villages were burning, they were trying to escape

I couldn't meet their glances, I was staring at my shoes
It was acid, it was tragic: It was almost like the blues…

I have to die a little between each murderous plot
And when I'm finished thinking I have to die a lot

There's torture, and there's killing, and there's all my bad reviews
The war, the children missing, lord, it's almost like the blues

Though I let my heart get frozen to keep away the rot
My father says I'm chosen, my mother says I'm not

I listened to their story of the gypsies and the Jews
It was good, it wasn't boring: it was almost like the blues

There is no God in heaven, there is no hell below
So says the great professor of all there is to know

But I've had the invitation that a sinner can't refuse
It's almost like salvation, It's almost like the blues

The genius of this song, besides the couplets is, I think, the tag line: almost like the blues. That’s a mouthful of shorthand spiritual wisdom obliquely suggesting that often our lament is not QUITE as cathartic as the blues: it’s close, it’s almost there, but when anguish is not intimate, like it is in the real blues, when it’s more universal or abstract, it’s not attached to real flesh and blood. In his intentionally paradoxical way, Cohen wants us to know that many of our songs are not as gritty as Howlin’ Wolf, Big Momma Thorton, or Coltrane because they’re disembodied. The real blues moves through lament – it doesn’t stay locked in the pain – but reaches beyond it. Singing almost like the blues is what an emotional tourist does – dabbling here, watching there, grieving in the abstract before moving on. The real blues is salvific, transformative, while almost like the blues is honestly emotional but rarely anything more.

Which is what Jesus tells us in today’s reading from St. John’s gospel. At table with his be-loved friends, he says to us today what he told always told them then: God has been glorified – illumi-nated, celebrated, and incarnated – now. Whenever you love one another as I have loved you, God is glorified. Do this for it is my new commandment. Now, remember the setting of these words: it may be the 5th Sunday of Eastertide for us, but the text comes from St. John’s account of the last supper where three important things took place: First, Jesus anointed his friends for ministry using humble, ordinary water as he washed their feet; second, he shared a Passover meal with them; and third, he told them that loving real people we can touch is the key for moving beyond ALMOST like the blues.

Instead of despair or abstractions, let’s regularly gather around the table, share food and encour-agement with one another using the stories and songs of our tradition, and then go back into the world to love those closest to us. THIS is how God is glorified.

· Now I understand that my third insight is the minority report when it comes to this passage – and I’ve only come to it with any clarity recently. Most scholars want us to believe that God was glorified when Judas left the table to enact his betrayal: for these theologians it is the Passion that expresses Christ’s love most clearly.

· But the flow of the story seems to suggest that God was once glorified when Jesus washed his disciples’ feet before the Passover meal; so it stands to reason that God would continue to be glorified whenever we do likewise. Simple, humble acts of love to real human beings offered without any illusion of measurable results is the NEW commandment – compassion freely offered – is what gives shape, form, and honor to the holy.

Contemporary Bible scholars insist that “what Jesus has in mind here is distinctive, subversive, and surprising, with wide-ranging social consequences.” (SALT Project) That’s what I’ve come to believe, too. To glorify God, you see, is to “mirror God’s image” in real time: it is to make our words of love and commitment to compassion flesh. To glorify God, from the Greek doxazo, is to manifest the light, wisdom, beauty, grace, healing, and awe of the holy in observable ways. I think of it as sacra-mental as our inward and spiritual love is expressed in outward and visible acts that point towards their source in the sacred heart of the Lord.

That’s one of the gifts of this text: it reminds us that our outward spiritual worship

is more about spreading love than going to church. Or ending all suffering. Or getting trapped in feelings that we cannot act upon. As I’ve shared with you many times, St. Paul crystalizes this calling in Romans 12 clearly:

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 the Lord. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God and you’ll 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.

Sharing real love where we find ourselves, living with compassion among our neighbors, is one of the ways to resist our culture’s lowest common denominator. I’ve come to trust it is how God is glorified and how that glory becomes flesh in you and me. The poet and artist, Jan Richardson, rephrases this truth saying:

Let it be that on this day we will expect no more of ourselves
than to keep breathing with the bewildered cadence of lungs that will not give up the ghost. Let it be we will expect little but the beating of our heart, stubborn in its repeating rhythm that will not cease to sound.
Let it be we will still ourselves enough to hear what may yet come to echo: As if in the breath, another breathing; as if in the heartbeat, another heart. And let it be we will not try to fathom what comes to meet us in the stillness but simply open to the approach of a mystery we hardly dared to dream.

God is glorified when we don’t plot and plan so much as welcome, receive, and respond. When we consciously and with some consistency share Christ’s love with others like God has shared it with us. The context of this story adds poignancy to our emerging Eastertide spirituality which is easy to miss if we only read the appointed lectionary texts in isolation. Without the bigger picture, we might easily miss the revolutionary meaning of Christ’s rite of foot washing. So, keep in mind that:

· The first anointing in the arc of this story happens a week before Passover when St. Mary Magdalene anoints the head of Jesus with perfumed oil. Magdalene transforms her tradition not only by taking on the role of the priest – a truly revolutionary act for a Jewish woman in first century Palestine – but by anointing Jesus as Messiah: Lord and Savior.

· The male disciples had hoped that such an anointing would take place in the Temple, but Magdalene lets it be known that those who embrace the radical hospitality and grace-filled love of God in Jesus don’t have time to wait for the institutional leadership to catch up to the Holy Spirit. The Cross is too close for comfort. Fear is everywhere. So, at yet another table, she does what others should have done: she anoints Jesus as God’s beloved.

A week later, on the Eve of the Feast of Passover, Jesus builds on Magdalene’s revolutionary wis-dom when he strips off his outer garment, ties a towel around his waist, kneels before his friends and students, and washes feet still filthy from traveling the dirt roads of ancient Israel. This act, in and of itself, symbolizes a spirituality of humility, proximity, and servanthood where the supposed master now becomes like a slave. But just so that no one misses the point, Jesus ups the ante by in-verting and replacing the traditional perfumed oil with ordinary water and literally anointing the bottom of a person’s body rather that the top. Do you see the life-changing sacramentality of this act? Water instead of sacred oil is radically egalitarian, feet rather than head celebrates humility, and the holiness of the ordinary table instead of the grandeur of the Temple makes living in the love of Christ accessible to us all. We don’t needs special places or times to practice love: we can do it anywhere! Isn’t that what the new commandment says:

Behold, I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another, for in this God is glorified.

St. John places all of this within the arc of the Last Supper where prophecy is revealed at a simple dinner table. In this farewell discourse, the last words of guidance and consolation Jesus shares with his followers as he takes his leave… are that while Jesus is on his way out, the Holy Spirit is on her way in… As the post-Easter community is about to be born — a community that Jesus insists will go on to do even “greater works” than he did… the living community will incarnate the love they have experienced with the whole neighborhood without concern for results…and THEN God will be truly glorified.” (SALT Project)

· After the foot washing, after his humble anointing, as the Passover feast begins Jesus says: NOW God has been glorified. NOT at the Cross, or Resurrection, or Ascension. NOW – in the upper room. Before the Cross, the Resurrection, or Ascension.

· I don’t know how I missed the simple intimacy of this promise for decades, but I think I get it now: With tenderness Jesus recognizes our wounds and anxieties saying, “Little ones, beloved and humble, I am with you – I am with you now in one way; and as you love one another as I have loved you – I will be with you again. Just keep on doing what we have done tonight.”

The focus of a disciple now is as it was then: make friends with those around 

us without regard to status, bridge the divides between “above and below, insider and out-sider, clean and unclean,” gather regularly for simple meals of table fellowship where we can offer one another encourage-ment through storytelling, songs, prayers, poems, and acts of beauty. This is what the community of faith is to do when everything else around us feels like madness: we feast, we listen, we encour-age, and we love.

When communities are under assault, when hell becomes normative and hope fades from our memory, when war and violence rage and peace is forgotten: the followers of Jesus are asked to focus on three counter-intuitive, counter-cultural acts: gather together for a meal, listen with care to one another’s reality, and share love with those you can touch. That’s what Syrian priests told their congregations during the ugly civil war, it’s what the Christian remnant did when Isis ruled the land, it’s what empowered those consigned by chance to the evils of Stalin and Hitler, it’s what the African-American church preaches consistently, and, my friends, it is one of the ways we who are contemplatives can let go of singing ALMOST like the blues and get down to the real thing.

Back in 1983, during an international people-to-people peace pilgrimage to what was then the Soviet Union, on our way back to the West, we spent some time in Poland during Marshall Law as Solidarity challenged the brutality of communist totalitarianism with a few more days in the then GDR: the German Democratic Republic of communist East Germany. One night we had a long con-versation with some East German church leaders who later became instrumental in the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

These were men and women who, after the nightmare of Hitler’s brutality had the chance to leave Germany for at least the freedom of the West – or entrée into England or the USA. But they chose instead to stay where they were. Under the double whammy, as one dissident put it, of German autocracy and Stalinist cruelty, they chose to endure the worst of both worlds. Because, it was absolutely essential to love their ordinary neighbors. IF there was to be any hope of rebuilding a new and healthy free Germany: “We HAD to stay where we were if we were going to be faithful to Jesus and believed by those all around us. If we were to have any credibility, we had to stand and deliver love and not take advantage of our elite status and skip out on the pain.” We talked about this faithfulness – and the cost of such discipleship – for hours before one person lifted up the words of St. Paul from 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 the Lord. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God and you’ll 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.

I think of that dark time in an East German apartment as we go deeper into the

chaos and pain of our trials: it is every bit as terrifying and broken as what the early church faced before and after the Cross. It’s going to get as horrifying in our own way as what our East German friends knew – and it is going to be costly for those who love the way Jesus loved us. In a recent interview, another of Christ’s servants, Wendell Berry, replied like this when asked what do we do now to challenge the fear and madness of our age and live as those nourishing God’s love within:

What can we do? We can take Gary Snyder’s good advice: “Stop somewhere.” He meant stop and stay and deal with the consequences. We can teach ourselves to think as community members rather than as individuals in competition with all other individuals. We can work, shop, eat, and amuse ourselves as close to home as possible. We can, on our own or with like-minded people, become mindful of all that we have in our places that is worth keeping, and of the best ways of keeping those things. And, to quote Gary Snyder again, we can: stay together - learn the flowers - go light.

The spirituality of Eastertide that I see unfolding from the stories of this season ask us to stop – be where we are fully right now. Reconnect with those around us with love and patience as neighbors. Open our tables to one another, listen carefully to one another’s stories. And trust that these small acts of tenderness are exactly what God asks of us at this moment. Then we won’t be living like it’s ALMOST like the blues, we’ll be singing a profound lament that owns our anxiety and danger, but trusts the love of God to be greater still.

Let it be that on this day we will expect no more of ourselves than to keep breathing with the bewildered cadence of lungs that will not give up the ghost. Let it be we will expect little but the beating of our heart,
stubborn in its repeating rhythm that will not cease to sound.
Let it be we will still ourselves enough to hear what may yet come to echo: As if in the breath, another breathing; as if in the heartbeat, another heart. And let it be we will not try to fathom what comes to meet us in the stillness but simply open to the approach of a mystery we hardly dared to dream.