· For about a year I went with my grandma Deanne to the Unitarian Universalist church of Stamford. My paternal grandfather had been pastor, so she felt very much at home there. When we started, I LOVED to enter the darkened old stone Sanctuary with its stunning stained glass and scent of centuries gone by still lingering in the air. Hearing the massive pipe organ took my breath away. And I was often enraptured sitting silently in that huge nave as the candles flickered and the gathered faithful raised prayers unto the Lord.
What I didn’t like so much was… Sunday School. Not the IDEA of Sunday School – I’ve always loved to learn – no, it was the content of our classes. Back in my grandfather’s day, this was a Unitarian Christian congregation; by the time I was attending with my grandma, however, the emphasis had shifted to the Universalist side of the merger. And, like the early days of so many mergers, both sac-red and secular, it’s easiest to gather the low hanging fruit first. So, with the best of intentions, our Sunday School celebrated what I came to call the lowest common spiritual denominator – we were learning to be nice liberals with good manners who knew how to share with one another – but who rarely spoke of God and NEVER spoke of Jesus.
Now, this is a viable spiritual path that clearly speaks to some, so let me be clear that far be it from me to denigrate this or any spiritual tradition, ok? I simply knew from a tender age that it just didn’t speak to me: it didn’t help me sort out a code of conduct for living nor did it teach me anything about prayer. Don’t ask me why or how I became so interested in contemplative Christian spirituality at such a young age because it was not in the air of our home nor the zeitgeist of our culture. But by 1st grade I knew that I wanted to follow Jesus. I didn’t really know what that meant at age seven, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to find out in that Sunday School. I just knew that I couldn’t take another Sunday talking about dinosaurs and evolution. NOT that I denied science, then or now: I just wanted to know about Jesus. So, that summer, sitting on the porch of our rustic cabin on Lake Webster – and yes I know how to say Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaug – I told my grandmother that I wanted to learn how to pray and live like Jesus.
· As best I recall, she gave me a concerned look, started to say something to me about Thomas Jefferson and the Deists, at which point I just silently got up and went to sit by the water as I realized my days at the Unitarian Universalist Sunday School were over. Then and now, I still find that the wisdom of God’s first created word in nature is often my ally when words no longer cut it.
· In time, I discovered that Jesus often retreated into the solitude of Mother Nature, too when he needed a place to listen deeply for guidance from his Heavenly Father. Our first reading to-day expresses the heart of a contemplative spirituality with great care:
The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Is-rael and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with your ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt – a covenant that they broke – ev-en as I loved them. So, this is the covenant… will put my law within them and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least to the greatest, says the Lord; and I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.
This oracle was first articulated to our ancestors in Judaism while they were in captivity to Babylon during the last 70 years of the 7th century before the Common Era. It was a mystical message of hope and healing then; and some one thousand years later was adopted by our Congregational founders. Notice that this text doesn’t abrogate the first covenant made on Mt. Sinai after the Exodus – Judaism is still viable and holy – for the new covenant is inward and honors a sacred love that never demands a one size fits all spirituality.
Some 500 years AFTER Jeremiah, Jesus told his followers that in my father’s house there are MANY mansions, right? The new covenant recognizes that there are a variety of spiritual paths that all have integrity – an insight worthy of respect as our Muslim neighbors enter the month holy month of Ramadan, ok? We need not all agree on how to love the Lord our God and our neighbors as ourselves in order to trust that salvation is still fundamentally God’s work not ours. Perhaps that’s why the new covenant implies that silence and trust are how the Lord puts God’s law within us. I will write my law upon their hearts and minds (not a stone tab-let). No longer shall they have to teach one another or say out loud: “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me within, from the least to the greatest. As Jesus said: the kingdom is where… within, right?
Now that last phrase in the Hebrew text literally says: every person will realize that their neighbor is a brother (or sister) because they will all KNOW me as I take away their sin and iniquity. That word, KNOW, in Hebrew is yada– a wonderfully paradoxical verb that COULD mean realized or acknowledged; OR it could mean, as it most often does in the Bible, sexual intimacy as in “Adam KNEW his wife.” Adam experienced Eve (and we hope to God that Eve experienced Adam) with profound pleasure, vulnerability, and trust. To KNOW is to trust God’s grace so thoroughly from the inside out that spirit and flesh embrace with joy. THIS knowledge, you see, is NOT abstract or aloof but boldly experiential, transformative, and incarnational. And THAT, dear friends, is what I was looking for – but never found – as a child while attending Sunday School with my grandma. Like the Psalmist of ancient Israel, I wanted to TASTE and see. I wanted to encounter something of the Lord with all my heart, soul, flesh, and mind – something mystical and vibrant – and intuitively I knew that Jesus was the key for me.
His spirituality is unique: it insists that there is NO delineation between the sacred and the secular for by faith heaven and earth are one just as the Lord’s Prayer tells us: Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it’s already being done in heaven. Jesus teaches us to live as embodied prayers believing that contemplation is more than just resting in God’s grace – although it is that, too. The sixth century wisdom keeper, St. John Chrysostom, used to say that contemplation is “luminous seeing or knowledge impregnated by love.” What a brilliant description: wisdom impregnated by love. But not an emotional love, “but a quiet, clairvoyant intimacy with the holy that is physically grounded in the human heart.” Jesus puts it like this in today’s text appointed for the fifth Sunday of Lent:
The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life will lose it while those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servants be also – and who-ever serves me, the Father will honor.
This is simultaneously a de/scription of Christ’s passion – his betrayal, trial, suffering, death, and resurrection – and a pre/scription for practicing the prayer of relinquishment. Or, as they say in AA, learning to let go and let God. That’s the first insight of this text: the time was ripe for the Son of Man to be glorified – that is, to show the world the purpose and meaning of his ministry – by accepting and enduring the Cross. The Rev. Stephanie Sellers writes:
Jesus entered as he did, where he did, doing what he did, because God needed us to finally comprehend the truth: God is not a sky king who heads an empire; God is the love that gives itself away for the sake of more love. Jesus could only communicate that point by standing outside the power structures and inviting disciples to join him and discover new life with him on the margins. In Jesus, God shows us what it looks like to be this vulnerable, humble, and self-giving. In him, we see one who did not run from the things that broke his heart, nor did he first calculate what he could gain from a situation. Jesus sought instead to give away his life, so he and others might flourish as God intends. . . .
The Cross, you see, unites agape love – radical compassion – with disciplined surrender of self. The Rev. Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault put it like this: the Cross shows a mystical alchemy at work when the raw primal force of eros is subjected to the sacramental act of surrender in what contemplatives call kenosis. Borrowing an early baptismal prayer, St. Paul sings this hymn in Philippians 2:
Beloved, be of the same mind as Christ, having the same love, being in full accord. Do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant and assuming human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. And in this humble act of self-emptying love, God exalted Jesus even more highly and gave him the name that is above every other name, so that at the name given to Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.
· First, the Cross shows us what the marriage of love and humble sacrifice means: we SEE and KNOW what God looks like through the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus for Scripture says that on the Cross Jesus took on the shape or form of God. His hidden birth at Christmas tells us that God can and does show up any and everywhere – often in the most unexpected places like a cold stable in Nazareth – but his birth doesn’t show us what God looks like.
· Same for his table fellowship: Eucharist shows us a feast where no one need be shut out of the bounty of grace. But as much as I love that feast IT shows us what the kingdom looks and feels like in practice but the feast doesn’t show us what God looks like either.
No, in our tradition, only the Cross exposes the glory of God: humbly and intentionally love takes the form of a sacrifice and TOGETHER they show us what God looks like in Jesus Christ. That’s foundational, ok? We tend to forget in Western Christianity that the Cross is both Christ’s embodied prayer but also our own as well. You see, the same love that empowered Jesus to face the Cross in his time can ripen within us bringing blessings both to OUR souls and those we love the more we practice letting go and letting God. When love’s passionate energy is harnessed with humility, a sacramental sacrifice takes place that gives shape and form to God in Jesus Christ, AND, tutors us in the practice of Christ’s love.
God invites us into a new covenant, where by the power of the Spirit we can choose to allow our hearts to break, and then take the pieces— our lives, our goods, our love, and our privileges —and share them all like a broken loaf of communion bread. By consciously and tenderly letting go of ego – letting it die within – grace begins to thrive and bear more fruit and before you know it, we are praying the wisdom of the Cross.
· Does that make sense? Are you still with me? Please understand I’m not asking does this make linear or even cultural sense because… it doesn’t. It’s not only paradoxical, ok? It calls into question a culture obsessed with an individual’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Letting go is NOT about acquiring; it’s about emptying; taking something you possess—your bread and power, your abilities and identities, your comfort and control, your treasured structures and even life itself—and releasing our attachment to them so that they can be useful to God’s love.
· It’s no wonder that St. Paul wrote that those who follow Jesus to the Cross have become fools for Christ. We are advocates of the upside-down kingdom. The way of the counter-cultural Spirit. Jesus opens his Sermon on the Mount by telling us: You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule. You’re blessed, too, when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you.
Our Western minds have been shaped by the blessings and disciplines of science – the pursuit of empirical evidence – or as Joe Friday said on Dragnet: Just the facts, ma’am. Consequently, the culture we have constructed is LONG on certainty but increasingly SHORT on nuance; a way of being where the bottom line has become the whole story. Back in 1934, T.S. Eliot warned us that this ob-session with the bottom line has consequences – and often they’re unintended. In “The Rock” he wrote:
The endless cycle of idea and action, endless invention, endless experiment, brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; knowledge of speech, but not of silence; Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, all our ignorance brings us nearer to death, but nearness to death but not nearer to GOD. Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries have brought us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.
So, every year Lent comes back around the circle of life with Jesus insisting that the grain of wheat must die before it can bear fruit. It must relinquish its essence in order to spread its wealth. That’s what he’s saying to those who grasp and clutch: trying to hold on to everything will ultimately cause us to lose it all. A mystical wisdom-keeper of the Western realm, Cynthia Bourgeault, gets it right when she tells us: It was not love stored up but love utterly poured out that opened the gates to the Kingdom of Heaven. Over and over, Jesus lays this path before us: there is nothing to be renounced or resisted. Everything can be embraced, but the catch is to cling to nothing.
· Now I may have said this out loud to some of you before, so forgive me if I’m repeating myself, but I am a slow learner when it comes to spiritual things. Often I’m late to the party. I eventually get there, but it takes me a LONG time. About seven years ago, I started to volunteer as a spiritual advisor to a small community of people with and without intellectual disabilities in Canada called L’Arche – that’s French for the ark. I would drive 6 hours one way to spend a few days in community sharing prayer, playing music for worship, and learning how to slow down and live from the heart of tenderness.
· One evening after playing some songs and sharing supper, I stepped into the living room to put away my guitar and found Geoffrey rummaging through my guitar case. Now, NO musician likes her or his instrument to be fondled without permission, and my first reaction upon finding my guitar in Geoff’s hands was… fury. I didn’t really KNOW Geoffrey yet – and he was a big, strong guy. To be blunt: I was angry that he’d violated my space by scarping up my VERY expensive guitar AND I was a little afraid for my well-being seeing that Geoff could probably flatten me with one blow. Somehow or another I jollied him into giving it back, packed up my precious guitar, and headed back to the states – taking the whole next six hours to fret and fumble over what to do next.
I wasn’t scheduled back in Ottawa for a few weeks so that gave me TONS of time to worry before I was to lead music for the community retreat. I know Psalm 37 urges believers NOT to fret and fuss, but… well, I’m a slow learner and I fretted the entire six hours back up to Canada without ANY clear strategy about what to do with Geoff. The retreat began, I lead some songs in English and French, and then sat with my guitar tightly in my grasp until lunch was served. I hadn’t seen Geoff, but I heard him as he sometimes shouted out words or thoughts that caught his fancy.
· I was still perplexed upon returning from the restroom when I saw him hovering over my guitar case and another wave of fear washed over me. Deep within I knew that trying to hold on to control was not going to work but I didn’t know what else to do. And then, thanks be to God, it hit me: I could sit down with Geoff before the next session, keep a hold of my guitar, and show him how to strum it while I played the chords. I didn’t know if that would really WORK but it struck me as a way to let go and try to let God… so I did.
· At first Geoff just looked at me. I gave him a guitar pick and he started to strum and before I knew it we were singing and dancing to La Bamba!Para bailar La Bamba para bailar La Bamba se necesita una poca de Gracia - Una poca de gracia pa' mí, pa' ti, ay arriba, ay arriba, Y arriba, y arriba Por ti seré, por ti seré, por ti sere Bamba, bamba, Bamba, bamba, Bamba, bamba
It was both an answer to prayer AND an embodied prayer: I hadn’t remembered that the translation of La Bamba is: to dance la bamba you need a little grace – se necesita una poca de Gracia. And there it was: a vision of the Cross as the marriage of love and sacrifice. It showed me again what God looks like and how we are made whole. So, let me close with this practice that NEVER fails. It comes from the wisdom tradition that Cynthia Bourgeault celebrates in the brave little book: The Wisdom Way of Knowledge.
In any situation in life, if you are confronted with an outer threat or opportunity, take time to notice how your body feels. Inwardly are you bracing, hardening and resisting; or are you softening, opening, or yielding. If you go with the former – bracing – you will be catapulted immediately into your smaller and more selfish self with its animal instincts and survival responses. If you stay with the later – letting go -regardless of the outer conditions you will remain in alignment with the sacred.
This is spiritual practice and maturity at its no frills simplest: a moment by moment learning NOT to do anything is a state of internal brace. Do you know what bracing feels like? (try it with your fists with me: 1-2-3 BRACE) How about letting go? (Try that, too: 1-2-3 release!) This, dear friends, is the good news for today. Let those with ears to hear, hear!
No comments:
Post a Comment