In the Eucharist, the Book of Common Prayer begins the Lord’s Prayer with the following words:

As our Savior Christ has commanded and taught us, we are bold to say “Our Father”.

It’s easy to read the tone of this as a command, an exhortation to obedience. Yet, taken within a wider context it’s really an invitation, although a rather formal sounding one.

We are being invited to pray as Jesus himself prayed. In giving his disciples this simple form of prayer Jesus invites them into a different kind of relationship with God, the kind of relationship that he enjoyed with God. In short, the Lord’s Prayer is Jesus invitation for us to model our relationship with God on the relationship he shows himself enjoying with God. Through the Lord’s Prayer we are being invited into the life of the Divine Community of the Lover, the Beloved, and the Lovesharer.

Intimacy -Father/Our Father

Our granddaughter Claire will be 11-years old on the 15^th of August. When she was younger, she often referred to her father not simply as daddy, but my daddy.  Hearing Claire utter the words my daddy, produced in me a kind of melting sensation; a sensation carrying the strongest intimations of warmth and intimacy, born of trust and an unquestioning presumption of safety. When Jesus told his disciples: when you pray, say Abba; is my melting experience what Jesus had in mind? Abba most directly translates in English not as father but as daddy or the more adult friendly  papa.  Yet, even when I address God as papa let alone daddy, why is it so hard for me to capture the experience I glimpse that Claire has in relation to her daddy?

This intimation of warmth and the intimacy can only arise from a sense of unquestioned trust and safety. This is the experience Jesus clearly had in mind when he told his disciples: when you pray, say Abba, hallowed be your name.  Like nearly everything Jesus said to his disciples, this would have provoked in them the error message of this does not compute.  Intimacy, affection, and unquestioning trust were not expectations they had when addressing God. For them, God was the God-of-our Fathers, the Creator of the universe. 2,000 years separate us, and yet we are not so different from them in our expectations when addressing God in prayer.

Paradoxically, I feel more comfortable with a little distance between God and me. Temperamentally, I am more comfortable addressing God as our Father, rather than as my Papa and to be truthful, Papa leaves me feeling a little silly. Maybe that’s because I am an Episcopalian? There is something in our religious DNA the balks at too much intimacy. It’s our Cranmerian legacy, the courtier bishop Thomas Cramer addressing God in the BCP in the same tones he approached Henry VIII. How can you hallow, which means to honor and respect as holy the name of God, if you call God daddy?  This quality of intimacy is the very thing our parched souls cry out for? It is this quality of love and trust that Jesus shockingly holds out to us as the fruit of prayer that always begins with, My Papa- holy is your name.

Vision – Your Kingdom come – your will be done

Jesus believed himself to be the embodiment of God’s in-breaking kingdom. In his first teaching in the synagogue at Nazareth recorded in Luke 4:18 he proclaims the vision of Isaiah and tells them that: 

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, … 

The notion of the in-breaking of the kingdom plays havoc with our sense of time, for it is both now and yet also something yet to come. We are all acutely aware from the evidence around us that in so many ways our world is still waiting for this vision to become a reality. When we pray these words we recognize that in Jesus the Kingdom of God, the age-old dream of the prophets of Israel, is already inaugurated, yet not fulfilled. Our task as Christians is to fight for the kingdom’s fulfillment in our own time and place as we pray: your kingdom come, you will be done on earth, dear Lord.

Confidence – Give us today our daily bread

In the time-span between the inauguration and fulfillment of the kingdom, we journey through a wilderness where there is no sustenance apart from what God gives us. Our Christian life unfolds within the New Exodus experience, evoking the memory of the Israelite’s dependency on the manna God provided in the wilderness of Sinai. Give us today our daily bread becomes both a personal and social request as we pray that we will receive that which is sufficient for our needs. For it is together we journey towards the Promised Land. In the wilderness, we pray give us not me that which is necessary unto this day. The potency of this request lies in the fact that it is intrinsically an inclusive one.

The rub – Forgive us our debts/sins as we forgive others….

Healthy societies need a periodic social reset. We feel ourselves today catapulting into the unpredictable because we have no ready to hand mechanism for social reset. In forgive us our debts as we forgive others …, we hear Jesus echoing the Jewish concept of the Jubilee, the year in which all debts were canceled. The English translators chose to use the word trespasses here. I find this very helpful because the definition of trespass is to find oneself where we have no right to be. In our relationships, we encroach upon one another and structure our social and personal relationships as instruments of self-assertion. Holding others in our debt and being in debt to others in relational terms, is a gross example of trespass. Jesus is inviting us to enter into an experience of the relationship he enjoys with God. His invitation is predicated on God’s prior forgiveness. Being forgiven requires us to also be forgiving.

Endurance – Lead us not into Temptation, but deliver us from the Evil One

What is the temptation here and who tempts whom? A traditional reading is that it’s God who tempts us as a way of testing our resolve and capacity for endurance. However, it’s not from the time of trial sustain us, but in the time of trial sustain us, good Lord. In last Wednesday’s daily E-message Obedience –Brother Give Us A Word, Br. David Vryhof SSJE noted:

There are times when the path to which God calls us leads us into trouble or difficulty. Being faithful to that path, being obedient to that call, can prove to be very costly. We have only to recall Christ’s agony in Gethsemane to know that this was true for Jesus, and he assures us that it will also be true for many of those who choose to embrace and follow him on the way. 

The temptation to take the line of least resistance is a continual danger for us as we work for the realization of the kingdom in our own contexts.  Whether we locate the source of evil in a being – the Devil, or in a collective malignancy that thrives in what Augustine called a privation of good, evil’s continual attack is real. We must always be mindful that the conditions that allow evil to thrive require only that good people do nothing.

Parables of prayer

Jesus does not simply hand his disciples a form of words. He demonstrates what the praying of the words involves in the three parables that follow his giving this prayer.

In the story of the man waking his neighbor at midnight for three loaves of bread, we can note a startling characteristic of Jesus’ attitude to prayer. The request for three loaves is an excessive request given that bread was baked fresh each morning and not kept longer than the day of baking. No one would have at midnight that much bread left over from the day. Therefore, we note that prayer involves the audacity of asking for a lot rather than a little.

We are told that his neighbor gives-in to his insistence not because he pities the man or feels generous, but because of the man’s anaideia mistranslated into English as perseverance. Yet, perseverance is not the meaning of anaideia. The correct English translation is not perseverance but as shamelessness, as to not care what anyone thinks of our behavior. Prayer involves abandoning our cherished self-respect and exposing ourselves to the shame of wanting and longing. For us, it’s a shameful thing to be at the mercy of our longing and a fearful thing to risk the humiliation of exposing our neediness to another. In our prayer with God, we must be audacious, impudent, and also beyond shame in our expression of our need of God.  

When we pray in the only words Jesus has given us to pray we become audacious and shameless, reveling in the intimacy of a loving relationship in which trust and safety are assumed. When we pray in the only words Jesus gave us we strive to make present the future fulfillment of the kingdom as we live according to its expectations in the here and now. Forgiveness becomes the hallmark of our mutual relationships, and as we face up the costs of discipleship, in doing so we loosen the grip of evil in the world.

Prayer involves the courage to ask in order to receive, to seek in order to find, to knock so that opportunities will open to us. This text is put into perspective in the famous Holman Hunt painting The Light of the World, now hanging in London’s St Paul’s Cathedral. Jesus is pictured standing with a lamp, knocking at a door overgrown with ivy and brambles. He clearly seeks entry, yet on closer inspection the door has no handle. The implication is that it can only be opened from the inside. What is depicted here is the door of the heart. Hunt captures who it is that knocks and who it is that opens to the knock. Paradoxically, it is Jesus who is doing the knocking, and it is we who have the power to open, or not.

 

In a sermon some time ago I mentioned the film The Way in which Martin Sheen plays the role of a father who undertakes to walk the Camino de Compostela, the ancient pilgrimage route to the shrine of Santiago (St. James) in the Basque region of northern Spain. It’s a film about love’s redemption through transformative action by a father driven to repair his relationship with his son who has tragically died some weeks earlier while undertaking the first stage of this pilgrimage.

To make a pilgrimage is to set out on a journey. To follow a way is a metaphor for more than the physical road taken. Pilgrimage is an action. One takes or makes a pilgrimage. We commonly think the goal of this kind of journey-making is to arrive at a location of spiritual significance. Yet, perhaps more significantly than arriving at a place, a location, pilgrimage is the experience of transformation along the way. The film The Way poignantly captures this process.

The Gospel

The short passage appointed for the gospel on the 9^th Sunday following Pentecost is comprised of five short verses from Luke describing Jesus’ visit to the house of Mary and Martha. In John’s Gospel, we encounter both women as the sisters of Jesus’ friend Lazarus. Yet Luke offers no such biographical connection.

This story is one of those stories that Christian’s over the centuries have loved to moralize about. It’s a story that has given rise to two strong archetypes. In common parlance, we invoke the Martha and Mary of this story as epithets for the competing tensions in the spiritual life. The Tradition has popularly read Jesus’ rebuke of the complaining Martha to justify placing contemplation before action. The Church has often taught that the life of contemplative withdrawal is a higher calling than that of active life sullied by the taint of worldly carnality.

However, we should hold this passage within the larger context of Jesus being on his journey to Jerusalem. Like any pilgrimage, it’s the journey itself that is transformative, as along the way Jesus uses incidents and events to teach his followers what it means to travel the way of discipleship.

Action and/versus contemplation?

Last week’s parable of the Good Samaritan, when taken together with this week’s story of Martha and Mary, focuses the spotlight on the tension between action and contemplation in Christian spiritual living. In the Good Samaritan story, Jesus ends with the words go and do likewise. In the Martha and Mary story, he seems to be advocating the very opposite.

Beginning with the story of the sending out of the 70 disciples to all the towns of the Galilee the connective theme of Jesus’ Lucan journey to Jerusalem seems to be the importance of hospitality as a central attribute for those who seek to travel along the discipleship trail.

The story of Martha and Mary and it’s larger archetypal projection of do-ers and pray-ers, of action versus the inaction, focuses on the centrality of hospitality in the spiritual life. Hospitality, or the lack of, it is the key theme in the sending out of the 70. It goes to the heart of the Good Samaritan parable, where the unlikely neighbor recognizes his obligations towards an injured man. Hospitality is the central theme of the Mary and Martha story. Martha’s practice of hospitality is active. Mary’s is contemplative. In short, hospitality provides the connective tissue for the various elements of the spiritual life.

Martha practices the responsibilities of hospitality. She welcomes Jesus and then busies herself with the necessary preparations of the host upon a visiting guest’s arrival on the doorstep. Mary practices the responsibilities of hospitality in her welcoming of that which Jesus has come to bring, his teaching and presence. But Martha has something else going on inside her. There is often a danger of feeling aggrieved or feeling put upon that can afflict those who are drawn to the active side of the spiritual equation.  Jesus does not rank Martha beneath Mary. It is to Martha’s accusative sense of grievance that Jesus speaks sharply.

Assessing the tensions

We become busy and we use activity to distract ourselves from something that is feared to be more challenging. Being preoccupied with action avoids needing to go deeper. Noise and action cover over our anxiety concerning silence. If we have nothing to do then what might happen in the seemingly empty spaces that open before us. For most of us Descartes’ declaration: I think, therefore I am, easily degenerates into I do, therefore I am.

Action and contemplation are opposite sides of the same coin. Both are essential elements of a balanced spiritual life. Action ceases to hold spiritual value when our busy-ness causes us to feel resentful. We become resentful, feeling aggrieved as out actions slip, often imperceptibly from a generous regard for another’s needs to a meeting of our own.

Contemplation is the development of a capacity to sit in silence in order to welcome God speaking through the spaces between actions, words, and thoughts. Yet, it ceases to be of any spiritual value when it degenerates into self-preoccupation.

I struggle with my own personal impoverishment. I do not possess the reservoirs of charity and compassion towards others that leads me to automatically place their needs before my own. I lack the reservoirs of courage and resilience that would otherwise propel me to get involved in another’s struggles. I find myself turning away from opportunities for Christian action and I fail to stand in solidarity with others because I am afraid of getting involved. I fill my time with busy-ness, always having something to do, something to worry over, something to be preoccupied by, because this is an easy way, not of actually helping others, but of serving my own needs and avoiding the challenges of contemplation. Yet without the renewal of contemplation, my addiction to action leads me only to burnout.

Somewhat paradoxically, I am also drawn to the idea of contemplation and have a fantasy of what such a practice should look like. Yet my experience of contemplation is usually a frustrating one. I never get to that state of awareness I long for. I continually fail to achieve that degree of spiritual high I crave. Meditation as a practice of contemplation becomes an arid experience of a kind of emptiness where I interpret emptiness as an absence, something missing.

My title for this entry is taken from the well-known book Contemplation in a World of Action by the great 20th-century contemplative, Thomas Merton.  He observes:

….as long as man thinks that the solution of his ‘identity crisis’ consists in achieving this capacity for self-assertion, we can have no peace.

The problem is that there is too much me-I  in my contemplation, as there is too much me-I in my life of action. If my contemplation does not open me to the sense of spacious hospitality within which God is welcome, then it fosters only a frustrated sense of isolation and the ego reproach of I can’t even do this right! Note the verb do as in accomplish in this reproach.

A matter of temperament

Temperamentally, each person has a default towards one pole of the tension between action and contemplation. Some of us are very action oriented, while others are more withdrawn and inwardly focused. The task is to balance our predisposition through the cultivation of its opposite. In each practice, however, the essential element is that of a spirit of hospitality, which is a spirit of curiosity, a spirit of openness, a generous welcoming of otherness. When we work to reduce the centrality of our own ego, it becomes possible to become transformed into a conduit for the Holy Spirit – the love sharer –in action.

Redressing imbalance

In the film The Way, Martin Sheen plays a father struggling in his relationship with his
son. The father is a busy dentist with an onerous load of work and social responsibilities that are part and parcel of being a successful American professional. If he is not working, he’s playing golf. Playing implies pleasure or recreation. But this kind of golf has little of either. It’s just another form of work, using the game as a social networking device. This father is critical of his son’s decision to take a break from the rat race and waste his time with what the father feels is the self-indulgence of spiritual seeking. Martha is peeved with Mary.

The news of his son’s death on the first part of the Camino has a devastating effect on him. He becomes compelled to complete what the son cannot now finish. His whole life becomes transformed in the process. Sheen’s character had failed to reconcile the tension between action and contemplation in his own life, and this became a tension acted out in his relationship with his son. Like Martha, he was critical and resentful of the way his son’s spirit of hospitality to the spiritual enabled him to sit at Jesus’ feet.

Through an act of redemption the father is led to a new self-understanding. Through completing his son’s unfinished action the father incorporates his son’s spiritual hospitality, making it his own. The film’s ultimate conclusion is not the arrival at the shrine of Santiago. The rest you will have to find out for yourselves.

 

Two reflections on race

I. Following Easter this year, Al and I took the inside of a week to visit friends in Washington DC. Our friend John is an inveterate day-tripper to places of interest. On one of the days, he had organized a visit to the not commonly known National Building Museum. One of the museum’s permanent exhibits explores examples of innovative and ground breaking town planning projects in a number of US cities; selected as representing bold experiments in community living.

One such project integrated young professional and low-income housing within the same community. The exhibit recorded young professional and low-income residents speaking about the experience of living in an integrated community. Despite a commitment by members of both sets of residents to invest in the success of the experiment, each spoke of tensions resulting from the very different ways each group used the public space.

For the predominantly low-income black families, the common space of the street and the parks provided the venue for social gathering. For the liberally minded, mostly white young professionals, this use of the public space amounted to loitering. They feared and were intimidated by their neighbors differently minded use of the public space, fearing in their neighbor’s exuberant and often noisy outdoor social gatherings the potential for trouble-making. The low-income residents experienced their white neighbor’s anxieties, which often resulted in the calling of the police, as racially motivated attempts to control them.

Communities and individuals tend to stereotype difference. We are acutely aware of this as we experience the world around us during this electoral season. Especially remembering the racial violence of the last week, we see the anxieties about race in particular, surfacing and exhibiting a violent quality we associate with the evils of a more racist past we like to tell ourselves is long gone.

II. I was particularly struck by the power of the cover of this week’s New Yorker. The New Yorker covers always communicate a complex truth with an ambiguity of suggestion that is open to multiple interpretations.

This week the cover depicted a tall, handsomely physiqued young black man, carrying his son on his shoulders. He is accompanied by two very  pretty daughters, the younger one contentedly eating an ice cream while walking at his side along a white sandy beach. It’s a scene of family summer vacation. It’s a picture of any young American father and his children at the beach, instantly relatable to as if their race is but another one of a number of attractive things about them.

But it’s a picture that is out of time and out of place given current events and larger social trends. Maybe this is its point! It’s a picture of a shared human commonality capable of transcending divisions of class, race, and skin color. I mention class here because it’s essentially a picture of a family free of the trappings of the normal projections of race as a socio-economic class indicator of poverty and crime-ridden community. Instead here, the inference is of an  American dream affluence that enables this black family to enjoy the kind of summer vacation at the beach, normally associated with middle-class, white, family summers.

Gospel reflection

Tribal and communal assumptions

Luke’s Gospel was written to commend early Christianity to the Greco-Roman world. His writing has a universal social appeal that especially speaks to us today because it paints a picture of God as being compassionately concerned with the plight of the vulnerable and outcast. Thus it’s no accident that the two most well-known of all of the parables of Jesus – The Prodigal Son and The Good Samaritan only occur in Luke’s Gospel. These parables remain, even in a predominantly secular society, the archetypes for forgiveness, inclusion, and good neighborliness.

On the 8^th Sunday after Pentecost much will be written and even more preached about the meaning of the parable of The Good Samaritan. The historical reasons for the animosity between Jews and Samaritans will be explored. It’s a parable that plays with the tensions of tribal community stereotypes of otherness.

My visit to the National Building Museum shows the sorry truth that even with the best intentions in the world it is difficult to embrace racial and cultural differences. The parable of The Good Samaritan reminds us that it’s not the radically different cultures on the other side of the world that it’s hardest to tolerate, but the nearby neighbor whose skin color, language, rituals, values, ancestry, history, and customs are different from one’s own. 

The New Yorker Magazine shows that skin color or race is not really the issue so much as the socio-economics of class and how these play out in images and experiences. The parable of the Good Samaritan confronts the hearer with our assumptions rooted in tribal community stereotypes of otherness.

As if we needed any reminding, we have just lived through another dreadful week when deadly police violence against black men has now triggered a backlash of racially motivated violence targeting otherwise innocent, white police officers. I am in agreement when the President who speaking from the Nato Summit noted:

What I can say is that all of us as Americans should be troubled by these shootings because these are not isolated incidents. They’re symptomatic of a broader set of racial disparities that exist in our criminal justice system.

Few now fail to recognize the criminal justice system and especially its law and order enforcement agencies are where our national failure to come to terms with the wound of racism upon our collective consciousness becomes most sharply focused. Race is not only a historical and culturally unresolved issue. It represents a key indicator of current economic inequality. Race acts as a lightening rod for societal anxiety, injustice, and oppression.

Personal-interpersonal assumptions

The core question in the parable fo the Good Samaritan concerns who is my neighbor? Christians in many churches throughout the land will be exhorted to follow the example of the Good Samaritan as if it’s a morality parable about being good rather than addressing the thorny issue of our responsibilities to our neighbor. Because in a society where the increasingly violent forces of polarization leave none of us unscathed, we want to sharply restrict the range of this question.

Today we seem to be just as guilty as those to whom 200 years ago John Wesley issued a warning against the danger of:

contracting our hearts into an insensibility for all the human race to but a small number whose sentiments and practices are so much our own that our love towards them is but self-love reflected.

So much of the fear that prevents us reaching out across the spaces that divide us is because it’s safer to confine our love to those like us; a kind of self-referencing love masquerading as love of another.

Limiting the concept of who constitutes our neighbor while convincing ourselves that we are good, decent people may be understandable, but the Christian life is not about being good. Being good is simply self-referencing not God referencing. I know this may seem to many to be a fine distinction but it is one of crucial importance.  In a world where secular humanitarian impulses are showing signs of chronic fatigue, the Christian witness needs to be more deeply rooted than in our own notions of being good, being decent.

The only way I can overcome my fear of the other is to be compelled by my desire to love God and to open myself to encounter my gratitude to God expressed in a generosity of spirit towards another.

Two ways of reading

It seems to me there are two ways to read the parable of The Good Samaritan. We can take a traditional reading and see the parable as an exhortation to copy the behavior of the Good Samaritan.This is to treat it as a morality play about personal goodness. But this leaves open the question for me of – do I possess that amount of good will, that level of altruistic motivation, that amount of personal generosity towards others? The answer is that when I measure my motivations and actions against this standard of behavior, I fall far short. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s that I think I can avoid becoming involved.

An alternative reading is to see this as a parable of God’s own nature. My actions towards others are rooted not in my own ability or willingness to be good, but in the recognition that the God whom I desire to love, is that good! My actions towards others emerge from my gratitude for the generosity God shows towards me because there but for the grace of God, go I.

We do not love others from our own easily exhaustible reservoir of self-love. We can only love others when we first recognize that it is God’s love for us, and our experience of God’s inexhaustible reservoir of love that inevitably compels us into a concerned involvement with and for one to another.

Let us renounce that bigotry and party zeal which would contract our hearts into an insensibility for all the human race to but a small number whose sentiments and practices are so much our own, that our love to them is but self-love reflected. With an honest openness of mind let us always remember that kindred between man and man, and cultivate that happy instinct whereby, in the original constitution of our nature, God has strongly bound us to each other. John Wesley

 

 

On the 4^th of July Weekend, the last thing I feel inspired to do is write a sermon for Sunday. The prospect of a less than half full Church, and the general atmosphere of weekend enjoyment and celebration sap me of any will towards inspired utterance.

I notice that I have a number of fragmentary associations coursing through the neural pathways in my brain, leading to seemingly unrelated thoughts about the 4th of July, current politics, and the readings for the 7^th Sunday after Pentecost.

One neural pathway

Some of the difficulties we currently experience in engaging in civic discourse reflect the fact that a conversation across the social divides – political, racial, religious – is now a conversation of the deaf. It’s easy to point to those others and see how deaf they are to one’s own point of view. Yet, temperamentally tolerant types like me, experience real difficulty in the current environment of seriously listening to any account of the world that does not accord with my own worldview. We are all the victims, each of us falling under the sway of the zeitgeist, i.e. popular mood of the time – a mood of fear and suspicion.

In the Western World, it seems to me we are witnessing an increasing attack upon our systems of representative democracy. In the US, we frequently hear politicians defend inaction in the name of letting the people speak. The Senate will not meet, let alone enter into confirmation hearings for candidates proposed to fill Supreme Court vacancies on the pretext of waiting for an opportunity to let the people speak through the presidential election. This constitutes a serious attack on the institutions of representative government.

The UK has undermined the structures of its representative democracy. The Cameron government has gambled and lost its risky wager. In an attempt to secure its own political advantage it allowed a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU. Let the people speak is a dangerous slogan in the hands of a political class increasingly clinging to electoral power through inflaming and exploiting public anxieties.

The Founding Fathers were not democrats- with a small d. They not only feared autocracy, they also feared democracy, knowing full well the dangers of mob rule. They knew the popular will was something most vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation. Consequently, the Founding Fathers were republicans – with a small r. The republic is one form of representative democracy. Parliamentary democracy is another.

The American and British systems of representative democracy both evolved as lessons learned from the horrors of the French Revolution, an event that ushered in a century of civic bloodletting and European war. In the face of the threat to liberty from an imperial autocracy, the Declaration of Independence celebrated on the glorious Fourth, embodies the Founders refusal to abdicate their historic liberties enshrined in English Common law.  Yet, just over a decade later, the writing and ratification of the Constitution embodied the Founders response to the threat to national unity from populist democracy. The Articles of Confederation championed the partisan interests of each of the States against one another, undermining the collective and national interests of the new nation.

Following the Brexit referendum, we see the British political party system in serious turmoil.There now is a very serious threat to the uity of the United Kingdom. It’s a good and hallowed political principle that has served Western Democracies well – that the government governs with the consent of a majority of the governed. As we can see all too clearly from the current British political scene, it’s quite another experience when the government governs at the dictate of a slim majority of the governed.

Another neural pathway

Tribalism is a stage of social evolution characterised by small ethnic, social, or religious units, each firmly believing that God is on their side. The notion that God is on our side is one of the most pernicious examples of idolatry. Any notion of our god replaces the God with a culturally, or politically constructed, idol.

There is a view that sees the development of our Western Society as a linear evolutionary process in which successive social, cultural and political developments and organisational states replace previous social, cultural, and political stages of organisation. Thus, mutually hostile tribal groups eventually coalesce to form larger ethnic, religious, or culturally based confederations. These larger units after a period of time coalesce into empires. Empires eventually regress at points of crisis into their constituent, homogenous cultural, ethnic, or religious units to become nation states. Nation states ususally represent ethnic, cultural, or religious identifications. As with earlier tribal units, after a period of renewed mutual rivalry and hostility, neigboring nations coalesce back towards wider collaborative collectives. The driver for coalescence at each stage of evolution is perceived self-interest leading to a sustained experience of collective self-interest, i.e. we gain more through coopertaing than we do through fighting.

Another view is that this evolutionary process is far from linear and more holarchical, as in holographic. Each part of a hologram perfectly reflects every other part. Concepts of linear or hierarchical development rest on the notion that successive stages of organisation replace and leave behind previous ones. By contrast, holarchical development sees successive organizational stages as embracing and including previous ones. Nothing is left behind, nothing completely forgotten. Every previous rung on the evolutionary ladder still remains within the successive stages of development, every ready to reassert itself when evolutionary momentum reaches a crisis point. Crisis points have the potential to reverse evolutionary momentum and developmental direction. Successive stages collapse and regress back into previous states of organisation.

The American experience is of 13 communities that for 200 years identifed as colonies within the British Empire. Increasing political and economic pressures led on the 4^th of July in 1776 to the Declaration of Independence, triggering an armed insurrection in defense of historic liberties dating back to the Magna Carter. During the war for independence, the 13 colonies were forced to coalesce around new, mutual identification as a fledgling American Nation. The new nation emerged through victory into a collective of sovereign states volunteering, in as far as their self-interests allowed, to coalesce within a loose confederation based on shared cultural, political and economic history. In 1787 these sovereign states elected to cede sovereignty via a written Constitution to a federal structure with a central government. 1789 is the point at which we can really speak about an American Republic as we now understand it.

Today, under the crisis pressures of economic globalization, the fears generated by the rise of militant religion, and mass population migration the US suffers a paralysis of representative governmental institutions allowing earlier ‘tribal interests’ to reemerge as the voice-s (for there are several tribes) of popular discontent. The EU, which developmentally is in the stage between a confederal and federal structure, struggles to face the same pressures affecting the US. The difference though is that it’s not the tribal voices within a single nation but the national voices within a confederation of nation states that gives voice to popular discontent. The British are simply the first to be offered the mechanism of referendum to express the rise of populist, xenophobic sentiments, and because of the failure of the Cameron government’s calculation, they are likely to be the last.

Yet another neural pathway

The readings for the 7^th Sunday after Pentecost cover the historical span from 800-850BC to 70 AD. Three readings, one from the Second Book of the Kings, one from Paul’s letter to the Galatians, and one from Luke’s Gospel all express the tension between tribal and universal visions of God.

It’s Naaman, the commander of the Syrian army and vanquisher of Israel to whom God gives healing. Paul proclaims to the Galatians that neither Jewish circumcision nor Gentile uncircumcision counts for anything when compared to the new creation God offers to everyone through Christ. And Luke records Jesus sending out of the 70(2) disciples to the towns of Galilee. 70(2) is a number that signifies the 70 gentile nations of the ancient world.

Matthew tells the same story but he records Jesus sending his disciples only to the lost of the House of Israel. Luke’s account dramatically and characteristically presents Jesus sending his disciples out with an open invitation of salvation to anyone – Jew and Gentile- who welcomes his disciples because they recognise that the Kingdom of God has come near to them.

For me, the challenge is always to apply the universality of God to my experience of the world. I am deepely commited to this in principle, but the rub is applying it in situations where annimosity and fear shape my encounters and reactions. I long to be able to cease seeing the world in dualistic, oppositional terms? Isn’t it true that most human beings simply want the same thing: somewhere to safely live, someone to love and to be loved by, something to do that brings a sense of self-worth and contributes towards the greater good. We come to fear one another when we believe that there is not enough of these basics to go around.

What if there is no their god or my god, but only our God, and the reality that the Kingdom of God has come near to us. What then? Maybe something like this. I invite you to visit this link, either here or on our FaceBook site.

There is a pre-modern view of religion as something existing outside time and place. According to this view religion, like the US Constitution originates in a timelessness free of the taint of culture and history.

All human experience is formed within the context of culture. Even prophets and Founding Fathers are products of their culture. For the last three weeks, we have been following the comings and goings in a period of the prophet Elijah’s life during which, he is hounded by Ahab, King of Israel, and his pathologically narcissistic wife, Jezebel. Last week I wrote about Jezebel and Ahab’s narcissism and you can see my detailed exposition here.

Elijah is very much a man of his culture. His contest with the prophets of Baal recorded in 1 Kings 18 gives us a view of a very acculturated religious conflict. There is much in this story that offends our sensibilities, especially our sense of God. The very images of God can only be articulated through the use of human imagination. Human imagination is to some extent limited by expectations. Expectations are very much shaped by culture.

As we have been following events in the life of Elijah in the first book of the Kings, so too, we have been following the Apostle Paul as he writes to the Christians in Anatolia in his Letter to the Galatians. Like Elijah, Paul is definitely a man of his times, formed and molded by his cultural location as a Pharisee Jew of the Hellenic-Roman, Jewish diaspora. Like Elijah, we have ambivalent and ambiguous responses to Paul. We find his fierce zealotry a little disconcerting. Yet we soar with his eloquence when he writes of faith, hope and love.

Traditional confusion over which of the thirteen letters ascribed to Paul are from his actual hand has created a disconcertingly contradictory impression of him. How does Paul view slavery, the role of women, the exercise of authority, relations between Jews and Gentiles? He takes a particular line in one letter. Then he espouses the very opposite, in another.

The thirteen Pauline letters span a period from the mid 1^st to the mid 2^nd centuries AD. Over this period of time culture and attitudes change in a more conservative and conventional direction as the early Christian communities become more established. Yet, each later letter, written beyond the span of Paul’s possible lifetime, claims the authority of his personal authorship. The later the writing, the more it appears Paul supports slavery, the subjection of women to male authority, and an increasingly ferocious attitude to the Jews as others.

Despite both Elijah and Paul being men of their time and culture, their stature as prophet and apostle rests on their startling encounters with God. These encounters take them completely beyond the cultural imaginary of their time and place. They are both mystics in whom a deep personal encounter with the divine stimulates a leap of imagination that propels them beyond the familiar, opening them and us to new vistas and new directions of travel for the human experience of God. To borrow Karl Popper’s scientific concept of threshold experience, God is revealed in a moment when the known gives way to the yet-to-become-known, changing all that we know in the process.

Elijah

Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains within the sound of silence

After his latest bruising encounter with Ahab in 1 Kings 21, Elijah flees from Jezebel’s threats. He journeys into the desert and he is on a knife edge between life and death. He shelters under a tree and waits for death to arrive through thirst and hunger. God sustains him with necessary food and water and Elijah sets out on the highly symbolic journey to Horeb, the mountain of God, the place of Moses’ encounter with God. He spends the night in a cave where he tells God of his sense of failure, loneliness, and isolation. God tells him to stand on the mountain and wait.

What happens next is a threshold moment; Elijah’s startling leap of imagination to behold God, not in the dramatic events of nature: wind, earthquake and fire, but: in the sound of sheer silence. God speaking through the sheer silence is not a culturally conditioned expectation for Elijah and his time; a time when God was expected to grandly display his power employing as much noise and pyrotechnics as possible. So it’s a leap of imagination for Elijah to perceive God speaking through the sheer silence. This is a huge leap forward in the Hebrew imaginary of God.

Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains within the sound of silence

God again asks him: what are you doing here? Poor Elijah simply repeats his mantra of woe and God tells him: Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus.  And he goes. 

Paul

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
‘Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp

When my eyes were stabbed
By the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence

Paul displays a similar capacity to be open to a threshold experience in the Popper sense of meaning. Much of Paul’s letter to the Galatians rehearses complex arguments that zoom way above my pay grade. Paul does not hold back. At times in this letter, he gives way to words of fierce denunciation as he tries to map out what it means to be clothed in Christ. Paul has to find ways to write about this that are both culturally familiar enough to the Galatians to be heard and understood by them. Yet, at the same time he is also opening up a completely new direction of understanding for them. In his denunciations, we hear Paul the Pharisee, whose old cultural traits are being put to new use in his incarnation as a follower of Christ.

Paul’s conversion on the Damascus Road is a threshold experience, not only for him but also for the development and direction of the Christian message. Nothing is the same after, yet, at many levels, Paul continues to be who he is, a Hellenic, Pharisee Jew, now a clothed in Christ. Yet, the consequences of his threshold experience suddenly make themselves known.

In the midst of his complex argument, Paul’s eyes are stabbed by the flash of a neon light. He writes: There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. Here, we see a profound leap of imagination from what is known and familiar to the yet to-become-known of God, crashing into Paul’s imagination.

From somewhere deep inside Paul, from the place of sheer silence, he articulates a revolutionary vision of God. It’s revolutionary in that it focuses not on delineating difference – a common religious activity, but in asserting and affirming commonality. He is diffusing the key binary polarities that divide people in his world and at his time.

For us to truly appreciate the revolution in Paul’s cultural imaginary that takes him well beyond the boundaried imagination of his time and place we might translate these as follows:

• no longer Jew or Greek – no longer us or them
• no longer slave or free – no longer exploiter and exploited
• no longer male and female – no longer divide by gender specifics but embracing the complementariness of masculine and feminine into a variety of combinations within the spectrum of what it means to be human

A curious aside

It’s worth noting that two of the binary polarities Paul separates with the conjunction or. In the last binary polarity – male/female he uses the conjunction and. Why? Jew or Greek, slave or free are polar alternatives. In contrast, male and female are complements. In Genesis, God does not say: let us make male or female, but let us make male and female.  You can’t have men without women or women without men. They are one entity; they both constitute what it means to be human. Translated into our developmental understanding of human nature, to be human is to comprise the principles of both the masculine and feminine.

 

As I write, my imagination signals a connection to the Simon and Garfunkel song The Sound of Silence. The words of this song could so easily be those of Elijah’s standing upon Horeb, the mountain of God, or Paul’s mind-meld with God the issues in his immemorial-timeless statement in Galatians 3.

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening

These two verses direct my attention to the sound of sheer silence out of which, the message of the prophets is written on subway walls and tenement halls, i.e. in unlooked for places.

In the paradox of the sound of sheer silence, we encounter God in the depth of the divine mystery. We too are shaped and bounded by our experience of culture, a culture within which the Simon and Garfunkel lyrics stimulate a leap in our contemporary imaginary.

Us

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon God they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
And the words that it was forming

And the sign said,
“The words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls.”
And whispered in the sound of silence

Contemporary culture invites us to seek God in the slick soundbites of our lives, where our commitment is circumscribed by the daunting prospect of an hour a week given to the worship of God. Where we long for an experience of community that we are too overscheduled to commit to building.

For many, God is believable only to the extent to which the divine can be explained or explained away. In our noisy and stridently over-stimulated world; a world in which competing voices clamor, shout, threaten, and cajole for our attention, I wonder what might await us if we were to enter into the God of mystery, here in the pregnant spaces of imagination that open uninitiated within us to behold God in the sound of sheer silence?

The Sound of Silence Simon and Garfunkel

 

 

 

 

Reflection on an early memory

I remember as a child, long before I could read, gazing at the pictures in an illustrated Bible that I think probably belonged to my grandparents. This is the first book I can remember. I used to carry it around with me and long before I could read the words in it I understood the stories conveyed through my imagining of the pictures.

There’s a name so very rich in associations from my childhood encounter with the illustrated Bible. Although, not knowing the story at the time, I still remember my horrid fascination at gazing at a black and white drawing of a woman being thrown out of a window to an awaiting crowd of men and excited-looking dogs. I must have asked someone, probably my grandmother, who was this woman being thrown from the upstairs window? I learned her name was Jezebel. To this day, the very mention of her name brings back with vivid accuracy this simple pen and ink drawing.

Early memories are the strongest. The vinyl disc is a great analogy for the way that early childhood impressions of the world form deep grooves in the earliest anatomical part of the brain connected with the function of memory. Here is the seat of instinctual responses alongside which our earliest sense and internal fantasy experiences of the world are etched. This heady cocktail of instinct and early sense experience etched in deep grooves of early memory, exercise often unconsciously, an influence over the rest of our lives.

A further reflection from childhood

The social and cultural world of my family was not one in which Churchgoing was a regular practice. Nevertheless, all the adults I knew assumed themselves to be Christian simply because they never imagined one could be anything else. This was a world of nominal Christianity, which while not shaped by actual belief or practice, was nevertheless peopled with Biblical character types. Jezebel was a popular Biblical character type frequently used to refer to any woman whose behavior raised a sense of moral indignation. To be called a Jezebel was an insult drawn from the cultural embedding of the story from 1 Kings 21. The utterance of the name is inseparable from associations and memories of it being used by both my grandmothers and to a lesser extent, my mother.

Reflection on the text

Ahab is a sorry excuse for a king. He is a very sorry excuse for a man. He is depicted as a man suffering from what we today recognize as narcissistic personality disorder, a condition that much afflicts those with a drive for power. Narcissism is an essential element for each of us in our emotional makeup. Personality disorder is a way of talking about someone with a severe character defect that impairs their capacity for mutuality – the give and take of relating that happens when two people give each other space to be themselves.

There are two main types of this condition, which I will refer to as dependent or aggressive. Both kinds of narcissistic disturbance make it difficult to tolerate the frustration of experiencing another’s separateness. The aggressive narcissist experiences other’s independence of mind and action as a deeply threatening personal affront or even attack. They respond viciously, going for the jugular. We recognize that this is often a characteristic of those who seek power because power blurs the distinction between self and others – others become simply extensions of our ability to impose our will. The other person is merely an extension or a pawn in the pursuit of one’s own desires. The character Frank Underwood from Netflix’s House of Cards demonstrates this personality type, well. There are others from real life politics that could also be mentioned here.

In this story from 1 Kings – Jezebel conveys an aggressive narcissist profile while Ahab seems to be of the more dependent type. Faced with Naboth’s refusal to sell his land to him, Ahab withdraws into depressed isolation. Ahab’s type needs the ruthless aggression of a Jezebel and in this instance, she does not disappoint him.

Naboth’s refusal to sell his patrimony reflects an understanding among Israelites that the land is only on lease from God, and that what we might call the freehold of land is vested in God’s ownership. God gave the Israelites their land in trust, to care and be responsible for. Part of that spirit of responsibility was neither to sell one’s own land nor confiscate unjustly, the land of another. Ahab is king in Israel, and as the king, he is simply God’s husbandman for just and good government. Alas, probably spurred on by his Sidonian (read non-Jewish) wife, Ahab seems to take his cue from the playbook of the Canaanite kings whose lands surround his. In short, he is weak and so needs his ruthless wife to do his dirty work for him.

Enter Elijah, the man of God. In the preceding chapters of 1 King’s Elijah is continually on the move in remote regions in an attempt to elude the long arm of the king and his wife. He has hidden in caves, sought temporary shelter and sustenance with an impoverished widow. He feels rejected, isolated and alone, exclaiming earlier in chapter 18 that he alone is the only one left as a prophet in Israel. Yet, God does not let him hide away. The word of the Lord comes to him telling him to go down to meet King Ahab and say to him: Thus says the Lord: In the place where dogs licked up the blood of Naboth, dogs will also lick up your blood. Elijah suddenly appears on the road Ahab is taking from his winter place to Naboth’s vineyard. His appearance on the road surprises the king who exclaims: Have you found me, O my enemy? And Elijah simply replies: I have found you. He then proceeds to proclaim God’s judgment upon Ahab and his house. For in Elijah’s words, Ahab has: sold [himself] to do what is evil in the sight of the Lord.

Reflection from the here and now

In the parish, I encourage Lectio Divina as a group spiritual practice. In short, Lectio Divina is a way of reflecting on a passage of scripture in the belief that through it God is seeking to draw our attention to something we need to address in the present moment of time – say five to seven days. As I meditated on this passage from 1 Kings 21 the words sold yourself lept from the page, penetrating deep into my imagination. Sold yourself – I began to wonder what have I sold myself to do as a justification for an action or attitude? This is an uncomfortable question.

I continually find that the thing I sell myself to repeatedly is fear. Fear convinces me that:

• Scarcity is the only reality, and so I become risk adverse to acts and attitudes of generosity and hospitality that lead me to an encounter with the reality of abundance.
• That difference is an attack upon my personal integrity – my freedom of conscience, my own self-interest, and so I become intolerant and through intolerance, I collude with justifications for discrimination.
• That no good deed goes unpunished and so I shrink back from concerned involvement and solidarity with those who need my help.
• I sell myself to fear and I become timid and afraid and pull back from action and attitudes requiring courage and commitment to hope – a lack of faith in that which is still in the process of becoming known in the future.

I sell myself to a hundred and one different fears in every moment of my day and night. If this is true for me individually, then what does it mean when as a community, as a society, as a culture we sell ourselves to fear? This results in:

• The degeneration of the quality and capacity for civic engagement.
• The impossibility of informed debate.
• The economic exploitation of ordinary people in the face of enormous wealth confiscation by the few.
• The resurgence of racist, misogynist, and discriminatory phobias of many kinds, once again rising to stalk our streets and corridors of power.
• The passive acceptance of disordered narcissism as a quality to be admired at best and tolerated at worst in our politicians, who pander to and stoke our fear, ensuring that our rage remains misdirected, aimed not at inequalities in work, housing, education, and healthcare, the legitimate sources of our rage, but at Latino’s, Muslims, foreigners, immigrants, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Blacks, Women, Men, Gays and the Transgendered; all neatly stereotyped and scapegoated. 

Soon, only a few brave voices are left to cry out against the doing of what is evil in the sight of the Lord.

In ancient Israel, all sections of society were bound by a covenant with God. The social justice aspects of the covenant were spelled out clearly in terms of mutual responsibility. This was a world in which wealth and power could not be severed from responsibility. Attempts to do so brought God’s judgment articulated through the voice of the prophet. I am left wondering what his equivalent might be today?

We live in a more democratic age when it’s not the voice of an individual, but the consensus of the community that speaks truth to power -Elijah as the voice of community conscience. David Brooks wrote this last week:

The larger culture itself needs to be revived in four distinct ways: We need to be more communal in an age that’s overly individualistic; we need to be more morally minded in an age that’s overly utilitarian; we need to be more spiritually literate in an age that’s overly materialistic; and we need to be more emotionally intelligent in an age that is overly cognitive.

Brooks argues for a reinjection of soul into our physical and social lives so that: 

We’d understand that citizenship is a covenant, too, and we have a duty to feel connected to those who disagree with us.

That’s the nub of the rub between Ahab, Jezebel, and Elijah. Brook’s conclusion is that we are more than utility-maximising individuals, we are love and connection seeking individuals who find in community the possibilities for loving and being loved.

A core task of communities is to arouse and educate the loves, to widen and deepen the opportunities for love and to appraise people by how well and what they love.

Jesus is our guide on what and how to love well. He loves and accepts the love of the woman – (a Jezebel, not in the personality disordered sense, but in the sense of the word as my grandmothers would have used it), who crashes the dinner party to express her unfettered love for him as told to us by Luke in the Gospel reading.

Long before I knew how to read the words in my illustrated Bible, I knew how to imagine the pictures. I wish I had seen the picture of the exchange between the woman and Jesus at the dinner party at the home of Simon the Pharisee reported in Luke in 7:36-8:3. If I had, maybe this too, alongside the imagining of Jezebel being thrown to her death would have given me, at this crucially formative stage, a more rounded picture of the world.