Author: KPB Stevens

Luke 24:13-35 Healing Memories on the Road to Emmaus

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Sheila Fabricant Linn speaks of this Emmaus moment and the moment when the two disciples memories are healed:

When Jesus joined the depressed disciples on the road to Emmaus, the disciples’ hearts were filled with grief and disappointment from their hurtful memories of Jesus’ death.  As they shared the events of the previous three days, Jesus listened and lovingly responded to each of the ways they felt hurt. Eventually the disciples became so full of love that they could forgive Jesus, themselves, and all who had hurt them.  The disciples traded their depressed hearts for Jesus’ joyful, loving heart. When they left Jesus, their own hearts were ‘burning within them.’ In healing a memory, we share our heart with Jesus and take on his loving heart until we can see the past in a whole new way, with Jesus’ vision.  By the time the disciples arrived at Emmaus, the greatest tragedy of their lives had been transformed into the greatest gift for loving as they joyfully announced to those who still grieved, ‘The Lord has been raised!’ (1)

As I’ve been reading the mystics, I’ve been considering what to do with memory.  John of the Cross talks about memory as the seedbed of the imagination. It is because of our memories that we can imagine, and it is our imagination that helps us extend beyond our limited selves and attempt to see the world as God sees it.  But not all memories are good – many are quite bad. And those bad memories may make us shy away from or even angrily reject our pasts. These memories must be redeemed if we’re to be healed. Sometimes we can participate in this healing by confessing our wrongs and seeking reconciliation. But sometimes that healing is a miracle.

For me, the most miraculous healing of memory came when I received a letter from a stranger. Somehow she had found a poetry book that I and a friend had put together in high school, and my adolescent poetry had spoken to her. It didn’t take me long to realize that she was the daughter of an ex-girlfriend, someone who had hurt me deeply in my youth. I was still carrying a wound, but this letter from her daughter brought me back in touch with her, and in our correspondence this ex-girlfriend apologized for hurting me, and explained the adolescent confusion that had led her to do so. My memory was changed. I had been blaming myself for the end of that relationship, as much as I blamed her. And I was, in certain ways, deeply to blame. But so was she, and once we had found each other again, she was the one who was brave enough to ask for forgiveness and reconciliation. This strange set of circumstances resurrected the past – it didn’t simply bring it back to life, it healed it, gave it new life, turned it into something that could feed my spirit instead of shaming me.  This ex-girlfriend, who isn’t a believer, still managed to be Christ to me as I walked my own road to Emmaus.

It’s when we experience these strange and unexpected moments of healing that we’re able to imagine that the entire world can be healed, that resurrection can come to everything. More, that we can give healing to others by reconciling the past to the present, by being honest about who we were and asking for forgiveness. This humility, this willingness to reconcile, is a blessing to others – it’s a way in which we bless others through our weakness, and through it shame is transformed into hope, fear is transformed into joy, ego is transformed into love.

 

  1. Don’t Forgive Too Soon: Extending the Two Hands That Heal, By Dennis Linn, Sheila Fabricant Linn, Matthew Linn

 

Luke 24:1-12 The Tomb of Longing

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Ten of the eleven remaining apostles don’t believe the women – only Peter does, and then only reluctantly, and with the need to verify what they say by running to the tomb.  Imagine what it must have been like to be one of the others. Called to be apostles, given power and privilege, they hide in the corner, afraid to hope, having surrendered their longing to dread. It’s the women who have enough longing to act. At first, they merely long to participate in a rite of grieving, to prepare the body that has been entombed without any preparation. Then they long to hope, to remember, to believe. But they accept longing, they don’t try to suppress it, and because of this they are the first to encounter the miracle of resurrection.

I’ve been reading the Spanish mystics alongside my reading and writing about Luke, and these posts have been full of references to John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila.  They knew more about peace and joy than most of us do, but they also knew more about longing. When he was dying, St. John asked to have the Song of Songs read to him, that great poem of longing that occupies such a strange place in the Jewish scriptures. He had been given great and tremulous moments of communion with God, moments of ego death when he was empty of anything but joy and grace, and yet he died with his longing alive within him, as we all do. However much we might seek peace and find peace, longing will remain. Even in resurrection. Even when we experience the miracle of the empty tomb.

David Whyte says as much in his lovely little poem, “Easter Morning in Wales.”  Part of resurrection, he seems to be saying, is the freeing of our longing. No longer entombed, it can emerge into the light and, in the light, it gives us eyes to see the beauty of the world, to experience its grace, and to respond with gratitude.  I have written about those glimmering moments when we can see through the eyes of God and experience life, all life, as God experiences it. That is what resurrected longing does for us – it makes us attentive and awake to these moments, it makes us what to talk about them, or write about them, as Whyte does. Our longing, when not aligned with God, can lead us to dark places. But when it is resurrected, and loosed from the tomb of our ego, it is that force which makes us pray and sing.

EASTER MORNING IN WALES
by David Whyte

A garden inside me, unknown, secret,
neglected for years,
the layers of its soil deep and thick.
Trees in the corners with branching arms
and the tangled briars like broken nets.
Sunrise through the misted orchard,
morning sun turns silver on the pointed twigs.
I have woken from the sleep of ages and I am not sure
if I am really seeing, or dreaming,
or simply astonished
walking toward sunrise
to have stumbled into the garden
where the stone was rolled from the tomb of longing.

 

Luke 23:44-56 Ego Death?

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So what does Jesus accomplish on the cross? According to Adyashanti, a writer whom I’ve mentioned before on this blog, the cross is the moment of ego death, when divine radiance burns “all of the old conditioning that opposes spirit out of our system.” I like this well enough, and agree that Jesus is modeling the thing that must happen to us, but it can’t be what’s happening to Jesus. Adyashanti is not a Christian, which sometimes makes him invaluable, since he hasn’t been trained in all the expected ways of thinking about things and can look at the life and death of Christ from unexpected angles. But for Christians, Christ is perfect, from before time and forever, even when he’s arguing, questioning, and changing his mind. He has no ego that has to die. So although the via crucis and the via lucis are a model for us, I think it’s fair to say that Christ enacts the model without needing to learn from it himself.

I’m not sure he actually had to die. In seminary, we were taught that the Eastern Orthodox don’t really need western Christianity’s atonement theories. For them, the death on the cross was never part of some grand and cosmic plan. It happened because the people who found Jesus so threatening, the people in power who were all ego and didn’t want to be anything but ego, killed him. They didn’t have to kill him, but they did, because that’s what the defensive ego does. It kills those sneaky thoughts that threaten it, that whisper in the night that we’re not really that important, that we do not make and control the world, that the most we can be is witnesses to God’s glory. Of course, the Eastern Orthodox fathers and mothers didn’t use the language of ego, and of course they probably didn’t all hold to this thought, since people and their thoughts are diverse. But I loved learning about this point of view, and for the most part I’ve accepted it.

Jesus goes to the cross and refuses to save himself, not because he’s enacting some grand plan, but because he’s egoless. He doesn’t try to control events, especially if controlling them means hypocritically forsaking everything he said during the Sermon on the Plain. He accepts a blessed poverty, a blessed hunger, a blessed sorrow, and the blessed hatred, exclusion, reviling, and defamation of other people. He goes to the cross for the same reason the disciples set out on the road with nothing in their pockets. He goes to the cross in order to live the beatitudes.

I have not known this moment, since my ego is still very deeply present, but the person of Jesus on the cross reveals that there is a moment when the via crucis and the via lucis will cease to matter. A moment in which we will be as indifferent to pain and suffering as we are to health and happiness. The great saints, John and Teresa and all the others, have known this moment. They write about it and reassure us that it’s there. But they also tell us that it only lasts a little while. Teresa says no more than twenty minutes. Then we find ourselves journeying again, traversing the via crucis and the via lucis, because we are human beings, and not God. We will never truly be able to be like Jesus on the cross, eternally perfect and egoless. But we will know moments of such perfection, hanging suspended from our needs and our suffering, perfectly joyous, full of God’s love and compassion for the whole world.

Luke 23:26-43 The Sudden Enlightenment of St. Dismas

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Now we come to the passion, and I feel tempted, like a great many Christian writers before me, to start talking about atonement theories, spilling ink, or in this case bytes, over that cosmic something that happened when Jesus died on the cross. But my intent with this blog has been to present Luke’s gospel through a contemplative lens, and heady atonement theories sometimes distract us from the love affair that the soul has with God, which is, to me, the great subject and interest of the Christian life.  So I invite you, dear reader, to go read some of the many, many books, articles, and blog posts that are interested in atonement theory, and then return here, if you’d like, for a strange little digression into St. Dismas, the penitent thief.

The contemplative life is not really a progression, although sometimes those who talk about it make it seem like it is.  It is true that as we grow in prayer and understanding, we feel ourselves transformed. But transformation can also happen in an instant, since all transformation is a gift of God’s grace, and God can decide to grace us or not at any moment. As I’ve written, I think there’s a purpose to our transformation. We are transformed so that we can live within the Kingdom of God, which means seeing all of creation with God’s eyes, caring and hurting for it with God’s compassion, and rejoicing in it with God’s joy. We listen to John the Baptist and Jesus when they tell us to be of a new mind, to let the old, broken habits die and to hold onto new habits lightly, always waiting for the presence of the Holy Spirit to disrupt us and letting processes of forgiveness and community remake us. I believe that this transformation is the purpose that our souls were made for, and we can learn to give ourselves to this purpose as we live out our lives. And yet it’s striking to me that the penitent thief who dies with Jesus achieves this transformation in an instant, by doing nothing more than attesting to the innocence of Jesus as he dies on the cross.

A number of years ago I was in Tokyo, and found myself looking at a sixteenth century scroll painting by Kano Motonobu in the National Museum. The painting depicted Xiangyen Zhixian sweeping with a broom. It captures this zen master moments before a roof tile falls off a nearby building and causes his sudden enlightenment. That’s all it took for Xiangyen Zhixian. One moment he’s sweeping and unenlightened. The next moment the roof tile has fallen, and he is enlightened. The same is true of Dismas, the penitent thief. One moment he’s dying on a cross for crimes he knows he’s committed. He says a few words to Christ. The next moment he is alive within the Kingdom of God, and his fear and suffering is transformed into deep love and compassion. His soul is alive with God, and he dies, like Christ, in a moment of exquisite peace, the grace of God’s created cosmos blowing through his mind, the presence of the divine burning through the fibers of his dying body.

The Christian tradition has given Dismas a name and called him a saint for this and this alone.  He allows us to understand that anyone can come into the Kingdom of God at any time, that God’s love is so vast that it can sweep up the righteous and the unrighteous alike. Many of us, myself included, are on long, patient journeys, seeking and loving God and giving thanks for those glimmers of the Kingdom that offer us deep consolation.  But if we ever encounter someone who has simply leapt into sainthood, we should not be suspicious of her, or deride her. Perhaps suffering has allowed for that leap, and perhaps not. Perhaps repentance has allowed for it, and perhaps not. Maybe it’s best to realize that the leap itself is repentance, metanioa, and that we can rejoice, with God, in the repentance of any person, anywhere, at any time.

 

Luke 23:1-25 The Oddness of King Herod

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Herod plays a strange role in Luke’s Gospel. Or one might say a mercurial role. He imprisons and beheads John the Baptist because he can’t stand John’s criticisms. Yet members of his court follow Jesus, or at least their wives do, as Joanna the wife of Chuza is named as one of the women who surround Jesus in chapter 8. One chapter later, Herod shows curiosity towards Jesus – he wants to meet with Jesus, possibly to learn from him. By chapter 13, his intentions seem to have changed, as some Pharisees warn Jesus that Herod wants to kill him. Finally, when Jesus is arrested and brought before Herod, Luke goes out of his way to tell us that Herod “was very glad, for he had been wanting to see him for a long time, because he had heard about him and was hoping to see him perform some sign.” Herod can’t seem to make up his mind about Jesus, yet throughout the Gospel it’s clear that Jesus has made up his mind about Herod.

Herod is like a tycoon who keeps a stack of self-help books beside his bed. He knows that his wealth and power haven’t brought him happiness, let alone joy, and he is seeking, always seeking, for something that can make sense of this. But he doesn’t really want to know why he’s still suffering even though he has everything a man could possibly want. Because the answer is that the very act of having and holding power and wealth is the problem. Desiring the wrong thing has become a habit with him. Yet he lies awake and night and eventually cracks open one of those self-help books. For a moment they reassure him, at least enough to go back to sleep. But the essential insomnia of his soul will never be cured, and he’ll never be able to truly rest.

The problem is that Jesus is not a self-help guru. He could have joined Herod’s court, connived for power, and issued platitudes that unthinking people might accept as wise. But he wants nothing whatsoever to do with Herod, and actively avoids Herod’s attention. He knows that Herod will never give up wealth and power, will never agree to go through the eye of the needle and enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Herod will live his life in riotous unhappiness, secretly knowing that he must change, and deliberately resisting that change. Jesus stands silently before him. Thwarted by his silence, Herod mocks him, and sends him away.

It is a small enough incident in the midst of the passion, and yet it speaks volumes. Most of us are unlikely to beat and kill the people who refuse to be interested in our ego-tripping. Yet we are likely to mock and ignore them. How dare they stay silent before our striving? How dare they shrug off our protestations of good will? How dare they refuse to be flattered by our regard? Yet it is these people who might really change us. But they’re not going to waste their time. We will not impress them with our facades. Jesus will only raise his eyes to us when we’re really willing to change.