Author: KPB Stevens

Jesus is Condemned to Death

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment
Meditations upon the cross were an integral part of Medieval prayer books.  But what does the cross mean for us now?  If I practice a this-worldly spirituality, then the idea of the cross as a gateway to a far away heaven won’t be tremendously helpful to me.  I can say that the cross saved me from my sins, and even that it saved the whole world from its sins, but I want an understanding of the cross that doesn’t presume that salvation means something that happens after this life over.  What is salvation in the here and now, and how does the cross help people to attain it?
It’s been helpful for me to reimagine what heaven consists of.  N.T. Wright suggests that heaven is another dimension of existence, but one that we can enter, however briefly, from this dimension.  So when I’m engaged in centering prayer, and I come to those moments of balance where I feel an infusion of light and peace, I have stepped a toe into heaven.  Or when I’m going about my daily life, and am suddenly infused with the purest sense of joy, this grace is a moment of heaven.  Wright goes on to say that reality is both the heavenly dimension and the earthly one, and that when we see through to that place of light and peace, we’re not seeing “true” reality, but only half of reality.  The other half is the rivers, the streets, the dirt and grime, the bright sunlight, the herons and hawks of this world.  To participate in reality, we must participate in both.
Jesus, being both God and man, participated perfectly in both, and our imitation of him leads us to want to do likewise.  But was the cross necessary?  Couldn’t he have shown us how to do this without dying an agonizing death?  Hadn’t he already shown us, before the temple priests had him arrested and Pilate sentenced him to judicial murder?  My base assumption is that it was unnecessary for him to die, but that once the mechanics of his death were set in motion, it was necessary for him not to resist it.  We killed him because we’re frightened of lives spent immersed in true reality.  Glimpses of heaven tend to make us realize that all our possessions and privilege can, at most, only give us half a life.  And to have a whole life, lived in both realities, we have to reorientate our priorities, and allow the sense of self that we carry to be remade.  This is a very painful process.  We fight to keep our illusions intact.  And if someone else has to die so that our false selves can live, so be it.  It was Jesus’s very statement of true reality, both in his words and his person, that freaked people out and threatened them.  And that was why they killed him.
A life that is perfectly balanced between the two halves of reality will not be convinced by the illusions of either one.  Jesus couldn’t enter into the anger and the resistance of the false self.  Nor could he simply escape into heaven.  He chose to accept his condemnation because he was so perfectly balanced between both the heavenly and earthly dimensions.  I think he chose it with a sense of bewilderment and sorrow.  Why couldn’t the priests and the Roman authorities and the jeering crowds simply accept that there is another way to live one’s life?  Why did they start with the base assumption that everyone was like them, including Jesus, and would seek political power and control over the world they lived in?  I think he felt sad for them.  And in this first moment of the walk to the cross, that sorrow and bewilderment predominate.

The Rose of Sharon

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Two events led me to start thinking about, praying with, and making art in response to the Song of Songs. The first was a Bible study during a clergy quiet day. We were reading Jesus’s Parable of the Dishonest Manager (Luke 16:1-13). As we sat in a circle, annoyed and shocked that Jesus would tell his disciples to “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth, so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal habitations,” I began wondering whether I had ever done exactly that. My mind traveled to the early days of my relationship with my future wife. We met when we were twenty-two and still in college. Neither of us really knew who we were, and we acted out different social roles, imitating our peers or images in the media or, at best, some vision of who we hoped we would be someday. There was something dishonest about the way we presented ourselves to each other – not in a conniving way, just in the fact that we didn’t know who we were, and therefore didn’t have much chance of being authentic in our relationships with anyone. It was through falling in love and being faithful to each other that we learned who we were, and everything that’s real in our lives and relationships now is the result of our patience with each other as we fumbled around and made mistakes and presented ourselves falsely. Reflecting on this as I sat in that circle of priests, I realized that my wife is my dishonest wealth, and I felt how miraculous it is that she should love me, and I her, a true gift of patience and luck and grace.

The second event that led me to the Song of Songs was a planning meeting. We were at the Edge House in Cincinnati, the Lutheran campus ministry that serves UC. A trapeze company had set-up in the park across the street, and as we talked young people were flinging themselves into the air. We were trying to decide on a theme for an autumn retreat, and we started by asking ourselves which questions our students were really asking. After a considering pause, one of our group said, “Well, I think they’re wondering who they’ll love, and how they’ll love that person well.” This was so basic and obvious that it was astounding that we had never addressed this question with our students. We turned to our Bibles and leafed through them, wondering whether scripture really spoke to this question at all. Maybe in Genesis, in those scenes when Isaac meets Rebecca, and then later Jacob meets Rachel, at the well. But more obviously, and certainly more extravagantly, in the Song of Songs.

It’s a primal question – “who will I love, and how will I love that person well?” The way we answer this question will affect not only our earthly relationships, but our relationship with God. This is what the early and medieval commentators on the Song understood so well. Until the Enlightenment, the Song of Songs was the second most preached about and commentated on book of scripture, surpassed only by the Gospel of John. It was treated as an allegory for the soul’s relationship to God, in both the Christian and Jewish traditions. To this day, many Sephardic communities chant the entire Song of Songs before Shabbat services every Friday. For Origen, and Teresa of Avila, and Bernard of Clairvaux, it was a text for celibates, a passionate enactment of human/divine relationship that could take the place of any earthly need for sex. But the Enlightenment, and the 18th and 19th century Biblical scholarship that followed it, put an end to this reading. The Song might be any number of things – wedding choruses, songs for fertility rites, court poetry – but it was, decidedly, not about God.

Last summer I led an adult forum on the Song of Songs, and when we came to those passages that compared a woman’s breasts to twin gazelles and bunches of grapes, one of the participants asked “should this even be in the Bible?” It seems so lascivious, and it is. But the fact that it is in the Bible should tell us something. It seems possible, and even likely, that those who compiled and canonized scripture understood that the Song of Songs is about God, while understanding that it’s also about sex. Perhaps they knew what we’ve forgotten, that the passion we bring to our earthly relationships is a training ground for the passion that we will, through much prayer and worship, eventually bring to our relationship with God. “Who will I love and how will I love that person well?” The Song of Songs suggests that the way we answer that question in our human relationships has everything to do with how we’ll learn to love God. Perhaps, through fidelity and patience, we might all come, eventually, to recognize and give thanks for the dishonest wealth we receive as we form each other in relationship, and through this recognition, come to dwell, spiritually, in eternal habitations with God.

The Annunciation

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Marie Howe, in her poem “Once or Twice or Three Times I Saw Something,” envisions Mary as a kind of mystic, a young girl who is already adept at seeing through the veil of this reality and finding the beauty and mystery of God. She’s able to hear the angel and believe his message because she’s already half-intuited that message from the world she walks through. Here’s the poem:

Once or twice or three times, I saw something
rise from the dust in the yard, like the soul
of the dust, or from the field, the soul-body
of the field— rise and hover like a veil in the sun
billowing— as if I could see the wind itself.
I thought I did it— squinting— but I didn’t.
As if the edges of things blurred— so what was in
bled out, breathed up and mingled: bush and cow
and dust and well: breathed a field I walked through
waist high, as through high grass or water, my fingers
swirling through it— or it through me. I saw it.
It was thing and spirit both: the real
world: evident, invisible.*

So Mary is a mystic, who has prepared, through a practice of deep attentiveness, for union with God. But it occurs to me, after meditating upon the annunciation story in Luke, that we’re never given the scene of that union, the story of the conception itself. We’re told about the annunciation, and then the next thing we know, Mary’s already pregnant and on her way to visit her cousin Elizabeth.

There’s a lacuna in the text, a blank space that exists between the annunciation and the visitation, and this painting is a meditation on that lacuna. As I contemplated Mary, I realized that she’s a stand-in for all of us who wait for union with God. What patience she must have had in her waiting. What faith that the promised union would happen. There is a solace in this, a sense that those of us who wait have her companionship in our waiting. As I painted, I wrote my own poem for her:

She Waits with Those Who Wait for God

Leaves are lace on the dawn’s body.
Houses scatter silhouettes at the sky.
All the world waits – for days she’s been waiting.
An angel came in invading
light. An angel called her favored –
she, mystic Mary, who can see –
who languishes in vision, longing
to have no borders, no frontiers to cross –
to be the shadow of a man coming towards her,
and then the man himself,
and then the sunlight in his hair
(she thinks that she might die within his cells –
she thinks that she might flow and stain like sweat) –
to be the green grass and the scalp
of earth beneath it – to ascend
in a yellow pulse along the day –
to balance in the memory
of God – to fall and rise again, like breath.
(Now strong sunlight through the window.
Now a solid brightness to her prayers.
She is an egg of being, a foretaste of delight.
Again, again she absorbs the light
that sunlight shapes against her skin.
Again, again her eyes are laughing sight,
a scatter of air beneath dove’s wings.)

*Howe, Marie (2009-09-08). The Kingdom of Ordinary Time: Poems (Kindle Locations 259-265). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

What does it mean to be wise in today’s world?

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The night before, someone had asked me if I thought that life was primarily comedy or primarily tragedy. I said comedy, without really knowing why. Then, as sometimes happens in the most surprising way, I found myself sitting at our Ministerium lunch the very next day, listening as Rabbi Roger Klein supported my sense that life is more comic than sad. Rabbi Klein was talking about wisdom. He had just finished speaking about Richard Sewell’s book, The Vision of Tragedy, in which Sewell asserts that wisdom is a recognition of the tragedies and problems of life, with a corresponding refusal to avoid them, and, most importantly, refusal to submit to them. Now he was speaking about Socrates. Socratic wisdom, he told us, has two main aspects. The first is humility. The second is the sense that life is comedy.

Not, the Rabbi assured us, comedy in a “laugh out loud” mode, but comedy as an ordering principal. He described tragedy and comedy as two species from the same genus. Comedy reflects a fundamentally ordered universe. Tragedy reflects a fundamentally disordered universe. Tragedy reflects the unacceptable contradictions of life, comedy the acceptable contradictions of life. I’ve been taking improv classes for awhile now, and I instinctively understood what he meant. When an improv actor steps out onto the stage, she doesn’t know what prompts she’ll be given or what her scene partners will say or do. She steps out prepared to create a scene from whatever comes her way. She has dedicated herself to the task of finding order in the raw materials of words and emotions and movements, and when we find improv funny, it is not only because of the incidental jokes and ridiculous situations that arise. The true joy that we take in improv arises from the fact that we’re watching order take form out of chaos, and the form that order takes is surprising, sometimes even shocking, but also deeply reassuring, because we human beings can do this. We can, through the simplest actions, reflect a fundamentally ordered universe.

Before talking about Sewell, Rabbi Klein led us through an investigation of David Brooks’s thoughts on wisdom, and Robert Nozick’s. He described Brooks’s point of view as primarily theoretical, given that Brooks is more concerned with thinking through what wisdom is than what it does. There’s a need for the cultivation of factual information and knowledge as we grow to be wise, but also a powerful need for experience. Knowledge gives us the capacity to create and evaluate, but the cultivation of wisdom takes time – it emerges from experience, and, unlike knowledge, it can’t be taught or transferred simply from one person to another. Differing from Brooks, Nozick is more interested in the practical aspects of wisdom. It comes about when we make meaning out of the practical truths that we encounter in the world, and through doing so change our perspective on life. Some of these practical truths are revealed when we attempt to achieve certain goals. We craft means of doing so, become aware of lurking dangers, and eventually come to accept unavoidable limitations. Through this we gain glimmers of self-knowledge. But also through it, if we’re truly wise, we detect, and even participate in, a current of joy. The wise person takes delight in wisdom itself and loves to share it, so that wisdom becomes an overflow of love.

All of these aspects of wisdom are found in scripture. Scripture speaks of the cultivation of the virtues as part of wisdom – do good deeds over and over again until they become your disposition, part of your temperament, inseparable from who you are. Scripture speaks of the transformation of loss, which is part of wisdom. The right response to loss, scripture tells us, is holiness – the redemption of the bad by turning it into something sacred. But most appealingly to me was the idea of comedy. The Bible, Rabbi Klein told us, is comedy, not tragedy. Again and again in both the Jewish and Christian scriptures, the contradictions of life are reconciled and a necessary order is reasserted, even in the face of violence and horror. The Sinai event is a comedic act, an act of creating a new order out of a devastatingly destructive old order. Resurrection is a comedic act, the act of reconciling the contradictions of life and death. In all cases, these acts of God are an overflowing of love, and in the grand comedy, creation itself flows out from God’s wisdom, and we are invited to learn and imitate it.

Considering the Lilies

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Students from the Edge House were singing as we hiked into Conkle’s Hollow. Sandstone cliffs rose up on either side, striated by the lapping waves of an ocean that disappeared millennia ago. Thin trees clung to them, and when the wind blew yellow leaves shook loose and scattered like the rain that was occasionally falling. A thin waterfall trickled down at the trail’s edge, and small fish darted in the shallow pool at its base. And the song reverberated through all of this, as other members of our group arrived at the big rock where the Edge House students were perching, and joined them in singing. We sang pieces from the paperless music tradition that Alice Connor teaches at the Edge House, and then Amazing Grace, at the request of a student from OSU, and then songs by the group Psalters, that Alice lined out for us, giving us each verse in turn and waiting until we’d repeated it before weaving the whole song together. A few years previously, my friend Jared Talbot, who is a post-doc in biology at OSU, had proposed to his wife in the Hocking Hills, and after she’d said yes, they’d hiked to the Rock House, where a Mennonite group had sung song after song together, a gift to any stranger walking through the rock formations. Our singing in Conkle’s Hollow that day allowed Jared to pass that gift on to all the other hikers who had braved the rain and came down the trail behind us.
We were on retreat as a community of campus ministries in the Diocese. There were students from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio State University, Mount Carmel College of Nursing, Xavier, and Ohio University. We had conceived of the retreat as a response to the pressures and anxieties that afflict everyone in Higher Education these days. The anxieties that plague campuses aren’t unreasonable. Students worry about the future, about the amount of debt that they’re taking on, about the availability of jobs in their field when they graduate. They worry about who they are and who they’re becoming, who they’ll love and how they’ll manage to love themselves. When planning the retreat, the campus ministers talked about this anxiety and turned, as we always do, to scripture to help us make sense of the present mood and frame a response to it. We looked at Jesus’s words in Matthew 6 – “can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? Why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.” We talked about how Jesus’s words might have multiple meanings. Yes, they’re a call to rest faithfully in God’s grace, but they’re also direct advice. Go and look at some flowers. It will make you feel better. And, we added, extending the thought, consider who you really are responsible for. There are so many voices demanding our attention that we can’t possibly respond gracefully to all of them. If we can become clear about our true responsibility, we can choose not to answer the demands of those whom we really aren’t responsible for, and give ourselves more fully to the things that truly call us.
So we gathered at a rented house in the Hocking Hills on a weekend in late October. When we gathered on Saturday morning, we introduced ourselves by naming things we were grateful for. Then Alice led us in a meditation on Ruth, who is responsible both to Naomi, her bereaved mother-in-law, but also to herself, going to Boaz in the night and requiring that he pledge his protection to her before she lays with him on the threshing floor. Out of the grace of this meditation, we went to Conkle’s Hollow, where we sang together at the base of the sandstone cliffs. Granted, it was October, and the only lilies in evidence were in a vase back at the house. But when the singing ended we all felt the profound stillness of the light rain of an October day. Later that afternoon, some of us hiked again, to the Rock House, and sat in the ancient hollowed out cliffs that had once served as a tribal fort, watching the play of color on rock and drift of leaves as they fell. That evening we gathered for public story-telling, asking first who had taught us responsibility in our lives, and then telling stories about the time when we came into our own sense of deep responsibility. These stories proved to be intense and powerful and often very sad. A box of tissues was passed along from person to person. And it occurred to me, listening to them, that there is often something lost in the moment when we come into our responsibility. They are so often moments of crisis, when the old dispensation, under which we’re free from the responsibility that someone else bears for us, disappears, and we find the weight of that responsibility shift onto our shoulders. And yet every one of these stories was a story of gain, as well, since receiving and accepting responsibility is an act of love. By accepting responsibility, we grow in our ability to love.
George, one of the Downtowners Campus Ministry group, pushed us to think beyond the responsibility we bear towards ourselves and those we love, and consider the responsibility we have for the world at large. The next morning, Dr. Ellen O’Shaunessy brought the point home in her homily as she talked about a trip that she and her husband had taken to Mother Emmanuel in Charleston after the murders this summer. How do we move beyond the confines of our own narrow world, and realize that we are responsible for strangers, some of whom act and look in ways that are very different from us? And how, and most challenging, do we learn to feel responsibility for those who have done us grievous harm – the killers who pick up guns and take innocent lives? After she was done speaking, we found an answer to her question in shared eucharist, and shared singing, which teaches us that greater responsibility that encompasses the whole world. It’s a lesson we learn bit by bit – by learning responsibility to ourselves, how to rest and how to discern our heart’s true call, and by learning responsibility to our loved ones, by taking on their burdens in moments of crisis. We learn through listening carefully to each other, as singers do when matching their voices, and by looking carefully at the world, at the shape of cliffs and the fall of leaves. When we consider the lilies, its not a small or insignificant act. It’s a moment of preparation for the coming Kingdom of God, a way of glimpsing that Kingdom, resting in it, and confirming that we’re willing to do whatever is required to help bring that Kingdom about and have it reverberate through other people, as if it were a song.

Conkle's Hollow