Author: KPB Stevens

Station Two, The Arrest of Jesus

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Station Two by KPB Stevens

THE ARREST OF JESUS

Judas brought a detachment of soldiers together with police from the chief priests and the Pharisees, and they came there with lanterns and torches and weapons. Then Jesus, knowing all that was to happen to him, came forward and asked them, ‘For whom are you looking?’ They answered, ‘Jesus of Nazareth.’ Jesus replied, ‘I am he.’ Judas, who betrayed him, was standing with them. When Jesus said to them, ‘I am he’, they stepped back and fell to the ground. Again he asked them, ‘For whom are you looking?’ And they said, ‘Jesus of Nazareth.’ Jesus answered, ‘I told you that I am he. So if you are looking for me, let these men go.’ This was to fulfil the word that he had spoken, ‘I did not lose a single one of those whom you gave me.’

They saw him and were amazed, but we can be alive to wonder, and still betray, having built rooms within ourselves in which to hide and pretend that we can be unknown to God. When we try to move beyond these rooms, we carry torches and heft weapons, so that we might prove that the force that keeps us small, and our happy consent to our fall, is a power that is greater than God’s. We enact brutality on the beloved, try to put out the eyes that are wide with grace, to prove that the smallness we believe in is really what we believe.

Think of a usual day. The confused tiredness of three in the afternoon, with the long, numb evening still to respond to. Think of the slight, inarticulate fear of leaving the house. Outside we might still be lonely, even in a crowd. And so many of our memories are hampered, somehow, by someone’s sneer or complete ignoring of our lives. Even when wonder is as simple as a line of light, tracing a building in the morning, who can we say this to, who would understand? Even when we pray, if we’re in public, if we extrovert a little gasp of joy, how can we trust it, if everyone around us is gasping to, if it seems to be, simply, the thing to do? Wonder, the low thrum beneath the beat of time, demands too much, demands a trust we may not have. Better to ignore it. Better to betray.

Seven Stations of the Cross – Station One, The Agony in the Garden

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Station One The Agony in the Garden

I’ll be leading the Stations of the Cross at St. John’s on April 16th. I plan to do something different then the traditional fourteen stations that start with Jesus’s trial. I feel that this arrangement leaves too much out. And I want to focus more on the disciples and the others who surrounded Jesus, so that I can consider their (and our) reactions side by side with his suffering. Here is the first one. I plan to make a little chapbook of the seven stations I’ll be presenting for those who come to walk the stations with me. The page with the artwork I made and the prayer I wrote to accompany this station is above, and the reading from scripture and meditation is below. I’ll be following this format with the next six posts.

 

THE AGONY IN THE GARDEN

He came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives; and the disciples followed him. When he reached the place, he said to them, ‘Pray that you may not come into the time of trial.’ Then he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, knelt down, and prayed, ‘Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done.’ Then an angel from heaven appeared to him and gave him strength. In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground. When he got up from prayer, he came to the disciples and found them sleeping because of grief, and he said to them, ‘Why are you sleeping? Get up and pray that you may not come into the time of trial.’ -Luke 22:39-46

It is incredibly hard to stay awake. At this moment, little tragedies are happening all over the world, yet it isn’t these that make me want to sleep. It is the closer suffering, the nearer pains. Some moment when I caused offense, or someone offended me. An ache in the body, a tiredness with being human, the simple desire to restlessly escape. Such sleep, the sleep that runs from trouble, isn’t true rest, but merely misery expressed as a hiding away. And all the while God, who sees everything, and to whom our little sufferings are hardly unique, is awake.

This is the first reason for our sleep – that true wakefulness is divine, and we are ill-equipped for divinity. I am, at least. Teresa speaks of the wound of compassion, the piercing we feel when we glimpse the world through the eyes that looked out from the cross. Because we are limited, we might, when seeing such suffering, believe that all is loss. We cannot see that the bodies that suffer are also held, or see the way that love sustains souls in pain. We cannot see that for every person there is a balance of moments of joy and pain, that the eye of eternity sees everything at once, both one day’s weeping and another day’s play. If we could live, like God, beyond the bounds of time, the joy that keeps the soul awake would not forsake us when we suffer for compassion’s sake, and from the cross we’d survey the empty tomb, the resurrection, the closing of the wound.

Acts 27:13-28:44 The Story Ends

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Sometime during the mid-eighteenth century, a Jesuit priest in France named Jean-Pierre de Caussade wrote a book that is sometimes called Abandonment to Divine Providence but is more popularly known in English as The Sacrament of the Present Moment. I’m going to begin this post with a quotation from that book, because its vision of the place of grace within human interconnectedness is astounding and deeply moving to me. Writing of transformed souls, Caussade said:

Everything in these solitary souls speaks to us of God. God gives their silence, quiet, oblivion and isolation, their speech and their actions a certain virtue, which, unknown to themselves, affects others. And, just as they themselves are guided by the chance actions of innumerable creatures that are unwittingly influenced by the grace of God, they, too, guide and sustain many souls with whom they have no connection and no commitment to do so. It is God acting in unexpected and often mysterious ways.

Often, when I think of interconnectedness, it is through a moral lens. I get angry at negligence and selfishness, because I think that it stems from an inability to catch glimpses of the world as its seen through God’s eyes. When I am negligent or selfish, it’s because I am willfully closing myself off from God, refusing to see the great need and hope that is present within creation at every moment in time. God, of course, can see everything, and knows our deep sorrow and deep longing. A truly Christian moral life is one in which we try to align ourselves to the divine compassion that accompanies this seeing and knowing, and then act from it as we try to alleviate suffering and care for others.

But de Caussade is expressing something different. He is saying that interconnectedness is as affected by our being as it is by our actions, that we both give grace through our very persons, and are the recipients of the profound grace given by “the chance actions of innumerable creatures.” Without knowing it, we abide in an environment of grace. Without knowing it, we contribute to that environment.

What, you may ask, does this have to do with the end of Acts, and the apostle Paul? This is my final post, my final word on Luke and Acts during the Big Read, and I find myself wanting to focus, one last time, on the transformed soul. Is Paul a transformed soul? I think that he is. That doesn’t mean that he’s free of the small self. But for the most part, maybe most particularly in quiet moments, he is part of grace’s weather system. On the ship at sea, he remains calm and compassionate, and in small ways the grace he gives sees them through the storm. When the snake bites him, he reacts quietly and without fear. And he ends his story in quietude, sitting in a prison cell, teaching and blessing the people who come to see him.

We are attracted to the dramatic, so the end of Acts can feel like an anticlimax. But I’m glad that we don’t hear the story of Paul’s execution. We are left with an image of peace, rather than an image of struggle. He is no longer arguing in synagogues or being chased around cities by angry mobs. He isn’t standing out in any particular way – the Roman Jews haven’t even heard of him. The end of his story is, indeed, unexpected. But he ends in a state of grace, visited by a few people, teaching gently, no longer a storm in himself, but a mere particulate in the atmosphere of grace, a drop of water in the sea, a spark rising from the fire. He ends like one of de Caussade’s simple souls, who “guide and sustain many souls with whom they have no connection and no commitment to do so.” There is no better ending for Luke’s story.

 

Acts 27:1-12 He allowed him to go to his friends and be cared for

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I wonder what Luke has been doing the entire time that Paul has been in prison. Obviously, he’s been nearby, waiting to accompany Paul to Rome, because now the pronoun switches from “he” to “we,” and there’s a sense that the old gang is back together again. What was this like to Paul, to move from his light imprisonment, where people, including governors, were free to join him, to a kind of floating imprisonment on the sea? I imagine that, although he had some chance to see his friends while imprisoned, he missed being immersed in the fullness of community. And that’s why, when I read this passage, I find myself focusing on the short lay over in Sidon, when Paul is allowed to go and stay with his friends. This re-immersion into community allows me to give some final thoughts about beloved community as a whole.

Way back in November I had a conversation with Amy Howton, the Diocese of Southern Ohio’s Becoming Beloved Community Coordinator, about how reading Luke and Acts fit in with the BBC initiative. You can read Amy’s write-up of that conversation here. In the course of our talk I said that “a community that has gone through a spiritual revolution is one in which people celebrate and take joy in each others’ efforts, ask humbly how they can add to them, and always ask whether the things they’re doing cultivate love.” As I think about that now, I realize that these communities are not at all unusual. My own church, St. John’s in Worthington, is just such a community. And because it is a transformed community, it has aided immeasurably to my own spiritual growth.

And yet, there is a great deal of spiritual work still to do within the institution of the church. We still sometimes work under oppressive hierarchies, make too much of being theologically right while ignoring the fact that we are spiritually lacking, and allow our traditions to dominate us, sometimes because we don’t recognize the blind traditionalism in our way of doing things. Leadership is necessary, but can it be a leadership that is self-emptying and humble? Theology is necessary, but can it arise from the joy of conversation and avoid the rigidity of dogmatism? Tradition is necessary (and, as an Episcopalian, I’m prone to say that it’s a positive joy), but can we set it aside when it interferes with the demands of love?

Even more than all of these things, we still have insiders and outsiders, high status people and low status people, a tendency to prize the spiritual gifts of some while ignoring the gifts of others. Can the people who are used to holding center stage move to the edge of the circle and sit quietly for awhile? Can the insiders choose to spend a season sitting with the outsiders and learning from them? Can we carefully pray over every person in our communities, and name the blessings of their gifts, and give ourselves space to wonder how those gifts might change us?

What is so powerful about Paul during his brief stay in Sidon is that he is open to being cared for. He, who was previously the leader, the teacher, who prided himself on his stamina and his ability to live with suffering, now falls back into the loving arms of his community, and places himself among those who must be cared for – among the widows and the orphans, whom Christian communities have always tending to with love. He trusts that the people whom he led will now lead him. And he is justified in that trust because this truly is a beloved community, full of joy, humility, and the cultivation of love.