Author: KPB Stevens

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.

 

Acts 25:23-26:32 Sweet friendship

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What, in the end, are we to make of the apostle Paul? Luke, who loves him, is not shy about telling us of Paul’s occasional foolishness and blind spots. Paul has been converted, but like any convert, the old self still shows up with dispiriting frequency. Recently I had a chance to chat with the psychologist and author Kevin Anderson, who told me that he tries to avoid using the word “ego” in his work. Instead he talks about the small self and the large self. The small self is what I’ve been referring to as the ego up until this point (although now, thanks to Kevin, I’m going to change my language). The large self is the transformed soul, in harmony with God and all of creation. It is Paul’s small self that led him to appeal to the emperor when the crowd was threatening him outside of the barracks in Jerusalem. It is the large self that saw Christ on the road to Damascus. Even at this late moment in our story, this moment that is near to Paul’s death, both selves are still fully operative.

Which leads me to some final thoughts on the transformed self and the very process of transformation. I have talked about how Jesus’ main purpose on earth was to lead people into transformation, with the understanding that transformed selves will be able to aid the repair of the world. Since the beginning of Acts, I’ve talked about how, after Jesus ascended, his followers attempted to create communities that could foster transformation and cultivate the large self. And throughout this entire journey, my not-so-secret spiritual companion has been Teresa of Avila, and her book The Interior Castle.

So I’m going to give Teresa the final word on transformation.  The Interior Castle uses the metaphor of a castle with seven rooms to describe the spiritual life, and the metaphor is crucially important. We can easily translate it into our own lives by thinking of it as a house, rather than a castle. Oddly enough, at the moment I do live in a house with seven rooms – two bathrooms, three bedrooms, a kitchen area, and a living room. Throughout the day, I wander from room to room. Teresa’s metaphor is a little different, in that not all of the rooms of the interior castle are accessible until God’s grace opens the door to them. But once all the doors are open, she assumes that the soul will wander in and out of different rooms throughout the course of a day, just like I do. Even the person who has entered the seventh dwelling, where the soul rests entirely with God, will frequently mosey out of that dwelling and into the first dwelling, there the little skittering creatures of pride, insecurity, vanity, and shame are as common as dust bunnies. No soul lives within the large self all of the time.

In her section on the seventh dwelling, Teresa doesn’t spend a great deal of time describing union with God, which is, as she freely admits, indescribable. Instead, she muses over how the soul can live in the world after being transformed. She writes:

You may think that an experience like this would propel the soul beyond herself, that she would become so absorbed that she could focus on nothing else. Actually, when it comes to doing anything relating to serving God, she is more present than ever before. As soon as she finishes such a task, she rests again in that divine companionship. In my opinion, as long as the soul does not give up on God, he will never fail to make his presence known to her in a clear way. The soul has grown confident now that God will never leave her. He has granted her this incredible favor, hasn’t he? Why would he allow her to lose this precious gift? […]

If her consciousness of the divine companionship were always that intense, she would never get anything done! It would be impossible to think of anything else or to function and live among other human beings. Yet even if the light of this presence does not always burn quite that clear and bright every time the soul checks, that sweet friendship is there.

The transformed soul, then, is not in a constantly blissed out and otherworldly state. Instead, the large self is so well known, so alive and constant, that as soon as we slow down and reach out to the divine, the small self can fall away.

In this way, the spiritual life really is a practice. I learned to play guitar when I was nine, and have been playing it ever since, without ever really becoming very good. But I enjoy playing it from time to time. Sometime a year will pass when I don’t pick up my guitar at all. Yet as soon as I pick it up, the fingers of my left hand stretch into the appropriate chords. The knowledge of how to play is part of my body, now. It’s part of who I am. That is what the transformed self is like. Often in our daily lives we are beset with tasks that require us to walk around in different rooms of our metaphorical houses. Some of these rooms still have all the furniture of our small selves. But we can enter them without worry, because, when the little skittering beasts try to cause us fear and anxiety, we can simply cast our eyes towards the divine, and find that the music of our souls is still playing, that God’s sweet friendship is still reverberating within us.

 

Acts 25:1-22 The primary world of the Kingdom of God

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The profound anticlimax of Acts continues, with more bureaucratic jostling by Roman officials whose names begin with the letter F. As a reader, I find myself longing for the beginning of Acts, those wonderful forty days when the risen Jesus was with the disciples, teaching and interacting, and everything was miraculous, bathed in a golden light. Where, oh where, have those days, and that feeling of miracle, gone? Luke seems to be structuring his two books using an ancient Hebrew literary convention, or at least a modification thereof. Stories like the Jacob cycle in Genesis start and end in similar fashions, and the most important part, the climax, if you will, is what happens in the middle of the story. So it is with Luke and Acts. Luke begins, and Acts ends, with nods to the administrative and political structures of their times (consider the listing of authorities in Luke, ch. 3). They both have significant sections spent outside of Jerusalem (at the beginning of Luke and during Paul’s travels in the second part of Acts). And Luke ends, and Acts begins, with the disciples in Jerusalem. The resurrection is the hinge point, the thing that happens in the middle that everything points to.

The resurrection invokes the Kingdom of God. I don’t think it’s going too far to say that the Kingdom of God is the resurrection world, the reconciled and healed creation. It is the place where miracles happen, where people are healed, where our small selves disappear so that our large selves can find expression, and where we can see, know, and walk with God.

J.R.R. Tolkien once gave a famous lecture about primary and secondary worlds(1). For Tolkien, our everyday world is the primary world, and the world of his stories (and the stories of others that often get described as science fiction or fantasy) describe a secondary world. He used these two terms, primary world and secondary world, because he wanted to make sure that his audience understood that his stories couldn’t be dismissed as mere trifles. Instead, he said, people respond to a well told story with the same emotions, passion and hope with which they respond to a factual, historical narrative. Our capacity to love and learn from characters from the secondary world is at least as strong as our capacity to love and learn from characters from the primary world.

I of course love and honor this claim by Tolkien, and have often felt, when reading or watching a movie or show, as deep an involvement with the people I meet in the story as I feel with the people I know outside the story, in ordinary life. Sometimes, I feel a deeper involvement, because I’m privileged, in a story, to know the inner lives of the characters in a way that I don’t know the inner lives of my friends.

This might seem like a long digression, but as I’ve thought about this distinction of Tolkien’s, I’ve begun to wonder if, for Luke, the Kingdom of God, the resurrection life, isn’t the vibrant, beautiful secondary world that sparks our imaginations and ignites our hope. I’ve even found myself quibbling with Tolkien’s use of the two terms, because it is the resurrection life that feels primary to me, and the drab, everyday world of corrupt officials and petty injustice that feels secondary. The end of Acts is rather a slog, but I think Luke knew what he was doing. He is providing a contrast between this secondary world of Paul’s imprisonment, and the bright, shining, miraculous world at the beginning of the book, when Jesus walked with the disciples.

I was reminded of this by my friend Sarah Iles Johnston’s wonderful new book, The Story of Myth.

 

Acts 24:1-27 Resurrection of both the righteous and the unrighteous

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Poor Paul. He gets stuck in prison for two years, and Felix, the governor, who is a rather feckless person, seems to be in no hurry to resolve his case. So Paul, and our story, comes to a grinding halt. Like I said, the end of Acts is a bit of an anticlimax. But since Paul references the resurrection in this passage, allow me to spend this post summarizing some of the thoughts on death, time, and judgement that I’ve gestured to while writing this blog.

The idea of resurrection developed in Judaism because of a concern for justice. There had been a revolt, and many people who were considered good and righteous had died unjustly. Some Jews started to worry about what this might imply about God. Could a just God allow evil to flourish and goodness to suffer without taking action in some way? Clearly not. Yet evil was flourishing and goodness was suffering. So they began to think of the resurrection as the way that God’s perfect justice could be shown on earth. Both the righteous and the unrighteous would be resurrected, and then God would judge them accordingly. When and how this would happen was an open question, and it has continued to be an open question in the intervening two thousand years. But regardless of when you think it might happen (and Jesus clearly tells his disciples not to waste time thinking about the when and the where), when it does happen God’s perfect justice will be revealed.

I have long struggled with this idea, and I’m not alone. Often the struggle comes down to a question: do you believe in universal salvation or not? My very inconclusive answer is that I don’t know. Sometimes I think that the entire worry about justice is wrong headed. If God is perfect love, then it’s not the actions of justice but the actions of love that we need to be concerned with. But even that doesn’t necessarily bring me to believing in an easy, free pass kind of universal salvation. After all, I love my daughter, but I’m not going to just forgive her and let her get away with anything she chooses to do. I love her too much for that. I think that it’s my role to help her be the best person that she can be, and sometimes that means restricting her behavior, demanding recompense, and being very honest about her failures. But here’s the thing. I expect her to do the same for me. If she, or my wife, or my dad, or my friends in the church, just let me do whatever I wanted, I would probably end up thinking that they didn’t love me very much. I would read their tolerance as indifference rather than love. Love is patient and kind, and doesn’t insist on having its own way, but it also creates a delicate filigree of relationship between us, and that relationship requires us to maintain certain practices and disciplines. We are subject to the dictates of love.

So if God is perfect love, then God loves us too much to let us simply skate off into an easy and meaningless salvation. When I am resurrected, I expect that I’ll be what I am now, a combination of righteousness and unrighteousness. I’ll still need to have my unrighteousness burned away.

I am obviously not the first person to think about this. This sort of thinking leads very obviously to ideas of purgatory, a liminal space where we can still work things out before being subsumed into the gigantic love of God. There are so many models for this, and they’re all entirely speculative. Maybe we get resurrected into an alternate dimension where we can untangle ourselves and gain freedom. Maybe in the resurrection we simply flip back through time to all of the moments when we were unrighteous, and have a kind of grand, cosmic do-over. That’s the fantasy held out by movies and shows like Groundhog’s Day and Russian Doll. Maybe we find ourselves in a gray and despairing city, waiting for a bus, like in C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce. It’s impossible to know, and the stories we tell about it are useful not as a definitive description, but as a comment on who we are now, before the resurrection. They use a purgatorial dream to help us understand how to work out our salvation with fear and trembling in our current lives.

In the end, I suppose I’m less concerned about the judgement of God than I am about the human potential for perfect righteousness. I agree with my friends the saints, with Paul, and with Jesus, that it is possible to live a life that really is life, to live in perfect imitation of the divine. No effort I make will allow me to do this, it can only happen through the action of grace. And perhaps that’s all the resurrection is. A time of grace during which God will help us to become sanctified.