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

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

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

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

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

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

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

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

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.

Acts 23:12-35 Playing with status

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know why I’m finding the ending of Acts so anticlimactic. Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading it through a contemplative lens, and there’s nothing very contemplative about what’s going on here. We get told about maneuvers by the Roman authorities to keep Paul safe, and there’s something of the potboiler about this section, but it doesn’t really lift the spirit or edify the soul. And since the entire ending of Acts has something of dry reportage about it, I will use these last posts to close out this study by returning to some of the themes I’ve frequently touched on. Today I’ll talk about identity and status, because Paul is relying on his status as a Roman citizen to keep him safe.

A very important thing happened long before the Diocese of Southern Ohio launched this Big Read of Luke/Acts. I was sitting with a group of friends and colleagues who were planning the Becoming Beloved Community initiative, and I said something like, “we need to be clear that a large part of Becoming Beloved Community is about combating racism.” Several of my African American friends immediately spoke up, and what they said surprised me. In essence, they wanted no part in one more anti-racism initiative. We’ve spent our whole lives trying to explain racism to white people, they said, and all of the church’s efforts have been about the conversion of white people. If we’re going to have any real change, it will only come when white people stop being the center of attention, when their need to understand or feel that they’re good stops taking all of the oxygen in the room.

I went away from that meeting troubled in my heart, because I knew that they were right, but also that their correct assessment of the situation meant that I couldn’t play a central role in the work. They were saying to me, and to other white men, it’s time for you to sit on the sidelines, to be patient and listen, to help where you can, but to give up the illusion that your transformation is actually helping us in any profound way. I affirm that it’s time for us white men to pay attention to a story that isn’t about us, and to not try to make it about us in any way. Obviously, the fact that I’ve written an entire blog about Luke/Acts demonstrates that I have a hard time doing this.

Like Paul, when I venture out to do or say something radical, I am always protected by my status. And during the last nine months I’ve been engaged in what people in the improv world would call a status negotiation. People like Keith Johnstone have written about how status works in our everyday lives. Status is a given. In any situation we are either playing low or high status. Johnstone uses the example of three teachers he knew in his youth to demonstrate this.

We’ve all observed different kinds of teachers, so if I describe three types of status players commonly found in the teaching profession you may find that you already know exactly what I mean.

I remember one teacher, whom we liked but who couldn’t keep discipline. The Headmaster made it obvious that he wanted to fire him, and we decided we’d better behave. Next lesson we sat in a spooky silence for about five minutes, and then one by one we began to fool about—boys jumping from table to table, acetylene-gas exploding in the sink, and so on. Finally, our teacher was given an excellent reference just to get rid of him, and he landed a headmastership at the other end of the county. We were left with the paradox that our behaviour had nothing to do with our conscious intention.

Another teacher, who was generally disliked, never punished and yet exerted a ruthless discipline. In the street he walked with fixity of purpose, striding along and stabbing people with his eyes. Without punishing, or making threats, he filled us with terror. We discussed with awe how terrible life must be for his own children.

A third teacher, who was much loved, never punished but kept excellent discipline, while remaining very human. He would joke with us, and then impose a mysterious stillness. In the street he looked upright, but relaxed, and he smiled easily.

I thought about these teachers a lot, but I couldn’t understand the forces operating on us. I would now say that the incompetent teacher was a low-status player : he twitched, he made many unnecessary movements, he went red at the slightest annoyance, and he always seemed like an intruder in the classroom. The one who filled us with terror was a compulsive high-status player. The third was a status expert, raising and lowering his status with great skill. The pleasure attached to misbehaving comes partly from the status changes you make in your teacher. All those jokes on teacher are to make him drop in status. The third teacher could cope easily with any situation by changing his status first.

Status, then, is always a negotiation. We “play” status. That is, with different people we are high status or low status, and we indicate our status to them by eye movements, posture, gestures, and words. What my friends in that meeting about the Becoming Beloved Community were asking was that I agree to accept low status for awhile. Sitting and listening in silence is a low status thing to do. Accepting that I don’t actually have any experiential “in” to another person’s story is a low status thing to do. Being humbled by my own lack of understanding, and by the array of human experiences that I have no knowledge of, is a low status thing to do. They were asking me to play low status so that they could, finally, play high status. In my own clumsy, misbegotten way, I’ve been trying to agree to their request. And yet, still, I’ve been writing this blog. I feel very much like Paul in this moment, full of a vision of a Beloved Community, but all too willing to fall back upon the status that my identity has given me without a second thought.