Tag: Attentiveness

Acts 14:1-20 Rains from heaven and fruitful seasons

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

“You should turn from these worthless things to the living God, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them. In past generations God allowed all the nations to follow their own ways; yet God’s divinity has always witnessed to that which is good—giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, and filling you with food and your hearts with joy.”

I read Paul’s words, and my first reaction is to think, “Ha! That’s what I’ve been saying all along!” I started this Big Read through Luke and Acts by emphasizing attentiveness, which I, and many others, consider a kind of prerequisite for the spiritual life. And I hear this emphasis on attentiveness in Paul’s words – pay attention to the rains, and the generosity of the earth, pay attention to your eating and relish the simple joy of food and drink. Don’t assume that you need your idols in order to do this. Don’t invest charismatic leaders, or processes or procedures, or memories and hopes, or the material goods that you accumulate, with the status of the divine. If you do so, you will be drawing your attention away from the divinity that is all around you, in the snow and rain and sunlight, in the quiet of your home, in the love of your community. Look for God in everything, and not just a few select things that you think you can control.

I am definitely reading my own point of view into Paul’s words, and yet I don’t think his words contradict that point of view. I think they support it. Yet the response of the crowd gives me pause. When they find that they can’t worship Paul and Barnabas, they stone Paul and try to kill him. Thwarted idol worship leads to violence. Joy and amazement that can’t be quantified, controlled, and contained, is simply too frightening. And this response to a spirituality of awareness and radical amazement was not restricted to first century Lystra. It is present in our world, and very present in the Christian past. The great mystics were always careful to give lip service to orthodoxy. They knew that they were encountering the divine in a way that was beyond human description and understanding. They also knew that there was an entire culture within the institution of the church that was deeply, deeply invested in claiming that its understandings were correct, that our glimpses of God could be captured in words and written down as doctrine.

In our current time, our greatest spiritual teachers are indifferent to orthodoxy, and feel less institutional and cultural pressure to defend any orthodoxy they might have. This doesn’t mean that they have contempt for the past, for the pieces of wisdom gleaned from great church councils and the saints who battled over small points of doctrine. If contemplation of these things increases our capacity to love, then we should contemplate them. If we want to reject them out of a kind of arrogance, a belief that we are somehow better or more enlightened, we should resist that impulse and turn again to the humility that opens our hearts to God. If consideration of theological disputes is important to our living within the discipline of our communities, we should consider them. But we shouldn’t give our hearts to them. Instead we should remain attentive to the world, to the swirling of grace and divinity through the moments of a day, and to the Beloved Community of humility and forgiveness.

 

Luke 18:18-43 The Blind Man’s Calling Out

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

A blind beggar calls out to Jesus as he and the disciples are approaching Jericho. Jesus heals him of his blindness. In this story, Luke is telling us that we can only really see when we come into contact with the divine. Sight is not about our eyes but our souls. True sight is seeing through the eyes of God.

Almost all of Jesus’ teaching have to do with stripping away false sight. Consider the camel going through the eye of the needle. Of all of Jesus’ parables, this is the most like a Zen koan. It is not meant to be explained by the rational mind. It is, in fact, impossible, and Jesus’ tells his disciples that it’s impossible. In order to grasp it, and enter the Kingdom of God, the rational mind must be set aside. Why? Because its rational to worry about the future and hoard our wealth as a security against it. It’s rational to stay right where we are and not wander towards Jerusalem and, possibly, our deaths. It’s rational to fear death which might just mean the extinction of our rational minds. Yet all of this rationality doesn’t serve us. It wants us to feel like we’re in control and presents good reasons to hold onto that control. It will never let us become lost in the wild compassion and wisdom of God.

In these chapters, an understanding of the Kingdom of God and eternal life is intimately tied to prayer. Along with joy, forgiveness, and faith, prayer is one of the four great spiritual concerns of Luke’s Gospel. Whenever the disciples are presented with something that seems impossible or that they can’t understand, Jesus tells them to pray.  At first, it doesn’t seem like prayer is present in this passage, but it is. The blind man’s calling out is a kind of prayer, and his restored sight is a kind of prayer. Prayer is the active dimension of the kind of faith that would allow us to give away everything we own to the poor, and leave everything we know to step onto the road that leads to resurrection. Prayer is a reaching out to the divine, an opening of our eyes to divine sight, an entry into the Kingdom of God. It’s not about our comfort and security, but a forgoing of comfort and security. It’s a kind of freedom from the fear that leads us to seek comfort and security. It is sometimes embarrassing and weird, like calling out again and again in a crowd, making our deepest hopes and needs known to everyone, without embarrassment.

 

Luke 4:1-13 The Wilderness

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

There are many reasons why we might find ourselves in the wilderness.  When my mother died, I spent a year in a wilderness of grief. In a way I was lucky, because I could point to some loss, some reason for me being there.  Sometimes, we find ourselves in the wilderness without a reason that we can name. We are simply there. The world has become thin and arid. We feel lost and alone.

Whether we can name the reasons or not, the Gospels are clear that the wilderness is necessary to our spiritual life.  Being in the wilderness is a step along the path of awakening, of realizing the divinity within ourselves. Much of that awakening has to do with stripping away – losing our sense of insecurity and our craving for protection, surrendering our need to assert our status, setting aside useless shame and the stories that we have allowed to define us.

The wilderness is a place where the clutter of life is stripped away so that we can learn to pay attention.  Attentiveness is the first thing that the spirit is inspiring in us and that Jesus is modeling for us. His attentiveness was sharpened by fasting, and anyone who has ever fasted knows that it concentrates one’s attention on the body.  Within Christianity, fasting has always been a primary form of body spirituality, a way of getting us to listen to our bodies, a way of bring our minds and spirits into alignment with our physical forms. It is, of course, also a form of self-denial, of setting aside the demands of the flesh and the mind so that we can focus deeply on God and God’s creation.

So the wilderness teaches an attentive, embodied, self-denying spirituality, and most of us are poor students.  I don’t think I’m alone in being afraid when I enter the wilderness, and continuing in fear as I consider what each of the wilderness’s lessons will reveal about me – about the person I’ve been and about my limited capacity to change.  At the end of Jesus’ wilderness sojourn, when Satan inflicts three trials upon him, those trials enact our usual responses to fear, and assure us that those responses can be overcome.
Jesus was tempted to turn stones into bread.  When we are afraid or threatened, we reach for those things that normally give us a sense of security.  We might stuff our bodies like squirrels preparing for a long and dangerous winter. “Eat, eat” our fear shouts at us, “because you may not know when you can eat again!”  We are tempted to satiate our bodies so that we can go back to ignoring them, and curl up into a kind of hibernation until the reason for fear goes away again.

Jesus was tempted to assert his sovereignty over all of the kingdoms of the world.  When we’re afraid, we might take our security from a sense of power and prominence. Surely we are too powerful and important for anything to hurt us, and we should remind people of that just in case they get any funny ideas when they see us in a weakened state.  More than that, we should remind ourselves that we’re still in control, that God is only there to help us get through this, not to change us or show us the limits of our strengths.

These first two temptations are basic and recognizable, and we all fall prey to them.  But if we follow Jesus’s example and get past them, there’s still one tough temptation awaiting us.  Because the very fact that we overcame the fears that wanted us to fall back on our old patterns of security is going to make us feel pretty good about ourselves.  And it’s then that we might begin to feel that we’re better than other people. What enlightened spiritual beings we must be, to have resisted the first two temptations so well!  Surely other people must recognize our exalted state and find us just the teensiest bit worship-worthy. This, too, is in the end only a scrabbling after security. We tell ourselves that if we can’t fall back on ourselves and our known patterns of behavior, we can at least fall back on our community.  But we secretly suspect that they won’t take care of us, even when we know that they’re good and they love us. We need to give them other reasons for caring for us, we need to earn their love and admiration, or show them that we have earned it by our spiritual goodness.

If we avoid these temptations, then we emerge from the wilderness awakened and transformed.  Or, more accurately, we emerge with some wisdom gained that can help us as we continue down a path of more profound awakening and transformation.    Many things have changed in us, and there are many difficulties still ahead. We might, even, find ourselves returned to the wilderness as we move through life.  But always with the awareness that we’ve come through it at least once, and with a better appreciation of our ability to imitate Christ.

 

Luke 2:1-21 Divinity Entangled with Humanity

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

The Gospels claim, and Christians believe, that divinity is entangled with humanity.  The evangelists go even further. When Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God, he is saying that creation itself is shot through with divinity.  Divinity is all around us, and it always has been. Poets and mystics alike attempt to see through the veil of ordinary existence to the extraordinary, pulsating life of the world.  This requires a deep spiritual practice. One of my favorite poets, Denise Levertov, describes this beautifully with a line from In Memory: After a Friend’s Sudden Death: “to heedfully walk and sing through dailiness noticing stones and flowers.”  We must be heedful in our noticing if we are to cultivate a spirituality of incarnational wonder.  And once you start practicing this heedful noticing, you find yourself spiritually aligned with the shepherds: accosted by angels, filled with joy and fear, ready to rush off and seek the miraculous.

The most surprising thing about the miraculous in the nativity story in Luke’s Gospel is that it takes the form of a newborn child.  Ephraim of Syria, a fourth century poet and theologian, wants us to dwell within this sense of surprise. “Mary bore a mute Babe though in Him were hidden all our tongues.”  Jesus, the miracle, the Word that dwelled before time and was active in creation, becomes human as someone who cannot speak. You might say, “well of course, that’s how all of us become human.”  But if all things are possible with God, then Jesus’ could have just shown up as an adult. His incarnation as a wordless, squalling baby is meant to tell us something. First, that the spiritual practice of noticing and participating in incarnation takes a great deal of care.  We need to attend to it like we would to a newborn. Second, that the spiritual life is a journey, just as physical life is, and that it will have moments of trial and error, success and failure, growth and senescence. We are figurative infants at the beginning of our imitation of Christ, and we would do well to remember that.  Babies lack control of words, of their bodies, of their relationships. They are humbly reliant on the people who surround them. And that’s how we should start. With humility and the acknowledgement that we are not in control.