Tag: Awareness

Luke 6:1-26 Blessings and Woes

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Jesus upends the lives and thoughts of the Pharisees, and they respond with anger.  He sees that they’re angry, but instead of trying to assuage their anger, he ignores it and continues in his world-altering actions and teaching.  He chooses disciples, and although he’s surrounded by a crowd of people, he begins his Sermon on the Plain by addressing them directly. And what he says is almost a repetition of the Magnificat.  Those of us who wish to be disciples should hear these words directly addressed to us. We have a choice when we hear them. We can respond with the anger of the Pharisees, or we can give ourselves to Jesus’ message, even while admitting that discipleship is going to be hard.

“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God.”  We know that Jesus has been preaching about the Kingdom of God in the synagogues of Capernaum, but this is our first chance to hear the content of that teaching.  We’ll hear about the Kingdom of God more and more as the Gospel goes on. It will never be exactly defined, just described in a myriad of different ways. This first description isn’t really about the Kingdom, but about those who have access to it – the poor.  Why the poor and not anyone else?

Mostly because they’re the ones who can see it.  The Kingdom of God is that sense of divine reality that pervades all things.  Anyone can see it, but only if you stop to look for it. God sees it all of the time, and in order to see it we must align our sight with God’s, and see reality as alive with a shimmering beauty and goodness, free of contest and envy and anger, humble and simple, yet abundant in its riches.  We can’t see it when we’re full of the kind of pride that wants to convince us that we control the world and know what its like. The concerns of power and prestige have no place in the Kingdom of God, and if those are our concerns, then we’ll reject the Kingdom when we catch a glimpse of it. Jesus addresses this first phrase of the Beatitudes to the disciples as a way of telling them what their training is going to be like.  As followers of Jesus, they will learn to set aside their need for control and power, their fears and their jealousies, and embrace both physical and spiritual poverty.

At the same time, he acknowledges that this is going to be difficult.  You will be hungry. You will weep. But he also reassures. You will be filled.  You will laugh. And his third acknowledgement and reassurance is both the most frightening and the most humbling.  People will hate and revile you for rejecting the things that they feel are so important. But you will experience joy.  

As I said at the beginning of this study, Luke believes that joy is central to Christian spirituality.  And since we’re describing the undefinable, let’s spend a moment with C.S. Lewis, one of the great describers of joy.  He calls it “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” Joy, for him, is

a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure.  Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again.  Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might also equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want.  I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.

Lewis is very nearly equating joy with longing, a kind of holy longing that is given to us by God.  Anyone who has ever experienced this longing knows that it’s better to have it than to not have it. Without it we pursue our pleasures but they feel ashen, we acquire but the things we own are merely junk, rather than loved possessions.  Such longing is like a kind of swooning romantic love, with all its risk and fears. And if you can experience that kind of love generally, if you can swoon over trees and buses and people’s faces, then you’re very close to experiencing what its like to see through God’s eyes, and with God’s heart.  This can easily become painful, because if you love the world, you don’t want to see it suffer. And that’s why there’s a strong note of social revolution within Jesus’ spirituality. Once you’re truly looking, and seeing the glaring and amazing divinity in everything, you can’t turn your back on suffering.  You are hurt with those who hurt, you are poor with those who are poor. And you want those who are closing their eyes and closing themselves off from this dangerous joy to get to experience it, too, even if that means that they have to give up their wealth and their illusions of power and control to do so.

 

The Eternal Now

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

One summer, I disciplined myself to take walks like “Eyes” does. I paused to look at the patterns and shapes of flowers, the stippling of color along their petals, the bend of their long stems. I opened myself to the silhouetted patterns of leaves against the sky as the buds unfurled and the sunlight grew in strength from April to late August. When it rained, I stood over the puddles and studied my muted reflection, broken by the impact of drops and the ridges of ripples. One day, coming back home, I looked at the dirt and bracken beaten down around the edges of a parking lot, and I thought, “this is the only time I’ll see this with these eyes, see this particular pattern of twigs and trash and stones. They’ll never be in this exact pattern again, the sun will never slant onto them in exactly this way, I’ll never again find the posture and the position of my body that allows me to see how dark and hard their shadows are.” Everything is ephemeral, and I felt very grateful to God for being in each and every moment, for abiding in the eternity that these passing things have a permanent home in. They exist here only moment by moment. With God, they exist forever.

That Autumn, my mother died. She was in the ICU for a month, and day after day my father and I were with her, in among the tubes and trays and beeping machines. At first I kept to the disciplines that had filled my summer with such a feeing of grace. I quieted my breath, paid attention to my body, felt how my emotions played themselves out in my stomach and shoulders. I was a spiritual warrior, an unassailable castle, and I would agree to listen to grief and learn from it, but it wouldn’t break me. Three days before she died, my daughter and I went to see Arrival, the science fiction movie starring Amy Adams. The movie begins with a death, the death of her daughter, but is really about time and eternity. The aliens experience time differently, and their language reflects an understanding of the eternal now. My daughter and I left the theater with our hearts in our throats. The hospital was on the other side of the highway, and the tower where my mother lay was visible from the theater’s parking lot. I checked my phone and saw, miracle beyond miracles, that she had come out of her coma, and we drove to the hospital and found her sitting up in bed, her eyes open, mouthing words around the tube that snaked down her throat and into her lungs. We told her how much we loved her, tried to explain what had happened to her. She tried to write us a note with her swollen hands, an illegible scrawl. But it didn’t matter. She was getting better. Soon we’d get to talk to her, to sit with her at the dinner table, to watch her age with grace and, eventually, far into the future, die with dignity.

The next day she had slipped back into a coma, and my brothers were summoned from California to be there at her death bed. In the following months, as grief took hold of me and all of my disciplines fell away, my daughter would talk about time. She said that she didn’t necessarily believe in life after death, but she did believe that all time was the same in the eyes of God. With God, all things are eternally alive, in all of their different moments of existence. My infant mother was with God in the eternal now, and my dying mother was with God in the eternal now. And each moment of my own life, and my daughter’s life, will continually exist in God until the end of time. That is what is meant by God’s eternity.

To walk like Eyes, to be aware, to perceive, is more than a pleasant past time, more than a spiritual discipline that makes one aware of mystery and beauty and fills one with gratitude. To walk like Eyes is to touch God’s eternity, to see the incredible preciousness of each passing thing and to know that it really isn’t passing, but eternal. After her sister died, the artist Lori Esposito embarked on a series of “grief walks.” She would place water and dye on a porcelain plate and walk with it until the water had evaporated and a pattern of dye was dried to the plate. If the weather was humid, these walks would take hours – if it was arid, they would be quick. She walked in all weather. I walked with her once, and stared down at the crystalline patters of dye that rimed the edges of the plate where the water had splashed, and at the diminishing pool of tint in the plate’s center, the way it dried in waves, lapped like the patterns of tide on a beach. I breathed and moved my body and concentrated on the plate. Lori was teaching me to understand and participate in grief by understanding and participating in the now. Because it’s in the now that all things are returned to us. It’s in the now that the world is restored.