Tag: Control

Luke 18:1-17 Children of Mystery

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Gerald May, in his beautiful book about St. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, says this:

When we were children, most of us were good friends with mystery.  The world was full of it and we loved it. Then as we grew older, we slowly accepted the indoctrination that mystery exists only to be solved.  For many of us, mystery became an adversary; unknowing became a weakness. The contemplative spiritual life is an ongoing reversal of this adjustment.

For me, this is almost a paraphrase of Jesus’ statement that “whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” Children are comfortable with mystery and willing to risk failure in a way that allows them easy access to the Kingdom of God. We might pause and wonder why we listen to cultural discourses that wish to convince us to surrender the sense of mystery that we knew as children, and worse, to become suspicious of it.

As adults, we tend more towards the Pharisee than the Publican in Jesus’ parable. The same voice that convinces us to sit in judgement on other people also whispers that we must dominate and control everything. Control allows no sense of mystery. The idea that there is something that lies outside of control’s reach is anathema to the part of us that rejoices that we are not like other people. If we’re comfortable with mystery, we acknowledge that we have no idea whether we’re like other people or not. We know something of ourselves, but not everything, and we certainly don’t know what motivates or drives others. We might be better in some ways and much worse in others. But we have no way of knowing.

It’s easy to understand why Jesus tells the disciples this parable when he does. They’ve just been hearing about the end times, subjected to a description of loss and devastation.  “Don’t lose heart,” he says. “Pray always.” You might feel like you’re being abandoned in your distress, but you’re not. Something is dying. Something is being destroyed. But that destruction brings you closer to God, not further away. It strips you of the sense that you can control the world, that you are a master of the universe, that you are better than anyone else. It opens you wide to mystery, and this only feels like a violation if you lack the mind of a little child, to whom mystery is a friend.

 

Luke 10:1-20 Responding to Beauty and Mystery

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

First, let me introduce you to Andrew Hudgins’ poem, “Two Strangers Enter Sodom.”

Two Strangers Enter Sodom
by Andrew Hudgins

Those who’d seen them told the others,
and we gathered at Lot’s doorsills
to watch them eat.  They had just dipped
their fingers into lentils

and their slender fingers glistened with grease.
Lot bathed their feet, small feet
just barely dulled with earth, releasing
light trapped beneath a sheet

of fine dust.  Slowly he released them,
each small foot oiled and dried.
“I want them,” someone whispered.  Another,
like an ardent echo, sighed.

Another said it openly.
“We want them!  Send them out!”
we shouted.  We’d seen unearthly beauty
enter a house, bathe, eat,

prepare to sleep.  Some might stop at looking,
but others, seeing it,
would reach out and, touching, they would take it,
even if taking it

destroyed what they desired.  We surged
against the strangers, screaming,
and the angels calmly struck us blind
with the light of our own dreaming.

Still reaching out, we touched each other:
coarse cloth, coarse hair, coarse skin –
and cringed from it.  We pawed cool air
for the lost celestial men,

whose footfalls faded lighter, lighter
till they were light’s own light
departing – or so it seemed to us
in our god-dazzled night.

Hudgins suggests that the sin of the Sodomites arises from them knowing only one response to profound beauty and revelation.  When heavenly messengers appear among them, they want to rape them. They want to assert power over them, to possess them, to subject them to carnality.  Their sin is famous because it’s an extreme response to a common instinct. Faltering before beauty and mystery, we seek to belittle it, control it, and reduce it to something we can understand.

For a moment in time, the seventy disciples have become heavenly messengers.  They go to the surrounding villages to declare the Kingdom of God through their words and through their deeds.  Something profound is seeping through the corners of the world. Revelation is appearing in the corner of the eye.  If the people were to turn their heads and look, they would find themselves transformed. Jesus prepares the disciples for an encounter with Sodom.  Some, he says, will reject this revelation and use the tools of violence and rape to repress it.

Yet when the disciples return, they have not encountered Sodom.  On the contrary, they return rejoicing, and in welcoming their joy Jesus is at his most poetic.  Cosmic results accompany their traveling, and the small, biting malevolence of the world begins to fall away.  Nevertheless, Jesus says, don’t rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but that your names are written in heaven.  It is not the disciples control over spiritual forces that is important. It is their participation in the revelation of the Kingdom of God.

When we encounter beauty and mystery, when we are moved beyond our understanding and catch a glimpse of revelation out of the corner of our eye, how do we respond?  Do we reject the glimpse, attempt to control the revelation? Or do we simply rejoice, and invite others to rejoice with us?

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.

 

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.