Tag: God

“A Psalm” by Thomas Merton

~ KPB Stevens ~ 1 Comment

A friend asked me for my definition of hope, and I found myself talking about covenant. Hope is the love of neighbor and the world that keeps you going, despite all of the reasons for despair. During an interfaith panel that I sat on a student asked how the panelists different traditions maintained hope in the midst of political conflict, war, and climate change. I found myself talking about the eschaton. I said that Christians make a huge claim when we say that we know the end of the story. We believe that Christ will come again in great glory to judge the living and the dead. We believe that the story of humanity on this earth has a meaning that will be revealed at Christ’s coming. I also said that while I yearn to learn that meaning, I am afraid of the end of the world, and am in no hurry to get to the eschaton. I live in the tension of loving the world and grounding my hope in that love, while at the same time being reconciled to the notion that many things are beyond my control, and that the love of God will be made most plain at the end of all that we know.

Merton’s poem speaks directly to this tension. At the beginning of the poem, a psalm leads him into a revery of love:

New eyes awaken.
I send Love’s name into the world with wings
And songs grow up around me like a jungle.
Choirs of all creatures sing the tunes
Your Spirit played in Eden.

But it is a brief revery. Soon, in his imagination, the universe dies of excellence. All of that beauty, all of the singing of zebras and antelopes and birds of paradise lead these creatures, and Merton, into communion with God. As if, for him, it is the very love of the world that leads us beyond it.

The stanzas that follow describe the eschaton:

Sun, moon and stars
Fall from their heavenly towers.
Joys walk no longer down the blue world’s shore.

Though fires loiter, lights still fly on the air of the gulf,
All fear another wind, another thunder:
Then one more voice
Snuffs all their flares in one gust.

This is not a reassuring vision of the parousia. Not a painting of a renaissance Christ descending on a cloud. The destruction is real, the abandonment of joy is real, the fear is real, and the end is real. But the poet makes a claim for continued existence:

And I go forth with no more wine and no more stars
And no more buds and no more Eden
And no more animals and no more sea:

While God sings by himself in acres of night
And walls fall down, that guarded Paradise.

That “I” is important. Wine-less, starless, exiled from growing things and gardens, from animals and oceans, the person persists. If it is an “I”, a person, who falls into a trance at the beginning of the poem, it is that same person who enters paradise through fallen walls. The person who loves is the person who will be judged worthy of eternity.

Is that the way out of the tension that I feel? To go further into love of neighbor, of family, of the world as a whole, and trust that such love will be what remains of me at the ending? Is hope the covenant that draws us into heaven? Merton attests that it is. I try to love that vision enough that I can believe it, and set my fear aside.

Here is the poem in its entirety:

A Psalm

by Thomas Merton

When psalms surprise me with their music
And antiphons turn to rum
The Spirit sings: the bottom drops out of my soul.

And from the center of my cellar, Love, louder than thunder
Opens a heaven of naked air.

New eyes awaken.
I send Love's name into the world with wings
And songs grow up around me like a jungle.
Choirs of all creatures sing the tunes
Your Spirit played in Eden.
Zebras and antelopes and birds of paradise
Shine on the face of the abyss
And I am drunk with the great wilderness
Of the sixth day in Genesis.

But sound is never half so fair
As when that music turns to air
And the universe dies of excellence.

Sun, moon and stars
Fall from their heavenly towers.
Joys walk no longer down the blue world's shore.

Though fires loiter, lights still fly on the air of the gulf,
All fear another wind, another thunder:
Then one more voice
Snuffs all their flares in one gust.

And I go forth with no more wine and no more stars
And no more buds and no more Eden
And no more animals and no more sea:

While God sings by himself in acres of night
And walls fall down, that guarded Paradise.

Luke 8:1-25 Being the Good Soil

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Enlight206 2The Parable of the Sower is the first parable in Luke’s Gospel, and includes a handy teaching on the very nature of parables and what we can expect from them in v. 10.  Richard Rohr compares parables to Zen koans. They’re meant to split apart our normal ways of thinking about things and help us see with different eyes and hear with different ears.  Which is why Jesus tells the disciples that the meaning of parables are hidden from most people. In order to truly engage with them, you must be committed to setting aside your current ways of thinking about and doing things, and head off into the numinous but sometimes very frightening unknown.  The disciples, who have given up a great deal to follow Jesus, have already taken the first steps. They contain the good soil that Jesus is talking about, and will allow themselves to be challenged by the rest of the parables as he tells them.

Rohr points out that the Parable of the Sower is about exactly such spiritual readiness:

The seed fell on several different types of soil.  Some just aren’t ready for the Word. They’re not there yet.  It’s not their fault; when the student is ready the teacher will arrive.  Normally we let God in the way we let everything else in. We meet God at our present level of relational maturity: preoccupied, closed, struck, or ready.  Most spiritual work is readying the student. Both soil and soul have to be a bit unsettled and loosened up a bit. As long as we’re too comfortable, too opinionated, too sure we have the whole truth, we’re just rock and thorns.  Anybody throwing us seed is just wasting time.

This is a reversal of how the Parable of the Sower is sometimes read, with the assumption that the good soil is the orthodox soil, all loamy with received wisdom and intellectual obedience.  But there’s a second, shocking parable that’s buried in this section from Luke, one that overthrows many of our orthodox assumptions of a proper Christian life. Jesus’ mother and brothers appear, and he’s told about it with the suggestion that maybe he should help them negotiate their way through the crowd so that they can be by his side.He seems strangely indifferent to helping them, saying that “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.” Everything we’ve been taught about the central role of family is overthrown. Jesus wants us to extend the love and care we might have for our families to everyone, to break the boundary of family so that we might be more like God.  

Because God, as Ronald Rolheiser points out, is also subverting our expectations in this parable.  God is acting like a foolish, profligate farmer. “Who would waste seed on soil that can never produce a harvest?” Rolheiser asks.  “God, it seems, doesn’t ask that question but simply keeps scattering his seed everywhere, over generously, without calculating whether it is a good investment or not in terms of return.  And, it seems, God has an infinite number of seeds to scatter, perpetually, everywhere. God is prodigious beyond imagination.” This parable, like all the other parables, is meant to jolt us out of any understanding that would limit God’s love to the good or the worthy.  

In fact, our very insistence that God reward our assumed worthiness will make us into bad or rocky soil.  It will destroy our capacity to see and to hear. Again, Jesus shocks us in this remarkable passage when he says “For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed, nor is anything secret that will not become known and come to light. Then pay attention to how you listen; for to those who have, more will be given; and from those who do not have, even what they seem to have will be taken away.”  He is not talking about material wealth here, but to our capacity to listen, to be plowed up by what we hear so that we can nurture the seeds of divinity when we encounter them. If we resist being unsettled and loosened and turned into good soil, then the religiosity that has gotten us this far will begin to slip away. We will abandon the spiritual life and say that it was doing nothing for us.  But if we accept our discomfort and truly listen with open ears, even knowing that what we hear might change and disrupt us, we will begin to grow, and find our capacity to see and hear expanding day by day.

 

Quotes come from Richard Rohr’s Everything Belongs and Ronald Rolheiser’s Wrestling with God

What Kind of God Exists?

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

In the second semester of my sophomore year of college – a semester when I was alone most of the time, and sad, mourning the end of a relationship and trying to figure out who I was without the girl who had left – during this depressing semester I took a class called “Philosophy of God.”  I got a D in it, and not just because I didn’t do the work.  Within the first few weeks of class, it became apparent to me that the professor was interested in answering a question that I didn’t care about – does God exist?  I had enrolled because I wanted an answer to a very different question – what kind of God exists?

It might be that I’m a natural believer.  Every once in awhile we hear about a “God gene” or a neurological explanation for why some people are religious and others aren’t.  But until I was seventeen I thought of myself as an atheist, and any religious longings that I felt were easily filled by art.  I liked writing and I liked drawing.  The two activities took me to a place that was somehow outside of myself, a place where time could go by without my noticing it, and I could feel the taut excitement of creativity mixed with the satisfaction of beauty.  When I was seventeen, I encountered God.  I moved outside of myself while walking on a hilltop in Northern California, and saw everything around me with a precision and clarity that I’ve never experienced again.  I knew that God existed, and didn’t need philosophical proofs for that existence.

What kind of God exists?  I’m still asking that question, although I think I have more answers now.  And I feel okay about being a priest and asking that question, being a priest and admitting that I don’t entirely know.  I’m just echoing the confusion of the early church, the confusion that the author of the Letter to the Hebrews spoke into when he said: “You have not come to something that can be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that not another word be spoken to them.”  Obviously there was an argument going on, which wasn’t atypical in the early church.  Some of the believers thought of God in the good, traditional, Old Testament way.  What kind of God exists?  Why, the God who spoke to Moses out of the burning bush, and the God who whispered to Elijah on a mountainside, and the God who appeared to Job in a whirlwind.  But there were believers who thought of God as an idea, and believers who thought of God as a revolution, and, finally, believers who thought of God as a person.  A specific person, whom they had known.  Jesus of Nazareth, a man who walked among them and ate with them and shared jokes and stories with them.

It must have blown their minds, this thought that they had personally known God.  Only a few people in the entire history of humankind had been so lucky.  The patriarchs and the prophets, people whom God chose as collaborators in the great project of restoring creation to its original peace and beauty.  And a few people who God signaled out for no apparent reason other than to be kind, such as Hagar, as she and her son Ishmael lay dying of thirst in the desert.  But never before had God come into the presence of so many and various people, and never before had God come in such a mellow way, simply as a man, and a man who was willing to be decidedly un-Godlike, to let them hit him and insult him and kill him.

There’s a beautiful prayer from the early church that, to me, speaks to exactly this sense of intimacy and wonder:

We give thanks to you, every life and heart stretches toward you, O name untroubled, honored with the name of God, praised with the name of Father. 2 To everyone and everything comes the kindness of the Father, and love and desire. 3 And if there is a sweet and simple teaching, it gifts us mind, word, and knowledge: mind, that we may understand you; word, that we may interpret you; knowledge, that we may know you. 4 We rejoice and are enlightened by your knowledge. We rejoice that you have taught us about yourself. 5 We rejoice that in the body you have made us divine through your knowledge. 6 The thanksgiving of the human who reaches you is this alone: that we know you. 7 We have known you, O light of mind. O light of life, we have known you. 8 O womb of all that grows, we have known you. 9 O womb pregnant with the nature of the Father, we have known you. 10 O never-ending endurance of the Father who gives birth, so we worship your goodness. 11 One wish we ask: we wish to be protected in knowledge. 12 One protection we desire: that we not stumble in this life.

You can hear their sense of wonder in that repeated phrase, “We have known you.”  This is a prayer that is as much about the people who wrote it as it is about God.  They’re reflecting on something that has happened to them.  What kind of God exists?  The one we actually knew and sat down with and ate with.

Somewhere along the line we lost that sense of intimacy.  We began to think about God as more distant.  Christ became a king, and then an emperor, someone so mighty and awe-inspiring that we couldn’t approach him directly, but had to ask his mom or one of the other saints to talk to him on our behalf.  But we’ve been trying to get back to that earliest understanding of Christ for awhile now, since at least the 1970s.  Diana Butler Bass, in her fantastic and exciting book Christianity After Religion, talks about how the Pentecostal movement began the process of re-orientating our faith to intimacy and experience, and how this reorientation was picked up by the Evangelical movement as a whole, and how it has become standard now in Mainline churches, and a normal part of American life in general.  We live in a society that values experience, Diana Butler Bass says, and people expect some pretty exceptional experiences when they come to church.

There’s a word I learned a couple of months ago.  Heirophant.  A heirophant is someone or something that leads people into a direct experience of God.  Ever since learning this word, I’ve been looking for a heirophant.  I wish I could say that I was a heirophant myself, just by virtue of being a priest, but I’m not.  I, like many people, long for experience of God but have little idea of how to get there.  Yet I have experienced God in my adult life – never with the intensity of that first experience when I was seventeen, but still, in ways that are powerful and meaningful.  Twice this year – once in a moment of extreme and unlooked for happiness when I was driving past North Market in Columbus, and once in a state of raw emotion when I was working on a painting.  You may notice that I wasn’t in church on either of those occasions.

But then, I think it’s unfair of me to demand that church become heirophantic, or consistently be heirophantic, all of the time.  I think that we should hope for the chance to experience God when we’re in church, but that we should also bring all of those outside experiences with us, and share them with each other.  Maybe it’s okay to experience a moment of profound joy while driving past North Market and then go to church without the expectation of repeating it, but merely to say thank you.  And maybe it’s okay if, on many Sundays, church is simply the place where we go to be with other people who have had similar experiences of God to our own, and know where we’re coming from.

Some of us have had experiences of God in our moments of most profound distress.  I have a friend who went through an excruciating, agonizing divorce.  The world changed for her, everything became very sharp and focused, magnified by her pain.  And yet, at the same time, she couldn’t shake a perception of angels, hovering just beyond her view, a careful, guarding presence.  Some of us have had experiences of God in our moments of greatest joy,  when we were immersed in beauty, like another friend, a former student who was camping last Easter Sunday and stepped out of her tent into a mountain morning and experienced the fullest sense of resurrection that she’d ever known.  Some of us have experienced God best when engaged in acts of justice, like my friend Marco Saavedra, who knows God as a perfect love that wells up in him as he stages protests and takes wild and extravagant action in the struggle for immigrant rights.  Some of us have had experiences of God that are based in Christian worship, and hard to explain – the moment when light breaks across the pews, and the soloist’s voice rises high and pure from the choir, while the words of scripture still resonate and the table is set for communion.  Some of us know God best in the simplest way, in the joy and support of community, without the need for any extensive experience beyond that which is offered by friends and supported by an ethic of love.  And, finally, there are some who come here out of a sense, a nagging, itching sense, that there is a strong truth to the world, if only they could find it.  That even if the world often seems crass, and cruel, and tiring, there is, in Gerard Manley Hopkin’s words, “the dearest freshness deep down things.”  A small, quiet grandeur that is just waiting to burst out.

What kind of God exists?  I don’t entirely know.  It’s a question I’m learning the answer to all of the time, gathering the answer from friends and neighbors and my fellow Christians.  I know two things.  I know that I want to experience the answer, and not just receive it as an intellectual proposition.  And I know that I want to experience the answer in the company of other people.  Thank you for being church, for bringing your experiences and your questions, for listening to me talk, for greeting each other at the peace, for sharing a meal with each other.  For creating experience, in other words, and letting me be a part of it.

Jonah

~ KPB Stevens ~ 1 Comment

In collecting resources for preaching about Jonah, I found the following:

See Jonah Run: Comic Narrative in the Book of Jonah by Beverly Beem.

A very good survey of Jewish midrash surrounding the book of Jonah can be found in A biblical text and its afterlives: the survival of Jonah in western culture by Yvonne Sherwood.

A few questions from the reading – why did God want Nineveh to be spared?  Later in the Bible Nineveh rears its ugly head again as a threat to the Israelites.  The Assyrians, the people whose capital is Nineveh, attack and destroy Israel and Samaria and invade Judah, besieging Jerusalem.  Did God spare Nineveh so that the Assyrians could later be a scourge to the Israelites, or was it a real politick temporary measure in order to deter the Assyrians from attacking Israel during Jonah’s time, or was it that God extended mercy to Nineveh, and like most of us, the city took God up on the offer for a short period of time and then, later, changed its mind.  I know that the last option is the most preach-able, and probably the most coherent, since if God is merciful to Nineveh why wouldn’t God be merciful to Israel and try to stop them from being scourged by the Assyrian whip?  But then again, being a little suspicious of God’s motives is a way of penetrating Jonah’s own psychology, because what is he if not suspicious of God’s motives?

Something in Sherwood suggests another part of Jonah’s motivations – if the evil Ninevites repent and the people of Israel don’t, won’t that make the chosen people look awfully bad?  Jonah is a prophet, which means that he must represent God to the people and the people to God.  In this instance, his interest is in representing the people to God, and he wants them to appear in the best possible light.  But they won’t look very good if the blood-thirty Assyrians start acting all righteous and they don’t.