Tag: Individual Transformation

Acts 5:12-26 Peter’s Shadow

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

The contemporary spiritual world is full of talk about shadows. This is due to the influence of Carl Jung, who talked about shadows as those parts of ourselves that we want to keep hidden, both from our neighbors and God, but most of all from ourselves. When we feel a strong dislike for someone and don’t know why, it’s because that person exhibits our shadow self. Maybe we claim that they’re selfish or weak, but it’s only because we blame them for bringing our own selfishness and weakness into the light. I first encountered shadow-talk in childhood, when I read Ursula K. LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. In that novel, Ged, a very gifted young wizard, full of pride and hubris, inadvertently summons his own shadow while trying to impress others with his magic. This shadow escapes from him, and he must spend the rest of the book hunting it, and growing in the humility that it takes to face a shadow. The book reveals what we all fear – that those parts of ourselves that we are most ashamed of will escape from our control and hurt others. But in spirituality, shadow work isn’t about getting better at repressing this shadow. It’s about learning to treat it gently, to forgive it, even to laugh at it, not in mockery, but in joy, when one can see how ridiculous our attempts to control it can be. Shadows can be redeemed. And a redeemed shadow can even be healing to other people.

Obviously, I think it’s significant that it’s Peter’s shadow that is healing people. People put themselves in the way of his shadow – they don’t run from it, but want to encounter it. This, truly, is what a redeemed shadow looks like. Peter doesn’t lose his shadow – a redeemed shadow is not, simply, vanquished. In Jungian terms, a shadow is anything outside of the light of consciousness, so Peter is probably not even aware of his shadow. That is, it’s still a shadow, not something he dwells on with his conscious mind. In a sense, it’s still beyond his control. But all of those traits are exactly what allow it to be redeemed. Our shadow selves can be seen as those parts of ourselves that are the well of our creativity – the unconscious parts of ourselves that can prompt us to thoughts and actions that our controlling conscious mind would never deem to think or undertake. A redeemed shadow like Peter’s is much closer to the unknowable, uncontrollable God, the understanding of God that Jesus tried to reveal to his disciples. The power of healing in Peter’s redeemed shadow might stem from exactly this – its a vision of a life that is released from fear and control, a life that doesn’t try to project its own disappointment and disregard onto other people, a life that is willing to stand exposed in the stark light of God, revealing all of its good and all of its bad and expecting to be loved, not judged.

Of course such a life is threatening to those who draw their power and prestige from judgment, from convincing others that they’re unworthy and in need of rules, rituals, life-hacks that can somehow restore them to grace, or at least make them better. This is why the temple authorities try so hard to put Peter and his friends in the darkness of a prison. They don’t want people to know that their shadows can be brought into the light.

Of course, most of us, myself included, have shadow selves that are not entirely redeemed, and when we try to bring them into the light, we are just as likely to hurt as to heal. Yet when we find ourselves living in Beloved Community, we are met with forgiveness, not scorn or judgment. We can cry in church, criticise our leaders, storm out of meetings, and find ourselves still loved, still accepted. We all have shadow work to do, but one of the great gifts of the community that the disciples founded is that it gives us a place in which to do it.

 

Luke 24:36-53 The Resurrected Mind

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

I have not paid much attention to the mind while writing this blog about Luke’s Gospel, and now when I come to the end, I am struck by the fact that Jesus’ last teaching was not about ethics or seeing with spiritual eyes. Instead, “he opened their minds to understand the scriptures.” Just as he healed the memories of the disciples on the Road to Emmaus (and did some scriptural teaching, as well), now he heals the intelligence. I write those words with some trepidation, because, ever since the enlightenment, we’ve had a tendency to idolize the intelligence, to become dry and didactic in our study of scripture, to repeat the necessary discoveries of German scholars and think that we’re wise. Or at least that’s the tendency of those of us who are seminary trained, because seminary is about educating the mind, rather than the soul. Maybe that’s appropriate, since the deep, spiritual education that Luke’s Gospel gives us is the result of following Christ out in the world, rather than sitting in academic cloisters. Still, I can’t help but feel that seminary can do a disservice in its approach, if it makes an idol of the mind and the intelligence.

Recently, I picked up Thomas a Kempis’ Imitation of Christ and read these words:

God speaks in a variety of ways to all of us impartially. We are often too prying to profit from our reading of Scripture; we want to understand and argue when we ought simply to read on. If you want to draw benefit, read simply with humble faith; and never desire to be known for your cleverness. Be ready to ask, and listen in silence to the words of the Saints (1).

Read with humility, Thomas a Kempis says, and I take that to mean that we should try to read with healed minds. Because in cultures that prize and reward intelligence, the mind becomes the bedroom where the ego goes to tryst. You can study and learn out of a desire to dominate and control others, reading and writing out of a deep fear that people won’t find you intelligent, or clever. You can study and learn without ever experiencing moments of grace in which the mind, like the eyes, are opened to a deeper compassion and a greater love for all the world.

This might seem like a strange way to try and bask within the resurrection. Jesus is Risen! I hear you say, why are you spending time commenting on academia? My answer is that we’re only halfway through the story. Jesus is risen, and the disciples are called to form a resurrected community. In the weeks to come, my focus will shift to community, to practices that attempt to enact the kingdom, to the ways of learning and being transformed that arise when we learn to trust our communities and live in them humbly.  In these Beloved Communities, it is not individual wit or learning that matters so much. Or it matters only to the extent that it can be offered to others in service and love. The healed mind understands, as Thomas Merton puts it, that “God does not give us graces or talents or virtues for ourselves alone. We are members one of another and everything that is given to one member is given for the body.”

(1) Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, 1.5

Luke 24:13-35 Healing Memories on the Road to Emmaus

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Sheila Fabricant Linn speaks of this Emmaus moment and the moment when the two disciples memories are healed:

When Jesus joined the depressed disciples on the road to Emmaus, the disciples’ hearts were filled with grief and disappointment from their hurtful memories of Jesus’ death.  As they shared the events of the previous three days, Jesus listened and lovingly responded to each of the ways they felt hurt. Eventually the disciples became so full of love that they could forgive Jesus, themselves, and all who had hurt them.  The disciples traded their depressed hearts for Jesus’ joyful, loving heart. When they left Jesus, their own hearts were ‘burning within them.’ In healing a memory, we share our heart with Jesus and take on his loving heart until we can see the past in a whole new way, with Jesus’ vision.  By the time the disciples arrived at Emmaus, the greatest tragedy of their lives had been transformed into the greatest gift for loving as they joyfully announced to those who still grieved, ‘The Lord has been raised!’ (1)

As I’ve been reading the mystics, I’ve been considering what to do with memory.  John of the Cross talks about memory as the seedbed of the imagination. It is because of our memories that we can imagine, and it is our imagination that helps us extend beyond our limited selves and attempt to see the world as God sees it.  But not all memories are good – many are quite bad. And those bad memories may make us shy away from or even angrily reject our pasts. These memories must be redeemed if we’re to be healed. Sometimes we can participate in this healing by confessing our wrongs and seeking reconciliation. But sometimes that healing is a miracle.

For me, the most miraculous healing of memory came when I received a letter from a stranger. Somehow she had found a poetry book that I and a friend had put together in high school, and my adolescent poetry had spoken to her. It didn’t take me long to realize that she was the daughter of an ex-girlfriend, someone who had hurt me deeply in my youth. I was still carrying a wound, but this letter from her daughter brought me back in touch with her, and in our correspondence this ex-girlfriend apologized for hurting me, and explained the adolescent confusion that had led her to do so. My memory was changed. I had been blaming myself for the end of that relationship, as much as I blamed her. And I was, in certain ways, deeply to blame. But so was she, and once we had found each other again, she was the one who was brave enough to ask for forgiveness and reconciliation. This strange set of circumstances resurrected the past – it didn’t simply bring it back to life, it healed it, gave it new life, turned it into something that could feed my spirit instead of shaming me.  This ex-girlfriend, who isn’t a believer, still managed to be Christ to me as I walked my own road to Emmaus.

It’s when we experience these strange and unexpected moments of healing that we’re able to imagine that the entire world can be healed, that resurrection can come to everything. More, that we can give healing to others by reconciling the past to the present, by being honest about who we were and asking for forgiveness. This humility, this willingness to reconcile, is a blessing to others – it’s a way in which we bless others through our weakness, and through it shame is transformed into hope, fear is transformed into joy, ego is transformed into love.

 

  1. Don’t Forgive Too Soon: Extending the Two Hands That Heal, By Dennis Linn, Sheila Fabricant Linn, Matthew Linn

 

Luke 24:1-12 The Tomb of Longing

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Ten of the eleven remaining apostles don’t believe the women – only Peter does, and then only reluctantly, and with the need to verify what they say by running to the tomb.  Imagine what it must have been like to be one of the others. Called to be apostles, given power and privilege, they hide in the corner, afraid to hope, having surrendered their longing to dread. It’s the women who have enough longing to act. At first, they merely long to participate in a rite of grieving, to prepare the body that has been entombed without any preparation. Then they long to hope, to remember, to believe. But they accept longing, they don’t try to suppress it, and because of this they are the first to encounter the miracle of resurrection.

I’ve been reading the Spanish mystics alongside my reading and writing about Luke, and these posts have been full of references to John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila.  They knew more about peace and joy than most of us do, but they also knew more about longing. When he was dying, St. John asked to have the Song of Songs read to him, that great poem of longing that occupies such a strange place in the Jewish scriptures. He had been given great and tremulous moments of communion with God, moments of ego death when he was empty of anything but joy and grace, and yet he died with his longing alive within him, as we all do. However much we might seek peace and find peace, longing will remain. Even in resurrection. Even when we experience the miracle of the empty tomb.

David Whyte says as much in his lovely little poem, “Easter Morning in Wales.”  Part of resurrection, he seems to be saying, is the freeing of our longing. No longer entombed, it can emerge into the light and, in the light, it gives us eyes to see the beauty of the world, to experience its grace, and to respond with gratitude.  I have written about those glimmering moments when we can see through the eyes of God and experience life, all life, as God experiences it. That is what resurrected longing does for us – it makes us attentive and awake to these moments, it makes us what to talk about them, or write about them, as Whyte does. Our longing, when not aligned with God, can lead us to dark places. But when it is resurrected, and loosed from the tomb of our ego, it is that force which makes us pray and sing.

EASTER MORNING IN WALES
by David Whyte

A garden inside me, unknown, secret,
neglected for years,
the layers of its soil deep and thick.
Trees in the corners with branching arms
and the tangled briars like broken nets.
Sunrise through the misted orchard,
morning sun turns silver on the pointed twigs.
I have woken from the sleep of ages and I am not sure
if I am really seeing, or dreaming,
or simply astonished
walking toward sunrise
to have stumbled into the garden
where the stone was rolled from the tomb of longing.

 

Luke 23:44-56 Ego Death?

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

So what does Jesus accomplish on the cross? According to Adyashanti, a writer whom I’ve mentioned before on this blog, the cross is the moment of ego death, when divine radiance burns “all of the old conditioning that opposes spirit out of our system.” I like this well enough, and agree that Jesus is modeling the thing that must happen to us, but it can’t be what’s happening to Jesus. Adyashanti is not a Christian, which sometimes makes him invaluable, since he hasn’t been trained in all the expected ways of thinking about things and can look at the life and death of Christ from unexpected angles. But for Christians, Christ is perfect, from before time and forever, even when he’s arguing, questioning, and changing his mind. He has no ego that has to die. So although the via crucis and the via lucis are a model for us, I think it’s fair to say that Christ enacts the model without needing to learn from it himself.

I’m not sure he actually had to die. In seminary, we were taught that the Eastern Orthodox don’t really need western Christianity’s atonement theories. For them, the death on the cross was never part of some grand and cosmic plan. It happened because the people who found Jesus so threatening, the people in power who were all ego and didn’t want to be anything but ego, killed him. They didn’t have to kill him, but they did, because that’s what the defensive ego does. It kills those sneaky thoughts that threaten it, that whisper in the night that we’re not really that important, that we do not make and control the world, that the most we can be is witnesses to God’s glory. Of course, the Eastern Orthodox fathers and mothers didn’t use the language of ego, and of course they probably didn’t all hold to this thought, since people and their thoughts are diverse. But I loved learning about this point of view, and for the most part I’ve accepted it.

Jesus goes to the cross and refuses to save himself, not because he’s enacting some grand plan, but because he’s egoless. He doesn’t try to control events, especially if controlling them means hypocritically forsaking everything he said during the Sermon on the Plain. He accepts a blessed poverty, a blessed hunger, a blessed sorrow, and the blessed hatred, exclusion, reviling, and defamation of other people. He goes to the cross for the same reason the disciples set out on the road with nothing in their pockets. He goes to the cross in order to live the beatitudes.

I have not known this moment, since my ego is still very deeply present, but the person of Jesus on the cross reveals that there is a moment when the via crucis and the via lucis will cease to matter. A moment in which we will be as indifferent to pain and suffering as we are to health and happiness. The great saints, John and Teresa and all the others, have known this moment. They write about it and reassure us that it’s there. But they also tell us that it only lasts a little while. Teresa says no more than twenty minutes. Then we find ourselves journeying again, traversing the via crucis and the via lucis, because we are human beings, and not God. We will never truly be able to be like Jesus on the cross, eternally perfect and egoless. But we will know moments of such perfection, hanging suspended from our needs and our suffering, perfectly joyous, full of God’s love and compassion for the whole world.