Tag: Individual Transformation

Luke 23:26-43 The Sudden Enlightenment of St. Dismas

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Now we come to the passion, and I feel tempted, like a great many Christian writers before me, to start talking about atonement theories, spilling ink, or in this case bytes, over that cosmic something that happened when Jesus died on the cross. But my intent with this blog has been to present Luke’s gospel through a contemplative lens, and heady atonement theories sometimes distract us from the love affair that the soul has with God, which is, to me, the great subject and interest of the Christian life.  So I invite you, dear reader, to go read some of the many, many books, articles, and blog posts that are interested in atonement theory, and then return here, if you’d like, for a strange little digression into St. Dismas, the penitent thief.

The contemplative life is not really a progression, although sometimes those who talk about it make it seem like it is.  It is true that as we grow in prayer and understanding, we feel ourselves transformed. But transformation can also happen in an instant, since all transformation is a gift of God’s grace, and God can decide to grace us or not at any moment. As I’ve written, I think there’s a purpose to our transformation. We are transformed so that we can live within the Kingdom of God, which means seeing all of creation with God’s eyes, caring and hurting for it with God’s compassion, and rejoicing in it with God’s joy. We listen to John the Baptist and Jesus when they tell us to be of a new mind, to let the old, broken habits die and to hold onto new habits lightly, always waiting for the presence of the Holy Spirit to disrupt us and letting processes of forgiveness and community remake us. I believe that this transformation is the purpose that our souls were made for, and we can learn to give ourselves to this purpose as we live out our lives. And yet it’s striking to me that the penitent thief who dies with Jesus achieves this transformation in an instant, by doing nothing more than attesting to the innocence of Jesus as he dies on the cross.

A number of years ago I was in Tokyo, and found myself looking at a sixteenth century scroll painting by Kano Motonobu in the National Museum. The painting depicted Xiangyen Zhixian sweeping with a broom. It captures this zen master moments before a roof tile falls off a nearby building and causes his sudden enlightenment. That’s all it took for Xiangyen Zhixian. One moment he’s sweeping and unenlightened. The next moment the roof tile has fallen, and he is enlightened. The same is true of Dismas, the penitent thief. One moment he’s dying on a cross for crimes he knows he’s committed. He says a few words to Christ. The next moment he is alive within the Kingdom of God, and his fear and suffering is transformed into deep love and compassion. His soul is alive with God, and he dies, like Christ, in a moment of exquisite peace, the grace of God’s created cosmos blowing through his mind, the presence of the divine burning through the fibers of his dying body.

The Christian tradition has given Dismas a name and called him a saint for this and this alone.  He allows us to understand that anyone can come into the Kingdom of God at any time, that God’s love is so vast that it can sweep up the righteous and the unrighteous alike. Many of us, myself included, are on long, patient journeys, seeking and loving God and giving thanks for those glimmers of the Kingdom that offer us deep consolation.  But if we ever encounter someone who has simply leapt into sainthood, we should not be suspicious of her, or deride her. Perhaps suffering has allowed for that leap, and perhaps not. Perhaps repentance has allowed for it, and perhaps not. Maybe it’s best to realize that the leap itself is repentance, metanioa, and that we can rejoice, with God, in the repentance of any person, anywhere, at any time.

 

Luke 22:47-71 The Mind of the Martyr

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

I wonder if Jesus was really afraid, and if he really suffered.  I know that there’s some danger in saying this, because we take such comfort from his suffering.  It explains and dignifies our own. But I’m led to this question by my beloved Teresa of Avila, who wrote

After the rapture has passed, the will remains so deeply absorbed and the mind so transported that for days the mind is incapable of understanding anything that does not awaken the will to love.  And the will is so wide awake to love that it is fast asleep to all attachments to any creature…The soul would gladly have a thousand lives to be able to give them all to God. She wishes that everything on earth could be a tongue to help her praise him.  She has this strong urge to sacrifice herself for him, but the power of her love makes the soul feel that what she has to offer is insignificant. She realizes that the martyrs didn’t accomplish much in enduring the torments they endured because with the help of our Beloved such suffering is easy.

If this is true of the martyrs, and I truly hope it is, then how much more must it have been true of Christ, the perfect human soul?  

When we talk about Christ’s suffering as he is beaten and mocked, I think that we need to acknowledge that this is not the kind of suffering that we know.  If we agree with Teresa that the suffering of such torments is easy for a soul that’s aligned with God, then Jesus’ suffering must be something different than physical pain or psychic fear. And yet we assert that he suffered. Teresa helps me see that he suffered on behalf of, not because of. It was not the scourge, the crown of nails, the spit and the insults that made him suffer. It was because he saw that his tormentors were in a kind of agony, the cruel agony of separating ourselves from God. Their cruelty could only arise from fear and deep self-hatred. They could not see themselves as beautiful and beloved, and so they couldn’t see others as beautiful and beloved either. Christ was egoless, but within his tormentors the ego continued to make its fierce and arrogant demands.

When Manet painted Christ being mocked by the soldiers in 1865, he gave Christ eyes that look upward, away from the soldier who is showing him the switch with which he will beat him. Christ is focusing on God, of course, but to me it always looks as if he’s also rolling his eyes. Is this the best that the ego can do? Try to threaten us with the pain that it feels, the shame that it dreads. Doesn’t it know that our our souls have the capacity to move past such pain and shame? For the transcended soul, the Christ-like soul, even the switch that the soldier holds could, in Teresa’s words, be a tongue to praise God.

I write this knowing that I myself am bad at suffering. I’m always affronted and outraged by it. It awakens my dormant ego, as if I had been sleeping and had cold water thrown on me. The ego wakes up shouting. It is true that this diminishes as I grow closer to God. Yet, although my soul has not transcended my ego, it is good to have the example of Teresa, of the martyrs, of Christ, to show me what it would look like if this ever came to pass. I can’t force it through my own actions, but I can hope for it, and be open to the grace that would render suffering irrelevant.

 

Luke 20:1-47 Beware the Scribes

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

As Jesus teaches in the temple, many of Luke’s themes of power and control, and the way that these things contrast with the dream of the transformation of the world, come to the fore. It’s no accident that John the Baptist’s name comes back into the narrative. As you’ll remember from the beginning of Chapter 3, it is John who stands against the power of caesars and high priests, whose voice cries out against their abuses. Now Jesus sits within the sphere of their power, and the chief priests with their minions, the scribes, come to dispute with him.

The direction of their attacks tell us much about the spirituality of power and control that they have adopted. Their opening gambit is to attack Jesus’ authority, since they understand authority as something that you inherit due to class or standing in society. In our society, authority is often assumed to adhere to white men, whether they’ve done anything to earn it. Jesus counters with the authority of John, which was not inherited but earned. John had authority because the people followed him. The priests and scribes can recognize that this kind of authority exists, but they don’t except it. They’re afraid to say this, because whether they except it or not, the crowds do.

So they move on to their second attack. Surely Caesar has authority. Isn’t paying taxes a de facto way of accepting a government’s authority? Jesus’ response is a shrug. It is, but that kind of authority matters so little that it really makes no difference whether you pay taxes or not. These forms of authority that the priests and scribes care so much about are illusory. To the mind of God, they do not matter at all.

Finally, the Sadducees show up, and essentially try to mansplain to him about why there can be no resurrection. Their authority is that of the precocious teenager who thinks he’s got it all figured out. They assume that the resurrection Jesus believes in is just a reiteration of this world, that things will continue pretty much like they do now, only better. Of course people will still be married in the resurrection. Won’t all of our social and political structures be pretty much the same?

And it’s here that the strangeness of Jesus’ vision of authority really comes to the fore. For him, authority depends on our closeness to God. In the resurrection, we will all be entirely close to God, almost inseparable from God. And God, who loves everyone equally, will invite us into that love. Our preferences will fall away. The loves we hold now are great training for this – if we allow them to, they will form us in love, increase our capacity for love. But they are a mere glimpse of God’s love, and when we are transformed into pulsations of that love, we will forget the particularities that formed us. Since the priests and scribes and sadducees rely on a different understanding of authority, one based on power rather than love, they cannot understand this. And Jesus warns us to beware of anyone who cannot understand holy love and who resist any formation in it.

Luke 19:28-48 Oppression and Transformation

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There’s a very real way in which Jesus’ actions as he enters Jerusalem are political theater.  He stages an entrance that is very similar to a Roman triumph, when a returning general would parade his troops through the streets and show off his captured enemies.  And the people of Jerusalem were used to these triumphs, having been conquered many times. The Macedonian king Alexander the Great had entered Jerusalem in triumph in 332 BCE.  The Roman general Pompey entered Jerusalem in 63 BCE. And on the same day that Jesus entered Jerusalem, Pilate brought up troops from Caesarea Maritima and processed them through the city.  Jesus’ procession was meant as a kind of protest to this display of Roman Imperial power. Pilate processed as a prince of war. Jesus processed as a prince of peace.

His actions in the temple were also political theater.  The temple was the place where people came to be reconciled to God, which they did by paying for the priests to sacrifice live animals on their behalf.  In this way, the temple controlled access to God. But the temple also collected taxes for the Romans, and stored the records of debt. So the temple was both a bank and a place of worship, and it was presided over by a High Priest who was in the Romans’ pocket.  So Jesus’ driving out of the money changers was an act of protest against this whole system. He didn’t think that we need anything to mediate between us and God, and he protested the system of economic and political domination that the temple had come to represent.

But what, if anything, does political theater have to do with the spiritual life?  It’s often the domain of activists, and while some of them are deeply spiritual people, some are not.  Some are more guided by anger than love. Yet Jesus makes clear that following him includes following him to Jerusalem, a place where oppression and political evil cannot be denied, a place where a once beautiful idealism has rotted.  How can a contemplative, who is driven by a deep affinity with God’s love for the world, encounter and protest oppression without going astray?

Gerald May, in his book The Dark Night of the Soul, which is primarily about Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, has some useful thoughts about this:

Instead of looking into social and political dynamics specifically, Teresa and John keep returning to the experience of the individual soul in relationship to God.  I have found this to be true of other contemplative writers as well. It is not that they are unconcerned with social liberation and justice, but that they are convinced such transformation will happen only through the changing of individual hearts.  The Dalai Lama put it starkly in 1991: “Although attempting to bring about world peace through the internal transformation of individuals is difficult, it is the only way.”

Jesus’ theatrics is not meant to bring the temple system down – he knows that it will fall under its own weight fairly soon.  His actions are meant to bring into question the very suppositions that the temple system is based on. Do we need to purchase God’s forgiveness through sacrifice?  Do we need our relationship with God to be mediated by a religious or political system? When we’re faced with a controlling and dominating person or group, is our only recourse to control and dominate in return?  His actions confront the many assumptions that get in the way of transformation. As long as violence, dominance, and oppression go unquestioned, the world can’t be transformed. But more than that, as long we refuse to question those forces in our spiritual lives, we can’t be transformed, and the transformation of the world depends on our internal work.

 

Luke 16:1-18 Eternal Habitations

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

I was sitting with other clergy in a Bible Study, and we were arguing about this passage.  After awhile I became indifferent to the argument, and began to think about the dishonest wealth that I had received in my life.  I took out a sketch book and wrote this poem for my wife:

Eternal Habitations

You are my dishonest wealth.
Close-faced when I met you,
we walked on snow as dry as sand.
I talked about North Africa.
I was so exotic.  You were very quiet.

Later we walked on grass.
I sang “My Funny Valentine” to you.
It was so exotic, this wealth of love.
I was still only half myself.
I lied and said, “I’m this, and this.”
Truth grew thin so I could replace it.

Years later she walked on grass,
our daughter, in blue overalls.
It was so exotic, the sunlight in her hair.
I was aware of how my pretense had allowed
our movement to a house, her birth,
our happiness the gift of how
I’d preened and postured –
on snow, dry as a desert,
on grass, with song, and all along,
we slowly saw through to each other.

I don’t deserve my wife’s love, and she doesn’t deserve mine.  We were so unformed when we met that we could only be dishonest.  We had no truth to tell, yet. We created the truth of ourselves together, the truth of who we were as individuals and the truth of who we are as a couple.   Our love for each other was a kind of grace – more than we deserved, but always there, and always shaping us. Because of our love, I understand the kind of dishonest wealth that Jesus is talking about.  I’ve been the recipient of it.

The wealth we receive from God is always dishonest.  We can do nothing to merit it, we can only accept it.  Once we’ve received it, we need to be faithful with it.  We need to cosset it and protect it and be grateful for it.  This is why Jesus’ seemingly random statement about divorce at the end of this passage makes sense to me.  If I know this dishonest wealth through my marriage, then I need to protect my marriage, to treat it as precious.  And this is true of any of the great, gifted loves. Not everyone is meant for marriage, and not every marriage is a form of dishonest wealth.  Sometimes they’re just dishonest. But when one receives the gift of love, from whatever source, one must be faithful to it. True riches, the riches that only God can give, will follow.