Tag: Individual Transformation

Luke 15:11-32 When He Came to Himself

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Starving, grimed with the dirt of the pig sty, the Prodigal Son came to himself. Maybe he hadn’t really believed in himself until that moment – believed that there was a real self, a soul, that was being obscured by all of the needs and wants of his false self. He had been living a life of sin, but not because he was spending his time on women, wine, and gambling. The root of his sin was a kind of atheism about who he was, the belief that he was nothing more than the jangling collection of his wants and desires. As Thomas Merton puts it, “all sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered (New Seeds of Contemplation, 34-35).”  

The moment when he came to himself was a theophany, a moment of encounter with God. It was the moment when he discovered his own soul.Merton, again: “there is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace and my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God.” This is not merely a story of a person changing his behavior. This is a mystical story, a story of profound transformation, a story in which God is revealed dwelling within the heart of a realized human being.

That is why the story has resonated for so many and for so long. Most people, if they’re honest, know that a change in behavior requires a change in perspective. Only transformed people can live transformed lives. This is why I’ve been so focused on the ego and identity in the last few weeks. Both the ego and identity are defensive masks. We wear them for ourselves as much as for other people. The Prodigal Son is a person unmasked. When you look at him, his soul is all you see. This is why his father is so excited, why he runs to meet this naked and exposed son. God embraces the person who has come to themselves. God, in fact, is already embracing our souls, is intertwined with the human soul in a double helix of love.

The elder brother continues to wear his mask. Unlike his younger brother, his is not a mask of self-license and foolishness. It is the mask of the upright, the person who refuses to acknowledge their own brokenness, the ego that believes that righteousness is enough.  The elder brother has not come to himself.

In order for him to do so, in order for us to do so, we need grace. Merton writes that “although I can know something of God’s existence and nature by my own reason, there is no human and rational way in which I can arrive at that contact, that possession of God, which will be the discovery of Who God really is and of Who I am in God….The only One Who can teach me to find God is God, Godself, Alone.”

 

Luke 13:22-35 The Narrow Door of Suffering

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday I talked about how Jesus’ teachings provided an alternative to the other types of Judaism being practiced at his time. In an anxious world that was predicting its own destruction, Pharisees worked at mutating their religion so that it could survive, Sadducees doubled-down on the old ways and traditions, Zealots sharpened their weapons and prepared for revolution, and Jesus looked and saw all of these choices and realized that they were united by one thing.  Each was an attempt to avoid the coming destruction, to somehow deflect the coming suffering. If only we follow the rules closely enough, the Pharisees said, we will not suffer. If only we maintain our power and privileges, the Sadducees said, we will not suffer. If we are successful in tearing down a corrupt and evil system, the Zealots said, we will not suffer. Jesus saw these beliefs as illusory. Suffering cannot be avoided, he said. The question is not whether we can escape suffering. The question is whether we can suffer and still love.

The disciples assume that they’ll be saved from suffering. After all, they belong to Jesus’ in-group. And, since the Kingdom of God is a vision of the world where there’s no suffering at all, it’s easy for them to assume that they can follow Jesus around the suffering. That the Kingdom of God is, for them, a kind of escape hatch. Yet when someone asks him if only a few will be saved, he tells them that there are no guarantees. “Try to enter by the narrow door,” he says, and then he goes on to talk about his own coming suffering in Jerusalem. The narrow door is cross-shaped. It is not an escape from, but a journey through, suffering, and not everyone is very good at accepting and living through suffering. Many will try to escape it, like the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Zealots do.

I am one of those who is not very good at accepting suffering. Suffering always feels like an insult to my capacity for control. When I suffer, my prayer practices tend to fall away. I grow sad and angry. I eat too much. I know this about myself, yet it always takes me by surprise. I pray through the good times, dedicated to my devotions, and I expect them to support me in the bad times. They don’t. This is mostly because they are mine, an effort of my own will. My ego is involved in them, and suffering strips the ego away. I strive to enter through the narrow door, but in the end, it is only grace that brings me through. Far from being the first, I am invariably the last to come to terms with suffering and let it shrive me.

Our world right now abounds with Pharisees, Sadducees, and Zealots. They’re entwined in our political and religious lives. I am often one of them, or at least I let my mind travel down hallways of expected self-perfection, authority, and dominance. Yet these are the very things that have to be stripped away if we are to enter through the narrow door. We all journey to Jerusalems of our own making, and our crosses will find us eventually. There is no just and loving way around suffering. There is the only the passage through it.

Luke 12:1-22 Is there a place for fear in my faith?

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

When Jesus tells us that we should be afraid, what is it that we should fear?  “Fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell,” he says. “Yes, I tell you, fear him!”  He is pretty obviously talking about the devil, but what does the devil mean to us? It makes sense to be skeptical of horror fiction versions of the devil, and suspicious of historical attempts to label people as demonic.  But there is evil in the world, and it stems from our furious need to control. There is a drive for domination that causes people to rape and beat those they claim to love, psychopaths to murder children, political leaders to advocate for and authorize genocide.  This is why Jesus talks about God’s deep love for us immediately after inspiring us to fear the devil. You think you need to dominate and control, but you don’t. God can show you how to let go of this hellish control, because God has let go of control out of love for you.  God will not dominate you, but will advocate for you. The Holy Spirit will visit you.

The thing to fear, then, is our egos, our false selves, the personas we wear, the identities we insist on.  They are all forms of the same dominance that destroys innocence and corrupts nations. Thomas Merton puts it better than I ever could:

There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify with the first person singular.  We must remember that this superficial “I” is not our real self. It is our “Individuality” and our “empirical self” but it is not truly the hidden and mysterious person in whom we subsist before the eyes of God.  The “I” that works in the world, thinks about itself, observes its own reactions and talks about itself is not the true “I” that has been united to God in Christ. It is at best the venture, the mask, the disguise of that mysterious and unknown “self” whom most of us never discover until we are dead…”Hell” can be described as a perpetual alienation from our true being, our true self, which is in God.

And that’s where fear can enter into a healthy spirituality.  I don’t fear God, but I fear my separation from God. I fear that I will be content within illusions of myself.  I fear that I will convince myself that sin is somehow justified, that doing wrong is part of a process of conversion.  It’s not. It is separation from God, and the conversion that Luke points us to is a union with God, an imitation of Christ that doesn’t show us our true selves, but is our true selves.  

 

Thomas Merton quote from New Seeds of Contemplation, https://www.powells.com/book/-9780811200998.

 

Luke 9:28-62 The Transfiguration

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

When Jesus comes down the mountain, he is not meek and mild.  He seems to chastise a parent whose son is possessed. He rebukes the disciples for wanting to consume the Samaritan village with fire.  Set against this is his kindness to a little child, his refusal to ostracize exorcists who aren’t in the in-group. Finally, he is mournful at the end of the chapter, and unbending towards those who would be his disciples.  This is a section of Luke’s Gospel that challenges our understanding of what religious experience is like, and the ways in which it transforms us.

First, the Transfiguration.  The past is present in this moment, in the persons of Moses and Elijah.  They also stand-in for Jewish identity, for the understanding of God that has been argued about and slowly articulated over thousands of years as the Hebrew people are formed, settle, and strive.  We often think of these two things as the most constitutive of our human nature: the experiences that form us; and, the identities that we’re born into and the identities that we choose. Jesus is in conversation with these two things, yet he refuses to stay with them, even though the disciples urge him to do so.

Instead he comes back down the mountain and immediately encounters a man in the crowd who has a demoniac as a son.  The disciples have failed to exorcise the boy’s demons, even though they’ve recently returned from all the towns and villages where they had no problem casting out demons.  Why are they failing this time? Perhaps it because of their remaining allegiance to the past and to their identities. When Jesus says he will be betrayed into human hands, he’s speaking to this allegiance.  After all, it is those who cling most fervently to the power and prestige that their identities provide who send Jesus to the cross. And it is the experience of insurrection after insurrection that lead the Romans to agree to crucify him.

Then comes the episode with the little child.  The disciples, in their fear, are trying to claim status and prestige.  Jesus confronts them with the child, who has neither status nor prestige.  Children are born into a set of identities, of course, but these identities have to be learned over time, and aren’t as settled with children as with adults.  The experiences that settle such identities haven’t happened yet. And these identities really don’t matter to the work of the Kingdom of God. Non-disciples who cast out demons in Jesus’ name are permitted.  The Samaritans, who reject the work of God because of their own settled identities, are left alone.

Finally, we are left to reflect on what an identity-free life that is uninterested in the past looks like, and what it costs.  It’s a wandering life, more unstable than the lives of foxes or birds. It’s a life where our past relationships really don’t matter that much.  All of this is present in this section, yet I struggle with it, just like the disciples do. I can’t pretend that I’m not a person who is made up of memory, like everyone else.  Can I hold those memories lightly, so that they don’t control me, for good or for ill? It’s dangerous to pretend that I don’t have an identity, that I’m not a white, heterosexual male and privileged in all of the ways that my identity is privileged in our world.  I want to hold my identity lightly as well, but I can only do that after admitting that it exists. Jesus does converse with Moses and Elijah, after all. He just doesn’t stay with them.

Luke 8:26-56 – The Way of Light

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Now we arrive at three tales of resurrection, although only one of them is a literal resurrection.  The Christian life may be said to involve two major movements, the via crucis or Way of the Cross and the via lucis or Way of Light.  The via crucis is that depth of despair that is experienced by a man possessed by demons, a woman who has been hemorrhaging for twelve years, or a man who is watching his beloved daughter die.  We all know our own versions of it – those periods of loss and grief that threaten to overwhelm our individual lives. We also experience the via crucis collectively. Numbers are important in this passage from Luke’s Gospel.  The woman has hemorrhaged for twelve years, Jairus’ daughter is twelve years old, and twelve is, of course, the number of the tribes of Israel. The whole Jewish people is suffering, walking the way of misery and despair. But the gentiles are suffering, too.  The Gerasenes are gentiles, settlers whose city is part of the Decapolis, the league of Greek cities in the region of the Sea of Galilee. They, like the Jews, know what it means to be oppressed by legions, and the five thousand demons that roil around inside the demonaic will not let the people forget their oppression.

Fortunately, we won’t be left walking the way of the cross forever.  In these three stories, Jesus brings each person through their travail and onto the via lucis, the path of resurrection.  Sometimes there’s a cost involved.The Gerasenes aren’t just angry about pigs. They have been oppressed by the Romans for so long that such oppression has become commonplace, easy to hide in the ravings of a lunatic in the cemetery.  When Jesus heals that lunatic, he makes the oppression obvious, even as he sets them from it. But the thing about our oppressions is that they are familiar. We come to accept them, and can even be reassured by them, because the alternative is a step into the unknown. Who are we once we give up the identities that the via crucis has pressed upon us? I might worry that I don’t know how to be someone who no longer grieves. Or that I won’t know how to be sociable, now that the reason for my social exclusion has been taken away. Or that I won’t know how to participate in a just society, when injustice is all that I’ve known.  To be resurrected is to step into a new version of the self, and this is often frightening and confusing.