Tag: jesus

Moses in the Sapphire Cloud

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

He was on the mountain for forty days, and what were those days like? Alone, the sky dense around him, the earth occasionally rumbling, and when he saw a glimpse of the divine, it was as if he was looking through stained glass, stained a deep sapphire. He sat and prayed, his hands folded neatly in front of his stomach, his legs crossed quietly, and he was like the Buddha beneath the bodhi tree, or Christ, caught praying in a future wilderness.

Later, the Syrian monk whom we call Pseudo-Dionysius found a model for his own prayer in Moses. “He enters into the gloom of the Agnosia,” Pseudo-Dionysius wrote, “a gloom veritably mystic, within which he closes all perceptions of knowledge and enters into the altogether impalpable and unseen, being wholly of Him Who is beyond all, and of none, neither himself nor other; and by inactivity of all knowledge, united in his better part to the altogether Unknown, and by knowing nothing, knowing above mind.” Agnosia is a closing off of the senses, so that the tangible world becomes unrecognizable, neither touchable, nor audible, nor scent-laden, nor flavorful, nor visible. For Pseudo-Dionysius, and the many, many mystics who came after him, this state of agnosia is the closest we can come to truly knowing God. For God is beyond our touch, our hearing, our scenting, our tasting, our seeing.

Yet a human being is more than a collection of sensory perceptions. Sitting alone on the mountain, deep within the divine cloud, Moses rested for the first time since he had heard a voice calling to him from the burning bush. When deprived of stimuli, the eye turns inward. Memory, desire, anguish, hope, joy, and hardship dance about within one’s mind. Day after day he had judged the people, settling their petty disputes. Day after day he had reassured them that they would be fed, that they would drink, that their bodies were worth something to God. He had fought Pharaoh and witnessed the calcification of Pharaoh’s heart. He had performed miracles. He had tried to make meaning of his experience, as we all do. But without silence, without rest, such meaning-making is necessarily surreptitious. Little jangling pieces of the puzzle present themselves, but there is no time or space to put them together. Blind, deaf, dumb, and numb, he still brought himself to the mountain, and I imagine that his forty days and nights were spent wrestling with that self, weeping sometimes, laughing, trying to make sense of all that had happened to him.

The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, writing in England in the fourteenth century, described the way in which the contemplating self is tempted to turn inwards. “When the soul first begins looking at this nothing, what does it see? As if gazing on a dark, mysterious painting, it sees depicted there all of its past sins, physical and spiritual…No matter where the soul turns, these sins never leave its eyes, until after a period of much hard work, bitter remorse, and countless tears, the soul has virtually rubbed them all away.” Moses must have confronted his mistakes and errors, his unkindnesses, his desire to flee from his mission, the inadequacy of his stammering voice.

In those forty days, he parsed every failure, rehearsed every mistake. And grew bored of them. Saw them for what they were. Only a partial truth, so small and unimportant that they could be subsumed in the greater truth of God’s love and silence. A spiritual agnosia embraced him, so that he could not sense himself, nor his past, nor his possible futures. Millennia later, the mystics would try to describe this, and find their descriptions cluttered with paradox. “At last, through infused contemplation and secret love, the soul transcends herself and all things and ascends to God,” St. John of the Cross wrote in the 16th century. “Love is like a fire. It rises perpetually upward, yearning to be absorbed at its very center.” 

But his soul friend, Teresa of Avila, used an opposite metaphor. “The spiritual marriage…is like rain falling from the sky into a river or pool. There is nothing but water. It’s impossible to divide the sky-water from the land-water. When a little stream enters the sea, who could separate its waters back out again? Think of a bright light pouring into a room from two large windows: it enters from different places but becomes one light.” Fire, water, light, each description entirely inadequate, the attempt to put words to the wordless, images to the imageless. 

This portrait of Moses, sitting in contemplation in the surreal mist, in the sapphire light, is an icon of a human being engaged in Contemplative Prayer. Not that Contemplative Prayer leads automatically to union with the divine. Not that you can sit to pray with that intention in mind. It is enough to experience noesis, the Greek term for the mind watching the mind. Thomas Keating has a famous metaphor for this. Imagine yourself sitting on a riverbank. Your thoughts are barges, slowly moving down the river. You can’t help noticing that they are present. But you shouldn’t climb aboard with them or travel with them. Just let them pass you by. Yourself, as watcher on the riverbank, is the mind. The boats on the river are the mind. The mind watches the mind. And sometimes, through grace, you experience a moment of unity with all things, and are infused with God’s love for all of creation.

Centering Prayer is a form of apophatic prayer. Mirabai Starr offers this definition, drawing on Pseudo-Dionysius:

“We must abandon all thoughts and sensory perceptions and embrace a darkness in which we wait patiently for an illumination that may or may not come. This is the via negativa, or “negative way,” and Dionysius attempts to describe God only in terms of what cannot be said about him. Knowing-by-not-knowing is also called apophasis because it describes what God is not. Apophasis is rooted in the Greek apophanai, meaning “to not say,” from apo, “not,” and phanai, “to say.” An apophatic approach to God literally means “to not say” or “to un-say” God.”

Moses, in his forty-day sojourn on Mt. Sinai, is understood by the mystical tradition to be engaged in apophatic prayer. Yet any reader of Exodus knows that the result of that prayer is chapter after chapter of wordy instruction. When he comes down the mountain, Moses doesn’t tell the people how to pray as he has just prayed. Instead, he tells them how he thinks God wants them to live. This is the paradox at the heart of the Sinai experience. Silence, unknowing, agnosia, lead to commandments, moral teachings, instructions on how to build the tabernacle and sew the priest’s robes. The boon that Moses brings to the people after forty days of unitive prayer is two stone tablets, and eleven chapters of the Book of Exodus that describe a radically different organization of culture, a covenantal relationship with God and with one’s neighbor, and a blueprint for building a kind of traveling Sinai that can shape a wandering people’s worship.

The priestly instructions in particular point to a very different kind of prayer than the apophatic prayer of unknowing. It is assumed that the people, collectively, will pray with words and images. Such prayer is traditionally called cataphatic. Cata means “with” or “according to.” Phanai, as we’ve seen above, means speech. Yet all of this speech, like the words in this essay, can be understood as being in service of silence.

The moral laws can bring one to a similar sense of unity with God, or at least a sense that the flow of one’s life is in harmony with the flowing water or the fire that Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross describe. The rabbis knew this, and spoke of it throughout the years. Take, for instance, this short passage from the Pirkei Avot, composed in Israel in the late 2nd to early 3rd centuries:

”Whoever occupies himself with the Torah for its own sake, merits many things; not only that but he is worth the whole world. He is called beloved friend; one that loves God; one that loves humankind; one that gladdens God; one that gladdens humankind. And the Torah clothes him in humility and reverence, and equips him to be righteous, pious, upright and trustworthy; it keeps him far from sin, and brings him near to merit. And people benefit from his counsel, sound knowledge, understanding and strength, as it is said, “Counsel is mine and sound wisdom; I am understanding, strength is mine” (Proverbs 8:14). And it bestows upon him royalty, dominion, and acuteness in judgment. To him are revealed the secrets of the Torah, and he is made as an ever-flowing spring, and like a stream that never ceases. And he becomes modest, long-suffering and forgiving of insult. And it magnifies him and exalts him over everything.”

A just society is one that is filled with such righteous people, although the rabbis also assured us that only thirty-six righteous people (the Lamed Vav Tzadikim) are sufficient to sustain the world.

The covenantal gift that Moses brings out of the silence of Sinai is a way of negotiating our relationship with the divine. We both seek and can sometimes know unity with God, but we also belong to the world, and the world can distract, wound, and elevate us. To be in the world is to be a self, while to be with God is to release the rigid container of self. Covenant is made up of praise and complaint. We praise God, asking divinity to draw near. But when we need ourselves to be functional in the world, we must find some distance from the totality of divinity, and we do this by complaining. This is Walter Brueggemann’s formulation. “The human self,” he writes, “is not an independent, autonomous agent but is always and necessarily preceded by a Thou, one radically other than us, who evokes, summons, authorizes, and “faiths” us into existence as persons.” We enter into a dialectic with this other, who is greater than we are, and therefore not commensurate with us, but willing to enter into a mutual relationship with us. Spirituality is the enterprise of coming to terms with this other in a way that is neither excessively submissive nor excessively resistant. The other always destabilizes us, undermining who we are or who we’ve chosen to be. We sometimes have to fend this other off, which we do through complaint and self-assertion, and we sometimes have to invite this other close, which we do through praise and self-abnegation. “Covenanting,” says Brueggemann, “consists in learning the skills and sensitivities that include both the courage to assert self and the grace to abandon self to another.” This is true of our relationship with God. It is also true of our relationships with one another.

The instructions for constructing the tabernacle and sewing the priest’s robes are arrangements for ritual, and that ritual is active and wordy. It doesn’t include idols, so images of the divine are not at issue. But it does include story. The names of the twelve tribes of Israel are engraved on the stones of “the breastplate of decision,” the overgarment that also hides the Urim and Thummim, used for divination, inside of it. On his very body, the priest wore the stories of the ancestors and their descendants, and when the Urim and Thummim were thrown to help with a major decision of national import, it was thought that the spirit of God guided their tumbling. The story of God’s guidance of Israel was present in these objects, as was the expectation of God’s future guidance. 

These priestly instructions can be seen as a kind of guidebook to cataphatic worship. But all prayer needs instruction. There are many fine books on Centering Prayer, much ink spilled in trying to describe the wordlessness of apophatic prayer. All prayer is a practice, is taught, is entered into and reflected on. Images and imagelessness, words and wordlessness, spin about each other in an ongoing cycle of prayer and worship. A prayerful reading of scripture might end in contemplation. Contemplation might lead to a word spoken, an understanding shared. God is both unknowable and known. As Richard Rohr so beautifully put it, everything that we come to know about God leads to ten more unknowns, and we can rest only in momentary truths and certainties as we encounter the overwhelming, eternal truth of the Ground of All Being. We both ascend and descend from Mt. Sinai. We both disappear into the beauty of God and inscribe our limited understanding on stone tablets.

Works Cited

Brueggemann, Walter. The Covenanted Self: Explorations in Law and Covenant. Fortress Press, 1999.

“Pirkei Avot,” Sefaria, accessed October 9, 2026, https://www.sefaria.org/Pirkei\_Avot.

Starr, Mirabai. The Interior Castle. Riverhead Books, 2004.

Starr, Mirabai. Dark Night of the Soul. New York: Riverhead Books, 2003.

The Mixture of the Multitude: Liberation Readings of Scripture

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

We gathered on Wednesday evenings throughout July and August, sitting around the ubiquitous plastic folding tables that are known to every church. Sunlight slanted in through the wall of glass windows, and the smells of the parish kitchen— old coffee, musty sponges, cleaning product— filled the room. We were there to study Queer Theology, a mix of older and younger people, many of us Queer, all of us bringing our own questions and experiences. Some of us, both young and old, Queer and straight, were content with the way that the church has expressed itself in the world over the past seventeen hundred years, while others were looking to Queer Theology to add to an emerging vision of what the post-Constantinian church might look like.

Our workshop leader, Dr. Judith Grant, led us through a very honest discussion of the three books that she asked us to read: Annemarie Jagose’s Queer Theory: An Introduction; Linn Marie Tonstad’s Queer Theology; and Patrick Cheng’s Radical Love. Our last session turned to a discussion of the enterprise of Queer Theology in general. It’s a postmodern approach to God and the church, and like many postmodern theories and theologies, it’s very good at presenting a critique. I am a fan of postmodernism in general. I like the critique, the hermeneutic of suspicion, the way that post-structuralist theorists challenge assumed reality and trace the histories of complex ideas. The history of sexuality is an obvious example of this, and is often used to counter fundamentalist readings of the Bible that denigrate same-sex relationships and diverse gender identities. So many of our assumptions about gender and sexuality are culturally determined, but how did they become part of our culture, and who was served by separating human experience into discreet categories and labeling desire? Are our current understandings of gender and sexuality even present in the Bible, which was composed and canonized in cultures that did not think about these topics in the same way that we do?

These are excellent questions to ask, but as we continued in our study, we wondered how far the critique could go, especially as it ventured into the realms of ecclesiology and sacramental practice. The power structures of the church are very prone to fall into domineering and abusive behaviors. A clergy person usually stands at the center of the circle of community, and that one person, with a small handful of advisors, can decide how wide the diameter of the circle can be. A minister might recognize that God’s love is limitless, almost absurdly vast, and try to widen the circle as far as it can go. Then the challenges of community, or the need for control, or a new friendship with a conservative scholar, might change that minister’s mind, and she might draw the circle tighter, willfully excluding those who had been told that they belonged. For Linn Marie Tonstad, this limiting of grace is almost a built-in feature of Christendom. She writes:

Churches that concern themselves with whether queers should be included often worry that including queer people is unfaithful to God. Such churches are concerned with faithful reproduction, which often takes two different forms: 1) faithfulness to established doctrine and 2) a concern for purity that expresses itself by determining who is allowed to approach the eucharistic table and how. The bodily purity of those who approach the table rightly is connected to their right to distribute the body of Christ to others. In this model of the church, the task of the church is to remain the same, not to change—to reproduce itself by training its new authorized representatives (ministers or priests) to defend the purity of the faith and to practice such purity in their own lives.

((Tonstad, Linn Marie. Queer theology: Beyond apologetics. Cascade Books, 2018.))

To break this open, to try to live as a different kind of church, is the task of post-Constantinian Christianity. But what structures might such a church have? Can it continue as an institution of any kind? Can it continue to ordain and give power to an exclusive coterie of leaders? Can it continue to use mid-20th-century business methods? Can it continue to espouse the systematic theology that it spent two millennia developing? Can it continue to study scripture using the 19th-century documentary hypothesis, or the careful parsing of historical, structural, and literary contexts? 

In the face of such questions, some members of our study group found Queer Theology very wanting. Like many post-structuralist theories, it offers a strong critique and a weak, or sometimes seemingly nonexistent, solution. Sometimes it feels like the only real path forward is to break apart the institution of the church altogether.

I didn’t really agree with this point of view, but it has left me casting about, trying to answer the question of how Queer Theology might be practiced within an existing church structure like my own parish. I am an Episcopal priest, trained in certain practices and rules. In our ecclesiology, only a priest or bishop can give a blessing. Only a priest or bishop can preside at the eucharistic table. We wash our hands in a lavabo bowl to show our purity. We either face away from or towards the people in the pews, who we might say are participating fully in the liturgy, but who often act as an audience for the priestly acts. We follow a prayer book and can’t diverge from its strictures. We follow the Revised Common Lectionary and shape our preaching around it. All of this creates a highly structured system that resists attempts to change it.

In the months that have passed since the end of our study, I have mulled over this question, and although I have no concrete answers, I have begun to encounter Queer and liberationist voices who are moving beyond deconstruction towards a new expression of faith. These are mostly biblical scholars, engaged in the project of queering scripture. They are very explicit in their intention to find themselves, and people like them, hidden within the Biblical text, and they write with a refreshing subjectivity. Take, for example, this passage from Rabbi Dr. Jay Michaelson’s article on Exodus in Queer Bible Commentary: Second Edition:

Biblical patriarchy is, itself, a social construct. Queer names do not appear in these genealogies – nor do many women’s names. The fathers and their sons, the tribes and their property – this is the history with which Exodus begins. Yet while it may seem immutable, it is, in fact, a fiction. Indeed, many of the characters who populate the book of Exodus reveal the imperfect fit between societal patriarchy and social and spiritual actuality. Our names, if we read in a certain way, do appear in Exodus – not in contemporary categories like gay or trans, but in the recurring mis-fit between socially constructed (or constricted) roles and actual, diverse existence. The text itself may not be aware of this subversion, yet through its veils, its queer personages shine.

((Michaelson, Jay. 2022. “Exodus.” In Queer Biblical Commentary: Second Edition, edited by Robert Shore-Goss and Mona West. SCM Press.))

For Michaelson, Moses himself is a queer personage. “Moses, who is both Israelite and Egyptian, and neither one, who lives as an outsider inside, not only ‘passing’ as Egyptian but, we are told, brought within its royal house. Moshe… never quite fits in, not only as a child, but even in his adult leadership role. He stutters, he has a temper, he seems like an introvert more comfortable as a shepherd (as he lives nearly one-third of his life) than as a leader of a nation.” Any societal misfit might find spiritual resonance with Moses. I find Michaelson’s queering of Moses not only convincing, but more honest in its engagement with his character than readings that see him as a paragon of virtue or an undisputed leader of humanity. One can even say that Moses himself was engaged in what we might now call “queering,” in that he challenged the cultural norms of his time, was engaged in an active process of imagining new ways of being in the world, and exposed the hard-hearted biases of Pharaoh and his cronies.

The poet Joy Ladin takes a similar approach to Jonah. “The Book of Jonah,” she writes, “tells a story every transgender person knows: the story of someone desperate to avoid living as the person (in Jonah’s case, as the prophet) they know themselves to be.” All of Jonah’s resistance and running away might seem odd to a comfortable reader, who can’t imagine why Jonah won’t just get on with the task that God has set for him. But to Ladin it makes perfect sense:

Jonah’s self-destructive response reflects a psychological pattern that is all too familiar among transgender people: flee from yourself for as long as you can, and when you can no longer endure the internal and external storms, kill yourself for the sake of others, so you can avoid ever having to live as who you are… Jonah’s flight from himself leads him simultaneously closer to death and closer to God. That spiritual paradox is at the heart of his story, and it was at the heart of the story of my life when I was living as a man I knew I wasn’t.

((Ladin, Joy. 2019. The Soul of the Stranger : Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective. Waltham, Massachusetts: Brandeis University Press.))

Moses and Jonah are well-known Biblical characters, and Michaelson and Ladin are unearthing their queerness, finding the ways in which their experiences rhyme with their own gay and trans encounters with the world. The Womanist theologian Wilda Gaffney and the feminist scholar Ellen Frankel take on a different task, investigating and giving voices to the truly marginal characters, and even to those whose existence is only hinted at by the task. In a wonderful essay on Zipporah, Gaffney traces the white supremacist scholarship that continued to read all Biblical figures as Aryan well into the 21st century. “Liberating biblical characters and their ancient counterparts from the clutches of white supremacist scholarship is womanist work,” Gaffney writes, “enabling hearers and readers of the biblical text to see the ancient world in its context, see diversity in the biblical and contemporary worlds as normative and God-designed, and to see themselves as the image of God represented in their Scriptures.” Gaffney presents a midrashic reading of Zipporah that emphasizes her multitudinous roles as motherless daughter, shepherdess, sister, clergy daughter, clergy spouse, ritualist (she knows the ritual that keeps the angel from killing Moses as he enters Egypt), ambassador to the enslaved Israelites, abandoned spouse, divorced mother, and ancestress.

A womanist midrashic reading of Zipporah reveals that she is a Black woman, a daughter of Keturah, an outsider to Israel transcending the binary of Israel and Ishmael. She is a motherless daughter, a sister, a shepherd, and a survivor all before she is a wife. She is a mother, a God-wrestler, and a divorcée. Then Zipporah became a single mother. Zipporah is a biblical matriarch whose matriarchy has been all but erased. Zipporah can be read as a clergy spouse and a church mother; she could be the patron saint of Black church women married to preacher.

((Gaffney, Wilda . 2015. “A Womanist Midrash on Zipporah.” In I Found God in Me A Womanist Biblical Hermeneutics Reader., edited by Mitzi J. Smith. Wipf & Stock Publishers.))

Ellen Frankel, in The Five Books of Miriam, presents her commentary as a dialog between multiple characters, including the Bubbes, or grandmothers, the matriarchs Rachel and Rebecca, the Prophet Miriam, Esther the queen, and Lilith the rebel. No single voice gets the last word. She imagines religious discourse as a dialog that takes place outside of time, and lets the people we meet in scripture comment on their own experiences and the scriptural narrative as a whole. She presents a feminist Talmud that values multiple readings instead of a single, authorized reading. While her lens isn’t explicitly queer, it is liberative, and follows the pattern of upsetting patriarchal readings of the text and imagining the wisdom and yearnings of disregarded, or even absent, biblical figures.

I want to end this brief essay by returning to Joy Ladin, who writes in her book The Soul of the Stranger, that

the things that cut me off from other people—my lack of a body that felt like mine, my inability to fit into gender categories, my sense of being utterly, unspeakably different—made me feel closer to God. God knew who and what I was. God had created me, fitting my mismatched body and soul together. God was always there, day and night, as I tried to live and sometimes tried to die. We were an odd couple, me struggling with a body that didn’t feel like mine, God existing beyond all that is, was, and will be. But when it came to relating to human beings, God and I had something in common: neither of us could be seen or understood by those we dwelt among and loved.

This is where liberative readings of scripture come into contact with the contemplative tradition, which has always resisted the church’s claim to have a monopoly on theological thought. Writing in the late 5th to early 6th century, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite also insisted on the unknowability of God, and his insight carried down through the ages, articulated again in works such as The Cloud of Unknowing and The Dark Night of the Soul. These works, and many others, form the basis of apothatic spirituality, prayer, and thought that is rooted in silence and an absence of images. And this, I think, is one of the major paths forward for post-Constantinian Christianity. An embrace of humility, a recognition that our claims to knowledge are necessarily limited, an acceptance that encounters with the divine will often lie outside of the mediation of the church. One could say that the Christian mystics were the first deconstructionists. They often had to carefully negotiate their position within the institution of the church, as their project did little to support that institution and often destabilized it. The contemplative tradition often “queered” what it means to be a Christian. Angela Foligno screamed aloud at the eucharist. Christina the Astonishing rolled herself up like a hedgehog and slept in trees. Francis took off all of his clothes in the town square and insisted on living a life of radical poverty. They lived in ways that pointed beyond existing structures and understandings to the intimate yet unknowable love of God.

The Anointing at Bethany

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

This is the last of my posts on the three poems published by As Surely as the Sun Literary Journal. Click here to read the poems.

Illumination

In many ways, this is a very simple poem about the desire to live in gratitude in the present moment. Judas’s complaint against Mary is unfair for many reasons. Perhaps he is a thief, as John’s Gospel states, and is reacting to seeing the money he could steal poured out as oil. But even if he is honestly concerned for the poor, his comments mark him as one of those people who believe that poor people should never enjoy any luxury or pleasure, and that they should never be allowed to give gifts, only receive charity. Such people walk around with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs tattooed on their brains, questioning why anyone would spend resources on the high levels of the pyramid while the base level of fulfilling physiological needs goes ignored. Who needs love and belonging and esteem when sleeping outdoors, begging for money, and wearing mud-splattered clothes? And if one were to somehow receive a gift of a few hundred dollars, shouldn’t they horde it for themselves instead of using it to throw a party or buy a present for a friend? Judas acts out of this logic, but ignores one basic fact: Jesus and his disciples are poor people. The scented ointment is being spent on the poor. Just not in a way that meets with Judas’s approval or his plans for thievery.

There is a freedom in Mary’s gift of oil that is based in holy poverty. I’ve used this term with friends who, like me, have lived through moments of material want, small paychecks, worry about making rent or paying for utilities, days spent scrounging for food and selling off possessions. I find that when I say the words “holy poverty” I then need to explain what I mean by it, since past experience of material deprivation makes it hard to think of poverty as holy, or as anything beyond a spirit-crushing slog through life. Yet great saints like Francis or Ignatius embraced poverty, and in doing so they made, with their lives, a spiritual claim. One can detach from wealth and comfort, and even come to see such things as detrimental to spiritual health. One can rely on God, and imitate Christ’s impoverishment. And yes, I know that there are arguments that Jesus, the son of a carpenter, grew up in a tradesman’s house and might have been considered middle-class at the time, if they had such conceptions of class. But as a teacher and miracle worker, he was poor and indigent, and although he attracted some wealthy followers, he himself owned nothing. He urged his followers to make gifts of their possessions, even to their enemies.

So Mary, if it is Mary of Bethany who pours the ointment, is doing nothing more than enacting holy poverty. She has come into possession of an expensive luxury. She does not keep it for herself, but pours it out extravagantly, a gift for the person she loves. It isn’t a gift with any strings attached. It’s an outpouring of gratitude, a recognition of the healing and resurrection that has already taken place. More than that, a recognition of the world’s beauty, the fact that trees and plants give forth fragrance, and that we can gather that fragrance and adorn ourselves with it. That nature, and seasons, and God, are all indifferent to our wealth and status. That gifts of beauty belong to everyone.

On Martha and Mary

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Here’s the brief illumination on the second poem that As Surely as the Sun Literary Journal published on August 4th. Follow this link to read all three poems in full.

How much of our annoyance with each other, our bitterness, our complaint and silent suffering, is due to busyness? Every great story has some element of sabbath in it. Because sabbath is the moment of reconciliation and peace. Not the performative peace of atonement and forgiveness. The simple peace of being being with someone in some shared space, and joining thoughts, smiling at shared hope, shared desire, feeling the boundaries of self thin. This is the truest ending to any story. It doesn’t come from vanquishing an enemy or completing a quest. It arrives unbidden, within an insistence on rest.

Martha and Mary have been turned into types, and then those types have been set against each other. As if to say that we must always live in competition, and that people can’t exist in any other mode. But we can, of course. Martha does not need to be chastised for her bitterness. Mary does not always have to symbolize those who refuse to help with the work. When their brother dies and Jesus comes to visit, it is Martha who asks questions, who sits and speculates, who asks for solace in her grief. Mary remains with the other women, mourning in ways that are expected of her. Both sisters take turn being wild, being thoughtful. Both know how to sweep a floor. They are not types. They are real people, shifting through the different modes of life.

Sabbath must be one of those modes. We cannot know God if we don’t know how to rest. God is more present in our rest than our busyness. But God will not hurry away while we make dinner and sweep the floor. God waits for us, for the finishing of our tasks, for the moment when we sit down at the table, in a state of peace, with all variations of ourselves present and at rest.

The Jordan is Not Too Far Away

~ KPB Stevens ~ 1 Comment

I have just had three poems published in As Surely As the Sun Literary Journal. You can read them by following this link. I’m going to publish commentaries on each of them in the next three weeks, starting today.

Sometimes I simply want to be inside of a story as if I were inside of a painting. The colors, the scene, the shape of clouds on a far horizon, the figures in the foreground, they all invite me in. But my participation is enhanced by noting the artist’s skill, the way that one color speaks to another. The way that an array of tones and tints leads the eye around the canvas, and gives it balance. When I sit to practice *lectio divina* with a scripture story, my prayer is enhanced by whatever small knowledge I’ve gained of the story’s artistry.

The story of the resurrection of Lazarus is beautiful, as much for its craft as its meaning. Jesus and the disciples are on the other side of the Jordan, where they are safe from Herod, who is seeking Jesus to take his life. The Jordan, of course, is the river that the Israelites crossed into the Promised Land. Moses died within sight of it but never crossed it himself. John the Baptist called the crowds from Jerusalem to come to the river and cross it again, and have that crossing be their baptism, the entry into a promised land of new life. He baptized Jesus there, and Jesus came up out of the waters, like a new creation. Given all of this, the disciples’ retreat to the safety of the other side of the Jordan feels like a surrender, as if they are giving up on the promise and the possibilities of living in a new way.

Mary and Martha don’t know where Jesus has gone, but the Jordan River is still part of their story. After all, water circulates. It evaporates. It comes down as rain. It flows. The waters of the Jordan are in the air around us, particulate and unnoticed, there to be breathed in, or to condense so that we can drink them. Lazarus lays dying, and his sweat contains some atom of the Jordan, the most minute promise and possibility. The allegory of rebirth.

Water. It flows everywhere in this poem. Sweat and tears are returned to the air. The river marks a boundary and a passage. Water flows from mothers at birth. It seeps slowly from the body after death. It washes away the dust of the grave. It is the blue of the painting. It is in the painted sky, in the embroidered flowers on the sister’s robes, in the flow of the river, in Jesus’s robes as he wades across. In the droplets that linger as he steps along the road, making his way into the hills. Its movement is its explanation, its need, and purpose. The poem serves nothing less than water.