Tag: Joy

Posts that reflect on joy and spirituality.

Acts 20:17-38 Saying Goodbye

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

This is Paul’s farewell address, and I hear an echo of Jesus’ own farewell address in it. In the twenty-second chapter of Luke, Jesus also meets with his disciples in a room. He has more clarity about what’s going to happen to him than Paul does, who doesn’t know that the journey he’s undertaking will eventually end in his death. Still, Paul expresses that he’s worried when he meets with his friends in Miletus. Both Jesus and Paul understand the urgency of the situation – that they are leaving behind a community that will need to act with an ethic of love and servitude, and that will be tested. The disciples at the Last Supper will see Jesus again soon, although they don’t quite believe his assurances that this is so. The church of Ephesus will never see Paul again. Both of these scenes are full of weeping, fear, hope, and prayer.

Is it appropriate to speak of a spirituality of departing? I have left many places in my life. Sometimes I’ve departed well, and sometimes just slipped away. In those moments when I snuck away in the middle of the night, I told myself that I was doing so because I didn’t want a big deal to be made of my departure. It would’ve been truer to say that I didn’t want to be disappointed if people didn’t react to my leaving in the way that I wanted them to. So I didn’t giving them a chance to react at all. In those moments when people have made a big deal of my departing, I’ve been slightly embarrassed, but also grateful because I’ve had the opportunity to express my love of them and my sadness over the fact that I was going. Reflecting on this, it seems that my ego was more involved, and more fragile, in those moments when I just slipped away. I wish that I had imitated Paul, and treated a good departure as another gift of community.

Last summer, when I was just beginning to think about the spirituality of Luke and Acts, I talked to the children at church about joy. We explored together the different kinds of joy that one can experience – sad joy, happy joy, creative joy, silly joy, and many other varieties. I used the example of parents sending their kids off to college – not the best example for six year olds, but on my heart since my own daughter will be leaving for college within a few years. We can have joy in such moments, I suggested, because we’re proud of our loved ones and excited for the rest of their lives. At exactly the same moment, we can feel grief because something that’s been so important to us is coming to an end. This, too, must be part of the spirituality of departing. The willingness to let ourselves feel everything – love, sorrow, joy, worry for the future, nostalgia for a vanishing past.

To say that something has a spirituality is to say that the Holy Spirit is active in it. I think that the Holy Spirit is very active in this departure that Paul takes from the church in Ephesus. I think it’s also present in all of our departures, if we can set our own egos aside and pay attention to it. Such moments can teach a huge array of spiritual virtues, not in spite of, but because of their sadness. We learn what things mean to us when we let them go. And although we’re called to hold our positions and even our relationships lightly, even though we shouldn’t try to control them or insist on having our own way, that doesn’t mean that we’re not allowed to feel deep and authentic emotion when we come to the end of a time of sojourning together.

 

Acts 12:1-19 Angels and Laughter

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

As I have said, many of the stories that Luke relates must have been told around the communal table when the early church met to pray and break bread together. I find it easy to believe that this story must have been a popular favorite, one that people asked to hear again and again. It was full of wonder, but also contained the slapstick humor of the maid Rhoda slamming the door in Peter’s face and not reopening it until she had talked to the praying disciples. This is a daffy, charming description of how people act, and its inclusion here is vital to my understanding of Luke’s spirituality. Through this simple story, he seems to be telling us that it’s okay to laugh, to find amusement, even to experience joy in the midst of dark times. In fact, it’s more holy to do this than it is to insist on acknowledging nothing but misery and sorrow.

Some people get angry when they encounter such seeming frivolity in a serious moment. Yet Rhoda’s response is, to my mind, in keeping with the presence of angels in Luke’s story. This is the fifth time that angels have appeared in the Acts of the Apostles. Two men in white robes stand beside the disciples in chapter one as Jesus is ascending into heaven. An angel appears to Philip and sends him off to meet the Ethiopian eunuch. An angel appears to Cornelius and tells him to send men to Joppa to find Peter. And, in Acts 5, the angels are responsible for another jailbreak, letting the apostles out of prison so that they can keep preaching in the temple. Angels seem to be always coming and going, and their main task seems to be the expansion of the group of believers, the widening of community. In every instance, the people they appear to do what they say – there is no denial of angels in this story. Angels appear, and the only response to them, Luke tells us, is acceptance.

He seems to feel the same way about Rhoda, and about the other funny little anecdotes that he sometimes weaves into his narrative. Rather than trying to repress them as frivolous, Luke is happy to tell us about weird things happening and people responding to them in inappropriate ways. I think that he wants us to know these stories because he wants us to be forgiving when it comes to our own inappropriate responses. For him, a beloved community is not a community of censure. Things will happen in these communities that we don’t know how to react to, and because we’re confused our reactions will be off, and sometimes blatantly wrong. If anyone is truly hurt by our wrongness, we should apologize. But a better response is to laugh at our own capacity for mistakes, to take a kind of delight in them, since none of us is perfect, and we’re all going to find ourselves in Rhoda’s position at one moment or another. And isn’t it wonderful that this community no longer always reacts to angels with fear and trembling, which was the usual response to angelic appearances in Luke’s Gospel? Sometimes there’s terror, but just as often there’s wonder that leads to a kind of hinky, stumbling reaction, and instead of finding this inappropriate, the community finds it delightful, and wants to hear about it again and again.

Acts 10:1-16 Shocking Visions and the Temple

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Cornelius is praying at 3:00 in the afternoon, which is the time of the temple sacrifice far away in Jerusalem. But divine presence doesn’t make itself felt in the temple. Instead an angel appears to Cornelius, who is a gentile, a centurion who has shown interest in Judaism and is generous in giving alms. But Cornelius has no proper right to divine visitation, at least in the minds of the temple authorities. And those authorities are unseen characters in this section. The temple laws and rules are still very much alive in the minds of Peter and the other disciples. They’ve been going to the temple a lot, and they can’t enter the temple unless they’re ritually pure. As L. William Countryman points out, “because worshipers were expected to be pure when entering the Temple, the implication is that the Christians maintained themselves in a state of constant purity.”

Unlike that other centurion in Luke 7:1-10, there is no urgency in Cornelius’ request. He doesn’t have a beloved servant who is dying. Peter, who’s been traveling wherever he’s needed, might have good reason to question whether Cornelius actually does need him. What is this summons all about?

But of course, he doesn’t receive the summons until he has a vision of his own. And the vision he gets is startling. That blanket full of food that descends from the sky isn’t just telling him to enjoy some pork and shellfish. It’s telling him that his time in the temple is over for now, that he won’t be able to return to the purity that allowed him entry. The fact that it descends three times during the vision (and, possibly accompanied by the same dialog with the heavenly voice each time) should remind us of Peter’s three denials of Christ. This eating of unclean things, this ending of any concern with purity, is now part of confessing Christ, of acknowledging Christ’s great prominence.

It is notable how slowly Peter and the other disciples are being weaned of dependence on the temple. It’s been the locus of spiritual power in their lives for so long that they have trouble imagining new ways of being faithful in their spirituality. This should stand as a reminder to us. We need to acknowledge our own temples – the norms and practices that are keeping us separated from other people – and remain open to new visions of faithfulness as they arrive. They might startle us. They might even shock us. Yet they will open our capacity for discovery, and hence for joy.

Acts 9:32-43 Discovery in the Holy Spirit

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Just as Paul is being blown hither and yon as he converts, learns, escapes, and hides, Peter, too, seems more than willing to go where he’s sent and accept whatever requests come to him. First he drifts down to Lydda, and then he follows a summons to Joppa, raises Tabitha from the dead, and then just stays there with Simon the Tanner until the next adventure comes along. He seems to have no agenda, no to-do list, no plan beyond following the prompting of the Holy Spirit. His actions are free in a way that few of ours are.

A few years ago I read Sam Wells’ book, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics. In it, Wells talks about the Acts of the Apostles, and the “improvisation at the beginnings of the church-the constant need to find ways of staying faithful in constantly changing circumstances and environments. Indeed,” Wells says, “Jeremy Begbie describes the whole of the Acts of the Apostles as ‘a stream of new, unpredictable, improvisations.’” I was intrigued by Wells’ book, and wanted to experience improvisation first hand, so I signed up for Second City weeklong intensive in Chicago, and from there took classes in Columbus, where I live. My improv career, such as it was, is now over, but I’m deeply grateful for the time I spent learning and performing, because I feel that it made me a better Christian, more able to imitate the wild improvisations of Peter and Paul.

One of the things that improv teaches is to always be open to new discoveries in a scene. We often think we know what to expect, and so we close down our senses and curiosity and simply fail to notice occurrences that don’t fit within the scripts of our lives. Discovery is about doing the opposite, opening your eyes and ears to everything happening around you and picking up all of the delightful, unscripted bits of human behavior so that you can respond to them joyfully. I learned this early on when a classmate misspoke and invented a word with the slip of the tongue. My instinct was to pass right over this, but my instructor stopped the scene and suggested that I use it, that I and my scene partner agree to live in a world where that word was used and made sense to everybody. Within minutes we were all laughing, caught up in the joy of discovery.

Thanks to this training I’m open to all sorts of things in my everyday life that I never really was before. This has been of great value within my church community. More than that, its filled my relationship with God with humor, delight, excitement, and silliness. In other words, its opened me up to joy.

I imagine that Peter, as he healed Aeneas and resurrected Tabitha, was full of joy. Yes, he was praying in Tabitha’s room, beside her dead body, and accompanied by the weeping of widows. Yet he must have been filled by the joy of the resurrection, his senses filled with the scents and sounds of the garden, as he reached out to raise her from the dead. He was open to the possibility of miracle and grace, and the Holy Spirit was thickening the air currents around him as he discovered that the practice of resurrection, in all its wonder, was part of his apostleship.

 

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.