Tag: Joy

Posts that reflect on joy and spirituality.

Luke 6:27-49 Give to Everyone Who Begs From You

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Jesus is still talking directly to the disciples, although he’s also surrounded by a crowd of people who have come for miracles and healings.  But his words are about discipleship, about what it means to truly follow him, and more, what it means to imitate him in the hopes of being able to heal and bring peace like he does.  Since his actions and words are revolutionary, he is laying out a revolutionary model for his disciples, one that will overthrow all of their societal assumptions about what is good and what is right.

We barely get three sentences in to these instructions before we confront one of our own deeply held societal assumptions.  “Give to everyone who begs from you,” he says. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard Christians quibble with this injunction.  People tell stories of giving money to a beggar and then seeing him enter a liquor store or drive away in a nice car. Wouldn’t it be better to simply give to some honorable charity, particularly if we afraid that we’re feeding people’s addictions or letting them get one over on us?  Jesus’ answer is no. Give to everyone who begs from you. He insists on this because giving is spiritually transformative. In a way, its not about the person who is asking you for money. It’s about whether you can cultivate a spirit of generosity, and hold your wealth and possessions loosely.

“Do good,” he says, “and lend expecting nothing in return.”  We might agree with everything surrounding these statements. We might concede that loving our enemies is important, and that we shouldn’t sit in judgement on others.  But many of us openly rebel against the idea of giving freely, with no expectation of anything in return, and not only that, giving to people who might be unworthy.  

But Jesus tells us to imitate God, and God is profligate.  If we are to be imitators of Christ and perfect as our Father in Heaven is perfect, then we can’t be scared, overprotective people.  Ronald Rolheiser describes God as “joyous, happy, playful, exuberant, effervescent, and deeply personal and loving” in Wrestling with God.  For us mere humans, exuberance, love, and joyfulness require a strong willingness to set fear aside and trust in goodness and beauty.  Profound, unsuspicious generosity is a key spiritual practice that will help us do this. We give to everyone who begs from us because we are invested in becoming more joyful, playful, effervescent people.

Luke 6:1-26 Blessings and Woes

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Jesus upends the lives and thoughts of the Pharisees, and they respond with anger.  He sees that they’re angry, but instead of trying to assuage their anger, he ignores it and continues in his world-altering actions and teaching.  He chooses disciples, and although he’s surrounded by a crowd of people, he begins his Sermon on the Plain by addressing them directly. And what he says is almost a repetition of the Magnificat.  Those of us who wish to be disciples should hear these words directly addressed to us. We have a choice when we hear them. We can respond with the anger of the Pharisees, or we can give ourselves to Jesus’ message, even while admitting that discipleship is going to be hard.

“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God.”  We know that Jesus has been preaching about the Kingdom of God in the synagogues of Capernaum, but this is our first chance to hear the content of that teaching.  We’ll hear about the Kingdom of God more and more as the Gospel goes on. It will never be exactly defined, just described in a myriad of different ways. This first description isn’t really about the Kingdom, but about those who have access to it – the poor.  Why the poor and not anyone else?

Mostly because they’re the ones who can see it.  The Kingdom of God is that sense of divine reality that pervades all things.  Anyone can see it, but only if you stop to look for it. God sees it all of the time, and in order to see it we must align our sight with God’s, and see reality as alive with a shimmering beauty and goodness, free of contest and envy and anger, humble and simple, yet abundant in its riches.  We can’t see it when we’re full of the kind of pride that wants to convince us that we control the world and know what its like. The concerns of power and prestige have no place in the Kingdom of God, and if those are our concerns, then we’ll reject the Kingdom when we catch a glimpse of it. Jesus addresses this first phrase of the Beatitudes to the disciples as a way of telling them what their training is going to be like.  As followers of Jesus, they will learn to set aside their need for control and power, their fears and their jealousies, and embrace both physical and spiritual poverty.

At the same time, he acknowledges that this is going to be difficult.  You will be hungry. You will weep. But he also reassures. You will be filled.  You will laugh. And his third acknowledgement and reassurance is both the most frightening and the most humbling.  People will hate and revile you for rejecting the things that they feel are so important. But you will experience joy.  

As I said at the beginning of this study, Luke believes that joy is central to Christian spirituality.  And since we’re describing the undefinable, let’s spend a moment with C.S. Lewis, one of the great describers of joy.  He calls it “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” Joy, for him, is

a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure.  Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again.  Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might also equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want.  I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.

Lewis is very nearly equating joy with longing, a kind of holy longing that is given to us by God.  Anyone who has ever experienced this longing knows that it’s better to have it than to not have it. Without it we pursue our pleasures but they feel ashen, we acquire but the things we own are merely junk, rather than loved possessions.  Such longing is like a kind of swooning romantic love, with all its risk and fears. And if you can experience that kind of love generally, if you can swoon over trees and buses and people’s faces, then you’re very close to experiencing what its like to see through God’s eyes, and with God’s heart.  This can easily become painful, because if you love the world, you don’t want to see it suffer. And that’s why there’s a strong note of social revolution within Jesus’ spirituality. Once you’re truly looking, and seeing the glaring and amazing divinity in everything, you can’t turn your back on suffering.  You are hurt with those who hurt, you are poor with those who are poor. And you want those who are closing their eyes and closing themselves off from this dangerous joy to get to experience it, too, even if that means that they have to give up their wealth and their illusions of power and control to do so.

 

Luke 5:1-16 – The Call of the Deep

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

What needs to happen in our lives before we can hear and respond to a sense of call?  As Luke introduces characters, he often hints at their backstories. Zechariah and Elizabeth are given a fairly elaborate backstory, and their lives provide the backstory to John the Baptist.  The Annunciation and the Visitation give backstory to the Incarnation, telling us how this young girl came to give birth to the savior of the world. When we meet the apostles, we are also given backstory, although sometimes it’s shaded and less elaborate.

Peter’s backstory manages to be both subtle and extravagant all at the same time.  We meet his mother-in-law before we meet him – Jesus heals her at the end of chapter four.  So even before the scene on the Lake of Gennesaret (also called the Sea of Galilee), we have some inkling of what Peter is like.  He’s married, he owns a house, his mother-in-law lives with him, and he’s been hanging out with Jesus, and was probably among the congregants at the synagogue in Capernaum when Jesus preached there.  In a way he’s primed to hear and respond to a sense of call, because he already know something about Jesus (this is not true in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew). In another way, he’s primed to resist the call, because he’s a married person with clear responsibilities.  Maybe it’s because of this that Luke makes his actual moment of call so big and dramatic – a miraculous catch of fish after providing Jesus with a floating pulpit, sitting right in Jesus’s shadow as the crowds on the shore stared at the both of them. Peter is already singled out as special before his call, and the abundance of his catch probably helped assuage any anxiety he had about providing for his family if he were to go off and follow Jesus for real.

But what about our own sense of call?  When I use that term, I’m not talking about discovering a sense of vocation, which is how we often talk about call when it comes to work or family.  I’m talking about the call to enter seriously into the spiritual life, the first step on a spiritual journey that ends in resurrection. Adyashanti describes a sense of call as “that moment when the trajectory of your life begins to turn toward the mystery of life…that transcendent aspect of life that shines through the world of time and space.”  If we’ve experienced that sense of call – and most people who start attending a place of worship have – what is the backstory that prepared us to hear it?

For me it was Holy Hill, a monastery outside of Milwaukee that my parents took us to when we were children.  I was raised Methodist, so entering the basilica at the top of the hill filled me with a sense of wonder and mystery.  I remember it as being dark and gloomy, with cavernous side chapels and a bank of votive lights that shimmered against the wall.  People moved and spoke differently in that space, whispering from their knees, and there was something strangely intimate about the shush and the darkness.  There was an odd machine in the Undercroft, a mechanism that you put coins into, and when you did music would start playing, and a diorama of the halt and the lame, set on a turntable behind glass, would begin to operate, leading the little ceramic people on a continuous circle through the doors of a church and out of them again, into a slow passage through the world.  But the most powerful aspect of Holy Hill was the Stations of the Cross, which you walked by following a wooded path across the topography of the hill itself. The stations were larger than life size, made of carved granite and protected by grottos of piled stones. We would walk there in all seasons, sliding down icy stairs in winter, walking over damp leaves in autumn, or beneath flowering trees in spring and summer.

This was the backstory for my own sense of call.  Holy Hill provided a chance to gaze beneath the surface of things, to be moved by wonder and joy.  Not the kind of joy that can simply be confused for happiness, but the kind of joy that creates sharp and distinct memory, an experience of the divine that prepared me to recognize God in other experiences when they came.  Holy Hill was my own miraculous catch of fish. What was yours?

 

Luke 1:57-80 Joy, Community, and Wilderness

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

When Elizabeth gives birth to John, her neighbors and relatives gather around in joy.  This is the second gang of people we’ve seen in Luke’s Gospel, the first being the crowd at the temple who gathered around Zechariah after he emerged from his encounter with an angel.  I think it’s fair to say that they were a random assembly, not a true community. It’s the true community that comes together after John’s birth, and the true community that responds to his birth with rejoicing.

Anyone who’s lived in a community knows that communities are complex, as full of willful hurting as they are of spontaneous rejoicing.  But with this first real community in Luke, we’re shown what they should be like when they’re authentic. The communities that Luke will portray throughout his two books are often a little awkward, confused, and stumbling.  Sometimes they’re downright funny. And this first community of Elizabeth and Zechariah’s relatives has all of those qualities. They think of themselves as the keepers of tradition, maybe even without realizing it. Of course the boy should be named after his father!  That’s how it’s done. And Zechariah, if he could speak, would say the same. I find it hard not to imagine Elizabeth’s frustration with this, and the frustration of any woman reading this story and remembering those times when what she’s said has been ignored or discounted.  This community of loved ones is stumbling through its joyfulness, getting things wrong. They don’t know that they’re dealing with the Holy Spirit, and that things are about to get weird.

No wonder they’re fearful after Zechariah writes John’s name on a slate, and then begins to prophecy.  It’s obvious that during his nine months of silence, he’s been pondering some things. The Holy Spirit directs his words, and what comes out of his mouth is so rich and profound that it’s become a canticle of the church, said or sung during Morning Prayer or Lauds.  The most surprising thing about Zechariah’s prophecy is that it’s not about things that will come true, but about something that already has come true.  God has already redeemed the people of Israel, has already made good on the divine promise that was given to them.  Zechariah is speaking about Jesus, of course, but Jesus hasn’t even been born yet. It’s as if the very promise of Jesus, the very possibility that God would become human and show us how to approach divinity through our lives and actions, is enough.  And this promise is already working in us. Because of it, we will be able to serve God without fear, in holiness and righteousness all of our days. Because of this promise, our sins are forgiven, and we will know how to walk in the way of peace.

Imagine being part of the community that first heard those words.  Some of what Zechariah’s saying makes sense, you might say to yourself.  We are descended from Abraham, and we have been waiting for certain promises to be redeemed for quite awhile.  And we get that John is going to be a nazirite, like Samuel was, and live in the wilderness and never cut his hair.  It’s a little old-fashioned, but we remember when people used to do that. But what about this new thing, this mighty savior that he’s talking about?  Who is this person? Where will we find him? What will he be like? And why are Elizabeth and Zechariah packing their bags and moving to the wilderness with their baby?

That last question is the most immediately important one to Luke’s narrative.  This portion of his Gospel, that starts with a community coming together to rejoice, ends with Zechariah and Elizabeth choosing isolation from community.  And this points to one of the things that Luke wants to say about community in general. Community is a good and important thing. But it’s not the most important thing.  Sometimes it will hurt and betray you. Sometimes you will need to leave it behind. In fact, if a new community, full of holiness and righteousness and hope is to be born, it’s necessary that the old community scatter so that bad habits will be broken, good habits regathered, and new practices ushered in.