Tag: Resurrection

Saint Peter Returns to the Garden

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

unless a grain of wheat by KPB Stevens

Unless a Grain of Wheat, India ink and pastel on paper

St. Peter Returns to the Garden
by KPB Stevens

God of calloused hands, like splinters,
like wooden bowls full of dinner,
I returned here with morning,
wanting to return
to that last evening we spent together,
all of us in a shadowed room,
our sorrow true as winter.
It was your winter –
your limbs like graying trees,
your body like this garden –
its dirt and worms were in your eyes.
Your blood was picnic trash,
your bones the tumbling walls of tombs.
Everything was falling feathers,
everything was embryos
spilled from broken eggs.

How did Spring come so quickly to this garden?
The birds are hollow bones and light
and flight. The leaves are a touch
on my face. I see the sweet wounds
of your body replaced
by roses that open with a fragrance
as green as sunlight,
as sunlight echoed from wet grass.
Each sorrow a petal, a caress.
You make pain itself into the lightness of Spring.
You make doubt into bird song, the sky into grace –
the last meal each meal –
each sight into taste.

Acts 24:1-27 Resurrection of both the righteous and the unrighteous

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Poor Paul. He gets stuck in prison for two years, and Felix, the governor, who is a rather feckless person, seems to be in no hurry to resolve his case. So Paul, and our story, comes to a grinding halt. Like I said, the end of Acts is a bit of an anticlimax. But since Paul references the resurrection in this passage, allow me to spend this post summarizing some of the thoughts on death, time, and judgement that I’ve gestured to while writing this blog.

The idea of resurrection developed in Judaism because of a concern for justice. There had been a revolt, and many people who were considered good and righteous had died unjustly. Some Jews started to worry about what this might imply about God. Could a just God allow evil to flourish and goodness to suffer without taking action in some way? Clearly not. Yet evil was flourishing and goodness was suffering. So they began to think of the resurrection as the way that God’s perfect justice could be shown on earth. Both the righteous and the unrighteous would be resurrected, and then God would judge them accordingly. When and how this would happen was an open question, and it has continued to be an open question in the intervening two thousand years. But regardless of when you think it might happen (and Jesus clearly tells his disciples not to waste time thinking about the when and the where), when it does happen God’s perfect justice will be revealed.

I have long struggled with this idea, and I’m not alone. Often the struggle comes down to a question: do you believe in universal salvation or not? My very inconclusive answer is that I don’t know. Sometimes I think that the entire worry about justice is wrong headed. If God is perfect love, then it’s not the actions of justice but the actions of love that we need to be concerned with. But even that doesn’t necessarily bring me to believing in an easy, free pass kind of universal salvation. After all, I love my daughter, but I’m not going to just forgive her and let her get away with anything she chooses to do. I love her too much for that. I think that it’s my role to help her be the best person that she can be, and sometimes that means restricting her behavior, demanding recompense, and being very honest about her failures. But here’s the thing. I expect her to do the same for me. If she, or my wife, or my dad, or my friends in the church, just let me do whatever I wanted, I would probably end up thinking that they didn’t love me very much. I would read their tolerance as indifference rather than love. Love is patient and kind, and doesn’t insist on having its own way, but it also creates a delicate filigree of relationship between us, and that relationship requires us to maintain certain practices and disciplines. We are subject to the dictates of love.

So if God is perfect love, then God loves us too much to let us simply skate off into an easy and meaningless salvation. When I am resurrected, I expect that I’ll be what I am now, a combination of righteousness and unrighteousness. I’ll still need to have my unrighteousness burned away.

I am obviously not the first person to think about this. This sort of thinking leads very obviously to ideas of purgatory, a liminal space where we can still work things out before being subsumed into the gigantic love of God. There are so many models for this, and they’re all entirely speculative. Maybe we get resurrected into an alternate dimension where we can untangle ourselves and gain freedom. Maybe in the resurrection we simply flip back through time to all of the moments when we were unrighteous, and have a kind of grand, cosmic do-over. That’s the fantasy held out by movies and shows like Groundhog’s Day and Russian Doll. Maybe we find ourselves in a gray and despairing city, waiting for a bus, like in C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce. It’s impossible to know, and the stories we tell about it are useful not as a definitive description, but as a comment on who we are now, before the resurrection. They use a purgatorial dream to help us understand how to work out our salvation with fear and trembling in our current lives.

In the end, I suppose I’m less concerned about the judgement of God than I am about the human potential for perfect righteousness. I agree with my friends the saints, with Paul, and with Jesus, that it is possible to live a life that really is life, to live in perfect imitation of the divine. No effort I make will allow me to do this, it can only happen through the action of grace. And perhaps that’s all the resurrection is. A time of grace during which God will help us to become sanctified.

Acts 2:14-36 The First Retelling

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My grandmother often told the same stories over and over again, to such an extent that we made up a joking diagnosis for her, saying that she had RSS, Repetitive Story Syndrome. My daughter has begun to point out my own tendency to repeat stories, and has also begun noticing when she does this. All people repeat stories, and I first became aware of this fact years ago, when I was reading the New England writer Sarah Orne Jewett. This simple passage from “The Farm House Kitchen” lodged in my mind:

The repetitions of the best stories are signal events, for ordinary circumstances do not inspire them. Affairs must rise to a certain level before a narration of some great crisis is suggested, and exactly as a city audience is well contented with hearing the plays of Shakespeare over and over again, so each man and woman of experience is permitted to deploy their well-known but always interesting stories upon the rustic stage.

I might have read more into this passage over the intervening years than is really there, but Jewett made it clear to me, for the first time, that its not the originality of a story that’s important, but the situation into which its told. Repetitive stories have a kind of liturgy about them. We all know them already, yet we retell them because they speak to the present moment and cast a new light on our current circumstances. My grandmother’s stories did this. I hope that my repeated stories do this, too. I’m sure that the repetition of Jesus’ story, told by different speakers at different moments in Acts, performs the same function. The circumstances that surround the retelling are important, and the purpose of the retelling shifts depending on the audience, the teller, and the place in which it’s told.

For this first retelling, it’s Peter who is the storyteller. Jesus told him that he would be the Rock of the Church. Jesus even changed his name from Simon to Peter, which means “Rocky.” But at the end of Luke’s Gospel Peter is anything but steadfast. This storytelling of Peter’s is the moment in which Jesus’ prediction begins to be realized. And Peter is not speaking to a group of believers, but to a crowd of strangers, some of whom are scoffers. They are an echo of the crowd that mocked and scourged Jesus on his way to the cross. Peter is speaking into a moment of miracle. Something powerful and overwhelming has happened – the rush of wind, the tongues of flame! – and now Peter sets out to make meaning out of it, something that we all have to do after important experiences. But it’s not personal meaning he’s making, although that’s certainly included in what he says. He’s making meaning in a way that will be of use to the community, to the church that is forming. By quoting the Hebrew scriptures, he is telling a story that his listeners already know. But he’s doing so in a new way, and drawing new conclusions from it. The repetitive story becomes the new story, due to the person who is speaking it, the people who are listening to it, and the moment of wonderment that has given rise to this retelling.

Mary Pierce Brosmer, who founded Women Writing for (a) Change in the 1990s, wrote a book about her organization that offered its transformative teachings to people at large. She begins the book by surveying the landscape, telling the story of how WWf(a)C came to be. But even this seemingly historical summary serves a purpose. She uses it to teach us that we should all survey our landscapes. That we should think about the communities we belong to, and try to tell their stories. Because in a very real sense, telling the stories of our communities means telling our own stories. In this telling, we will arrive at a degree of self-understanding. For my grandmother, many of her stories were about the village in Yugoslavia where she became a young wife and mother, and that she had to flee from at the end of World War II with my mother and uncle in tow. Many of my stories are about my teenage and college years, and I tell them to my daughter as she goes through her own adolescence as a kind of camaraderie, so she will know that she’s not alone in her experience. For the most part, these aren’t community stories, because we no longer live in the long settled communities of Jewett’s day. But the church is such a community, and the retelling of stories in Acts holds out the possibility that telling and retelling the story of a church is a way of talking about resurrection.

 

Acts 1:12-26 The Witnesses

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The first concern of the disciples after the resurrection is to heal their community.  They have several reasons to feel incomplete if there are only eleven of them. They are twelve because twelve is the number of Jacob’s sons, and thus of the original tribes of Israel. They are twelve because Jesus appointed twelve, and laid the structural basis of their community. And, most importantly, they need to be twelve because Judas wounded them in his betrayal, and they need that wound to be healed. And that’s what I want to think through today – the healing of community, and what a healed community, that is a resurrected community, looks like and acts like.

I have to admit that I feel unequal to this task, since I, unlike the disciples, have never lived completely within such a community. Most Christian communities, be they churches or young adult communities or convents, remain broken. They are, metaphorically, communities of eleven disciples, not twelve. Everyone is still smarting from little betrayals, bringing the betrayals and hurts inflicted on them in the past into the communities that they find themselves in, and bringing the shame and guilt from their own betrayals of others with them as well. Yet even these broken, incomplete communities are called to be witnesses of the resurrection. And they’re able to do so because, even when broken and incomplete, they can catch glimpses of what the resurrected community is really like.

A witnessing community is both honest about its own brokenness and able to envision what it would be like to be fully healed. Such communities, like the individuals who inhabit them, are both humble and idealistic. Because the ideal is so clearly articulated, people know when they’re falling short, but because their stance to themselves and one another is rooted in humility, they approach their failings with laughter and forgiveness, rather than punishment and scorn. They’re able to adapt to the needs of others, and delight in discoveries of new ways of doing things, while also honoring the old ways. And they’re always waiting for the moment when some quieter, shyer presence steps into the center and starts to lead. They’re always waiting for, and honoring, the Matthias’ and Josephs, and ready to accept their witness when the spirit is ready to speak through them.

All of that transformation that Jesus insists on in Luke’s Gospel now begins to express itself in community. The disciples are transformed people, and the church that begins to form around them is a transformed collective, a group of people who are able to live within the Kingdom of God. Like a contemplative state, the fullness of this community won’t last forever. They’ll fall from this state of grace back into their humanness, and sometimes squabble and wander off on their own paths. But they will remember and witness to these early days. And it’s through their witness that we come to understand the possibilities of our own communities, and to rejoice in them.

 

Luke 24:36-53 The Resurrected Mind

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I have not paid much attention to the mind while writing this blog about Luke’s Gospel, and now when I come to the end, I am struck by the fact that Jesus’ last teaching was not about ethics or seeing with spiritual eyes. Instead, “he opened their minds to understand the scriptures.” Just as he healed the memories of the disciples on the Road to Emmaus (and did some scriptural teaching, as well), now he heals the intelligence. I write those words with some trepidation, because, ever since the enlightenment, we’ve had a tendency to idolize the intelligence, to become dry and didactic in our study of scripture, to repeat the necessary discoveries of German scholars and think that we’re wise. Or at least that’s the tendency of those of us who are seminary trained, because seminary is about educating the mind, rather than the soul. Maybe that’s appropriate, since the deep, spiritual education that Luke’s Gospel gives us is the result of following Christ out in the world, rather than sitting in academic cloisters. Still, I can’t help but feel that seminary can do a disservice in its approach, if it makes an idol of the mind and the intelligence.

Recently, I picked up Thomas a Kempis’ Imitation of Christ and read these words:

God speaks in a variety of ways to all of us impartially. We are often too prying to profit from our reading of Scripture; we want to understand and argue when we ought simply to read on. If you want to draw benefit, read simply with humble faith; and never desire to be known for your cleverness. Be ready to ask, and listen in silence to the words of the Saints (1).

Read with humility, Thomas a Kempis says, and I take that to mean that we should try to read with healed minds. Because in cultures that prize and reward intelligence, the mind becomes the bedroom where the ego goes to tryst. You can study and learn out of a desire to dominate and control others, reading and writing out of a deep fear that people won’t find you intelligent, or clever. You can study and learn without ever experiencing moments of grace in which the mind, like the eyes, are opened to a deeper compassion and a greater love for all the world.

This might seem like a strange way to try and bask within the resurrection. Jesus is Risen! I hear you say, why are you spending time commenting on academia? My answer is that we’re only halfway through the story. Jesus is risen, and the disciples are called to form a resurrected community. In the weeks to come, my focus will shift to community, to practices that attempt to enact the kingdom, to the ways of learning and being transformed that arise when we learn to trust our communities and live in them humbly.  In these Beloved Communities, it is not individual wit or learning that matters so much. Or it matters only to the extent that it can be offered to others in service and love. The healed mind understands, as Thomas Merton puts it, that “God does not give us graces or talents or virtues for ourselves alone. We are members one of another and everything that is given to one member is given for the body.”

(1) Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, 1.5