Where did you find bread?

Proper 14 Year B RCL

John 6:35, 41-51

There are truths and experiences that could become less true when they are put into words, because words cannot capture the fullness of the experience.   I’m going to risk that this morning.

It was a cold December night as I sat in my little office at home in New Haven, Connecticut.  My wife, Laura, was out, practicing with the chamber orchestra.  I was coming to the end of my first semester in seminary, and that evening I felt like I needed to take inventory of “how I was doing.”  Had I prayed enough?  In just the weekdays of life in the seminary, one could attend at least 12 worship services, not including worship at whatever church you find yourself attached to.  No one expects you to go to every opportunity to pray.  Still, I thought, could I have gone to more?  How was I doing in my classes?  Could that have been better?  Have I been the type of person I could be proud of during that time?  Was I living up to my own expectations? I was finding problems all over the place, which is not a surprise for me.

I am my own worst critic.  I am incredibly hard on myself.  It is one thing to have your own inner critic, like a backseat driver for your life sometimes pointing out inconvenient truths.  It is another thing to say that you are your own judge, jury, and prosecutor, and the defense never showed up. At its worst, with critique run rampant, one feels like an imposter going through life hiding from others.  Others may talk about how well-put-together you may seem, but on the inside you feel a nagging sense of smallness, and hypocrisy, and phoniness. Failures can become all-consuming.  Imperfections are exaggerated.  Does this sound familiar to anyone else?  Perhaps not as severe?

I had set aside time and readied a space to do this introspective work because I remembered the work of Howard Thurman, an African American pastor who inspired much of MLK’s theology.  He was also a mystic, and his devotional material is praiseworthy 70 years after the fact.  In regards to the necessities of introspective work, he once wrote that:

If we were to try silence in prayer, we may discover that the discomfort we feel are the dark parts of our soul rising to consciousness. Our failings, our senses of inadequacy, our regrets come to the fore because we have deliberately chosen to no longer drown them out. It is difficult to sit with these thoughts for long, almost unhealthy to do so. But in a context of prayer, we hold ourselves up for our own introspection and we also hold ourselves up to God. These are aspects of our human condition that we would rather hide from God, from others, and from ourselves. Yet it is better to acknowledge realities, and in the presence of a God and Spirit who is willing to follow us into the depths of our being, the very core of our soul. We will find God forgiving and understanding. Once we get past our discomfort with ourselves and learn to rest in the love and presence of God, the conversation can begin.

It is a place where one attempts to drop all walls, all self-deceptions, all excuses, and lay bare one's self before God.  It would be despairing, if there were not something to break the fall.  All doubts, all false certainties, all attempts at self-justification, all hatreds of oneself; they fall away.  One is left with God.  

And so there I was--sitting in my office, dark except for a single candle illuminating a cross and a hand labyrinth before me.  After a period of time in silence, and cataloguing my faults, something happened, something that became my barometer for knowing how close I am to God in particular instances.  In those moments the direct experience of God—the description of which varies for many people--most resembled a dark buoyancy.  It felt safe and calm. I called it, and continue to call it, "the womb of God."

What became so clear in those moments when I had finished listing all of my faults—what God gave to me with the most intimate knowledge possible is that I am broken, yet beloved.  The distance between God and me became clear—and yet it was also clear that God was and is joined to me, and I am in God. One finds parts of one's very being transfigured.  Changed.  God gives a simultaneous yes and no that both affirms belovedness while calling one to the fullness and likeness to Christ we are called to be.

In those moments, bread from Heaven tasted like love, unconditional love, filling me with a sense of my belovedness even as I was being moved to consider more deeply the full humanity God was calling me to live into. I could intellectually assent to that belovedness before; but after that experience, I knew it. 

That is what the bread of Life looked like to me: an experience of God that cut through my anxiety about how well I was doing at life, as though my performance was the sole source of earning God’s love.  I thank God for such a sweet morsel of the bread of life, for the memory of it has sustained me through dark and difficult days.  And occasionally, I find crumbs that manage to fill left for me along the path my life takes me—little reminders of the awesomeness of God’s love and care and presence. 

There were a couple of reasons I am reticent to tell you this story this morning.  I’ve already mentioned one:  putting the experience into words can sometimes betray the fullness of the experience.  There are two other reasons that are pet peeves.

The first is this:  I distrust leaders and spiritual virtuosos who claim their abilities and exclusive access to constant revelation as reasons for others to listen to them.  Jonestown shows one end of that road to such an appeal to the power of the divine.

The second is this:  there is always a danger that following the truth of the Gospel can lead to a claim of Christian superiority to which everyone must defer.  Such an attitude of superiority is opposed to the truth that God’s self-revelation in Christ should ultimately lead to service, not to an entitlement to be acclaimed.

These two pet peeves point to some problems Christians have.  We run the spiritual risk of thinking we can decide who is worthy of God.  We can claim that we have exclusive access to the mind of God, and so we have no need to listen to our neighbors.

Our spiritual disposition matters greatly when we try to live out our faith or share it others— and Christians are finding that those to whom we speak are becoming more adept at comparing our own rhetoric to some understanding of the faith we follow. 

I believe the antidotes to such problems are found in the sentiments of Daniel Thambyrajah Niles, a Methodist pastor who once noted that, “Christianity is one beggar telling another beggar where he found bread.”^[1]

Let’s come back to that in a moment.

I want to talk a little bit about the gospel text. 

We are in the middle of a five week run of Jesus talking about bread.  This conversation Jesus is having started when he turned the few loaves and fishes into a feast as a sign of the kingdom to come.  The crowds start following Jesus around, and Jesus begins interpreting the sign of the loaves and fishes to the crowd.  Jesus fed them for a day, but Jesus is offering them something more substantial.  Bread—an essential element of the diet of so many cultures—becomes the metaphor of a relationship to God the Father through Jesus Christ.  The sustenance we gain by our daily bread is a pale comparison to the participation in the divine life we are offered through relationship to Jesus Christ. 

Jesus is talking about eternal life, but a heavenly destination is not all we are called to.  We later learn in this gospel that we are called to participate in the divine life of the triune God.  We know this through other metaphors Jesus gives us: he is the vine and we the branches in John 17, and the unique mystical dance we participate with each person of our triune God:  Of which Jesus prayed to the father saying “"The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one; I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me (John 17:22).”  When Jesus tells us that eternal life is available through believing in him, this is not simply a matter of belief in a set of propositions about God.  It is about our trust in a relationship that brings us into the divine life, through which we see the world as God sees it.  We know shape of this life when we respond to the call to love God and our neighbors.[2]

What Christ offers to us—this possibility of a deep relationship with the divine—is a gift.  It is not an achievement on our part.  It is not something we can earn, it is freely given by God in God’s grace; and as Jesus said, it is grace offered to all, for the prophets tell us that ‘all shall be taught by God.'  It is both an unsettling and comforting thought: 

“Salvation, Enlightenment, Eternal Life, Wisdom, are not the products of human endeavour as our bread is…[and this is] foreshadowed by the manna of the wilderness and now fully revealed in [Christ]; the bread of life is offered to all who are hungry enough to trust that five barley loaves and two fish can feed a multitude… There is nothing to achieve or to do. Which means you cannot decide or designate who gets some and who doesn’t.”[3]

This brings us back to our quote from D.T. Niles.  At its truest understanding, “Christianity is one beggar telling another beggar where he found bread.”  We are not the bakers of the living bread.  Nor are we the distributors of the living bread, and as such we are not at liberty to decide who is worthy to receive the bread.  A Christian’s joy in having risked a relationship with the divine is not license to set the conditions for another person’s access to that relationship.  No, our joy is in telling all we meet that there is something better to be found, that there is living bread that satisfies hungers our world creates and leaves unfulfilled.

The bread of life we are offered is the life of Christ given for this world so that all may know the love of God and the life eternal—That is what is offered to all. But the hunger that bread satisfies may look different for you. For me, the bread of heaven is knowing that perfection is admirable but impossible under my own striving, and that I cannot exist or act apart from the love of God.  What might the bread of heaven taste like for you?  How might you share with someone where you found such bread?     

---

[1] D.T. NILES, New York Times, May 11, 1986

[2] Martin Luther, “On Faith and Coming to Christ”, #20, http://web.archive.org/web/20030210182718/www.markers.com/ink/mlonfaith.htm.

[3] Peter Woods, http://thelisteninghermit.com/2012/08/07/what-beggars-know-about-bread-john-635-51-ordinary-19b/ .

Where was God?

TW: miscarriage, callous treatment

Yesterday, in my last blog post, I wrote about the first three days following Laura's miscarriage.  This post picks up some days later.  The miscarriage happened on a Friday, the reflection from the last blog post was written on the following Sunday, and I'll now write about what happened the next Monday and Tuesday.  The main points of my grieving process after Monday and Tuesday are relatively episodic, and I think they will amount to one more blog post of short reflections. I think that might amount to this week's flood of writing.  The miscarriage might be something I return to in writing and reflection, but the posts this week will cover the bulk of my reflection and experiences since then.

This post deals head-on with the question of where I thought God was through the week after the miscarriage.  I will not lay out an argument of theodicy here, and I want to reiterate my second disclaimer from yesterday:

I will make claims about where I felt God’s presence in the midst of suffering.  In doing so, I am not suggesting that my experience should be normative for everyone who experiences a miscarriage.   I certainly do not wish to imply anything that could be construed as “if you suffer more than I did, your faith is/was not sufficient.”  If something of my experience of God in the midst of suffering is helpful, I will be happy.  If someone has experienced miscarriage or another loss as a time of God’s absence—or if someone makes no reference to God at all in her or his experience—I do not wish to imply that the person has a lesser belief or that he or she have somehow failed in grieving. 

Finally, my experience was my own, and I make no claim that decisions I made would function as a guaranteed universal prescription for others who would seek to lessen their pain.

The Monday after the miscarriage rolled around, and the question on my mind was whether Laura would go back to work or take another day off.  She decided to go back to work, deciding that Friday, Saturday, and Sunday were enough days to recover.  For a few months before the pregnancy Laura was a rather active member on Babycenter.com, which is an online support community for folks trying to get  pregnant, or they are pregnant, or they have children.  It's a place where parents support one another.  The website runs many smaller forums, which can sometimes get specific, but one example of the specificity are the groups one can join of women who are planning to deliver in the same month you may also be delivering.  That way, you have an online support network, information and research source, and cheer-leading squad.  By the time folks moved from the "trying to get pregnant" to the "pregnant" areas of the community, the more-specific groups meant names were recognized and absences were noticed.  Sometimes women left the "expected delivery in Jan 2013" group quietly.  Laura did so as well at some point that weekend.  Babycenter.com also has forums for those who experienced loss, and Laura joined some of those forums.  At least one woman from the previous forum noticed and reached out to Laura.

Monday morning, Laura showed me one of the posts from the miscarriage forum.  A woman had written a little about her own experience, but the bulk of her post was a question:  "Why is it that God will allow folks who will be good parents to miscarry, while children are being born to terrible/abusive/unloving/neglectful parents?"

I don't have an answer to that question, and I didn't attempt to provide her with one as I felt like I was "too close" to the topic to effectively engage it in an online forum.  Still, I was quite happy to see that many of the responses were of a helpful kind, and a few affirmed that yes, you can be angry with God.  At the very least, to admit anger to God (or with God ) is a place of honesty, which is much more helpful than a dishonest front the cuts off the healthy expression of grief.

But the post stayed with me for the rest of the day.  I took the post and looked at it from a variety of perspectives.  Was the question a way for the woman to distance herself from the loss she experienced? ...To couch the matter in a theo/philosophical way to hide her own pain?  What were the implicit theologies she lives with?

But the questions I was asking about her post were symptomatic of something I'm less proud of.

I was coming to a point at which I could say that I had survived the experience, and was now becoming reflective of it.  In other words, For the past few days I had prayed for God's presence, but was not really in a place to notice if God had shown up.   On Monday I began thinking about whether or not God was present, or what my relationship to God was through that time.

[But I do think God was present in the care Laura and I showed for each other.  While we both cared for each other, I bore the brunt on Friday and Saturday, while she cared for me on Sunday.]

Now I was beginning to think about it, and the one thing I knew was that I was not angry with God.  I did not think God owed me a child.  I certainly didn't think God had killed my child.  My theology allows that death is a natural process that God does not necessarily interfere with, but God's role in such tragedy is the task of transforming the circumstances--of seeking and working toward the Good (once again, my task here is not to write a systematic theodicy).

But, oddly enough, theology can often be a point of pride, and it can be so very easy to critique the theology of others to deflect thinking about oneself.  By Tuesday it dawned on me that I might be doing just that. I was comparing this woman's implicit theologies to mine, and finding her's wanting.  Why did she think she deserves a baby?  God is not a cosmic vending machine into which we put prayer and get things we want.  I was  over-analyzing this one woman's post about her own miscarriage in ways that struck me as being rather callous toward her--even though I would never speak to her and appreciated that others were genuinely helping her.  And it became clear to me that what I was doing was finding a way to compare pains in order to lessen my own.

"This hurts, but at least I don't have to untangle bad theology along the way," I thought.  It is common after loss for people to hear others imply that their suffering is their own fault.  The most common form is something like, "Can't you just get over it?  You're making yourself depressed."  My own reaction to this woman's post was a variety of that dismissive sentiment:  if you just changed your theology, you would hurt less.

But that is not how loss works in the immediate.  And the comparison wasn't making me feel better, either.  In retrospect, I'm glad I realized as early as I did how I was reacting to her story, and that I had enough sense not to attempt to speak with with this woman in online forums.  I probably saved us both some additional pain.

The full realization of what I was doing with this woman's story hit me on Tuesday morning, and I was disgusted with myself.  I suspect that many people experience loss as a time when their sense of compassion--or capacity to sit with another in suffering--is compromised, constricted, and lessened.  At least that is how I was experiencing myself in those days.  When the full import hit me I stopped what I was doing and I prayed/confessed:

"God, please do not let my pain create within me a callousness toward others who suffer, especially those who are experiencing the same loss.  Continue to show me how to be a conduit of your love for others."

I have occasionally gone through what I would call mystical experiences (defined as times of awareness of God's presence within, or direct union). For me, those moments the direct experience of God—the description of which varies for many people--most resembled a dark buoyancy.  It felt safe and calm. Before the miscarriage I called it, and continue to call it, "the womb of God."  It is a place where one attempts to drop all walls, all self-deceptions, all excuses, and lay bare one's self before God.

Immediately after my prayer, I felt the familiarity of God's loving direct presence that I knew from earlier experiences.  I'm not sure how long it lasted--seconds or minutes.  But I left the experience with a profound sense of comfort.  The experience was not a promise that pain would go away, only that God was there in the midst of it all and had not abandoned me.  And I think God was pleased that my desire was to turn back to my neighbors in love.

The experience has continued to shape me.  It serves as an example of mountaintop mysticism, an experience like the one Peter, James, and John experienced when they joined Jesus on the mount of transfiguration.  The experience of God directly is so amazing and different from the daily notions we get, seeing through the mirror darkly ( 1Cor 13:12) that there is a desire to try to remain in that experience as long as possible--to hold on to the experience with everything we have.  But I think the practicality of mysticism--a mountaintop experience--is precisely that it prepares one for the 'valleys' of our lives.  The months following the miscarriage were extremely difficult, but this experience became a touchstone to me.

And there were many times that I needed the touchstone.

Jesus Came to Thomas Anyway, part II: The Underlying Theology

I preached on Thomas this past weekend, and lo and behold, many other of my seminarian colleagues did as well; there is an old joke that seminarians and curates can always count on preaching Thomas, the transfiguration, and the trinity.  It has been wonderful these past two weeks to hear about the different directions people took.  It's also obvious that preachers make choices, and they are the type of choices that frustrate any attempt to say that biblical texts mean only one thing. Community matters as well.  The sermon I preached at St. Paul's on the Green was a sermon for that community; if I wrote a sermon for All Saint's Episcopal Church in Mobile, AL or St. Augustine's in Tempe, it may have looked much different.

Even before I preached my sermon, and definitely after I preached it, a couple of things came to mind.  First, I just make an initial observation that the two 'major' sermons I've preached at St. Paul's have both made reference to doubt, questioning, disbelief, or my time outside of the church.  My preaching in other places has not done this.  I doubt all of my sermons at St. Paul's will make mention of these themes, but I have found it personally helpful to show that a healthy life of faith is also one that can admit to times of trouble and question; this does not show weakness.  When properly done, an honest appraisal or openness of one's life of faith shows integrity.*  There have been people for whom such integrity coming from the pulpit has been helpful.  Second, preaching on the subject of doubt in the life of the community is difficult, and requires more than one sermon.  It is always becoming clearer to me that preaching involves making choices and sometimes relying more on one's underlying theology than one may be comfortable with. 

In some ways what follows is an exercise in laying bare my own underlying theology.  And I will begin by asking why admitting doubt is a good thing in a Christian context.  This will mean taking some educated guesses as to why people think doubt is a bad thing, and some replies.  Then we need to look at doubt itself because the term means a few different things, not all of them bad.  Third, I'll come back around to why the community matters.   

I opened the sermon by saying that I have been haunted by the phrase "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe (Jn 20:29)."  I’ve always heard this phrase as a condemnation.  This passage is easily used as a bludgeon; and a person can use this bludgeon on herself, or someone can use it on her.  If one have doubts or questions, one may be left with the sense that Jesus is no longer talking to Thomas, but in one's mind's eye, Jesus turns points his finger, revokes his blessing, and one is no longer welcome or worthy to stand among those who believe.  A person in doubt or with questions can then experience church as something of an exercise in endurance, abuse, and uselessness; where the obviously more righteous and believing people gather.

..."Or," thinks the doubter, "they are all wearing a facade of faith; the hypocrites."

Relationships corrode at this point.  Since others may not admit doubt, the person with questions loses the sense that the community will understand them.   The person in doubt can no longer be honest, which is unhealthy. One can only stay in that type of situation for so long.

The community can further make the person with questions uncomfortable.  Pastors can take the story of Thomas as an opportunity to preach that the congregation needs to stay faithful with an implicit 'or else.'  This creates a further sense of isolation for the person in doubt.  "I'm on thin ice with God, if there is a God."

The community may go so far as to promote itself to an instrument of God's judgment, and pronounce the penalties of disbelief.  The community by its actions or its preaching may, in effect, say to the doubter that God will no longer listen to them until their faith is increased.  

Why would a community do this?  The most charitable guess I can make is that the community thinks this is what faithful living means, and that complete submission to God is paramount and required for God to be gracious.   When I am less charitable, I think some communities fear doubt and questions as "contamination."  These communities cannot handle someone who disrupts the narrative.  Sometimes it's just a spiritually immature snobbery.

There are biblical texts for this sort of exclusivism.  The passage above may be one, but as I notice in my sermon, to pronounce a blessing does not automatically come with a curse.  We still have to make sense of the fact that Thomas, in his disbelief, spends an entire week with the rest of the disciples. They do not make Thomas leave.  They do not berate Thomas.  They stay in relationship to Thomas and Thomas also stays with them.  Then a week later, Jesus, who could have written Thomas off in his unbelief, returns.

Blessed may be the one who believes yet has not seen, but Jesus shows a grace by the personal encounter that demonstrates that he will go to great lengths to make himself—and God—known to all.  And it is in this personal return of Jesus to Thomas that we see the point of the encounter.  We start of see the nature of God in Jesus, who is the expression of God’s love in the flesh.  A love that continues and is not simply bound to how much love the disciples can return to God.  This is the love of a God who desires and yearns to be in relationship; and in relationship, to open the eyes of the disciples to the way the world should be.  This is why the disciples, after having received the Holy Spirit, do not turn Thomas out of the community.

 This theological understanding should serve as a reminder to the community of their own proper role in the life of faith and doubt.   

But what about those in the community who look down on those without faith, some of whom may even desire that there be an accounting that leaves some condemned?  And what about those who think that the community is too easy on those who do not believe?  There are a few replies.  One reply that is biblically grounded is to look to the story of the prodigal son (Lk 15:11-32).  The story might be familiar.  A man has two sons, one gets his half of the inheritance early and squanders it, his father welcomes him back when he returns.  A metaphor for God and us (and much, much more to be said about that at some point).  What is less well known is the latter part of the story:

  ‘Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. He replied, “Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.” Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. But he answered his father, “Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!” Then the father said to him, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.” ’(Lk 15:25-32

The other son feels slighted by his father's generosity.  Have you ever experienced something like this?  When someone you know was forgiven way too easily while you did everything right?  It's a difficult thing to see.  Yet, it is also how God works.  When communities forget the lesson of God's abundant love and grace, and set themselves up as the older brother, we do a disservice to God and to those who experience doubt and questions.

To stay in the parable:  imagine what would happen if the the older brother met the younger brother first, and said that 'the father' cares nothing for him.  The younger brother turns around and leaves, with no moorings to what gave him meaning and hope in the past.  So too, the church that does not seriously consider how best to stay in relationship to one who doubts or questions drives people away from God.

Finally, it is also probably common for churches to be gentle with people who question or doubt for a short time, but then the patience runs out.  Personally, this seems like a symptom of an impatience with the lack of control one can exert over the will of the other when we should instead trust that God is doing work through us in God's good time [but this isn't to say that skillful pastoral care is important].  We are called to hold open the space for an experience of the holy and name it when we see it.

Suppose one finds a community in which it is safe to admit doubt, and one finds a community in which one can still experience love and belonging after admitting doubt, what does one do about the doubt? There are spiritual perils here; but there are bright sides to both of these experiences, and a mature community can help.  Indeed communities need these experiences to mature. Doubt is often the crowbar God uses to pry through old ideas and comfortable ways of being to expose an entry into a deeper place in one's soul.**

Now, there are probably more than two classes of doubt/questionings of the faith, but I'm going to limit myself to two.  The first is the questioning of tenets of the faith.  In terms of questioning of the tenets of faith, it is always worth the community's time to ask whether the presentation of the faith is in a language that people can find intelligible.  The immature community may say "why don't you get this? We will repeat it to you again and again until you can repeat it back to us."  The immature community may then say, "we tried, but something is wrong with you."  The mature community stops, and considers. Does our language even work here...in this time and place?  The community of faith should be continually seeking to discover the proclamation of the Gospel in a way it needs to be heard by the context in which the community finds itself.  This does not guarantee success in convincing people about the truth of the Christian Way, but the community should never forget that, as the faith passed on through the generations, each generation needs to find its own voice and way of expressing its experience of God.  The mature community will also let people who wish to be in relationship stay in relationship.

The other form doubt and questioning can come in is the loss of the sense of God's presence.   In mystical theology, saints and theologians have known since early times that the Christian walk means a time of 'spiritual dryness.' More liberating than the freedom to admit doubt is the knowledge that Christians have experienced doubt as a specific part of the life of faith for a long, long time.  The loss of the historical memory and appreciation of tradition in American Christianity, and particularly the mystical tradition (especially in some parts of the mainline), means that the spiritual resources available to the community in times of doubt and questions are impoverished.  I wonder how many people experience this stage of the development of their faith and cannot find a community or the resources to push through to the other side.  But one needs a community that values the spiritual maturity and vulnerability to allow people to admit to questions before it can help people through the "dark nights of the soul."

I know this post is getting long, but bear with me as I take a quick detour through The Christian Way, in a very, very brief form.

Christian mystics have different numbers of stages to the pinnacle of Christian life, which mirrors Christ's life of loving regard for all. (See the Rule of Benedict, Chapter 7, the steps of humility in which one goes from the fear of God to a perfect love which casts out all fear; St. Bernard of Clairveaux's On Loving God, which details the Christian's move from loving one's self, to selfish love, to loving God as God, to finally loving one's self in God; and the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola).  I'll mention three rough stages: the illuminative, the trying/dark night, and the unitive/contemplative/stable.

Christian mystics often speak of illumination or conversion as the awakening to God by which people come to experience the love of God.  This can happen before or after a profession of faith.  This is the part of the life of faith that feels like a honeymoon.  Everything is roses, fervor, warmth, liveliness, and elation.  In very traditional terms, this is the experience of God which awakens people to the gulf between God and themselves in terms of holiness and goodness.  This stage may also jump-start the turn of the persons god-given gift of desire to the good, and the long process of growing into the fullness of Christ begins.

Then come the rough times; the fervor dies down, the warmth one experienced at doing good goes away.  God may seem far away, hidden.  Christians experience conflict and testing.  In traditional terms, this is sometimes called purgation and purification.  The true motives of our actions and beliefs are revealed--Do we seek heavenly reward or do we really love God and neighbor?  God is leading a person to the latter.  The paradox is that God is as close to the person in this stage as the first.   A person may experience this process and label parts of it, particularly the second stage, as doubt and questioning, and the trouble is that immature Christian communities see this and get nervous.  They think the conversion "didn't take."  Communities can fail people in this stage.  This is also precisely when community is so important.

Finally, there is the unitive/contemplative/stable stage, where the person gains a clarity about their life in God and continue in growing into the fullness God created him or her to be.  Discernment and humility typically characterize this stage, and contemplation becomes action embodied as second nature.  BUT, this is not a linear progression; folks sometimes cycle back through the dark night.  This is where, as I said above, doubt and questions represent God's way of calling us deeper.  The life we live is too small for the soul God is reworking.

Back to Communities. The Christian tradition has acknowledged that God is present to people even in their doubts and questions, or in the initial seeking of God. This is true even when Christians feel uncomfortable around people who do not believe the same way that they do (this is a sign of spiritual immaturity, which can be remedied by seeking God's face in the 'other').  But, the entire point of the church is to offer God’s welcome and to not hold back the good things of God from anyone. The Church acknowledges that all belong with God regardless of whether or not one believes, and the Church exists so it can be a place in which believers and nonbelievers can experience Christ together.  And even if some Christians feel a bit funny about caring for people who are so different, God calls us into this experience of walking through life in the light of a radical love.  We are called into relationship with God and the world, which is to be characterized by an indiscriminate loving regard-- for God, neighbor, and stranger.  Doubter and Questioner.

If a community has a choice between entertaining a doubt/question or distancing itself from those who have doubts and questions, the greater sin is to distance people.  When a community distances itself, the community forgets that a more profound fact about God can be found in a question, not an exclamation.

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*By 'properly done,' I mean that a pastor is not using the sermon as a moment of purely private reflection and personal pastoral care.  Pastors encounter the Biblical text on behalf of the community, and the community should be reflected in that work.  Also, the core of the Gospel is hope in the midst of trouble; if the pastor snuffs any sense of hope, the gospel is not being preached.
**I think I owe Hal Roark for this phrasing.

An Easter song/poem/prayer

RIse heart; thy Lord is risen.  Sing his praise
                                                  Without delayes,
Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise
                                                  With him mayst rise:
That, as his death calcined thee to dust,
His life may make thee gold, and much more, just.

Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part
                                                  With all thy art.
The crosse taught all wood to resound his name,
                                                  Who bore the same.
His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key
Is best to celebrate this most high day.

Consort both heart and lute, and twist a song
                                                  Pleasant and long:
Or, since all musick is but three part vied
                                                  And multiplied,
O let thy blessed Spirit bear a part,
And make up our defects with his sweet art.

"Easter" from The Temple (1633), by George Herbert

A Poem From St. Symeon, the New Theologian

We awaken in Christ's body as Christ awakens our bodies
And my poor hand is Christ.
He enters my foot and is infinitely me.
I move my hand
And wonderfully my hand becomes Christ,
All of him,
For God is indivisibly whole,
seamless in his Godhead.
I move my foot,
At once he appears like a flash of lightning.
Do my words seem blasphemous?
Then open your heart to him and let yourself receive
the one who is opening to you so deeply.
For if we genuinely love him,
We wake up in Christ's body
Where all our body
All over, every most hidden part of it,
Is realized in joy in Him,
And he makes us utterly real.
So everything that is hurt
Everything that seemed to us
Dark, harsh, shameful, maimed ugly, irreparably damaged
Is in him transformed
And recognized as whole,
As lovely and radiant in his light.
He awakens as the Beloved
In every last part of our body.

-From The Enlightened Heart:  An Anthology of Sacred Poetry, trans. Stephen Mitchell

Wiki:
     Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022 AD) was a Byzantine Christian monk and poet who was the last of three saints canonized by the Eastern Orthodox church and given the title of "Theologian" (along with John the Apostle and Gregory of Nazianzus). "Theologian" was not applied to Symeon in the modern academic sense of theological study, but to recognize someone who spoke from personal experience of the vision of God. One of his principal teachings was that humans could and should experience theoria (literally "contemplation", or direct experience of God).
     Symeon was born into the Byzantine nobility and given a traditional education. At age fourteen he met Symeon the Studite, a renowned monk of the Monastery of Stoudios in Constantinople, who convinced him to give his own life to prayer and asceticism under the elder Symeon's guidance. By the time he was thirty, Symeon the New Theologian became the abbot of the Monastery of St. Mammas, a position he held for twenty-five years. He attracted many monks and clergy with his reputation for sanctity, though his teachings brought him into conflict with church authorities, who would eventually send him into exile. His most well known disciple was Nicetas Stethatos who wrote the Life of Symeon.
      Symeon is recognized as the first Byzantine mystic to freely share his own mystical experiences. Some of his writings are included in the Philokalia, a collection of texts by early Christian mystics on contemplative prayer and hesychast teachings. Symeon wrote and spoke frequently about the importance of experiencing directly the grace of God, often talking about his own experiences of God as divine light.

The Womb of God, Mysticism part 2

Of my most direct experiences of God, the strongest one was a particular night in December 2010.  It has become something of my barometer for knowing how close I am to God in particular instances.  In those moments the direct experience of God—the description of which varies for many people--most resembled a dark buoyancy.  It felt safe and calm. I called it, and continue to call it, "the womb of God."

It is a place where one attempts to drop all walls, all self-deceptions, all excuses, and lay bare one's self before God.  It would be despairing, if there were not something to break the fall.  All doubts, all false certainties, all attempts at self-justification, all hatreds of oneself; they fall away.  One is left with God, who begins the work of removing the scales from one's eyes.  

See yourself as I see you.  See the world as I see it. 

Broken, yet beloved.  The space between God and me becomes clear--the space between the sacred and the profane--and yet God is joined to me, and I am in God.   The world will go from shades of grey to vibrant color and contrast.

One finds parts of one's very being transfigured.  Changed.  The parts of me that seemed soiled become pure as I hold it up to God.  

This part of you can stay, but it will not stay the same.  You will not let it.

"You will not let it." Not a command, but an observation.  God reclaims that which God made and turns its purpose back to its original glory.

Things will change once you see as I see.  You are forgiven.  You are loved.  You now know this. Try not to forget it. 

Dark buoyancy is replaced by gravity as I feel myself sitting in my chair.  No, I wasn't levitating, but I was back from somewhere.  I opened my eyes to see the candle, cross, and labyrinth laid out before me. 

What I am describing is not a one-time event, but an example of a lifetime's work of returning to God.  It happens every time I find a part of my life I have been keeping God away from, either intentionally or by oversight.  And, silly me, God is already there, waiting for me to catch up.  Waiting to show me the fullness for which I was made.

Mysticism part 1

[Christian] educators ought to remember that a religion which is first entirely bound up with narrow and childish theological ideas, and is then presented as true in the absolute sense, is bound to break down under greater knowledge or hostile criticism; and may then involve the disappearance of the religious impulse as a whole, at least for a long period.

Did we know our business, we ought surely to be able to ensure in our young people a steady and harmonious spiritual growth. The "conversion" or psychic convulsion which is sometimes regarded as an essential preliminary of any vivid awakening of the spiritual consciousness, is really a tribute exacted by our wrong educational methods. It is a proof that we have allowed the plastic creature confided to us to harden in the wrong shape. But if, side by side and in simplest language, we teach the conceptions: first, of God as the transcendent yet indwelling Spirit of love, of beauty and of power; next, of man's constant dependence on Him and possible contact with His nature in that arduous and loving act of attention which is the essence of prayer; last, of unselfish work and fellowship as the necessary expressions of all human ideals—then, I think, we may hope to lay the foundations of a balanced and a wholesome life, in which man's various faculties work together for good, and his vigorous instinctive life is directed to the highest ends. -Evelyn Underhill, Life of the Spirit (1922).

"The Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist at all." –Karl Rahner[1]

I've been fascinated these past two semesters by mysticism and, I would argue, it's necessity in the Christian life (for the purposes of this post, my definition of mysticism is simply 'union with God').  To that end, I've been reading Evelyn Underhill, an Anglo-Catholic mystic who wrote from around 1912-1941.  Even though an Anglo-Catholic in a time when factionalism in the Church of England was bitter, Underhill’s keen attention to the balanced spiritual life led her to frequently hearken back to the evangelical John Wesley’s life and work.  Underhill counts him as a saint and her approving mentions of Wesley are also representative of her willingness to pull from all of the Anglican tradition in her work, though she was also by no means limited by the Anglican Communion--or even Christianity--in her examples.

The above quote came from a book Underhill wrote in 1927 which included a chapter on Christian education.  What interested me about it is what I interpret to be a reference to what is nowadays called a 'born-again experience,' an experience which some evangelicals claim to be necessary in order to call oneself a Christian.  Often this is described in Evangelical circles as the moment one can point to, to the day or time, in which a person felt Jesus 'come into his or her heart,' usually after the admission of grievous sin.  Then one prays the 'Sinner's prayer,' Jesus makes residence in the person, and the person is considered saved.  If you are ever asked if you are 'saved,' you are probably being asked if you've ever experienced something like this.[2, see footnote below]

I think what is being described by Evangelicals as the born-again experience qualifies as a mystical experience and is real.  To say otherwise would be to admit limit to God's capability to reach people.  But I am unconvinced that this introductory experience is the only way to understand or gauge one's entry into the Christian life.  Further, I worry that when mystical experience in a certain prescribed way becomes the basis of deciding who is made truly Christian and who is not, it opens up a Christian group to drawing the borders of the faith too narrowly.  It also opens up the Christian group to attempting emotional manipulation in order to bring about the belief in a certain mystical experience.  I think Underhill would agree with my assessment, and she points to the particular type of born-again experience as a failure of education in the Christian tradition-- a tradition which in its fullest expression understands and discerns the direct experience of God.  She wished instead to instruct others (particularly children) into a 'steadier' entry in the life of God. 

So why is mystical experience so important?  First and foremost, Christianity is a religion with many abstract concepts and theologies which attempt to explain an objective reality that its own concepts grant to be ultimately indescribable.  But faith in something cannot live on it's philosophical underpinnings alone.  It is precisely reliance on these concepts that Underhill is worried about, especially if these concepts never evolve beyond simplistic and too-rigid understandings of the faith.  A simplistic understanding of Christianity in the abstract-- particularly that which does not allow for further knowledge, self-examination, or the admission that one may be wrong-- does not prepare someone to maintain their own convictions under the realities of human life or criticism from others.  Experience is necessary for fully understanding what one believes because Christianity is not a religion that posits a disinterested God, but of a god who seeks full relationship with the created universe.  

Christianity is a faith of ever-expanding relationship--of relationship both to God and to all of Creation.  The Christian, in the mystical experience of Reality (The way God would see the world, mediated through Christ, and sustained by the Spirit), receives “the vision of an intensely loving heart; and love, which cannot keep itself to itself, urges him to tell the news as widely and as clearly as he may.”[3] John Wesley would certainly agree. For if one wants to preach the Gospel of Christ, one must already possess the experience of God in order to relate it others.[4] Without this experience, the love of God is hearsay and a proposition, and not much more. 

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[1] Karl Rahner, Concern for the Church:  Theological Investigations Vol. 20 (New York, Crossroad Publishing Co., 1981), 149.

[2] Broad, sweeping, too-simple theological proviso:  I don't think 'salvation' works like what I've described above.  Salvation (which is not to be easily explained) is an incomplete work on all of Creation brought to completion at the Eschaton, and to worry about being "saved" in an afterlife is to completely jump over other important concepts of Christian theology and life:  justification and sanctification (or theosis), which are linked to salvation.

[3] Underhill, Practical Mysticism.

[4] Underhill, Life of the Spirit.