The Way of Wisdom

 

St. George's Chapel, The Bishop's Ranch

Do not forsake her, and she will keep you; love her, and she will guard you. The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom, and whatever else you get, get insight. - Proverbs 4:6-7

 

For Jews ask for signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.  - I Corinthians 1:22-24

 

Drawing on Hebrew scripture's image of Divine Wisdom as a preexistent feminine figure through whom God created all things, the New Testament describes Christ as the Wisdom or Sophia of God.  She is incarnate in Christ.  This image is taken up in the prologue of John's Gospel and in St. Paul's letters (see John 1:3 and Colossians 1:15-15).  In later tradition, we see Anselm of Canterbury referring to Christ our Mother in his Prayer to St. Paul, and St. Julian of Norwich, too, in her Revelations of Divine Love, refers to Christ as our True Mother.  They are implicitly referencing and transposing this biblical image of Sophia onto Christ. 

 

We often reserve the "divine feminine" to Mariology, if we honor it at all, but that does not do full justice to the range of images in Christian tradition.  How delightful, then, to worship at St. George's Chapel at the Bishop's Ranch yesterday, and pray in these words written by Father Brendan Williams, CSR, the chaplain at the Ranch:

Almighty God, whom truly to know is everlasting life: Grant us so to perfectly know your Divine Wisdom, embodied in our living Master, Jesus Christ, that we may steadfastly follow her steps in the way that leads to illumination, and thereby attain to eternal life; through the same Divine Wisdom, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit: One God, now and forever.  Amen.

And to affirm our commitment to the Way of Wisdom, in this Affirmation of Faith also authored by Father Brendan:

You, O God, are supreme and holy.

You are absolute Being, Consciousness, and Bliss,

from before time and forever.

You continually give birth to the world,

and give life to all beings.

Like waves on an ocean,

in and from you all things arise,

and, in your time, they return to you.

 

You, O God, are infinite Love,

and goodness beyond all measure.

You have revealed your compassion for all Creation

in Jesus Christ, the embodiment of your Wisdom,

who lived and died and rose again.

 

You, O God, are ever living, eternal,

birthing all things in the breath of your Spirit.

May we know your Truth and be freed

from every error and illusion.

May we be one and whole,

united forever with your Life,

in which there is no death.

Amen.

 

Father Brendan's liturgical innovations, rooted in Eastern Christian tradition and enriched through encounter with other Eastern Wisdom traditions, skillfully and poetically weave together themes of creation, incarnation, and the divine feminine that we desperately need to recover to heal our fragmented world.  They give fresh expression to the Mystery of God, who is calling us into a future that requires us to deepen our capacity for imagination and compassion.  A deep bow to Father Brendan, with thanksgiving.

Reflections on Observing Holy Week

We are drawing close to Holy Week, and I would like to share some reflections on how to enter more fully and freely into its observance.  It is the most important time of the Christian year.  It is also the most challenging time of the Christian year.  To experience this time meaningfully, we need to avoid its pitfalls and embrace its promise. 

 

Two Big Pitfalls

It is important to acknowledge up front that Holy Week lends itself to the worst kind of anti-Judaism.  While the Church has acknowledged that “the Jews” did not kill Jesus, our sacred texts and liturgies can still reinforce this idea if we do not handle them with care.  As one of my parishioners pointedly (and rightly) reminded me:  “We have to do better than just throwing the other team under the bus.”  If we come away from Holy Week believing that Judaism is the bad guy in this story, then we have missed the whole point. 

 

So, let’s be clear:  Jesus is a Jew, and his ministry was very much a reform movement within Judaism.  The texts of the New Testament are written primarily (perhaps entirely) by Jews, and they express 1^st Century conflicts among competing interpretations of Jewish faith.  Some Jews came to believe that Jesus is the Messiah.  Others disagreed.  This was very much an intra-Jewish debate.   Context matters and it is important to keep this context in mind. 

 

Jesus was crucified by the Roman Empire for sedition at the behest of some local Jewish authorities in Jerusalem.  John’s Gospel, properly translated, refers to them as “the Judaeans,” not “the Jews.”  Scholars like John Dominic Crossan have worked assiduously to separate out the historical kernel from the theological husk of the Gospel accounts. 

 

Theologically, Jesus’ death reveals the duplicity and cruelty of all human regimes of domination, and the veneer of religious piety within which it is hidden.  The Passion narratives rip away the political and religious justifications to reveal the violence at the heart of human civilization and the innocence of its victims.  Who killed Jesus?  We all did.  Human civilization did.  That is the theological significance of the Passion that the Gospels seek to convey.  The Passion is not a story about what Jews did to Jesus, much less to Christians, but rather about what humans do to each other.  Sadly, the history of what Christians have done to Jews only serves to underscore the truth of the violent human dynamic that the Passion story reveals.  Using this story to reinscribe the very “us” vs. “them” binary that Jesus seeks to overcome indicates just how seriously Christianity too often has misinterpreted it.

 

This leads to a related pitfall during Holy Week: the doctrine of substitutionary atonement.  It is the idea that Jesus’ died for our sins, bearing the punishment that we deserve to satisfy God’s demand for retributive justice.  Jesus did not die for our sins.  He died because of our sins, because of our collective enslavement to order based on sacrificial violence.  His death is liberating, not because it placates an angry God; but because it confronts us with the truth about ourselves, and makes it possible for us to consciously choose sacrificial love instead of sacrificial violence as the basis for human and ecological community. 

 

The theological meaning of Jesus’ death and resurrection is the evolutionary leap in human consciousness that it inaugurates, unleashing an unlimited potential for growth in wisdom and compassion.  The Eastern Church understood rightly that salvation is deification, recovering the image of God within us.  Jesus died, not to liberate us from divine wrath, but from human wrath, so that we might reclaim our identity and our unity in divine love. 

 

One Big Promise

This is the big promise of Holy Week:  that by dying to the way of violence we can be reborn in the way of love.  We can partake of the divine nature by realizing the potential of our human nature.  There is another way to live. 

 

Holy Week is a dramatic rehearsal of the way of love.  Its practice is familiar to any good community organizer.  It begins with intentionally raising the tension in the system to make visible its violence and inhumanity.  It does so creatively:  a march on Jerusalem from Galilee with a symbolic entrance into the city that recalls prophetic hope for justice, a symbolic cleansing of the Temple in protest against exploitation, and a teach-in calling the authorities to account for their complicity with oppression. 

 

It continues with a kind of political ju-jitsu, confronting civilizational violence with a willingness to sacrifice oneself in solidarity with its victims.  Jesus refuses to deny either the reality of oppression or the humanity of everyone involved.  Conflict is heightened, not through reciprocal violence (sacrificing other people), but by raising consciousness through a willingness to make sacrifices in the service of truth and reconciliation (risking vilification, arrest, punishment and even death).  Sacrificial violence is opposed by sacrificial love, so that that the binary of “us” vs. “them” is overcome.  There is only “us.”

 

Sacrificial love escalates the confrontation by expanding the circle of community embracing the path of love.  The “them” keeps getting smaller and the “us” keeps getting larger as we realize and manifest the flow of mercy in tune with the beating heart of God at the center of reality.  The promise is resurrection: life lived from this center.

 

May we honestly and carefully navigate the pitfalls of Holy Week as we journey together to claim its astonishing promise.  May it become the pattern of our collective life until the promise is fulfilled. 

 

 

 

The Trinitarian Vision

In the beginning is the relationship, and reality is relational all the way through and all the way down.  It’s all about relationship.  This is an existential truth, deeply rooted in our experience.  That is what the Christian symbol of God as Trinity tries to convey.  

Unfortunately, the traditional language of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the idea of these being three “persons,” tends toward a kind of tri-theism.  This language is, of course, rooted in the biblical texts, but there it is invoked in a narrative context in which the meaning of the terms is clearly derived from the character of God’s relationship with the world.  In literature, individuals are not presented in the abstract and then proceed to have relationships.  Rather, it is through engaging in relationships that the character of a person is revealed.[1]  Experience gives rise to the symbol, and what is being expressed in the symbol of God as Trinity is an experience of relationship.  

As this narrative language was taken up into philosophical speculation, the symbols, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, were easily misunderstood as three substantial beings who have a relationship with each other.  But that is not what the early theologians of the church were trying to convey.  Following the biblical tradition, they experienced God’s power in relationship to the Source of the created world, to Jesus as the incarnation of that Source, and to the Spirit of love pervading the relationship that is invisible but still concretely present.

This experience of relationship is so powerful that they imagined God as relationship without remainder; not as three persons who have relationships, but rather three subsistent relations distinct but constitutive of one divine reality.  God simply is the relations that God has.[2]  The substantive nouns drawn from biblical narrative used to describe these subsistent relations obscures their dynamic and interdependent character.   What the Symbol of the Trinity expresses is the character of reality as emergent (deriving from a Source rather than self-generating), as evolving (the becoming of all that is), and as internally related (revealing an implicate order in its dynamism). 

Raimon Panikkar argues that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is a homeomorphic equivalent to the nondual advaita tradition in India:  emphasizing the constitutive relational nature of reality that cannot be characterized as either unity or duality.  This is difficult to grasp, because we have internalized so deeply the ideology of liberal individualism.  We really do think we are absolutely independent, self-constituted monads bumping against each other like so many billiard balls; merely externally related, if at all. 

But that is not the case.  It is my relationship to you that makes you, “you,” and me, “me.”  We are internally related to each other and co-constitutive of our identities.  I am “me” in relationship to “you,” and you are “you” in relationship to “me.”  This explains why the death of a loved one is so wrenching; or a divorce, or even a child growing up and going off to college.  Notice, too, that this means that I am “me” only in so far as I am for “you;” and you are “you” only in so far as you are for “me;” we are the energy of love that unites us.  In this way, we participate in the very life of God, the subsistent relations within the Godhead that constitute the generative, self-giving, dynamic of love. 

We are constituted by, and constitutive of, a universe that is an irreversible, emergent process.  The universe is an evolving constellation of relationships moving toward greater complexity and consciousness, marked by centricity or self-organization at every level from the physical to the biological to reflexive-consciousness.    Each self-organizing part is constitutive of a larger whole, from the atom to the molecule to the cell to the organism to the ecosystem to the planet to the cosmos.   Each is related to all.

There is a convergence underway in the new sciences of quantum physics, systems biology, and ecology moving us away from the modern age’s mechanistic view of nature to a renewed holism that

has reversed the relationship between the parts and the whole.  The properties of the parts are not intrinsic properties but can be understood only within the context of the larger whole.  What we call a part is merely a pattern in an inseparable web of relationships.  Therefore, the shift from parts to the whole can be seen as a shift from objects to relationships.  A system is an integrated whole whose essential properties arise from the relationships among its parts.  Nature is an interlocking network of systems . . . Nature is more flow than fixed.[3] 

In the beginning is the relationship, and reality is relational all the way through and all the way down.  It’s all about relationship.  It isn’t that you and I form relationships.  It is that relationships form us.  And God is the relation of all relations, the depth dimension of reality uniting humanity and the cosmos in an emergent, evolving, dynamic system of systems ordered and energized by love.

Ilia Delio writes that

Evolution unveils a depth of integrated wholeness that is open to more unity, centricity, and consciousness.  Love is not sheer emotion or simply a dopaminergic surge in the limbic system; it is much more deeply embedded in the fabric of the universe.  Love is the integrated energy field, the center of all centers, the whole of every whole, that makes each whole desire more wholeness.  While love-energy may not explicitly show itself on the level of the pre-living and non-reflective, it is present inchoately as the unifying principle of wholeness as entities evolve toward greater complexity.  “But even among the molecules,” Teilhard [de Chardin] wrote, “Love was the building power that worked against entropy and under its attraction the elements groped their way towards union.”  Love-energy marks the history of the universe.[4]

The new science is aligning with a new religious consciousness in the reimaging of the primordial and perennial trinitarian tradition of reality as Spirit-Matter-Consciousness.  In this vision,

“Everything that exists, any real being, presents this triune constitution expressed in three dimensions . . . The cosmotheandric intuition is not a tripartite division among beings, but an insight into the threefold core of all that is insofar as it is.”[5]

The Christian symbol of the Trinity is a particular expression of the universal experience of reality as trinitarian, expressed differently in the symbols of other cultures.   It is a vision of reality whose source, end, and energy is love.  It is a vision we desperately need to reclaim. 

As that part of the universe which has become self-conscious, we humans have become responsible for a “cultural selection” that operates in addition to natural selection to decisively affect the evolution of love on earth.  We can choose to align ourselves with the truth of the Trinitarian vision through the cultivation of Christ-consciousness in ourselves: the realization of our deep interconnection with, and responsibility for, life in the cosmos.

Constance Fitzgerald argues that

Our ability to embody our communion with every human person on the earth and our unassailable connectedness with everything living is limited because . . . we continue to privilege our personal autonomy and are unable to make the transition from radical individualism to a genuine synergistic community even though we know intellectually we are inseparably and physically connected to every living being in the universe.  Yet the future of the entire earth community is riding on whether we can find a way beyond the limits of our present evolutionary trajectory.[6]

What is required is a deep surrender of the ego in trust that God’s power, the power of love, is working through us.  We are invited to participate in the next great evolutionary leap, at the spirit level, the level of consciousness, in which we grow into the fullness of Christ.  Fitzgerald goes on to say that

The evolution of spirit or consciousness . . . happens not just or mainly through physical propagation but through a spiritual one in which people “bear fruit by virtue of the atmosphere which radiates from them on their environment and . . . also by means of the works which they produce in common and through which they propagate their spirit.  This idea of spiritual generativity may sound far-fetched or ungrounded, until we consider what scientists are discovering and speculating about the true nature of our world.  For example, as long ago as 1982 it was reported that “under certain circumstances sub-atomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them, whether an inch, 100 feet, or 10 billion miles apart.”  Scientist David Bohm’s explanation:  there is a deeper and more complex level of reality than we experience, an “implicate order or unbroken wholeness” from which all our perceived reality derives.  If such a fabric of interconnectedness exists in nature, it is no stretch of the imagination to apply it to consciousness.  Genuine contemplatives have testified to this long before scientists.[7]

We can experience this deeper and more complex level of reality, “because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”[8]  It is our hope and our responsibility.  May the Spirit of truth that Jesus promised lead us into all truth and to the fullness of the Trinitarian vision.[9]

---

[1] David S. Cunningham, These Three Are One: The Practice of Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), p. 62.

[2] Ibid, pp. 59-65.

[3] Ilia Delio, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018), p. 32.

[4] Ibid, p. 44.

[5] Raimon Panikkar, Christophany: The Fullness of Man (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004), p. xii.

[6] Fitzgerald, “From Impasse to Prophetic Hope: Crisis of Memory,” CTSA PROCEEDINGS 64 (2009), p. 38.

[7] Ibid, p. 41.

[8] Romans 5:5

[9] John 16:13.

Who Am I?

Icon of the Transfiguration of Jesus

The story of the transfiguration of Jesus is recorded in all three of the synoptic gospels:  Mark, Matthew and Luke. The placement of this story in the synoptic gospels, and especially in Luke’s Gospel, is significant.  In all three gospels, the transfiguration follows closely on Jesus’ question to his disciples, “Who do people say that I am,” followed by Jesus’ first prediction of his crucifixion and resurrection.[1]   The transfiguration also marks a turning point in the gospel narratives, from Jesus’ ministry in the Galilee region near his hometown to his journey to Jerusalem, where this prediction will be fulfilled.[2]  In other words, the transfiguration is set in relationship to the questions of identity and destiny:  Who am I and what is my purpose? 

These are the big questions, aren’t they?  In the gospels, the story of the transfiguration serves to deepen our engagement with these questions.  It does not provide an answer; at least not directly.  It is a story filled with evocative images and allusions to other stories that invite us to live into the questions, to love the questions themselves, and to discover their meaning in our life’s journey. 

In approaching this story, we do well to recall the advice the poet, Rilke, gave to a friend.  “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”[3]

I want to consider these questions as addressed to us and about us – not only to and about Jesus. Normally, we read the gospels to help us understand better the identity and destiny of Jesus.  That is a legitimate project, no doubt.  But the purpose of that project is to hold up Jesus as a mirror in which we can see more clearly our own identity and destiny.   St. Paul makes this quite clear: “all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.”[4]  Let us look at the transfiguration story as in a mirror, to see what it tells us about our identity and our destiny.

The first question is “Who am I?”  Interestingly, Jesus actually poses the question slightly differently, “Who do people say that I am?”  The disciples give various answers:  John the Baptist, Elijah, one of the prophets.  Peter confesses, “You are the Anointed One of God.”  Jesus responds by telling them not to tell anyone who he is, and then says he will undergo suffering, rejection, murder and resurrection.

There are several tantalizing clues about the question of identity in this brief exchange.  Notice first that we receive our identity through the eyes of others.  Who do people say that I am?  Identity is relational all the way down.  It is not something fixed, stable, internal to myself.  It is always being negotiated in relationship to others, to their perceptions and my perception of their perceptions.  I am who I am in relationship to others.  And their perception of me is always colored by the lens of their experience.  We are always identifying one thing in relationship to other things.

A woman in a coma was dying.  She suddenly had a feeling that she was taken up into heaven and stood before the Judgment Seat.  “Who are you?” a Voice said to her.  “I am the wife of the mayor,” she replied.  “I did not ask you whose wife you are but who you are.”  “I am the mother of four children.”  “I did not ask you whose mother you are, but who you are.”  “I’m a school teacher.”  “I did not ask what your profession is but who you are.”  And so it went.  No matter what she replied, she did not seem to give a satisfactory answer to the question, “Who are you?”  “I’m a Christian.”  “I did not ask what your religion is but who you are.”  “I’m the one who went to church every day and always helped the poor and needy.”  “I did not ask you what you did but who you are.”  She evidently failed the examination, for she was sent back to earth.  When she recovered from her illness, she was determined to find out who she was.  And that made all the difference.[5]

Who are you?  Jesus resisted the disciples attempts to identity him in relationship to their own cultural conditioning, roles, and expectations.   We are not who others think we are, and so we are not who we think we are either!  It takes some real effort on our part to live into this question because we think we know who we are, confusing our identity with our cultural conditioning. 

In St. Paul’s metaphor, our perception of reality, including ourselves, is distorted by the lens of our cultural conditioning.  Moses wasn’t the only one wearing a veil.  Such distortions aren’t just a Jewish problem; though, because St. Paul was a Jew, he describes the problem in terms of his own cultural conditioning.[6]  All religion, all cultural conditioning gives us a distorted sense of identity. 

We see each other and our “self” through the veil of our conditioning.  This veil limits our perception by fixing an identity that we internalize, and then use as a lens that both focuses and occludes our vision.  Becoming a “self” in this way is how we lose our freedom. 

A student walked up to the clerk at the language laboratory and said, “May I have a blank tape, please?”  “What language are you studying?” asked the clerk.  “French” said the student.  “Sorry, we don’t have any blank tapes in French.”  “Well do you have any blank tapes in English?”  “Yes, we do.”  “Good.  I’ll take one of those.” 

Anthony De Mello comments on this story, “It makes as much sense to speak of a blank tape being French or English as it does to speak of a person being French or English.  French or English is your conditioning, not you.”[7]

The transfiguration of Jesus points to another possibility – that we can receive our identity from God, rather than from our cultural conditioning. Jesus was not Elijah, or Moses, or one of the prophets, though on the mountaintop he is seen together with them.  They are part of the relational matrix of life held in being by God.  He was not even the Anointed One, the Messiah, in any conventional sense.  God said, “You are my son, by Chosen One, my Beloved.”[8]  This identity too, is relational all the way down, but it is open to the experience of reality unveiled, moment by moment, and to the discovery of our freedom in being present to what is given, trusting that what is given is held in love. 

In the transfiguration experience, we are given an image of identity as a dynamic, evolving response to love that is continually emerging from the heart of reality; not a static fixed entity somewhere in me.  I am who I am becoming.  I am never a finished project, but rather an evolving response to love, being transformed into Love’s image from one degree of glory to another. 

In the cloud of God’s glory, Jesus speaks with Moses and Elijah of his impending “departure,” literally, his “exodus.”[9]  Jesus’ identity is revealed in the context of a journey of liberation.  Just as the Israelites journeyed from Egypt to the promised land, leaving behind slavery to become the people of God, Jesus realizes his identity in leaving behind his cultural conditioning to become God’s beloved child.  He drops the “self” of his conditioning and receives his identity from God instead, being transformed from one degree of glory to another, until he becomes all love.

This is real freedom, as St. Paul understood.  “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”[10]  When we receive our identity from God, then we become free.  Free to love.  This is a radically de-centering experience.  In the dialogues of St. Catherine of Siena, God is reported to have said to her, “I am He who is; you are she who is not.”  Liberation is the experience of our “is-not-ness,” freedom from the veil of our cultural conditioning so that we can flow with reality.[11]  When we are free to respond to love’s invitations, then we discover our destiny.  We will intuitively know how to respond to people and situations as they arise in each moment.  It is much easier to love people when we no longer need to receive our identity from them.

We never stop having to drop our illusions, shake off our conditioning.  We keep falling asleep and must wake up again and again.  We are tempted, like Peter, who saw Jesus transfigured on the mountain top with eyes unveiled, to want to grow a little bit, to experience a little bit more freedom, and then try to fix a new identity into place.  Peter wanted to build a tabernacle, create a new religious identity.  He wanted to replace one veil with another.

So how do we begin to drop our illusions, our “self,” and receive our identity from God?  Here, I would just note that in Luke’s gospel, the questions of identity and destiny are raised and explored in the context of prayer.  Jesus is praying when he asks his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?”  It is while praying on the mountain that this question is lived more deeply.   It is through the radically de-centering experience of prayer and meditation that we begin to live the question, not only on our knees or our meditation cushion, but in daily life.

Who am I?  What is my destiny?  Am I willing to be transformed from one degree of glory to another?  These are questions that must be lived.  Let me leave you with one last image: that of the dancer and the dance.  God is the dancer and creation is God’s dance.  It is not that God is the big dancer and we are the little dancer.  We are being danced by God!  When we understand this, when we trust this, then we are free.[12] 

---

[1] For example, Luke 9:18-22.

[2] Luke 9:51.

[3] Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (Letter 4, 16 July 1903).

[4] II Corinthians 3:18.

[5] Anthony De Mello, Taking Flight:  A Book of Story Meditations (New York:  Image Books, 1990), p. 140.

[6] II Corinthians 3:12-16.

[7] De Mello, Taking Flight, p. 141.

[8] Luke 9:35, cf. Matthew 17:5.

[9] Luke 9:30-31.

[10] II Corinthians 3:17.

[11] Anthony De Mello, Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality (New York:  Image Books, 1992), p. 105.

[12] De Mello, Awareness, p. 105.

The Courage to Love

 

The #NoJusticeNoDeal Campaign calls for police reform in San Francisco

For God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.   – 2 Timothy 1:7

Last January, the annual meeting of our congregation voted unanimously to become a member congregation of Faith in Action Bay Area (FIA).  FIA is a network of more than 100 congregations and community based organizations working together to promote justice and human dignity in communities across San Francisco and San Mateo Counties.   This decision followed the recommendation of a team of St. James members who have been exploring a partnership with FIA since 2014.

Often, when we talk about faith based community organizing, we talk about what we do (work on particular issues or campaigns) and how we do it (educational forums, voter engagement, meeting with public officials, press conferences, protests), but we rarely talk about why we do it.  We fail to address the heart of the matter.  Different people may explain why they do this work in various ways, but for me it boils down to this:  I want to love more courageously. 

The summer of 2013 was a turning point for me.  In July, a Florida jury found George Zimmerman not guilty of the murder of Trayvon Martin.  I had paid attention to the case, because it touched on my own fears for the safety of my son, then 15 years-old, who could easily have been Trayvon: a black kid living in a neighborhood where many people might have thought he didn’t belong. 

I was appalled that an unarmed 17 year-old could be stalked and shot dead with impunity.  When the NAACP in San Francisco called for a rally outside of City Hall to protest the verdict, my husband and I attended.  It was a pitiful rally in terms of turnout; less than 100 people.  Few of the participants where white, and I was the only white clergy person I could see.  I knew black folks who had showed up for immigrant rights.  I knew black folks who had showed up for marriage equality.  Who was showing up for them?  That was when I knew that I had to start showing up.

I showed up because I love my son.  All organizing work for justice is rooted in love.  Who or what do you love enough to fight for?  I realized I had to have the courage to stand up against racism if my love for my son was to have any meaning.  I needed folks who could help me to find that courage and express it in ways consistent with the energy of love.  That is how I found my way to Faith in Action Bay Area, organizing for justice and human dignity.  Justice is what love looks like in public.

After Ferguson, Missouri was disrupted by the murder of Michael Brown, I traveled there with other clergy from FIA and heard the stories of people in that community.  I began to make connections.  What began as an impulse of love launched me into a web of relationships I could not have otherwise anticipated or imagined.  Coming home, I began to hear stories of people in San Francisco directly affected by the racism of the criminal justice system. 

As I listen to the stories of people living in contexts different from my own, I begin to see them.  Their stories changed my perception of the world.  The first revolution is internal; a softening of the heart that allows us to absorb more of reality. I was disrupted by their pain and struggle, and by the acknowledgement of my own privilege; together, we began to imagine the possibility of a world without racism. 

This is what faith-based organizing work is fundamentally about: building relationships, building the beloved community across the usual divides of religion, race, class and gender.  My internal conversation about who I love developed into conversations with other concerned parents of children of color; which grew into a team of people building trust to fight against racism in the criminal justice system; which expanded into a base of people, a movement working to change laws and implement police reforms.  Finally, it had to include elected officials who have the power to make change.  We had to talk with them to learn how to leverage our collective power to make the changes we needed to protect our kids. 

This is basically what Jesus did his entire ministry.  He got clear about God’s will for him and the work he was called to do in the world.  He traveled all around the Galilee listening to people’s stories, coming close to the pain in their communities.  He gathered a team to make change, to teach, and to heal; to turn despair, isolation, and fear into a powerful community.  He engaged the religious and political leaders of his day in often difficult and even confrontational conversations.  In solidarity with those he loved, he was executed by the state for resisting evil.  And from his sacrifice, he gave life to a movement that is still setting the world on fire with God’s love.

Faith based community organizing is about finding the courage to love.  It isn’t about this or that issue.  It isn’t even about winning.  It is about building relationships so that we can claim our power as the people of God, who has not given us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power, and of love, and of self-discipline.  We can become the people we need to be, so that we can realize God’s dream for the world; if we have the courage to love.

Bearing Witness

I have been privileged to have some powerful conversations with colleagues this week about how to respond to white supremacist provocation in San Francisco this weekend. There has been passionate conversation in particular about whether or not clergy should be present at Crissy Field, where the white nationalist rally will be held. One colleague asked, "What would being there accomplish? What would you hope to achieve?

My response is "nothing." This is not a situation in which there are winners. There is only the brutality of hate and the ongoing suffering of victims of centuries-old racism. The people of God will be at Crissy Field in all their beauty and in all their brokenness. Clergy will be there as a visible sign that the faith community is there too, at the place of greatest contradiction between the reality of evil and the reality of beloved community. We are not there to solve a problem, but to bear witness to that Love which transcends our differences and heals our wounds.

Clergy will be there, not as leaders, but to offer prayerful, nonviolent support to our community. We are there to bear witness. We will not abandon our sisters and brothers who are most vulnerable, nor ignore those who have demeaned their own inherent dignity in their espousal of racist rhetoric, intimidation, and violence. We must offer hope and healing to the vulnerable, judgment and mercy to sinners, at Crissy Field and everywhere else where the people of God gather.

I respect that others will choose to bear witness at other places in San Francisco. That is as it should be. Let us hold each other in prayer and love wherever we may be.

Theosis: Sermon for the Feast of the Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Transfiguration of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Transfiguration is attested in all three Synoptic Gospels:  Matthew, Mark, and Luke, as well as by the Second Letter of Peter.   While the Gospel of John does not include an account of the Transfiguration, it explicitly underscores the theological significance of the event in an important dialogue between Jesus and Philip.

Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves. Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.  (John 14:8-12)

All four Gospels make the same point:  in seeing Jesus, we see God.  And in seeing God, we are empowered to become fully ourselves:  human beings created in God’s image.   Through Christ, we become united with God in the creative, life-giving work of love.

This teaching is at the heart of Christian faith.  It was expressed beautifully by Bishop Irenaeus of Lyon in the Second Century, when he wrote that "The glory of God is man fully alive, and the life of man is the vision of God. If the revelation of God through creation already brings life to all living beings on the earth, how much more will the manifestation of the Father by the Word bring life to those who see God" (Against Heresies IV, 20, 7).  This vision of God is made possible through "the Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, Who did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself." (Against Heresies V, preface)

This is a great mystery, and it is astonishing to realize that God desires to freely share God’s life and glory with us!  God desires so much more for us that we can ask for or imagine!   How patiently God waits for us to wake-up to our desire for God, to become united with his will for us, which is true freedom and joy.   

In Luke’s account, Jesus brings Peter, James, and John up to the mountain to pray.  The three disciples struggle to remain awake, but in doing so see the glory of God revealed there.  This is the work of prayer:  the struggle to shake off our illusions and preoccupations, so that we can attend to God’s desire for us and our desire for God.  Prayer is the work of seeing God so that we can see ourselves as God sees us. Prayer is waking-up so that we don’t miss the point of being alive!

Prayer can be a struggle, much as attending to any relationship can be a struggle.  It takes effort and perseverance, time and attention, for a real relationship with another human being to unfold, to move beyond our projections and illusions about each another to that we can really see each other.  Genuine friendship is the fruit of such effort; accepting one another as we really are so that we can grow into the fullness of who we are meant to be. Real friends love each other, and they accept each other, warts and all, thereby providing each other the space and time to let go of those things that prevent them from becoming fully alive. 

St. Theresa of Avila describes prayer in much the same way.  She writes that “prayer in my opinion is nothing else than an intimate sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with Him who we know loves us.  In order that love be true and the friendship endure, the wills of the friends must be in accord . . . Oh what a good friend You make, my Lord!  How You proceed by favoring and enduring.  You wait for others to adapt to Your nature, and in the meanwhile you put up with theirs!”  (The Book of Her Life, VIII, 5-6)

Like any good friend, God puts up with us until we can see ourselves through God’s eyes: as objects of God’s loving desire, invited to share God’s life and work.   Prayer is the experience of God loving us until we can love ourselves.  Then God loves us some more, until we begin to love others as God loves us.  We adapt ourselves to God’s nature and so become like Jesus.

Good friends also listen to each other, deeply and patiently.  The voice from the cloud announces to Peter, James and John: “this is my Son, my Chosen, listen to him!” (Luke 9:35).  The vision of God in the face of Jesus Christ also entails a willingness to listen to his voice, to internalize his teaching, not simply to venerate him but to follow him, to become like him.  How do we do this?

In Eastern Orthodox tradition, the Feast of the Transfiguration is a celebration of the chief end of human life:  deification or union with God’s will.  This is called theosis in the Eastern Church, a process of transformation through catharsis (purification of mind and body) and theoria (illumination by the vision of God).   Theosis is not our achievement, but rather God’s gift to us, whereby we become transparent to the energia of God in the power of the Holy Spirit.  The practice of prayer disposes us to become willing to receive this gift, empowering us for service in God’s name. 

In English, theoria is translated as “contemplation.” Gerry May defines contemplation “as a specific psychological state characterized by alert and open qualities of awareness . . . contemplation consists of a direct, immediate, open-eyed encounter with life as-it-is.”  Contemplation as a psychological state occurs naturally and can be taught, learned, and cultivated.   May notes that when practiced over time, the psychological state of contemplation produces changes in brain function, with quite visible psychophysiological effects:

1 1.Increased clarity and breadth of awareness:  the experienced contemplative develops a capacity for more panoramic, all-inclusive awareness that includes stimuli that is normally screened out as distracting or irrelevant.  Thus more information is available for consideration.

22. More direct and incisive responsiveness to situations.  Since a greater range of perception is available, the experienced contemplative is more present in the moment and responsive to people and situations.  At the same time, she is increasingly confident in the mind’s natural intuitive ability, thus spending less time consciously thinking about what to do.  This combination of increased information and decreased effort makes for more immediate and efficient reactions.

33. Greater self-knowledge.  Mental activities that were previously unnoticed become visible; the unconscious becomes conscious, increasing understanding of thoughts, sensations, emotions, and memories.  Personal abilities and vulnerabilities are better understood and accepted.  Most importantly, the insubstantiality of one’s self-image is recognized, making one less vulnerable to a variety of existential anxieties.

All of this makes for a remarkable increase in personal power, but at the level of technique, contemplation is morally neutral:  it can be cultivated for great good or for great evil.  Contemplation becomes contemplative prayer only when it is directed toward a conscious desire for God and knowledge of God’s will.  This is also why, in the Christian tradition, the practice of contemplation is always done in conjunction with the cultivation of the virtues, especially the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. 

Here, we move beyond honing neurological responsiveness and personal power to cultivating a willingness to be open to God’s grace, embracing the vulnerability of friendship with God of which St. Teresa speaks.   Contemplative prayer is a willingness to embrace the vulnerability of loving and being loved.

In contemplative prayer, we reach the limit of what training and effort can achieve, and surrender to the healing and transfiguring power of God’s love.  We cannot make the vision of God happen.  We can dispose ourselves to become willing to receive it, to risk the vulnerability of love.  This willingness is risky.  In prayer, St. Catherine of Genoa heard God say, “If you know how much I loved you, it would kill you.”  How much love can we bear?  May argues that the only psychological determinant that correlates with our capacity for love is our willingness to accept the pain of love and the courage to bear it.  Love can hurt, but it also heals like nothing else can.[1]

In the Kontakion for the Feast of the Transfiguration, our Eastern Orthodox sisters and brothers sing,

On the Mountain You were Transfigured, O Christ God,

And Your disciples beheld Your glory as far as they could see it;

So that when they would behold You crucified,

They would understand that Your suffering was voluntary,

And would proclaim to the world,

That You are truly the Radiance of the Father!

In Christ, God willingly risks the vulnerability of love for the sake of life, for our life and the life of the world.  In contemplative prayer, we gamble on that same risk and surrender to this love.  We become truly ourselves: icons of God’s own love, united with God in the work of justice, healing and reconciliation.  For this, we were made.  Amen.

---

[1] May’s discussion of contemplation and the quote from St. Catherine of Genoa are found in Gerald G. May, “To Bear The Beams Of Love: Contemplation And Personal Growth” at http://www.theway.org.uk/back/s059May.pdf.