Becoming Human Again: A Homily for the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany

For our meditation this morning we have two profoundly moving stories about the healing of leprosy: Naaman, the Syrian warrior who seeks out the Hebrew prophet Elisha, and the unnamed man who humbly implores Jesus to make him clean. In both these stories, the issue isn’t simply about a medical cure, but also about being made clean. Leprosy was much more than a skin condition. It carried a terrible social stigma, rendering one morally impure, dirty, literally untouchable.

To be a leper was to be beyond the pale of human community. It meant exile from even the most cursory human interchange. It was to be an outcast. For these men, then, healing meant so much more than curing a disease. It meant becoming human again.

This desire to become fully human, to be in communion with God and with one another, is our soul’s deepest longing. The stories of Naaman and of the unnamed leper are our stories, mirroring back to us our desire and our fear. There is something of the leper in all of us. We all want to be made clean.

Naaman immediately put me in mind of the Roy Cohn character in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Millenium Approaches. Roy Cohn was a real-life lawyer and power-broker in New York, a right-wing demagogue and closeted homosexual whose bread and butter was the demonization of other homosexuals for political gain. From Joe McCarthy to Ronald Reagan, Roy Cohn was a key Cold War anti-communist and anti-gay crusader.

There is a revealing scene in Kushner’s play, in which Roy is sitting in the office of Henry, his doctor. The year is 1985, and Henry has just diagnosed Roy with AIDS. For Roy, it is not the threat of death that disturbs him, but the threat of being identified with homosexuals and drug-addicts. It is the threat of social stigma and powerlessness that he most fears.

Roy tells Henry, “Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are men who in fifteen years of trying cannot get a pissant antidiscrimination bill through City Council. Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout. Does this sound like me, Henry? . . . Roy Cohn is not a homosexual.”

Roy Cohn is representative of a certain class of closeted, affluent gay men, who in the early days of the AIDS pandemic were horrified to discover the ways in which AIDS stripped them of the cover that protected their privilege. Suddenly, they found themselves either in denial – Roy Cohn protested that he had liver cancer to the end – or else they found themselves in solidarity with drag queens and heroin addicts struggling to be made clean. In Kushner’s play, Roy is never made clean because he is never willing to accept the powerlessness revealed by his need. Ironically, it is a former drag queen, a black nurse, who cares for Roy as he is dying; irony, however, doesn’t lead to insight or healing for Cohn.

Naaman, like Roy Cohn, is a man of power and privilege who would never be seen with lepers. You can imagine his growing anxiety as the spots begin to appear on his skin, his mounting fear as he contemplates the loss of status that the progression of this disease portends. Unlike Roy, however, Naaman is willing to accept the reality of his condition, even to the extent of entrusting himself to the advice of a Hebrew slave-girl, who tells him of a prophet in Israel who can make him clean.

Naaman goes to Israel, but not without struggle. It is humiliating to go hat-in-hand to those whom he holds in contempt, people over-and-against whom he has defined his own superiority. He clings to his sense of privilege and is enraged when Elisha doesn’t just magically wave his hands and provide an immediate cure. But Elisha knows that real healing requires more. It requires a kind of baptism.

Naaman has to die to his self-image as one who is powerful and superior. He has to drown that image in the waters of his enemies, in the Jordan River, so that he can become simply human, no more and no less. Sure, there are purification rites and perfectly good rivers back home in Damascus, but only in the Jordan River can Naaman recognize the humanity of the Hebrews – the despised other – and see mirrored in them his own humanity.

The restoration of healthy skin, the outer change, is a sign of the deeper, interior transformation that Naaman undergoes. That deeper change is an acceptance of his own humanity, in all its vulnerability, and the humanity of those whom he formerly despised. Naaman recognizes his dependence upon the other, the enemy, the way in which healing is realized through acknowledging the intimate and inescapable interconnection of all things. He is restored to communion with God and with others.

We desire to be made clean. We want to experience this communion. But it means accepting our leprosy, our vulnerability, our need to accept those aspects of ourselves and of other people that we would rather deny or demonize – our imperfections, our weakness, our fear, our anger, our illusions – all those things which render us unclean, all those truths that would make us outcast if others only knew.

And it means being willing to simply ask for help. This is what is so affecting about the unnamed man who humbly kneels and begs Jesus, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” Perhaps this man had undergone another kind of death, dying to his self-image as a victim, as one who deserved and simply had to accept being an outcast. At any rate, he can no longer deny his desire to be made clean.

We have the power to make one another clean. How? By touching each other, by refusing to believe the lies we tell to stigmatize some people so that others can feel better about themselves, smug, superior, and secure. Jesus made the leper clean by touching him, by acknowledging their shared humanity and refusing to treat him as an outcast.

I’m reminded of a story I once heard about Jon Bruno, the Episcopal bishop of Los Angeles. Bishop Bruno is a former football player and L.A. police officer. He is a big, imposing guy, not somebody you want to mess around with. Even his name sounds tough! In the early days of the AIDS pandemic in Los Angeles, Jon was still a parish priest. Young men were getting sick and dying all around him, social pariahs often abandoned by their families, sometimes even by other gay men terrified of the disease. Here was a new class of lepers.

But Jon knew how to make people clean. He kept a rocking chair in the corner of his office. As these dying men came to him seeking healing, Jon would hold them on his lap with his big arms wrapped around them, and gently rock them for as long as they needed to be held. Immediately, the leprosy left them, and they were made clean.

Jon is a disciple of Jesus, and he understands what Jesus knew so well. We have the power to make people clean, if we choose. And we, who so passionately desire to be made clean, can be whole again if we are humble and have the willingness to ask for what we need. Do you not realize how much we need one another for our healing? Do you not hear Jesus saying to you today, “I do choose. Be made clean.” Together, we can become human again.

Bishop Ed Browning famously proclaimed, “In this Church, there will be no outcasts.” Let us stretch out our hands and touch one another and make it so. Amen.

A Longish Post on Purity of Heart

Recently, I’ve noticed a shift in my spiritual practice and understanding, a growing sense that I do not possess consciousness. Consciousness possesses me. It isn’t in me; I am in it. It envelops everything. Through the medium of consciousness God desires to commune with me. This communion takes place in a field of awareness, energized by the Holy Spirit. It is a place of deep Silence.

This Silence is not the absence of sound. It excludes nothing, but it is deeper than the absence or presence of sensations, feelings, images or thoughts. All things rest in this Silence. It is always there, on the edges of our awareness. When my awareness becomes wide open and receptive to this Silence, my soul rests in God. This communion with God is pure gift. It is what the Christian tradition refers to as “infused contemplation.”

In this Silence we are given to know our true selves. We experience Christ within us, the union of divine and human in each soul. We are in Love. This realization is the fulfillment of our deepest desire, the longing that only God can satisfy.

The contemplative tradition speaks of purity of heart as the necessary condition for this realization. Summarizing the teaching of the desert fathers, John Cassian in his Conferences, describes this realization variously as eternal life or as the kingdom of God, which is both in us and we in it.

. . . the aim of our profession is the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven. But our point of reference, our objective is a clean heart, without which it is impossible for anyone to reach out target. (Conference I.4)

Our objective is purity of heart, which [St. Paul] so justly describes as sanctification, for without this the goal cannot be reached. In other words, it is as though he said that you have purity of heart for an objective and eternal life as the goal. (Conference I.5)

Purity of heart is described not only as sanctification but as perfection. Perfection, however, is not identified with moral striving or ascetical discipline per se. These are only means toward the end of perfection, and they must arise from and give rise to love.

Perfection, then, is clearly not achieved simply by being naked, by the lack of wealth or by the rejection of honors, unless there is also that love whose ingredients the apostle described and which is to be found solely in purity of heart. (Conference I.6)

In the same way, fasting, vigils, scriptural meditation, nakedness, and total deprivation do not constitute perfection but are the means to perfection. They are not themselves the end point of a discipline, an end is attained through them. (Conference I.7)

In fact, such good works without love are a barrier to the realization of communion with God because they serve only to reify a false self-image and sense of self-importance. Cassian argues that anything which can trouble the purity and the peace of our heart must be avoided as something very dangerous, regardless of how useful and necessary it might actually seem to be. (Conference I.7) Purity of heart requires us to relinquish our attachment even to our good works, for such attachments engender self-centeredness rather than love and divert us from our true end. To cling always to God and to the things of God – this must be our major effort, this must be the road that the heart follows unswervingly. Any diversion, however impressive, must be regarded as secondary, low-grade, and certainly dangerous. (Conference I.8)

In a reading of the Gospel story of Mary and Martha that is typical of the contemplative tradition, Cassian argues that the Lord locates the primary good not in activity, however praiseworthy, however abundantly fruitful, but in the truly simple and unified contemplation of Himself. (Conference I.8) Martha’s service was not bad – far from it. The problem was her preoccupation with it, her attachment to what was secondary to the primary end of communion with the Lord. This is a subtle matter of motivation and intention.

Purity of heart, then, is not a matter of moral perfection. It isn’t achieved by being busy with things human or divine. Purity of heart is desire without attachment and its preeminent sign is humility. This is not easily realized or understood. We frequently are deeply attached to the attainment of what we desire, perhaps especially our desires for such good things as peace, justice, and healing. In fact, it seems immoral NOT to be attached to “good” desires.

In a passage worth quoting at length, Gerald May points out that

The message of contemplative traditions does not come easily upon this scene. It is that attachments, even though they are an integral part of us all, are not really necessary for full, effective living. Desires are necessary, they not only signal our biological needs but can also spur us toward creative action in the world. Desires to care for others, to make the world a better place, to know God or to be in accord with universal law, to create and to forgive and to heal – all of these are not only worthwhile but may constitute our only hope for continuing as a species. But attachments, say the contemplatives, do nothing but confuse, preoccupy, and muddy our minds. They create needless personal suffering. And they impede one’s capacity to make creative, healing contributions to the world.

Attachment to any desire creates two fundamental problems that interfere with one’s responsiveness to the world. First, attachment adds a quality of drivenness to basic desire. One no longer simply needs or wants something but instead starts grasping, clinging, or clawing for it. There is an atmosphere of desperation about this process, a deep frenzy that pulls the fundamental need way out of proportion. Second, attachment causes distorted perception. Being so invested in our own feelings, we may totally misperceive and misinterpret the nature of things around us. In such instances, our behavior springs not from the natural and inherent requirements of a situation but from our preconceived notions. We see not what is, but what we crave or fear.

Either of these effects alone can create significant problems, but when drivenness is combined with distorted perception, as in vicious racial prejudice or religiopolitical crusades, the results can be awesomely devastating. Attachment, then, can be seen as a major determining factor in social injustice as well as in private psychological suffering. The more we are attached to the attachment, the more vicious that turmoil can become. But still we cling.[1]

May helps us to see more clearly that purity of heart is not about moral perfection but about awareness. The saints are people who have cultivated awareness of reality, who have acknowledged and let go their attachments so that their desire for the Good is unencumbered by egoism or distorted perception. Purity of heart is marked by humility precisely because its realization necessarily involves an acceptance of suffering, of responsibility, and of finitude – not an easy combination to integrate!

Purity of heart is the condition in which we realize the simple and unified contemplation of God. It is the state of desire without attachment because all desire is fulfilled in Love and there is no desire left with which to be attached. There is just being in Love.

The cultivation of purity of heart through contemplative and ascetical disciplines helps to prepare us for the gift of communion with God. We can’t make it happen, but we can dispose ourselves to receive it. We can become willing to let go attachments so that our desire can find its true fulfillment in communion with God. We can purify our desire for God and accept God’s desire for us.

And then we can act in freedom, free from the willfulness and distortions bred by attachment. We can engage in good works without being preoccupied with them in ways that sever our sense of rootedness in Love. We can begin to allow God to work through us, rather than simply bolstering our ego and assuaging feelings of insecurity or guilt. And we will does this with great humility, for the clarity of perception we are given reveals our spiritual and moral limitations as well as those of others.

Purity of heart is not an escape from the responsibility to ameliorate suffering. As John Cassian noted in a particularly poignant and prophetic statement,

As for those works of piety and charity of which you speak, these are necessary in this present life for as long as inequality prevails. Their workings here would not be necessary were it not for the superabundant numbers of the poor, the needy, and the sick. These are there because of the iniquity of men who have held for their own private use what the common Creator has made available to all. As long as this inequity rages in the world, these good works will be necessary and valuable to anyone practicing them and they shall yield the reward of an everlasting inheritance to the man of good heart and concerned will. (Conference I.10)

Purity of heart is desire without attachment. It is rooted in Silence, in Love, and in union with the One who desires us eternally, who frees us to live with awareness and compassion. Its sign is humility and its fruit is prophetic service for the healing of the world.

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[1] Gerald May, Will and Spirit: A Contemplative Psychology (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1982), pp. 227-228.