Many students of the Bible say that the fourth “gospel,” written by John, is the last one written. It sounds like that to me, too. It sounds like it is written by an old man who has been through a lot.
John did go through a lot: a lot of miracle, then crucifixion, then resurrection, then persecution, then evangelism, then church development and leadership, then church conflict, then a final persecution that lead to his exile on the island of Patmos where he had his amazing vision, and where he might have also written his account of Jesus’ work.
When John begins his brief, but poetic and profound, summary of the birth of Jesus, he strikes a mournful note in the middle of it. To me, he sounds like an old man who has suffered to bring the good news of Jesus to people who have rejected it and abused it. That bothers him.
The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own,
but his own did not receive him.
Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—
children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.” (John 1)
He is pondering light coming into darkness. He knows the darkness well. It is a darkness that does not recognize God coming onto it. It is a darkness as deep as being rejected by your own family — you come home and they leave you out in the dark!
Life born into the dark world
But John does not dwell there too long. He wants to tell the truth about what happened to Jesus and to himself as a result of meeting Jesus. He can’t wait for the big reveal, really. He almost breathlessly gets to the secret he wants to unveil: In the midst of this dark world where the light is not recognized as light, and family is not loved as family, the life of God is born into to the world and born in people who receive it, who recognize God in Jesus and trust him for renewed life.
I’m feeling with John this Advent. Last night, we spent our monthly Coordinators meeting celebrating our deep love for each other and the great successes of our work in 2010. It felt like an island of light, and spiritual depth in the middle of deep darkness. We need to make sure the light keeps revealed.
Because on one occasion during my 35th-anniversary trip to Costa Rica, my host asked me what I did for a living. When I said, “I am the pastor of our church,” he immediately said, “In my family, we never talk about religion or money.” The darkness wouldn’t even let me be recognized for who I am. I got a gag order! (The order did not work that well, but I got it).
Another time I asked my local guide, who had been so helpful in every way, when the festival in Nicoya was scheduled. I had read something about a Christmas procession in a guide book. She said something like, “Oh, people in the church do things. I’m not sure.” The church has a parade and a person can manage to be totally ignorant! (Putting Mary on a sedan chair and clogging traffic may not be the best advertisement, but it is pretty adroit ignorance to channel the input to some cranial “junk mail” folder!).
I have such wonderful Advents! Jesus is coming and I recognize and receive him. I am born and feel born of God. It is amazing. It was amazing to sit among my close colleagues and witness how the light came into their personal darkness. But that miracle happens in a world that seems to be turning its back on God-with-us even more deliberately, even among people who should know better,
I hear a mournful tone that I have decided to hold on to this season. My carol has become “In the Bleak Midwinter.” John wants to rush to the joy of new birth, but he has enough discipline to let the whole truth be told. Self-giving love does not come to the world without suffering. In a dark, maybe darkening, world, the light continues to meet resistance. And yet it continues to shine.
After a week, here in Costa Rica, I am acclimating. It did not frustrate me, this morning, when a chorus of howler monkeys and roosters woke me up at the crack of dawn. Yesterday I described the variations I wanted on my pizza with some forcefulness, in Spanish. We are an adaptable species.
God adapts to being a human
My own quick adaptation to this splendid environment for my pilgrimage this winter, reminded me of Nikos Kazantzakis musing about how God was invited to adapt to being human when he came for us in Jesus. In The Last Temptation of Christ, he adds a further temptation to the ones listed in Matthew 4. He imagines that it was tempting not to go to the cross because Jesus might have wanted to fully adapt to being human – be a carpenter, to have a wife and children, to receive the days as they came and die without any larger interest in the life of the Spirit or in restoring creation.
It is true that most of us are adapted to sin. It can be as obvious as deciding, “The ten extra, unhealthy pounds I carry are normal for me,” or deciding that, “Since I like smoking I can adapt to the long-term destruction it is creating.” Or it can be as mysterious as not pondering, “Why I don’t feel like I know God?” or “Why I can’t let go of my guilt and shame?” or “Why does my childhood trauma make more difference to my development than my salvation?” Or it can just be about going with the herd: “If all the other monkeys are howling for IPods, so do I.” Or “If they all work seventy hours a week, so do I.” We are an adaptable species.
Advent refuses to adapt
Maybe one of the good things about Advent is that it is a season that refuses to adapt. It is an old discipline that keeps the heart of the incarnation accessible, even when “Christmas” adapts to all sorts of perverse influences. If you observe Advent, you are going against the flow. The local Costa Ricans down the street from the palace in which I am vacationing have some pretty basic accommodations; but they have a Coca-Colaesque Santa decorations, and their bodega plays “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” translated into Spanish (uh, it is going to be 84 today). “Christmas” has acclimated to what the world thinks is important. Even the world knows that and goes with it, anyway – sometimes people focus more on “family” as an antidote, but they go with it. To focus on the coming of Jesus and his refusal to adapt, even as he becomes one with us is quite a challenge.
We’ve got ten days left. Why not be unadaptable in the ways we are usually acclimated as a way to honor God coming to be one with us and fitting us for heaven? I think the season of Advent will call us to be in our bodies, but not letting them drive us, to be in our environments but not think they are our end, to appreciate our appetites but not just feed them, to see the sin around us and not be entangled, to have open, loving eyes for a world without God and not miss Jesus coming to it.
I guess I did kind of a mean thing at the Advent Day Retreat yesterday. I usually avoid coercing people to do anything, but I made the retreaters turn to a couple of other people and answer this question: “What makes you a good place for Jesus to be born?” Be the manger; be the bed. It is not so shocking that God should be born in us if God is born in a stable! What makes you a good place for Jesus to be born?
Be the bed
Their reactions made me feel a bit like Paul writing to the Galatians: “My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you, how I wish I could be with you now and change my tone, because I am perplexed about you!” (Gal. 4:19-20) Quite a few people seemed to be having a problem admitting, much less saying, that they were a suitable place for Jesus to be born!
They could easily go with how gracious God is to have come to a disintegrating, rebellious creation, to humbly be born in a stable and to act as a servant. But it was much harder for some to get their minds around the suggestion that the stable was quite good enough for God and that servanthood is a splendid means to express God’s self-giving love. God is delighted to live in us. Be the manger.
“But,” the immediate protest begins, “Won’t I end up being a prideful fool who is unaware of my sin if I start feeling good enough to receive Jesus?” There are many prideful fools around, after all.
But isn’t it also prideful to tell God that it is absurd for him to feel OK about filling you with his Spirit? Isn’t it foolish to keep an iron grip on your unworthiness instead of letting saved-by-the-grace-of-God be your new self-image? Isn’t it a bit audacious, in a bad way, to tell God she is crazy to love you so much, to want to snuggle in next to you like she apparently, historically does?
It is perplexing. Is Jesus so unformed in us that we would easily revert to being fearful slaves to whatever monstrous thing used to run us – so much so that we would leave Jesus perpetually knocking on the door of it?
As soon as people were given a chance to claim their right to be children of God, yesterday — to be the earthen jar in which glory is carried, to be the chosen friend in whom the secrets are confided, to be the sent one in whom the campaign for world redemption is entrusted, many were kind of tongue-tied. Maybe you are, too. I watched a couple of groups just sit there staring at each other, waiting, until it got too awkward and they had to say something. But even when they started talking, it was not like they were as appreciative of God’s home as God was happy to be there! They did not have a ready list of what made them a decent house.
Being self-critical is useless unless Christ lives in us! Otherwise we are like a dog in the manger – not saving ourselves and not letting the baby get in there!
In light of God’s delight to be with you, there are plenty of important ways to spend the season of Advent.
Maybe you are so full of yourself you need to empty out so Jesus can get a toe-hold.
Maybe you should stop being so preoccupied with whether Jesus is alive in you enough and go be an incarnation of the life you already have.
Maybe you need to wrestle with your disbelief and try to get to the bottom of it once and for all.
God knows what we should do; maybe we should ask him.
I stumbled on one important way many people need to spend the season. Be the bed. God wants to be born in you. Come on, you’ve got to be at least as good as a stable! Are you really going to tell him there is no room? tell him he shouldn’t even want to stay in you in the first place? he’s dumb to even knock? he should come back when you’re tidy? Don’t do that. If you have to do something other than enjoying your undeserved favor, at least fluff the hay a bit.
“[E]ven seeming emptiness is not sterile. In the times of waiting, it is enough if we do nothing more than sit with the birthgiver, offering a hand to be held.” – Margaret Guenther
God is so filled with love that he is repeatedly born in the empty, welcoming space of the soul. You can see that as a vision of eternal fertility. Or you can see it as an invitation to further tragedy as new life is aborted 1000 times a day and wasted. But, the truth is, the emptiness is teeming with life. Whether life-receiving or life-rejecting, we are not vacuums, even when we act vacuously.
We could miss the morning glory
We could miss the life. I walked out of Morning Glory and said, “That movie was charming and meant nothing.” But Gwen immediately and appropriately corrected me. “What do you mean? That movie was about staying with someone and hoping for change.” It dawned on me that, “I am Rachel McAdams having a moment of self-loathing as I leave the theater!”
Rachel is the struggling producer of a morning TV show. Harrison Ford is the curmudgeonly has-been anchor subjected to her care. With perpetual perkiness, indefatigability and hope, Rachel wins him over, saves the show, proves mom wrong about disrespecting her dreams, makes New York seem friendly and gets the supposedly hunky guy (although I wasn’t seeing the purported hotness, there).
On the other hand, we could pretend that cobbled-together plots like that bear some resemblance to reality. As I walked out of Morning Glory, my first reaction was ungenerous and narrow, but it was not totally wrong. I laughed. I teared up. I enjoyed Rachel running in slow motion past Prometheus in Rockefeller Plaza. But at some point, I had to hit my head and say, “What do you mean? She found an apartment in Manhattan in one-morning! She meets a guy and after one page of dialogue they have passionate sex! Jeff Goldblum was cast! Real life is not like what rich people fret about in New York!” The movie is purposeful delusion. It is systematically giving birth to wind
Wait for something to be born
So, as usual, there was birth planted in its emptiness. But, in the end, I think the life of God was aborted. So, as usual, my reaction was right and wrong. So I am glad to remember the original quote up top. It is probably the wisest response, most of the time, to patiently wait for anything that can be born to be born.
I want to spend this week holding hands with people as they are giving spiritual birth. If they give birth to wind, may I hold their hand again when the next spiritual pregnancy comes to fruit. Even the movies are clamoring for morning glory. I think it is up to me to see that yearning as an emptiness waiting to be filled by God. When the smallest bump can be seen, or even the discomfort of being sick with something that isn’t recognized as something, yet, it is good for me to sit and hold someone’s hand. I’m not sure what will be born, or not. But my comforting presence given freely to those making their fear-filled journey through the big city is not useless.
My uniform is pretty simple. In summer it tends to be shorts and indestructible Chacos. In winter I put on long pants and black sneakers. Perhaps I picked up the simplicity from Christians I admire. The Amish have a uniform from the late 1800s which continues to turn heads in Lancaster Co. And I love the Franciscans, especially the Capuchins (after whom cappuccino and cute monkeys are named), who returned to the brown (hooded) robe of St. Francis in the 1500’s, including the rope belt with three knots to remind them of their vows.
But the Capuchins sent me the worst tract in the mail the other day! (We are on innumerable religious mailing lists). I don’t really want you to see it because you might believe it. I just want to complain. Complete with a picture like the one at the right, they intended to “comfort those who mourn” with a prayer from the “Roman Ritual.”
Almighty and most merciful Father, who knows the weakness of our nature, bow down Your ear in pity to your servants, upon whom You have laid the heavy burden of sorrow. Take away out of their hearts the spirit of rebellion, and teach them to see Your good and gracious purpose working in all the trials which you send upon them. Grant that they may not languish in fruitless and unavailing grief, nor sorrow as those who have no hope, but through their tears look meekly up to You, the God of all consolation. Through Christ Jesus Our Lord.
Prayer that might drive you out of faith
Since we don’t know how to pray, and since the Spirit of God is praying for us, we can say a lot of dumb things when we talk to God and it will be fine. So I am sure many people have prayed that prayer with no great adverse impact. But I want to object to two things in the tract that I think have driven many people right out of their faith, instead of comforting them.
1) As you saw in the prayer, their logic is: God laid the burden of sorrow on you, so you should stop rebelling against that and see your grief as something good.
God does do great things for us when we are grieving. Our losses are primary places where we change and grow and learn to trust God. But our sorrows are hardly God’s plan, like we should spend our days meekly looking up to God though our tears, waiting for him to send a trial! So many people I know have understood this logic and see themselves as the perpetual rebel and God as the perpetual sender of trials to keep them on the track of meekness. It is not a good relationship. If the Lord wanted to send me burdens it was kind of odd for Jesus to become like me to bear them with me and on my behalf.
2) Their conviction is: Dead people are watching us from heaven
In a part of the tract I don’t even want you to see, the friars tried to comfort those who have lost a loved one by convincing us that when people die we have not lost them, they are watching us from heaven and waiting until we join them. Considering that they are watching us from bliss should encourage us to live a good life so we can join them. They are praying for us, even if they are in purgatory.
I can only complain so much, since I know very little about the structure of the afterlife. But I don’t think my dead loved ones leave their bodies and become like angels in heaven (or whatever they are in purgatory) to pray for me to leave this life of tears and join them in happiness as soon as possible. My hope is in a restored creation, not a disembodied eternity. It is OK with me if God works this out any way he chooses (I’m sure she’s glad I’m OK with that!), but I don’t think he is populating heaven with the ghosts of my loved ones to haunt me. The friars want me to find comfort in the “real and continual presence of our loved ones.” No, I think they died. When the Lord says the word, they will rise to eternal life if he chooses. How the timing and physics of that works out is not my concern (at least not my prerogative).
I wouldn’t bring all this up, except that a lot of my friends have a secret: they don’t believe a lot of the stuff their religion teachers crank out, especially when it comes to heaven and hell. The Catholic Church, in particular, has accrued so much nonsense in their theology over the years that you have to shut off your brain to go with it; it’s like Mormonism. Just rebelling against the nonsense is kind of a cheap way out. So I thought I’d validate the process of trying to think things through a bit rather than just closing our hearts completely. So what if the Franciscans sent me a dumb tract? – they were trying to comfort me. They’ve got a lot of other things going for them, like St. Francis. Let’s keep talking.
This little meditation is for the groaners: people whose hearts are aching, whose bodies don’t work, whose mental and emotional habits don’t match up with their heart’s desire. God is groaning with you.
We ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as children, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what one already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. Romans 8:23-5
Hoping for what Jesus promises is exercising faith. Waiting patiently for what one does not have is exercising faith. Groaning inwardly (and outwardly, where it is welcomed) is inevitable.
Get the groan out
I’d say groaning is downright therapeutic. When people tell you to stop whining (more likely when you tell yourself to stop whining) check to see if you are being too impatient, but also check to see if the Spirit of God is in you, making a promise of better things to come, and you want those things so much it makes you groan with desire and anticipation.
In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And the one who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will. Romans 8:26-7
Sometimes, being at a loss for words is exercising faith. Not knowing how to pray and knowing one doesn’t know is exercising faith. Being poor in spirit leaves a lot of room to be rich in Spirit. The Spirit of God is “groaning” in us, longing even more deeply than we do for our redemption. The Spirit of God knows what you know about yourself and knows what you don’t know; all of you is connected with God’s loving heart.
Let the Spirit groan
When you feel your worst, when you have groaned so much you don’t want to groan any more, give up and let the Spirit groan for you and trust yourself to God’s good will.
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. Romans 8:28
None of these thoughts are too new, perhaps. What is new is this day.
It might be a day when the pain has not gone away. We might hide our pain from an unsympathetic world who seem to think we just need to get over it. But we can’t hide it from God, who has always cared, and who showed his care so completely by entering our pain and sin and even death in Jesus. His desire was and is to work for our good.
something is growing
God is calling you into good. She is at work, your spirit to his Spirit. This day is also a new day to hope in that.
My friend told me about a troubling dream the other day. He was disturbed by it. He was interpreting it according to his ordinary awareness—the same awareness he has about what he feels about his dinner choices or his latest review from the boss. So he was not completely excited when I became enthused about what he had dreamt. He initially thought I was taking his bad feelings lightly.
I thought his dream was a wonderful expression of his spiritual awareness, which I have had the privilege of watching in him as it developed. Just below the surface of his ordinary awareness, his dreams were holding the spiritual awareness of the great changes God was making in him. I think that God’s work in us is emanating from places too deep for us to be fully aware of. We can often spot what is happening and cooperate when his works rises as close to our ordinary awareness as our dreams.
Integrating all night
In this case the dream seemed to be about the classic struggle to put together the competing and complementary elements of the gifts and desires we all contain. How can I be myself and serve? How can I do what I want and do what I should? How can I follow love and still tell the truth? How can I experience what I think I need and still give what I have to contribute? How can I leave my past behind and still be true to what I have become? In the words of Jesus: how can I lose my life and find it? It is no wonder that the dream felt disturbing! Spiritual birth pangs were sending an urgent message that something new was trying to be born.
I am wondering how many of my readers are experiencing similar disturbance? What are your dreams telling you? I have to say that I think our whole network has definitely experienced the surfacing of dreams lately – from Haddon and Fern’s emergence, to Frankford and Norris’ crowning new baby congregation, to the rumblings of newness at Broad and Washington. Several people have told me that they are aware that God is bringing about something new. Are you aware of it, too? Any dreamers care to share?
I have received a lot of mentoring from the Apostle Paul — from my first real reading of the New Testament as a teenager, I felt a deep kinship with him. My thought was then, and still is, that, “If Paul can do it, so can I.” He is so obviously a real guy, with all his gifts and limitations in action. He has a personality that shows through. And God uses him.
Oldest image of Paul, 4th C., From Catacomb of St. Thekla in Rome
I look at the accounts of Paul in Acts and what he writes in his letters like a story about an action hero. He is such a persuasive teacher and a courageous missionary! He is so dramatic that it is easy to overlook the quieter, interior qualities that are basic to making him so influential.
I have learned a lot from Paul about how to deepen my relationship with God by learning to wait, listening in prayer, and moving with the promptings of the Spirit. I felt like doing this little study to prove that he really was that kind of spiritual guy. It seems that, for most people who read his letters, Paul is all about principles, morality and preaching. He is primarily a great example of an evangelist and church planter. But what about the quiet side? Is he ever silent? How does he get his direction? There are some hints about his personal relationship with God in the New Testament record. I want to list some main ones to encourage us all to move with the “regular guy” Paul as we attempt our own expression of our faith in this era of the world.
Waiting
Paul was cooling it in his home town after he escaped Jerusalem. It is important to learn how to wait.
Then Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul, and when he found him, he brought him to Antioch. Acts 11:25-6
After his conversion Paul spent “many days” with the disciples in Damascus. The “scales” coming off his eyes also had to do with unlearning his passionate Jewish activism, and no doubt had to do with a major interior change. It took time. In Galatians he gives a more complete timeline:
But when God, who set me apart from birth and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not consult any man, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went immediately into Arabia and later returned to Damascus. Then after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Peter and stayed with him fifteen days. Galatians 1:15-18
The timelines in the Bible are hard to put in order, since that is not the interest of the writers. But this at least implies that Paul spent a significant time in the desert after his conversion. He apparently had a sojourn like Jesus, being confronted and purged by God’s Spirit in preparation for his major role in building the kingdom.
Paul had significant times of waiting throughout his ministry and he used them. Many of them were the times he was in prison. He spent two years awaiting trial, at one point.
As Paul discoursed on righteousness, self-control and the judgment to come, Felix was afraid and said, “That’s enough for now! You may leave. When I find it convenient, I will send for you.” At the same time he was hoping that Paul would offer him a bribe, so he sent for him frequently and talked with him. When two years had passed, Felix was succeeded by Porcius Festus, but because Felix wanted to grant a favor to the Jews, he left Paul in prison. Acts 24:25-27
Martin Luther King did well with his imprisonment, too. We may face that ourselves, one day. Until then, we wait in all sorts of other ways – imprisoned in our jobs, or on the Schuylkill. It is good preparation time, if we use it to be with God.
Worshipping
Paul got direction by receiving it from the body as they received it from the Holy Spirit during times of worship and prayer.
In the church at Antioch there were prophets and teachers: Barnabas, Simeon called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen (who had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch) and Saul. While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.” So after they had fasted and prayed, they placed their hands on them and sent them off. Acts 13:1-3
If we have worried about our spiritual development at all, so many of us have spent our days interpreting spiritual material and applying the logic we concoct. As a result we often have little idea of what the writers of the Bible were doing to receive the material we are interpreting! They obviously spent a lot of intense time in prayer getting direction for what they were going to do. From the way Paul writes his letters, it might sound like Christians should all be articulate theorists. But he is obviously a lot more than that. His applications are resting on the foundation of his experience of Christ in his body.
Listening
Paul developed the ability, as have so many after him, to listen to the Spirit of God in any number of ways. Somehow the Spirit prevents him from doing one thing and directs him to do another.
Paul and his companions traveled throughout the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in the province of Asia. When they came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to. So they passed by Mysia and went down to Troas. During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them. Acts 16:6-10
The boiled-down “science for the masses” we have all learned has made us very suspicious about spiritual promptings and visions. (And Paul tells us to test them well, himself). Combined with the excesses of the Pentecostal movement, so often portrayed in living color on TV, we end up tempted not to listen to the Spirit at all. So our own directability is pretty much nil. Meanwhile Paul is remembering his experiences of revelation as foundational to all he does and says:
I will go on to visions and revelations from the Lord. I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows. And I know that this man—whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows—was caught up to paradise. He heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell. I will boast about a man like that, but I will not boast about myself, except about my weaknesses. 2 Corinthians 12:1-5
He had a great experience of hearing from God fourteen years before he was writing, but he was still talking about it. He had regular experiences of being directed that his companions wrote about. I think that teaches me to stop and listen.
God still needs deep people. We have a lot of reasons why we are not developing into deep people. And we really have a lot of reasons why we are not going to follow the spiritual promptings we do receive. But one excuse we should never use is that such depth is beyond us. The wild movement of God’s Spirit is for regular people, like the Apostle Paul.
Today is St. Kevin’s Day, so I thought I would post a piece I shared in 2008 after I got back from my Celtic pilgrimage. For those who have time for quite a bit of reading, enjoy!
One Sunday at our meeting I met a nice woman who said that she used to live in South Philly but felt that God released her to go live in the burbs. Now she just loves going out her kitchen door and hearing the creek running through her backyard.
That’s nice. When she meditates out there and meets God, she’s probably having the same kind of experience as the writer of Psalm 104.
God’s trees are well-watered—
the Lebanon cedars he planted.
Birds build their nests in those trees;
look—the stork at home in the treetop.
Mountain goats climb about the cliffs;
badgers burrow among the rocks.
The moon keeps track of the seasons,
the sun is in charge of each day.
When it’s dark and night takes over,
all the forest creatures come out.
The young lions roar for their prey,
clamoring to God for their supper.
When the sun comes up, they vanish,
lazily stretched out in their dens.
Meanwhile, men and women go out to work,
busy at their jobs until evening.
What a wildly wonderful world, God!
You made it all, with Wisdom at your side,
made earth overflow with your wonderful creations. (Psalm 104:14-24, The Message)
What a wildly wonderful world! I honor all the people, past and present, who want to preserve it! I don’t have a creek in my backyard, but I know many places that have made praise well up in me, too.
Finding a thin place
The desert has been a wildly wonderful place where I have seen God revealed in memorable ways during my life. I often talk about the first time I ever went to the Anza Borrego area in the California desert as a young teen. I had one unforgettable night under the stars. …
I was terrified of the snakes in the desert to begin with, and then they told me not to get out of my cot if I wanted to sleep outside with my friend. If I put my foot down there might be a rattler, because they came out at night. So I was shivering alone in my bed from fear and from the desert cold. Then I looked up and felt an even deeper kind of shiver. I was alone in the universe staring up into a crystal clear sky with huge stars, huge moon and utter silence. I began to feel what I later named the glory of God in an inarticulate, visceral way. I felt some kind of excitement and joy well up in me to meet whatever was calling to me. Something that had always been in me was meeting something that had always been calling me. You have probably had experiences like that when you found yourself surprised by God being revealed in creation.
Our ancestors in faith among the Celts were especially good at finding the “thin places” in creation where so many of us meet God. Some places in the world seem like there is a thinner gap or thinner barrier between heaven and earth. The so-called New Age people talk about spiritual vortexes all the time, I’m not going with their interpretation of the power they feel, but they might be on to something. One of John McCain’s houses is in Sedona, Arizona, where we discovered a lot of pilgrims to such a vortex on one of our trips. Go figure. The Celtic believers thought and many other people have thought that there seem to be natural places where God’s dimension and ours meet.
Turning toward a thin place
In some places people might even create a thin place because they have gone to a particular place to seek God repeatedly – it’s almost like they’ve been digging through the walls of the prison and now the wall is so thin you can hear through it.
We do things like that, here. For instance, a Celtic Christian would often light a fire, like we do, and expect people to let the fire mark a time and place as a sacred, thin place where we would meet God. They would expect seekers to see and feel God in the fire, to assume the fire to have some kind of spiritual life in it, to receive the fire as full of some gift from God. The place where Circle of Hope meets is just a wilderness of chairs and walls before we come in and name it a place where we will meet God — then it has the possibility of being a thin place — like we called the place away from being folding chairs and drywall and it repented and became a place where God dwells — like we repented of seeing the room as just another room and saw it as a place to meet God. That’s how thin places — where God’s dimension and ours meet — are shaped.
To go searching for God in the thin places that seem built into nature is a repentant thing to do. It is an act of turning away from the suppression of God’s glory under human-made things, and turning back to the Creator. Like the woman who fled to the suburbs wanted to escape the suppression of creation under the asphalt and hear God in the creek, sometimes we are given that very luxurious choice. Sometimes, of course, we just bump into these places instead of finding them when we are seeking God and they are just as transforming.
The Apostle Paul says that everyone has a soul equipped with and for these feelings of knowing God as a creature who is part of creation. Everyone has some kind of knowledge of God somewhere inside, or at least we have to have a very hard heart not to have some of instinct for meeting the Creator in creation somewhere. The Celts assumed that everyone has a place in them that could make a connection with God and was in fact connected, if only by breathing the air God made. Our wanton disregard for creation, seeing it as a means to our own ends, would seem like blasphemy to them. For instance, I’m sure they could not fathom anyone being so committed to automobiles that they would rather poison the air and change the climate than walk.
Polluted places of connection
It think Paul is similarly appalled in the following piece of the scripture. He sounds kind of tough. But He is not just mad about godlessness. He is feeling it. His tone is more prophetic, than merely angry. He’s trying to excite that place in us where God is or can be known, but which is quite polluted — the spiritual trees have been uprooted, the relationship has been eroded, and the spiritual landscape needs to be restored.
The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.
For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that everyone is are without excuse.
For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. (Romans 1:18-21)
This is my paraphrase of that, with some help from Eugene Peterson:
Acts of human mistrust, wrongdoing and lying accumulate, as people try to put a shroud over truth. That grieves God and makes him justifiably angry — like you get mad at your beloved dog because he never seems to be able to stop chewing up your throw pillows.
One would think that people would be aware and respectful of God, since his presence and value are as presented rather clearly in the world around us. By taking a long, thoughtful, and unself-centered look at what God has created, people have always been able to see beyond what their physical eyes can see. The power and mystery of God are behind the power and mystery of that lightning or any light. Nobody has a good excuse for ignoring God.
There is no good excuse, but there is a good reason behind not recognizing and honoring God. People knew God perfectly well, but when they didn’t treat him like God, refusing to worship him, they trivialized themselves into dishonor and confusion so that the light of sense and direction in their lives went dark.
What the Celtic Jesus followers and I think is that this darkness Paul is talking about, that you probably know about quite intimately, can be dispelled in the thin places. There is no magic about thin places like Irish people became known for thinking — like fairies live there and some magical thing will happen if you stumble across one. But the thin places can be used to seek God and you might even make one for yourself to use.
The spirit behind what I am saying is in this prayer from the collection of prayers and sayings of the old school Celts that were collected in Carmina Gadelica. This prayer may be is a bit much for some of you, so let’s not say it aloud, because then you might feel coerced to pray it. Just move your lips in silence or make the faintest whisper if you want to take part in it. I’ll read it out loud. When we get to the part about our warp, that is a term from weaving, like God is knitting us.
I believe, O God of all
That You are the Father of life;
I believe O God of all.
That You are the eternal Father of love.
I believe, O Lord and God of all the peoples,
That you are the creator of the high heavens,
That You are the creator of the skies above,
That You are the creator of the ocean below.
I believe , O Lord and God of all the peoples,
That You are the One who created my being and set its warp.
Who created my body from dust and from ashes,
Who gave to my body breath, and to my being consciousness.
I am giving You worship with my whole life…
I am giving You honor with my whole utterance
I am giving You reverence with my whole understanding
I am giving You humility in the blood of the Lamb.
I am giving You love with my whole devotion
I am giving You affection with my whole sense
I am giving You my existence with my whole mind
I am giving You my soul O God of all.
Kevin in his thin place
The person English speakers call St. Kevin may have prayed this very prayer in the place he found called Glendalough, the Glen of the two lakes. He was especially good among the notable Celtic ancestors in the faith at using the thin places. They say he lived for 120 years, all the way through the 500s. He was a son of the aristocracy who fled the power and wealth of his family to seek God as a hermit in this place that came to be known as Glendalough, which is just south of present-day Dublin. We don’t have a lot of factual evidence about him, just a few stories and the elaborate ruins of the city that grew up when people came to follow his example and live with him, until he felt obligated to lead them.
Glendalough, the thin place
Gwen thought this was a pretty shot of the place when we visited. The big round tower is just visible over the hill. This would have been the view a lot of pilgrims saw to let them know they were almost at this famous thin place called Glendalough.
Probably the most famous story about Kevin is about the time a bird made a nest in his hand. If you ever see a statue of him, it will probably look like the picture below. Kevin was known for spreading himself out flat on his back on some big rock in the middle of nowhere. He was all about being one with the rest of creation and experiencing God from the sky down and from the ground up. One time he spent such a long time in this contemplation that a blackbird made a nest in his hand. When he came out of his reverie he realized what the bird had done. Despite the pain of doing so, he kept his hand still for mother blackbird until her children were hatched and gone.
You’ve got to wonder how these stories get going! I would say this one got going because we all have a yearning in us to be so still, so in touch, that life would be given into our hands, and we would be able to handle it without wrecking it.
In his later years Kevin went off to his desert again. He’d interrupted being a hermit to lead the community, but then he went off again. The lower lake, where the main compound is, is pretty lush. But the upper lake is quite a bit higher in elevation and starts getting kind of scrubby at the top. Kevin went and lived in a small cave up there to be alone. At one point Kevin did go back for a while to straighten some things out, especially when he heard about the otter.
Here’s the story about the otter. One day Kevin was praying on the porch of his cave, and he dropped his precious psalter into the water. While he was lamenting his great loss, an otter he had befriended retrieved the book from the bottom of the lake. Miraculously none of the pages were ruined, or even smudged.
As the story goes, this same otter also helped feed the brothers and sisters in Kevin’s community and brought salmon to them from time to time. One of the monks got the idea that this otter would be easy to catch and he could use his pelt. The otter saw that he was going to be trapped and stopped delivering salmon. Some monks went hungry and some left the monastery altogether because they were hungry. When Kevin noticed that his otter friend was gone, he prayed to discern the disappearance. Before long he was visited by the brother who had plotted to kill the animal. That sent him back to exercise some direct leadership of the community for a while.
Find the everyday thin places
Is this story too simple for you? Maybe you have never had an animal who was a friend. That is to your loss. The Celtic church had a very lively sense of the interdependence of humans and nature, animals and trees and air and such. Long before we had to convince people that “Drill baby drill” might not solve all the ruin we had visited on the planet, the Celtic Christians thought that living in respectful symbiosis with the rest of creation was a basic act of faith. We have to teach people, even convince them, that the body of Christ is an organism, not just an organization of thoughts and pieces of data and material. But Kevin had a oneness with creation and thus with the Creator.
It is hard for a lot of us, like it was my suburban friend, to find a thin place in the city. But it is possible. I have tried to refine this art over the years. Here is what I did lately, maybe it will give you some ideas for how to practice the discipline:
I was running along Kelly Drive the other day and I was irritated by the wind making my run harder. Then I felt guilty about being irritated by the wind and decided to feel it instead. The wind teaches me, to push through, sometimes it blows things in me away, sometimes it delivers the Spirit of God.
Kelly Drive is a great resource. It is always good for becoming one with the river. Letting it take you somewhere, wash things away, be as ever-changing as you are.
The other night when I came up out of the subway at City Hall the birds were in Dilworth Plaza again. Quite often there is a whole mess of birds that roost in the branches of the trees there. I stopped and listened. I like their joy. I like how they are always keeping track of each other and protecting each other with their songs. Stop for birds.
The other day I had a minute to check in on the news, which I like, and which I can hardly wait to be over. I went into my den and the autumn sun was warming a section on my couch. My cat knows all about these sun places. Before I flipped on the TV I decided to spend a minute having a Sabbath in that sun and let it warm me. The sun made me feel better. The heat somehow made be feel more secure.
A week or so ago I was tempted to just dash through my backyard to the car, but I decided to stop and enjoy this lonely rose that caught my eye. It was the last rose of summer. I had to make a detour from my schedule and make a special event of bringing in that final blessing. I like how beautiful and fragrant roses are. So I put it in a vase. It is encouraging to see the roses who have some last strength stored up to bloom before the cold comes. It is expected in spring, but not so expected in fall.
Kevin seems to have been more interested in otters and blackbirds and roses than with people. Nonetheless, God drew together a vibrant community around him. Apparently, God rarely calls people to retreat to the boondocks and contemplate in the bosom of untrammeled creation. Even if you do, a city might build itself around you. So we need to bring respect for creation with us as we go — notice every bit that keeps popping into view. By doing so much to honor it, we encourage people to be hopeful with us that it will be all be restored. Let’s give thanks for it, so our hearts don’t go dark.
A simple psalm to spur some thoughts of love on the day we mourn for all the people who have died from the lack of it.
Even in the room with the wedding
there were conflicts worthy of a Memorial Day.
The wars of the world
are personal bad blood writ large
and the blood we carry
is the war in the world writ small.
So even on the weekend of remembrance
it is not dishonoring to remember
the wars in our souls,
even though no one may spill our blood
and the injuries we cause
are hidden, internal bleeding.
What shall be our memorial?
It can certainly start with Jesus
and that should lead away
from memorializing our wars:
the slight, the snub, the stolen power,
the theft, the hate, the wasted hour,
the stealth ill-will before which we cower.
We can choose better memories,
like Jesus choosing to forgive us.
And that could lead toward
memorializing our blessings:
the hug, the laugh, the spoken love,
the gift, the note, the look above,
the moments we feel we have enough.
The toxins we carry would like to marry
each moment, until each remembers them,
and a statue to war
is on each corner of our daily path
and the blood of Jesus
is an unused way, a memory.
My own quick adaptation to this splendid environment for my pilgrimage this winter, reminded me of Nikos Kazantzakis musing about how God was invited to adapt to being human when he came for us in Jesus. In 
We could miss the life. I walked out of 
But the Capuchins sent me the worst tract in the mail the other day! (We are on innumerable religious mailing lists). I don’t really want you to see it because you might believe it. I just want to complain. Complete with a picture like the one at the right, they intended to “comfort those who mourn” with a prayer from the “Roman Ritual.”
Here’s the story about the otter. One day Kevin was praying on the porch of his cave, and he dropped his precious psalter into the water. While he was lamenting his great loss, an otter he had befriended retrieved the book from the bottom of the lake. Miraculously none of the pages were ruined, or even smudged.