+Z’ev

Today’s assigned readings:

AM 1 Samuel 1:1-20; Hebrews 3:1-6
PM Zechariah 2:10-13; John 3: 25-30

He who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. For this reason my joy has been fulfilled. He must increase, but I must decrease.”
John 3:29-30

A series of comments on my other blog on Wednesday cause this meditation to be a bit of self evaluation. The entire thread is here, but the crucial comments can be summed up as in two points and a quote:

1) I said, I was just thinking… that we are functioning from differing hermeneutics: yourself from a “hermeneutics of faith” and myself from a “hermeneutics of suspicion”.

2) The comments are being written by an Orthodox priest whom I’ve known online for longer than I’ve been Orthodox - and since before he was in Seminary.

… greater context of this weblog’s theme of deconstructing Orthodoxy by means of the kinds of things converts say… And I do believe that this overarching theme does not stem from a real faith in Christ and love for His people but from a real rejection of His Church and a desire not to live by its life-giving, salvific path. That’s an ideological stance which almost always leads to this deconstructive mode of theologizing, irrespective of who happens to be following it.

There were other comments suggesting that this is not a way of faith but of nihilism.

So I ask myself not “is that true” but rather is the Diagnosis correct? Ultimately the Gospel is right there in Verse 30. +>i Jesus must increase and I must decrease. But verse 29 is the job description for the preacher or teacher of any sort. “The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice.” The joy of the preacher is not that his own words were heard but that the Voice of the Bridegroom was heard - most often in spite of the preaching.

Is that the way it is? Do folks read my blogs and hear “pretentious blathering prose” (a phrase from my writing workshop at NYU) or, my some miracle, is it possible God can speak here and be heard over the clattering of my keys?

Of course, I have no answer. It’s merely a critical note: an on-going corrective. St Francis taught us to “Preach the Gospel at all times. Use words if needed.” So, in one’s manner of life the Gospel should shine forth. Blogs being about words, that’s all we have so the stated purpose or style of this blog is first “to tell your story in such a way as it becomes Gospel. The second point is not to tell us what the lesson ‘really means’, although telling us what it means to you is proper - show us by means of the thing that really happened.” It’s words about life that should hit these pages and those words should point to Gospel happening.

Today is the feast of the Visitation of the Virgin Mary to her cousin Elizabeth. It’s not at all an Eastern feast - the Catholic Encyclopaedia says it started in 1263 with the Franciscans. As Christ does to Elizabeth, coming in the person of another, so Christ comes to each of us… When he comes to me, do I reply with “real faith in Christ and love for His people” or rather with “a real rejection of” Christ and his people?

Elizabeth says, “Who am I that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” How do I welcome the guest at my door - expected and unexpected - who is Christ, himself? What about the “virtual door” of the blogs? To my mind, that is the only answer to the question of Nihilism: is love shown? Is the guest served from what in the Celtic pagan traditions is called the Coire Ansc, the bottomless cauldron of Hospitality? Does the preacher stand aside in joy while the guest hears the words of the bridegroom?

(How’s that for mixing all the metaphors as a conclusion?)

Collect for the Visitation

Father in heaven, by your grace the virgin mother of your incarnate Son was blessed in bearing him, but still more blessed in keeping your word: Grant us who honor the exaltation of her lowliness to follow the example of her devotion to your will; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Today’s assigned readings:

Deuteronomy 4:25-31; 2 Corinthians 1:23-2:17; Luke 15:1-2,11-32

But when he came to himself he said, “How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger!
Luke 15:17

The prodigal “came to himself” out in the world, poor and destitute, eatting pig-feed out among the Gentiles. What does this mean? What does it mean “Came to himself” when that is the first action on his road back to his father? What does one do, “coming to himself”? (The Greek, btw, contains nothing special or “mystical”. It uses the same word with which you might say, “Come to the table” or “he came to the party” or “she came with us in the car”.)

On the one hand this could be an interesting turn of phrase that simply means “he sat down to talk over the problem with himself.” On the other hand it sure sounds like that 70s quest to find himself.

I’ve noted before my “spiritual journey” through evangelicalism to ECUSA, to paganism to ECUSA, to Orthodoxy… to God, one hopes. I’m praying I’m on this journey God-ward, Love-ward. They are the same thing, after all. And each step, I must admit, feels as if it is a “coming to himself” in the “find himself” way: my coming out, my finding God at each step, my painfully slow growth in the ways of friendship, patience and love, my recent, awkward realisations of regret, and my pangs of guilt for that… it’s this slow and gradual process of “coming to” myself.

The saints like to read in this story a number of things: they like to see Jesus in the role of “father” and us as the prodigal, of course; some like to see the prodigal as a symbol of the gentiles while the elder brother is the Jews (not my favourite readings, to be honest, nor one that works for any of the text beyond vague ideas). But almost every sermon I’ve ever heard or saint’s commentary I’ve read points out the same thing. After “coming to himself”, the first thing he thinks of is his father.

That’s important: “coming to himself” is somehow tied to a God-ward realisation. If life is to be a constant metanoia, a constant turning around to God, then the exact result of any such turn should be God. But this is not to indicate an absence of God in the process before the turning! There is no place where God is not. (If you find one, let me know: there are times when God annoys me so very much!) Unlike the human father in the very human story of the Prodigal, God is always present. “Coming to self” in real life means the realisation that God is present. That moment of internal communion, that moment of union is the beginning of salvation, the beginning of wholeness: a seed, if you will, from which the Tree of Life may grow.

(Just a side note - I’m seeing a connexion here, between “coming to himself” and the Hindu phrase, Tat Tvam Asi, “Thou art that”.)

In my RSS feeds on Tuesday, I found this prose poem by Leonard Cohen:

Poem 50 (”I lost my way, I forgot …”) from Book of Mercy
I lost my way, I forgot to call on your name. The raw heart beat against the world, and the tears were for my lost victory. But you are here. You have always been here. The world is all forgetting, and the heart is a rage of directions, but your name unifies the heart, and the world is lifted into its place. Blessed is the one who waits in the traveller’s heart for his turning.

(Props to A Big Jewish Blog)

Look at the passage from Deuteronomy. It’s the story of the Prodigal told as a prophecy: because of their missteps, God will lead them out into the nations (v 27). There they will be just like the gentiles (v28) but they will suddenly “come to themselves” (vs 29, 30). Then, in verse 31, “Because the Lord your God is a merciful God, he will neither abandon you nor destroy you; he will not forget the covenant with your ancestors that he swore to them.”

Of course, Jesus was speaking to a nation that had been exiled and called home again several times. The theme was common to their faith. The theme is common to us, here in the 21st century as well, regardless of our faith tradition. The 1960s and 70s were about “finding myself”. We know this in our hearts. And when we turn there, God is there only waiting for us to turn.

“Blessed is the one who waits in the traveller’s heart for his turning.”

It is here, I think, where we might begin a discussion of what is, incorrectly, called “Open Communion” - what we mean is something else, “Radically Open Communion” - open to all, baptised or not, Christian or not. (”Open Communion” is, generally, the position that all Christians are welcomed without regard for denominational difference. It’s the official policy of most of the Protestant world.) Although this meditation is not the place for a theological debate, here is a point of this parable as I read it. God is right there: the desire of the person causes the realisation. The event happens. The sacramental action - realisation that “something is wrong”, baptism, communion, or whatever else, Church service, lunch with an ex-boyfriend - that facilitates the moment of “coming to self”, the moment of communion, is unimportant.

Today’s assigned readings:

Deuteronomy 4:15-24; 2 Corinthians 1:12-22; Luke 15:1-10

Since you saw no form when the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire, take care and watch yourselves closely, so that you do not act corruptly by making an idol for yourselves, in the form of any figure - the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any animal that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flies in the air, the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth. And when you look up to the heavens and see the sun, the moon, and the stars, all the host of heaven, do not be led astray and bow down to them and serve them, things that the Lord your God has allotted to all the peoples everywhere under heaven.
Deuteronomy 4:15:19

The very simplified line or argument for using what are called “Holy Images” in church (icons, statues, etc) runs like this:

Under the covenant with Israel it was true that “since [Moses] saw no form when the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire” the people of God were not allowed to make images of anything, lest they should fall in to idolatry. However, even God broke this, his own command, by putting images of angels in the tabernacle - even on the Ark of the very Covenant itself. So, clearly, it’s not images that are bad, in and of themselves. But in these latter days, “the Word of God and God Himself has been made flesh and dwelt among us”. We beheld him. We heard him. We touched him. The argument of “since you saw no form” is no longer valid and, in celebration of the incarnation - God taking human flesh - we make images.

After that simplified form, it gets pretty complex: it can come out demanding we use icons (but not statues) or it can come out supporting all sorts of things that might seem strange to us in modern times when an image is only a photograph or a google away. But that’s the basic argument: God has a form now.

Let me underscore how radical this is. Judaism is adamant in her rejection of this idea. The rejection of it is sung in synagogue services - the hymn Yigdal includes the lines

Exalted be the Living G-d and praised,
He exists - unbounded by time in His existence.
He is One - and there is no unity like His Oneness.
Inscrutable and infinite is His Oneness.
He has no semblance of a body nor is He corporeal;
nor has His holiness any comparison.

But Christianity says the Unity of the Holy is not impaired in any way, but rather further glorified because it is a Tri-Unity and because the Second Person of the Trinity has Human Flesh and that same is incorporated in the Godhead.

There’s a reason I’m piling all this doctrine on the top of the post… it’s important for the storyline that follows.

I have an addiction to adult content. It’s a rather strong addiction. It’s so strong that I can make “adult content” out of a newspaper sports section. It’s hard to describe the process… it’s like becoming enmeshed in something in which you can’t get out, but don’t want to. In fact, you want to keep going deeper. The availability of adult content on the net is irrelevant to me: Time magazine or the latest edition of CMT will provide enough. And that is my clue. The overlap, if you will. It’s something - that I can’t quite explain yet - about the image, the icon, if you will, that is out of balance. In a sense one tries to eat the icon instead of being pointed beyond to God. It’s getting tied up in the earthly with no heavenly involvement. It’s the thing that the writer was trying to get to in Deuteronomy: it’s so possible to get led astray by the beauty of it all, the beauty of the things that God has given to all people, that we forget the Beauty God has reserved until himself.

But then there is the other side…

The word became flesh and dwelt among us. The Beauty of God’s son, God Himself, is just a human beauty like ours. Or rather… our human beauty is just like God’s.

It is a hard line for me to walk. It’s so easy to get into a gnostic denial of the body. It’s so easy to get into a simple “turn-it-off-because-it’s-evil” attitude that, at heart, denies the incarnation no matter how much we want to dress it up as pious modesty or post-Resurrection “Holiness Teaching”. It’s equally easy to get lost in the “flesh is ok now” attitude. So hard is the line to hold that I wish the rules were black and white.

When I force myself into a black and white box - which obsessiveness with rules, I’m learning at work, is just another aspect of addiction - it becomes, ironically, easier to judge others for breaking the rules I have trouble keeping. Once I start myself down that road, it’s easy to gnostically deny others too.

Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”
Luke 15 1-2

Jesus, however, has other plans. Jesus ignores all those rules - including the ones that God himself wrote. He walks in, sits down and breaks bread with the sinners. Are we supposed to hear in this text an echo of Eucharist in Luke’s community? This accusatory phrase is carved into the side of the altar at St Gregory of Nyssa Church. If God broke bread with sinners and told us to love as he loved, and told us to break bread… guess what: we’re going to break bread with sinners, too. It’s about communion.

This is the point of the Tri-Unity, really: God is so filled with Love that he is not complete alone but rather requires in his love an expression of communion. As with God so with us - it is not enough that we love. But that we love in communion. This goes beyond simple “howdy” on the street corner or simply sitting next to each other on the bus (or in the pew). It certainly goes beyond the mere objectification of pornography or beyond the internalised rote responses of addiction. It requires… demands communion. And God has given us the tools and the wherewithal to pull it off. We feed each other rather than eating up each other. When we feed each other we feed God and we feast on him.

It’s not a complex step. It’s not a hard dance to figure out. In fact it’s too easy: that’s the problem. In Christ all the answers are yes… (2 Cor 1:19) and that love, that charity can be, for one who likes rules, just a stumbling block. But “all the promises of God find their Yes in him. That is why we utter the Amen through him, to the glory of God.”

The divine image of God (i.e. humanity) comes home and dances with God again in the cool of the evening.

Today’s assigned readings:

Deuteronomy 4:9-14; 2 Corinthians 1:1-11; Luke 14:25-35

Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand?
Luke 14:31

It would be easy to turn this verse into a Memorial Day political commentary on the current illegal wars in Iraq and elsewhere.

But I won’t go there.

For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, “This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’
Luke 14:28-30

Right up front, here’s a parable we never tell ourselves. I never finished anything until I was 37 - less than 3 weeks, in fact, from being 38. I dropped out of college in 1987 and never went back. My motto had been, “never leave a company unless you can leave ‘em in the lurch.” Even though I stayed at the Episcopal Church Centre in NYC for nearly 10 years, I felt I was treading water. When I suddenly moved to SF it was because I’d quite my job in NYC. In SF I learned how to cut strings effectively and move forward quickly: I could ditch anyone or anything faster than you could say “I need…” In a lot of my life I felt like the rules of engagement had been described in a musical from the 80s called Chess. The song is “Nobody’s Side.”

Everybody’s playing the game

But nobody’s rules are the same

Nobody’s on nobody’s side

Better learn to go it alone

Recognize you’re out on your own

Nobody’s on nobody’s side

Never make a promise or plan

Take a little love where you can

Nobody’s on nobody’s side

Never stay too long in your bed

Never lose your heart, use your head

Nobody’s on nobody’s side

Never take a stranger’s advice

Never let a friend fool you twice

Nobody’s on nobody’s side

Everybody’s playing the game

But nobody’s rules are the same

Nobody’s on nobody’s side

Never leave a moment too soon

Never waste a hot afternoon

Nobody’s on nobody’s side

Never stay a minute too long

Don’t forget the best will go wrong

Nobody’s on nobody’s side

Never be the first to believe

Never be the last to deceive

Nobody’s on nobody’s side

Never make a promise or plan

Take a little love when you can

Nobody’s on nobody’s side

Kinda crappy, huh? You know, along the way I think I sublimated those ideas… (it was one of my favourite musicals, I’ve owned several recordings. My friends and I would go to piano bars and sing it.) My perceptions…

My spiritual journey was part of this - sort - from a nice evangelical childhood to ECUSA, to Wicca to Gnosticism and what’s called “High Magick”, to ECUSA, to Orthodoxy. (and now to what? I don’t know.) It’s possible to see all this as phases started and never completed. Being a convert to Orthodoxy feeds into this, btw. My priest encouraged me to make a break so firm with my past as to not even talk to people from “back there”. Three years of journals are shreded. Since he knew I wanted to be a priest, I was told that a priest (or monk) could never refer to his pre-ordination past. In a sense he encouraged me to go there early. But this wasn’t Orthodoxy, really. It was just a way that priest had of control. It fit in with my “cut and run” ideas, but it wasn’t the real faith: In fact Bishop Seraphim (a retired Bp in the OCA) wrote to me once not to belittle my past: “there is Grace before and behind” he said. We must learn to see that. It took a long while to hear him…

My relationships - sexual ones, that is - are pretty much the same. On top of the usual casual dalliances that are common to all of my friends, gay and straight, there are several attempts at long-term. In the story I used to tell myself, I was treated pretty badly. But no, in handsight: I can convince myself it was about 50/50 but really, in the longer-term ones I was the ass.

And what have I to show for 35+ years? Not much, really - some stuff, some pictures and a lot of people who love me and wonder what the heck was wrong. I’ve lived in a lot of places. I’ve had a lot of jobs. And most days, I wake up and feel like i have to start all over again with no sense of continuity.

At least that’s the way I looked at it.

I finished my BA in August of 2002. I finished something. It worked. It earned me other jobs. I cut and ran one more time - from San Francisco to Asheville. And suddenly (well, ok, it took nearly 4 years) a life happened: not a brand new life, mind you. This is the life I’ve been leading for 40 years.

I was emailing back and forth with my friend, Donald, about scripture and about the writings of St Paul. We’re discussing what it means to wrestle with the Biblical texts. How can we take the Bible as a cultural document, but also as a spiritual one, speaking to us where we are but at the same time honestly speaking to us from where the writers were - all of us on a journey together; a journey that is as individual as each of us and as common as birth and sunrise.

The example he brings up is Genesis. It’s not that we modern folk know more about things than the author of Genesis 1 or the author of Genesis 2, or even the redactor who combined them. Rather, he or she may have been at the same point on their spiritual journey as any of us - or more or less mature in the faith. How do we hear that author speaking? What do we learn? (This is my paraphrase of his post, what I read and remember now.)

That was an interesting point… and I wondered how to look at Saint Paul who is at turns radically inclusive and radically exclusive. There is a progression, sure, from New Convert to Grumpy Old Man. But how do we need to hear it?

And the reply came back, very gently (and perhaps unintentionally) pointing me to my own online ouvre: developmental, yes, yet all online. How might a reader take “I was in Hell” coupled with news of my journeys to Canada to see Brodie? How might any of that be read in conjunction with my first-ever entry of a web-based journal (6 October 1998) or even more, the original, email journal/zine - which goes back to 23 January 1995! How, indeed, would a reader encompass all that? Worse, how do *I* encompass it? I’ve shredded the print form of the first three years out of horror (as even John Donne, my namesake, did to some of his early work). The online form, however, is with us forever. I can be embarrassed and saddened when someone happens on that past, or…

For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, “This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’

So it suddenly dawns on me that this parable (for whatever reason it was recorded) has a tendency to think about life in blocks. We can, you know: individual relationships, domestic locations, jobs, five year blocks, three month blocks, fiscal years all make sense as a way to cut our lives into discreet scenes and then judge them as successes or failures. We then get a “majority opinion” on our life, a sort of Supreme Court Judgement. We can know at any moment in time if we’re winning or losing.

But Jesus refocuses all of this by inviting us to take up the cross… and the Greek is written in such a way as to invite us to do that over and over, daily. It’s not a once-in-a-lifetime thing. It’s an over-and-over thing. The question is not how many times we tried and failed (or tried and gave up) but rather how many times we kept trying. To take a page from the Twelve Steps - specifically steps 8 and 9 - “Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.” And having made those confessions and amends, they become learnings, rungs on the ladder. I would not be able to love now were it not for those failures.

Back to St Paul’s conflicting comments. St Paul’s letters stretch, in time, from the 40s - 60s, of the Common Era - leaving out, for a moment, those letters generally agreed not to be authentically Pauline, (First Timothy, Second Timothy, Titus, Ephesians) - we can see, in Paul’s 15-20 year journey as a Christian, development of doctrine. And Grace in all areas or, as my writer says, “But it has the intriguing virtue of suggesting to you and me (to name two people) that we might look at and listen to our younger selves not only with compassion and forgiveness, but remembering that our younger self - despite all the foibles and failings we each can see in those selves - was up to something authentic, holy, essential and blessed and there’s graceful learning for us in it too.”

St Paul as blogger. And an image of God’s salvation for our own timelines.

No man lays a foundation and doesn’t build the tower? Yes, actually we do it rather often. As Jesus points out elsewhere, as St Paul does as well, we don’t know the future. We make plans but can not keep them: Life happens. The point is not the plans or the failures, but the Life. There is Grace, always. Before and behind. We choose to live in that Grace, taking up our cross and moving forward, God-ward or Love-ward (they are the same thing), following in the way of Jesus.

Pentecost Sunday:

Isaiah 11:1-9; 1 Corinthians 2:1-13; John 14:21-29

Monday (1st BCP):

Deuteronomy 4:9-14; 2 Corinthians 1:1-11; Luke 14:25-35

Tuesday:

Deuteronomy 4:15-24; 2 Corinthians 1:12-22; Luke 15:1-10

Wednesday:

Deuteronomy 4:25-31; 2 Corinthians 1:23-2:17; Luke 15:1-2,11-32

Thursday, Visitation of the BVM:

AM 1 Samuel 1:1-20; Hebrews 3:1-6
PM Zechariah 2:10-13; John 3: 25-30

Friday (Justin):

Deuteronomy 5:1-22; 2 Corinthians 4:1-12; Luke 16:10-17(18)

Saturday (Blandina and Her Companions):

Deuteronomy 5:22-33; 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:10; Luke 16:19-31

PM: Eve of Trinity Sunday:

Sirach 42:15-25; Ephesians 3:14-21