Author Archives: mbj

Purifying the heart

“There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” (Mark 7:15)

I am back from nearly a week in Maine, where I reveled in the company of wind and waves, basalt and barnicles, shorebirds and seaweed.  My brother moved to Maine several years ago, and he has just finished building a small house beside the sea.  I visited his house for the first time, and what interested me most about it – besides its being wonderfully energy-efficient – is that the house maintains a kind of flow between inside and out.  I am not an architect, so I’ll put this in simple terms, but an exposed steel beam runs across the living room ceiling and holds the weight of the floor above.  The steel beam extends from the inside of the house all the way outside, where it holds up an outside roof – so you can see that the beam is at work on both the inside and the outside of the house at once, and that it connects the house horizontally, inside and out.  In a similar way, when you walk up to the house you notice that the wood posts that hold up the entryway roof are tree trunks shorn of bark; when you walk inside the house, similar tree trunks serve as pillars inside the first-floor living area.  So the tree posts outside the house are the same as the tree posts inside – again there is a flow between inside and out, outside and in.

I mention this today because our Gospel is all about that flow.  The Pharisees and scribes seem to be focused only on the outside, on what is external: on washing their hands before they eat, on washing the produce that they buy in the marketplace, on washing the cups and pots that they use when preparing their food.  Let me hasten to say that there is nothing wrong with washing our hands before we eat.  I’m not about to tell you to stop asking your children to wash their hands before supper.  Nor am I about to tell you to stop washing your lettuce or apples or mangoes before you put them in your mouth — just ask anyone who’s been to India what can happen if you don’t.  And of course there’s nothing wrong with washing the dishes or with keeping our pots and pans clean.  In fact, ordinary tasks such as washing dishes, harvesting a garden, or packing a school lunch can be mindful, holy experiences. But the Pharisees seem to be so intent on, so attached to outward cleanliness and purity that they have forgotten about inner intention, about the purity of the heart.  Jesus rebukes them for their hypocrisy, quoting from Isaiah, “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me” (Mark 7:6, citing Isaiah 29:13).

Let’s pause for a moment to think about how much emphasis we place on outward things.  Like some of you, I’m sure, I grew up in a family that was all about looking good to the outside world – we put our best foot forward, kept our socks pulled up and our shirts tucked in, and put on a happy face.  Never mind the conflict and craziness that was going on in private, behind the scenes – what mattered was to look good on the outside, to achieve, accomplish, and keep up appearances, and to have a spotless house when guests came in. 

Focusing on externals can be expressed in different ways.  Maybe we focus on the grades we get in school, not on how much we are learning.  Maybe we focus on how much money we can make, even if we’ve got plenty already.  Maybe we focus on piling up accomplishments and reaching for accolades, rather than on serving God and neighbor.  Maybe we focus on polishing our reputation and looking good in other people’s eyes, rather than on honoring our own integrity and limits, and doing what we truly feel called to do, even if that sometimes means disappointing the people around us. 

Religion itself can end up being about nothing but externals.  That’s one reason that so many people these days are leaving church, and calling themselves “spiritual but not religious.”  They associate religion with outward things like following rules and repeating rituals that have no meaning, with empty legalism and pompous moralism, rather than with the inner work of purifying and transforming the heart.

The fact is, Jesus was all about purifying and transforming the heart.  And, friends, I hope I’m not saying anything new when I say that our Grace Church community is all about transformation and transfiguration.  If you hang out here a while, you will change.  I am changing and you are changing.  Together, we are going with the flow of the Holy Spirit.  So Jesus reminds us today not to look to externals, but to the transformation of the heart.  As he tells the crowd in today’s Gospel, “There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile… For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come.” And then he lays out this terrible list of things that can flow out of our heart: “fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.  All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person” (Mark 7:15, 21-23).

What emerges from our heart can be evil; it can defile us; it can degrade or debase us.  I don’t have to tell you that these are strong words.  I can imagine two opposite reactions to what Jesus is saying.  One is to feel hopeless — When I look inside, I’m going to see nothing but a flow of filth.  The other is to feel angry, defensive, or simply bewildered — Hey, I’m a nice person; I don’t recognize any of that! None of that applies to me!  To both these reactions, I want to make one thing clear: our faith tells us that we are not essentially evil.  Scripture tells us that we are created in the image and likeness of God.  That likeness to God may be sullied, even deeply sullied, deep down some part of ourselves, made in the image of God, is already in union with God.  Deep down our soul is already shining with God’s light, though we may have a long way to go and a lot of work to do before that light can shine out through our words and deeds, through our thoughts and choices and everyday behavior.  It is a lifetime’s work to become who we really are, an expression of God’s love, to let ourselves become not just the image of God, but God’s likeness, as well. 

So how aware are we of what is flowing out of our heart?  If we put all our attention on outward show – if we are busy looking good and behaving correctly, busy following rules and keeping up appearances, busy thinking that church membership is like belonging to a social club – then we may be only vaguely aware of what is going on inside us, and how what is inside us is expressing itself in everything we do. 

Take, for instance, lying. In today’s Gospel, Jesus warns against “deceit,” and our second reading, from the Letter of James, cautions that “If any think they are religious, and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless” (James 1:26).  So how are we doing with avoiding deceit and with bridling our tongues?  Do we consistently tell the truth?  To put it another way, on a typical day, how many times do we lie?  Never?  Once?  Twice?  Only when pressed, such as when someone asks, “Does this dress make me look fat?”?

As part of my light summer reading I read a book entitled Spy the Lie.  It was written by some former CIA officers who were trained to interview suspected terrorists and to spot the signs that indicate whether or not a person is telling the truth.  I was interested to learn that “Some behavioral research suggests that on average, we lie at least ten times in a twenty-four-hour period, including the so-called ‘white lies’ that we tell in order to avoid hurt or conflict.”¹  Ten times a day!

I suspect that most of us have no idea that we lie that much.  It is easy to get desensitized to lies, for we live in a world in which lying is almost taken for granted.  Without realizing it, we become attached to a certain image of ourselves and then we present stories about ourselves to other people that reinforce and prove the image that we intend to portray.  But that image is not who we really are.  And we are surrounded by these kinds of deceptions.  Day by day we are bombarded by advertisements making claims that everyone knows are not true, and right now we are in the midst of a fierce election season, when the words thrown about so ardently by politicans and commentators can have only a casual connection to actual fact. 

Yet if we want the light of God’s truth to shine out from within us, we need to resist the cultural pressures to lie.  A way to do that is to start paying closer attention to the words that come out of our mouths.  Are they truthful?  Are they loving? Are they necessary?  That is a good triplet of qualities for defining right speech: whether or not it is truthful, loving, and necessary.  And we can reflect on why we said what we said.  When I said that sharp word, what was going on inside me?  When I boasted just then and inflated the truth, what was that about?  When I kept silent and ducked, rather than speak the truth that the situation required, what was I afraid of?  Jesus is inviting us today to grow in self-awareness, and deceit and lying is just one example of what we may notice when we look within.

By now we may be asking ourselves why in the world we should bother to turn our attention away from external things and do the much harder work of inner exploration.  The answer is simple. 

Because there is a divine love that wants to flow through us without impediment. 

Because the Spirit of God longs to transform and bring into harmony what is inside us and what is outside us, so that we are all of a piece like that little house in Maine, no longer pretending to be someone other than who we really are.

Because the world needs people who are self-aware and awake, open to the flow of God’s love, and intending from moment to moment to let that love be expressed in everything they say and do. 

We may have some distance to go before we become people like that, but the path before us is trustworthy, and we have a loving companion and savior who is walking at our side. 

1. Phil Houston, Michael Floy, and Susan Carcinero, with Don Tennant, Spy the Lie (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012), p. 17.

“Get up and eat”

“The angel of the LORD came a second time, touched him, and said, ‘Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.’  He got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights…”
–1 Kings 19:7-8

Those of you who come to church every week have probably noticed that as far as the Gospel reading is concerned, someone seems to have pushed the pause button.  For a while now our Gospel text has been drawn from the very same chapter of the Gospel of John.  Today we reach the midpoint of a stretch of five Sundays in which the Gospel passage comes from Chapter Six of John’s Gospel, the chapter in which Jesus feeds the five thousand and then launches into a long meditation on being the bread of life.  The imagery of Jesus as bread from heaven, as bread for the soul, is so evocative and so important that here at the height of summer our lectionary brings it back to us week after week, so that we can chew on it a while – savor it, relish it, wonder about it, and perhaps really take it in.
“I am the bread of life,” Jesus tells us today.  “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty” (John 6:35).  Jesus is offering himself to us as food and drink, and naturally our minds turn to the Eucharist.  What wisdom are we learning here, Sunday after Sunday, as we listen to the familiar words of consecration and receive again the bread and wine?  How does receiving Communion shape our souls, so that gradually we come to radiate the love that created us and that will greet us at our journey’s end?  There are many ways to answer these questions, for the Eucharist is inexhaustible — it can never be fully grasped or explored.  We are in the presence of a mystery that is larger than our minds can fully comprehend.  But as I consider the Eucharist, three things stand out for me, three ways that the Eucharist teaches us how to take in the bread of life.  As I see it, the Eucharist speaks to us about intimacy, attention, and thankfulness.  So I will say a word about each.

The God I meet in Jesus, the God I meet in every Eucharist, is a God who seeks intimacy with us, a God who longs to draw close.  So many of us are filled with self-doubt.  So many of us speak harshly to ourselves, or find constant fault with ourselves.  What a contradiction it is to that inner voice of self-attack and self-rejection to meet a God, Sunday after Sunday, who is eager to welcome us home, eager to listen to us, to bless us, to receive us just as we are.  There is something very intimate about standing up to approach the altar, about stretching out our hands to receive the bread and hold the cup.  God in Christ is longing to meet each one of us in particular, and as we take in the bread and wine, we are saying Yes to that encounter, Yes to a very personal, quiet, and intimate moment in which we take God into our depths.

When I distribute the bread, I trust that the bread I am placing in each outstretched hand will go exactly to the place in that person’s soul that most needs healing or transformation.  Perhaps the person is coming to Christ with a broken heart, or perhaps the person is restless and dissatisfied, searching for something more.  When we kneel at the altar rail, we may be worried or angry, lonely or joyful.  It doesn’t matter.  Whatever we bring with us to the altar – whoever we are, whatever our wounds or delights – Jesus longs to meet us right where we are, to heal us, to give us what we most deeply need: himself.

These quiet moments of communion offer us intimacy not only with ourselves and with Jesus.  They also give us a glimpse of our connection to each other.  We share the one bread.  We drink from the same cup.  And afterward, as we return to our seats and sense the presence of others who share our wounds, our longing and healing in Christ, we may be startled by the sudden discovery that we are part of one another.  We share a connection that goes deeper than any merely social identity.  Now Christ’s blood is flowing in our veins.  Now Christ’s body becomes our body.  We can never again fall for the illusion that we are isolated and alone, or that our identity ends with our skin.  We are part of a larger whole.  Through the Eucharist we taste our intimacy with Christ, and Christ is always enlarging the boundaries of our love.  There is no limit to love.

So, I am learning about intimacy.  The Eucharist also teaches me to pay attention.  Let’s be honest here.  For those of us who often come to church, it can be easy not to pay attention.  Many of us have probably memorized most of the words and gestures, and it is easy to slip into automatic pilot and just go through the motions, standing, sitting, or kneeling at the appropriate times, while our minds rush hither and yon from one distraction to the next.  It’s not surprising, really – we live in a fast-paced, go-get-‘em culture that favors multi-tasking and speed.  Some years ago I read an article in Newsweek that reported that the goal of fast-food outlets is to get to 90: that is, “to take an average of 90 seconds from the moment a driver places an order at the menu board to the moment when the food is handed out of the takeout window.¹”  I wouldn’t be surprised if the food goes down in 90 seconds, too, before we’ve had a chance to really taste it.  Most of us live faster than humans are designed to live.

I think it’s vital that the Eucharist be a meal that we do not hurry, a meal to which we give our full and undivided attention.  For this meal, at least, we park the car and put down the cell phone.  We shut off the TV.  We take our time.  We savor the familiar words.  We give reverent attention to one bite of food, one sip of wine.  We know that God is intimately present to us, and we become as present to God as we can, listening for the nuances, the surprises, listening for what happens within us when the experiences of the week just past come up against the truths of God.  Every Eucharist has something fresh to give us, some new insight to disclose – but only if we pay attention. 

And isn’t paying attention one of the basic practices of the spiritual life?  When we pay attention, we notice the present moment.  We find the sacred not in some transcendent, untouchable realm somewhere else, in some heavenly place “out there,” but right here in the present moment, just as it is.  Contemplative awareness is sometimes defined as living on the spot where you are, or living in the now, making contact with the present – and staying there. Maybe learning to be present for this sacrament is a training ground for learning to be present for the rest of life.  Every moment can be a sacramental moment, a moment of perceiving and participating in the presence of God, but that can happen only if we are paying attention, only if we are awake.

And finally, the Eucharist teaches us to give thanks.  That, of course, is the meaning of the Greek word, eucharistia: thanksgiving.  In our “Great Thanksgiving” we recall the blessings of life and above all God’s gift to us in Jesus Christ.  Every week, we proclaim that it is a “right, good, and joyful thing, always and everywhere to give thanks” to God.  What a powerful reminder of the fact that when we are fully engaged in life, we are full of thanks.  Whenever we look clearly into experience, we realize that everything is surprising, everything is gift.   I awoke this morning – thank you!  There are people to love – thank you!  There is work to do – thank you!  There are challenges to face – thank you!  There is a breath to inhale, a breath to exhale – thank you!  I am alive, and here I am, in this miracle of a day – thank you!  As Jewish writer and rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, “Just to be is a blessing; just to live is holy.”  When we make a practice of giving thanks, thankfulness eventually takes hold of us, not because something special has happened, but just because we are.  Why is threre something rather than nothing?  Why am am I here now, rather than not here?  In our brief lives, we live an unfathomable mystery.  What to do in the midst of a glorious mystery?  Give thanks, give thanks, give thanks.  More than one person has begun to seek God simply from a need to give thanks.

Intimacy.  Attention.  Thankfulness.  These are three spiritual practices that I learn from the Eucharist.  Like Elijah, we may arrive at the table feeling depleted, even desperate, and yet when we do what the angel urged Elijah to do, when we “get up and eat” (1 Kings 19:5,7), we discover that in the strength of this food the journey ahead is not too much for us.  Jesus came to bring us life, abundant life, and thanks to the gift of himself in the Eucharist – and moment by moment as we go through our day – our deepest longing is satisfied.  God is with us to strengthen and guide, to bless and give cheer, and we do not walk our journey alone.

1. George F. Will, “At the Table/On the Road,” Newsweek, June 26, 2000, p. 68.

Radiance on the Mountain

I can’t imagine a more appropriate context in which to ordain and consecrate Rob Hirschfeld as a bishop than the Feast Day of the Transfiguration.  We’re on the mountaintop today, gathered to celebrate the transforming power of the Spirit of God.  As we heard in the passage from the Gospel of Luke, about a week after Jesus foretells his death and resurrection, he takes with him Peter, John, and James and goes up on the mountain to pray.  In the solitude of that holy mountain, with its long, sweeping vistas and its cold, clean air, Jesus’ prayer grows into an intense religious experience.  “While he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white” (Luke 9:29).  To describe this change, Greek manuscripts use the word “metamorphosis” (metemorphothe);  Latin manuscripts use the word “transfiguration” (transfiguratus est).  Whatever you call it, it’s the same thing: at the top of the mountain, Jesus is swept up by the love that sustains the universe.  What Dante calls “the love that moves the sun and other stars”¹ so completely embraces Jesus that who he really is, who he has always been, is briefly revealed.  A dazzling brightness emanates from his face, his body, even his clothes.  The sacred radiance at the center of reality is shining through him, bursting through his seams, streaming from his pores, and even the three sleepy disciples can see it.

What just happened?  The holy presence that secretly abides within every person and every part of the created world has suddenly, briefly become visible to the human eye.  The vivid image of Jesus lit up from within accords with the experience of mystics from every world religion who speak of a vibrant, shimmering energy or light that flows through everything, although usually we don’t it.  In Asia, the cosmic life force is called chi in Chinese and prana in Sanskrit, and in many Eastern traditions, enlightenment is associated with a flow of energy throughout the body.²  Christian mystics likewise speak of the Holy Spirit as a Presence or energy that moves through the body, and the body of creation.  For Christians, there is something deeply personal in this energy: it is the dynamic, creative Presence of the Holy Spirit.  When we sense its presence within ourselves or in the outside world, God seems to light up the edges of things or to shine out from within them.  We see the hidden depth behind the veneer of ordinary reality.  The eternal makes itself known to us, and we may experience it as light, although it is beyond the reach of ordinary sight.  That’s where the language of paradox and poetry comes in, where mystics speak of a “dazzling darkness” or a “dark radiance,” just as in this passage Luke uses the language of paradox when he describes Jesus’ experience in terms of both a dazzling light and an overshadowing cloud (Luke 9:29, 34).  Something about perceiving that radiant darkness awakens our love.

I like it that God’s transfiguring radiance is at the center of this celebration, because I’ve heard some people say that Rob is a safe choice for the next bishop of New Hampshire – after all, he’s white, he’s a man, and he’s straight.  You might expect someone like that to be bland and timid, maybe to do what the disciple Peter did on the mountain.  Peter was so overcome by the vision of divine glory that – not knowing what he was saying (Luke 9:33) — he started chattering about building three tents or dwelling-places right there on the mountainside.  It is easy to identify with Peter, because when God shows up and we are confronted by the disruptive and untameable reality of holy mystery, our first instinct may be to try to regain control and to build some tidy, little boxes that we hope will contain the unruly energy of God – somehow box it in.  When we’re in that frightened-Peter mind-set, we want to play it safe.  

Bishop Gene Robinson and the Diocese of New Hampshire have been courageous in bearing witness to the liberating love of God over the past nine years, and I am sure that when Gene announced his plan to retire, some people were hoping that in its next election of a bishop, the diocese would choose someone safe.  Well, I’ve known and worked with Rob for a good long while, and I have to say that he is not safe – no, really, he’s not.  By which I mean that Rob’s fundamental intention is to liberate the love and creativity of the Holy Spirit.  Rob is a person of prayer, and anyone who returns day after day to the holy mountain of prayer and lets God’s creative life pour into him or her is going to be less and less satisfied with the status quo, less and less willing to settle for doing things the same old way, the way we’ve always done them.  Some of the ways that we’ve been doing things aren’t working, so it’s time to let the river of God pour forth into new channels of prayer and action.

I want to suggest two ways that we often misunderstand transfiguration.  One is to think that transfiguration is only for someone else – for Jesus, maybe, or for Moses.  Or maybe transfiguration is only for mystics or the really pious, or, heaven forbid, only for bishops.  I invite you to pull out your service leaflet and to take a look at the image on the front cover.  Please notice that this classic icon is not a picture of Rob being consecrated bishop.  It is a picture of Jesus Christ transfigured on the mountain.  But you know what?  It is also a picture of you, of your own true self when you allow God’s light to light you up!  The transfiguration that Jesus experienced on the mountain is available not only to him, and not only to the few, the elect, or the elite.  It is available to everyone.  As Irish poet John O’Donohue puts it, “there is a secret immensity in every life.”³.  The glory that shone through Jesus Christ is already shining in our hearts, longing to blaze up like fire and to melt away everything in us that is less than love.  Divinisation – the process of participating more and more consciously, more and more fully in the life of God – begins with our baptism, when our soul is united with Christ.  The incarnate Christ is our mediator, our doorway to the divine, the one who says, “Everything I have is yours; I give you my joy; I give you my glory” (c.f.  John 14-17).  Each of us has a chance to discover what that means in our very particular life, to become intentional about our spiritual journey as we seek day by day to grow in love and to make ourselves more available to God, more vulnerable and more open to God’s intimate presence.  Transfiguration is the flowering of our belovedness and our baptism, the fullest expression of who we were born to become – a people lit up with God.

But if we accept that holy transfiguration is in fact intended for us, then along comes a second misunderstanding – the temptation to make it a project of the ego, to claim credit, to strut, to parade ourselves, to make a show.  If the ego catches your soul preparing to ascend the mountain of God – if the ego sees you packing your water bottle, your compass, your map, and a change of socks – the ego is going to take notice.  “Hey,” says the ego, “If you’re heading up the mountain, I’m coming, too.  I want to polish myself up and look all gleaming and shiny, to stand above everyone and be important.  I’ll just hop in your backpack and inflate it a bit.”  So ego jumps in!

Rob tells me that soon after he was elected bishop, a friend said to him, with some excitement, “Hey, Rob, now you can climb up Mount Washington and look out at everything you see and say, ‘All this is mine.’” 

Of course that’s what the ego wants to do.  Jesus faced down that temptation, and empowered us to face it down, when he stood with the devil on a high mountain during those forty days in the wildernes and refused to worship anything less than God (Matthew 4:8-10). 

What’s odd and paradoxical about transfiguration is that we can reach the top of the mountain only when we’re willing to go down.  The path up the mountain is also the path that leads down, for it’s humbling to discover the ego in our backpack.  It’s humbling to notice how many parts of ourselves are not loving and not filled with light.  The higher we climb up the mountain and the more the soul is illumined by God, the more clearly we see our weakness and limits, our blindness and confusion, our self-centeredness and hardness of heart.  So the path up to holiness also leads downward into repentance and humility, into a more complete dependence on the mercy of God.  The more we open ourselves to divine light, the more we learn to gaze on ourselves and other people with compassion, for all of us are a work in progress, and soul-work takes time.

The path down the mountain also propels us to seek God in our ordinary lives – not just in spectacular experiences, but also in the daily round of family life and committee meetings, in the apparently humdrum routine of what we do every day.  How is God shining through this moment, as I wait in line, as I drive my daughter to a lacrosse game, as I plan a meeting, as I wash the dishes?   Can I breathe in God’s light right here, right now?  For God’s brilliance is always just below the surface of things, visible to eyes that have learned to look at the world with kindness and compassion.

Sometimes we begin to shine, and the people around us feel the blessing and catch the fire.  You notice that when Jesus was filled with light, his disciples shared in the experience, too: they saw his radiant face and clothes; they were overshadowed by the same cloud that overshadowed him; they heard the same divine voice that rang in his ears.  There is something about religious experience that is not for ourselves alone: when one person lights up with the presence of God, other people light up, too.  It’s infectious.  It’s catching.  And so other people are inspired to take up their own spiritual journey and to learn how they, too, can become who God intends them to be.  They, too, will be impelled to engage in the great work of our time – to tackle climate change and poverty, discrimination and war.

In a few moments Rob will be examined by the Presiding Bishop and will make a series of promises.  The bishops will lay their hands on his head and pray for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.  

In becoming a bishop, Rob is committing himself to his own path to transfiguration, not just for his own sake and for the salvation of his soul, but also in service to the light that shines in you.  

In becoming a bishop, Rob is committing himself to shepherd the secret immensity of each person he meets, to help you see and know that God is shining out from within you and that everyone has a place in God’s heart.  

In becoming a bishop, Rob is committing himself to tend the hidden radiance of this diocese, to bring to light your creative possibilities and to encourage and share in your ongoing quest to be transfigured into love itself.

Rob, we thank you for your willingness to do this.  I urge you to keep doing what you’re doing: to carry the pure light that shines in you, and to hold fast to the practices that make you available to God.  Set aside regular time for solitude and silent prayer, for rowing, painting, and writing poetry, for taking long walks to nowhere with Rocky.  

You know that bishops are like an oak tree – they stand in a high place and, like a lightning rod, attract a great deal of energy, both positive and negative.  So I urge you to stay grounded, to sink your roots deep into the love of God, so that you don’t get knocked over.  Keep listening to the inner voice that always whispers in your ear, as it whispers in every ear: “You are my beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

Welcome your inevitable failures and lapses, for they are part of the journey, too.  Thanks be to God, it’s the path down the mountain that teaches us humility and forgiveness.  Our failures can be the gateway to compassion for ourselves and other people.

And I hope that you will savor the ordinary, the challenges and tasks of family life, the routine business of the Church – for a secret divinity is hidden within each moment.  Beneath the humdrum of the ordinary, we can hear the drumbeat of the Spirit. 

There are plenty of  challenges ahead – no question about that.  So let’s look to the light, to the glory, and take this journey together.

1. William Johnston, “Arise, My Love…”: Mysticism for a New Era, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000, p. 115.

2. Ibid.

3. John O’Donohue, “The Priestliness of the Human Heart.”

No Leisure Even to Eat

“[Jesus] said to them, ‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.’ For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat.”
–Mark 6:31

By deciding to come to this retreat, you accepted Jesus’ invitation to come away for a while and rest.  Like the apostles, we may be very busy, living scattered and distracted lives, hurrying from one task to the next, “coming and going.”  Many of us know what it’s like to  be “coming and going” inwardly, too, feeling full of confusion, handling conflicting emotions.  Jesus knows that we need to come away to a quiet place of solitude and inward listening, so that we can sort out what is in us, rest in the love of God, and touch our essential nature as the beloved of God. 

I am moved by the observation that the apostles had “no leisure even to eat.”  Those of us who struggle with food may very well eat with no sense of leisure – maybe we eat standing up or on the fly, while we’re driving or reading, working or otherwise multi-tasking.  We may grab every possible opportunity to eat, but eat without satisfaction, without really being filled.  We may eat with a sense of shame or guilt, anxiety or disgust, rather than with a sense of serenity and leisure.

Whether or not we’re wrestling with an eating disorder, we come away on retreat because we’ve reached a point where we want to stop our restless “coming and going” – we want to find our center in God, that still place deep within where we know that we are seen, known, and loved.  We come away on retreat because we want to find leisure to eat: we want to learn not only to handle food more wisely, but also to appreciate and to take in each moment as it is given to us. We want to breathe in the love of God that is given to us breath by breath, heartbeat by heartbeat, and to let that love tranform our lives. We want to learn what it feels like to be fed.

Jesus knows the need of the apostles to come away and rest a while, and find leisure to eat — and he knows our need, too.  Jesus the good shepherd knows our hunger to be seen, known, and loved, and our longing to be healed and made whole.

Heaven knows that when we were small, for one reason or another the important people in our lives may not have noticed or been able to provide what we needed and were most hungry for.  So how precious it is when our hungers are seen and taken seriously!

A wonderful story comes to mind that I heard a while back. 

A family settled down for dinner at a restaurant.  The waitress took the orders of the adults, then turned to the seven-year-old. 
‘What will you have?’ she asked. 
The boy looked around the table timidly and said, ‘I would like to have a hot dog.’ 
‘No,’ the mother interrupted, ‘no hot dog.  Get him meat loaf with mashed potatoes and carrots.’
‘Do you want ketchup or mustard with your hot dog?’ the waitress asked the boy. 
‘Ketchup,’ he said. 
‘Coming up,’ she said as she started for the kitchen.

There was a stunned silence at the table.  Finally, the boy looked at his family and said, ‘You know what?  She thinks I’m real.’¹

The people around us may not think we are real – but Jesus knows we’re real.  Jesus knows that our longings matter.  Like the waitress in the story, he turns to us and asks, “What will you have?  What are you hungering for?  What is the longing so deep that you can barely put it into words?”

Jesus came to bring us life, abundant life, and the first way he works with our desires is to awaken them.  For those of us trained since childhood to believe that our needs and feelings don’t matter, and that everyone else’s desires are more important than our own, it is startling to meet in Jesus someone who takes our desires seriously.  In the Gospel of John, Jesus’ very first words to those who approach him are, “What are you looking for?  What do you seek” (c.f. John 1:37).  “Ask,” he says elsewhere, “and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock and the door will be opened” (Matthew 7:7-11).  In other words, risk expressing your desires in prayer.  Dare to give them voice.  In the face of all the pressures to shut down, to go numb, to stay anesthetized, dare to listen for the power that rises from your depths, for the deep Yes that is connected to your life-force and your deepest creative energy.  The God we meet in Jesus is a passionate God, a God who provokes and nudges and galvanizes us to join in the dance of life, and who wants to awaken us to our full potential as human beings.

If the first way that Jesus works with our desires is to awaken them, the second is to set them free.  He says not only “Ask, seek, knock,” but also  “Leave it, drop it, sell it.”  Drop your nets and follow me.  Sell your possessions.  Put it down.  Give it away.  Let the dead bury the dead.  As Jesus says in Mathew’s Gospel, “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid.  Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field” (Matthew 13:14).

When we know what matters most, we can let other things go.  When we are in touch with our most authentic longing, we are free to release the people, places, and things to which we once so desperately clung.  It is an experience of inner liberation.  It doesn’t mean that we no longer enjoy the things of this world — on the contrary, we do enjoy them, we relish them, we delight in them, but what’s different is that now we enjoy them without clinging or clutching.  When we know, really know, that our hunger is for the eternal, that only the Infinite can satisfy our infinite longing, then we can eat with our friends and enjoy the food. 

“Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves,” the good shepherd says to us tonight, “and rest a while.  Let me awaken your desires, and let me set them free.  Let me feed you with the bread of life, for I see you and know you and love you.  Here your hunger will at last be satisfied, and in the strength of this bread, you will have power to give yourself as bread to other people.”

Just after the passage we heard in tonight’s Gospel, Mark goes on to tell the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand.  In a few moments we will share the bread and wine of the Eucharist, given to us by God in Christ with such tenderness and at such great cost.  We will gather at this holy table so that everything in us and around us can be lifted up and blessed — not only the bread and the wine, but also we ourselves and the whole creation, every leaf of it and every speck of sand.  Sharing in Holy Communion helps us to perceive at last our own belovedness, our own blessedness in God, and also the fact that everyone is beloved, all beings are blessed.  Everyone and everything is part of a sacred whole, and all living things are kin.  In the strength of the blessed and broken bread, and of the blessed and poured-out wine, our deep hunger is filled.  For this I want to say: thanks be to God. 

1. Jack Kornfield, “Respect for Parenting, Respect for Children,” Inquiring Mind, Vol. 8, No. 2, Spring, 1992, p. 8.

Finding God in goodbye

My husband has led retreats for many years, and from time to time he invites retreatants to bring a poem to share with the group. Invariably, absolutely without fail, someone brings a poem by Mary Oliver, usually “Wild Geese” or “The Summer Day.” Just about everybody I know loves these poems – my husband does, and I do, too – but their selection has become so predictable that my husband and I sometimes joke about wanting to shoot those geese or to ignore that summer day. Well, the joke is now on me, for as I thought about this sermon and about the fact that Rob will leave Grace Church in two weeks and that in two weeks we will have to say goodbye, what came to mind was a poem by – you guessed it — Mary Oliver. It’s not “Wild Geese” or “The Summer Day,” but another poem, one entitled “In Blackwater Woods.” ¹ Here are its closing lines:

To live in this world

you must be able to
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t like letting go. I don’t like to say goodbye. When we allow ourselves to care – when someone’s presence becomes important to us, when we open our heart to someone and we notice how our spirits lift when he or she walks into the room, we will probably be sad when the time comes to say goodbye. As Joyce Rupp puts it in a book called Praying Our Goodbyes, “Every goodbye has some suffering in it and the greater the parting the deeper the pain; the greater the loss, the … [larger] the empty space that accompanies it.” ²

No wonder many of us tend to run from goodbyes. It is so much easier to wave breezily, “See you later! Gotta go!” No big loss here; no need to feel much. It is tempting to make light of the sorrow that is part of saying farewell. Maybe we hide our sadness from other people by laying low and keeping quiet, or maybe we hide it from ourselves by staying too busy to feel anything, or by stuffing down our feelings with extra food or drink. “It’s no big deal,” we may tell ourselves. “And if I do need to grieve, I intend to do it fast and then get on with things.”

Trying to anesthetize oneself and to go numb is a familiar way of avoiding the pain of goodbye. So is getting angry. If I get angry with you just as you’re about to leave, then I don’t have to feel my sorrow about your going. What a convenient time to pick a fight!

But of course we can’t keep dodging the goodbyes of life if we want to experience life in all its mystery, depth, and fullness. We can’t keep skittering across the surface of things like motorboats on a lake if we want to grow in self-awareness and wisdom, or to deepen in compassion. It is when we face, feel, and pray our goodbyes that a loving God can find us, console us, heal us, and give us strength and courage to let go.

So let’s take Rob’s imminent departure from Grace Church as an opportunity for reflection. And if this goodbye is not the one that is most vivid to you right now, I invite you to choose another one to reflect on.

What has been stirred up in you since you learned that Rob’s tenure at Grace Church is coming to an end?

What has been most difficult for you as you anticipate his leaving?

What will you miss the most?

What have you learned from Rob or received from Rob that you never want to forget?

What gifts did he give you?

What gifts did you give him? (Please remember that when we entrust someone with our story, or allow someone to be with us at a vulnerable time, we are offering a gift to the other person, the gift of ourselves.)

What, if anything, feels incomplete in your relationship with Rob, and how might you complete it?

And if Rob has been a person and a presence who is important to you, how do you intend to embody or to carry out in your own life what you have seen in him?

As we reflect on these questions, we do so in the presence of the God who loved us into being and who sustains us invincibly through all the changes and chances of this life. The God we know in Christ is a God of infinite compassion. Today’s Gospel story gives us not one but two stories of Jesus’ power to awaken us and to make us whole. The woman with the flow of flood is healed, and the child is restored to life.

So I imagine Jesus coming to us this morning to say, “Right here, where you feel the pain of loss — right here, where you face the reality of separation — right here, where you need to say goodbye and where you glimpse the fact of death, which is behind every goodbye — I am with you. Dare to keep your heart open. Dare to admit how much you have meant to each other. Dare to accept how much you have given each other, how much you have learned and received from each other.” I imagine Jesus saying to us this morning, “Dare to love one another, for in the pain of separation, you will find that I am with you, and I will lead you to new life.”

That, to me, is the great surprise, and the great mystery: as we risk keeping our hearts open in the face of separation and loss, as we dare to experience and to express our love for one another, even in the face of goodbye, even in the face of death, we discover the love that has no fear of death, the love that transcends change, the love that no loss, no separation, no death can destroy. This love was ours in the beginning, even before we were born, and it is ours at every ending, too, as we say goodbye. Love is what we were made for, and when we dare to love, in union and in separation, in presence and in absence, as we say hello and as we say goodbye, Jesus Christ draws near, and bears us deeper into the heart of God, that place of infinite compassion and infinite respect. Sometimes other people are most present to us when they are absent. Sometimes God is most intimately present when we feel God’s absence.

In a little while we will share the Eucharist. I praise God because here at this table, where Christ gives himself to us again and again in the bread and wine, we will always meet – every one of us, the living and the dead, those who are near and those who are far away. Here in the sacrament of Holy Communion, Christ draws us to the heart of God, where everyone is present and where the limits of time and space have no meaning anymore. When we say goodbye to those we love – when we say “God be with you” and “God go with you” – we give thanks that love is all, that love is everything, that love will never end.

I give thanks today for the great work that God has given us to do – to love and serve God with gladness and singleness of heart — and for the chance to make a difference at such a crucial moment in the history of life on this planet.

1. Mary Oliver, “In Blackwater Woods” (from American Primitive, 1983) in New and Selected Poems, Boston: Beacon Press, 1992, p. 178.

2. Joyce Rupp, O.S.M., Praying Our Goodbyes, Notre Dame, Indiana: Ave Maria Press, 1988, p. 32.