Wholeness

Do I even believe in wholeness?  Not really.

I was in a group last week and the leader asked us what kind of spiritual practice we had that was helping us become whole.

I thought – what does that even mean to me?  Whole. 

Do I even believe in wholeness?  Not really.

We are always incomplete, always missing something, always imperfect. 

Never whole.

But I knew what she was getting at.  She wasn’t trying to get at wholeness in a perfection sense, but in some other sense. But she wasn’t going to define it for us.  She was going to let us define it for ourselves.

For me…

Wholeness is:

Being able to sit with what is missing: in me, in life, in others and be at peace.

It is not feeling the need to fix, control, strive to move from the current place of lack to place of non-lack But it’s not a numbing to the desire.  Not a detachment from the longing for the place of non-lack.

Instead it’s the ability to feel all the strength of desire and longing and be completely in love with the longing, without needing to fulfill it. 

That’s the closest I can get to love and grace co-existing in me.

The Fire of Life

Desire and Uncertainty are the fire that keeps life burning

.

I knew a man who, after his retirement said, “I’ve done everything in life I ever wanted to do,” and I knew a woman who, at 101 years old said she wasn’t ready to die because she still had so many things she wanted to do. 

I considered the man a lucky man and the woman’s situation a sad one. 

Neither the man nor the woman were doing anything particularly enviable with their lives. 

The man had a good life, a nice home, a devoted wife, children, and grandchildren.  He had traveled and had the career or his dreams.  Most days, he sat at watched TV in his recliner.  Some would say he had lived the ultimate life and was enjoying his retirement. 

The woman was a widow living alone in her home.  She had been an abusive and judgmental mother and had driven wedges in her relationships.  She was a hoarder, and her house was filled with trash and she would let no one in to visit.    

And yet … the man no longer had anything he desired, and the woman did.

Life is made up not just of what we have and what we have achieved, but of what we desire.

Peter Rollins tells a story about a compulsive gambler who died.  When he was in eternity, he found himself in a casino at the craps table.  Winning.  Every time he played, he won.  Over and over.  After some time, he began to be a bit bored with the whole thing, all the uncertainty and risk seemed to be gone and he knew he would win this time and the next.  He said to the dealer, “who knew heaven would be a craps table and I would win every single game!”  The dealer replied, “what makes you think this is heaven?”

Look at the things you don’t have, the house you don’t have, the children not yet born, the flaws in your partner and yourself as the very things that create life.  These are the things that give us something to strive for, something to look forward to.  It is desire and uncertainty that are the fire that keeps life burning. 

Proper Interpretation of Scripture

Isn’t it about Control?

I read a post on social media today.  The author of the post was quoting a foreword he had written for a book. 

“Ever since the reformation it has been fashionable in certain Protestant circles to speak blithely of the perspicuity of the Scripture.  A desire to democratize the Bible led to the wishful thinking that the proper interpretation of all Scripture is self-evident.  But if anything is self-evident about the Bible, it is the glaring fact that a myriad of possible interpretations set forth by well-meaning exegetes compete for our allegiance.  And this is never more the case than when we consider the Pauline epistles. The New Testament itself admits that when it comes to Pauls’ letters, ‘there are some things in them hard to understand’ (2 Peter 3:16). So the notion that one can just open the Bible to Romans and easily grasp Pauls’ often dense arguments is wildly over optimistic.  Though it may offend our individualist and egalitarian aspirations, the truth of the matter is that we often need some scholarly assistance if we are to properly interpret our sacred text.  Thankfully, the church has such scholars…”

I’ve not read the book, but I like the work of the guy who wrote the foreword (and who posted it).  I’m intentionally not mentioning his name because I am not trying to cast him in any kind of negative light, but I do want to explore a question that this foreword brings up for me.

(I have to write an aside about “perspicuity” – maybe you are more literate than I, but I felt the need to look that up to be sure I knew what it meant -  the ability to think, write, or speak clearly.  Ok, so with that out of the way, on to my questions)

I wonder about all the discussion that goes on in religion around the subject of “interpretation of Scripture.”  It seems to me that what is at the heart of it is authority and control.  The debate seems to revolve around what/who gets to decide what is right or correct.  I agree with the author that the Bible has a myriad of possible interpretations.  I agree that those who put forth these interpretations compete for our allegiance. The author here seems to conclude that the solution is not a swing toward individualism, but to lean upon scholarly assistance to obtain “proper interpretation.”

I have no beef with scholarly interpretation of scripture.  I consider myself a scholar of scripture.  I’ve learned a ton from my studies and my understanding of scripture has widened and broadened from it.

But for me, there is a bigger issue at work here.  An issue deeper and more important than how much scholarship one has or whether or not someone has interpreted scripture poorly.   That issue is this … Why are we competing to try to “win” the contest over correct interpretation of scripture at all?  Isn’t this simply the pursuit of a kind of knowledge of good and evil?   

Isn’t the bigger issue here the belief that if we just know enough / have enough scholarship informing us, we can attain to the knowledge of good and evil?  ( In this instance, “good and evil” being good vs. bad interpretation of scripture.) 

Isn’t the quest for proper interpretation of scripture rooted in control? If we have the proper scholarship, or give authority to the proper person, place or thing (i.e., biblical scholars, the bible itself, the pope, the priest, the minister), then we can be more assured that we are right.  Authority imparts control.  Someone or something has the authority to determine what is right and thus we don’t have to rely completely and entirely on grace. 

Desire

If I get all that I desire – what is left to live for?

If I get the thing I desire – I will just desire a new thing.

If I get all that I desire – what is left to live for?

We think that getting the object of our desires is what will make us happy, but we are mistaken.  It is the desire itself that is the stuff of life. 

Imagine if there were nothing else you wanted.  No new tastes, no new experiences, nothing to look forward to.   This is how depression feels.  There is nothing you want – you don’t want to eat, you don’t want sex, you don’t look forward to anything at all.  You have no reason to get out of bed.  No desires. 

Next time you don’t have the thing you want – the relationship, the object, the experience, the achievement know this….

The longing for it is what makes life worth living. 

The Open Soul - Part 9

Grace is a dangerous idea

Paradoxically, it is not knowledge that enlightens, but unknowing.

It is not the lack of doing or wrongdoing that are darkness but is instead the pursuit of meaning through doing.

It is in the open space of unknowing and un-judging that is created by grace where peace and love are born.

Without this self-emptying, we will naturally divide good from bad and restrict what we will accept.

We cannot love our enemy because there will be things in the enemy that we reject, we cannot love the enemy in ourselves because there are things in ourselves we have rejected, we cannot love the world, because there will be things in reality we reject. 

Thus, love can only exist when the field of grace is open and sin is no-thing. 

When sin is something, we judge it and fear it, when sin is no-thing, we have nothing to fear; from ourselves, from others or from the chaotic reality of life.

In this way, the paradox of light as the open space of unknowing created by grace allows us to “have fellowship with one another” (1 John 1:5-7), with ourselves and with the world. 

Grace has always been a dangerous and heretical idea. Christ was crucified as a heretic for living a life of radical grace. Meister Eckhart was tried and accused as a heretic. With grace we empty ourselves of all control and place ourselves in the hands of God - or in the hands of reality (call it what you will) - with no way to control how goodness or blessing is accessed.

With grace we have stepped out of the boat and onto the water, and it is here that we find the open space into which God can create.

But remember - if we have let go of our ideas about “god” as good or compassionate - we have no idea what will be created.

The Open Soul - Part 8

The quest for meaning casts us out of an open acceptance of reality and into an anxious pursuit that never finds fulfillment.

“From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

Matthew 16:21-23

The modern philosopher Slavoj Zizek echoes Christ’s rebuke of Peter (when Peter rejects the reality that God will die) when he speaks about “the pressure of meaning” as the place “the devil waits upon you.” Like Hessert (see “The Open Soul - Part 7) , he asserts that we should reject the meaning-making narrative.

Christianity is the acceptance of meaninglessness.[1] Both Hessert and Zizek use the holocaust as an example of why we must move away from meaning making. In the holocaust, (as in the crucifixion) God cannot be found through power or meaning, but must be found in their absence.[2] In the face of such great evil, truths are so traumatic, they resist being integrated into the universe of meaning.[3]

It is only the suffering God (Christ crucified) that answers such questions. In Christ crucified, God moves from Objectivity (a transcendent Master who can pull the strings from above and make things as they should be) to Subjectivity (an infinite plurality whose nature cannot be defined)[4]. Zizek cautions us to not try to make meaning of the crucifixion, but to allow it to be what it was – the destruction of God and in this way a revelation of the destruction of ultimate meaning.[5]

Hessert articulates this in this way:

“Christ crucified is the end of the expectation that power will bring life to its fulfillment in the sense of actualizing its present potential. Faith in Christ crucified means giving up the kind of justification of life that realizing one’s potential would offer. There is thus a direct correlation between faith as the surrender of the claim to divine power and “Christ crucified” which is the absence of such divine power.”[6]

The Judeo-Christian tradition may have been inviting us to move away from this quest for ultimate meaning from the beginning. The Eden story can be seen as a cautionary tale against the quest for meaning. Eve’s pursuit of knowledge to make meaning worked in the opposite way intended and rather than creating meaning, cast her and Adam out of paradise.

The all too human quest for meaning is the proverbial forbidden fruit, the ultimate idolatry. It casts us out of an open acceptance of the reality that is and into an anxious pursuit that never finds fulfillment.

It is only through absolute emptying of self and trust in grace that the human is freed from the need for meaning-making and is able to live in a space where we are ”not glad because of any special thing or …distressed by anything at all, for all will be well”[7]

[1] Slavoj Zizek. “The Pressure of Meaning” 25:08-25:58  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qVAxuHRKOw

[2] Hessert, 29.

[3] Slavoj Zizek, “Only a Suffering God can Save Us.” Lacan.com, accessed December 14, 2022, https://www.lacan.com/zizshadowplay.html  Section 2 Kierkegaard

[4] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition. ed. Margaret Canovan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 10.

[5] Slavoj Zizek, “Only a Suffering God can Save Us.” Lacan.com, accessed December 14, 2022, https://www.lacan.com/zizshadowplay.html  Section 2 Kierkegaard

[6] Paul Hessert. Christ and the End of Meaning: The Theology of Passion. Rockport MA: Element Inc. Out of Print (1993): 31.

[7] Norwich, 153.

The Open Soul - Part 7

Christ Crucified is an invitation into meaninglessness

Can human beings make meaning in the world if they have let go of ideas of good and evil, light and darkness, even God to such a degree?

The apostle Paul spoke of this when he said that Jews were looking for signs and Greeks for wisdom, but he preached only Christ crucified. (1 Corinthians 1:22-25). To Jews, signs were a way of interpreting God’s favor and making meaning through power,[1] and to Greeks knowledge and understanding satisfied the human impulse to make meaning through making sense of things. 

Christ crucified is the breakdown of the use of power to move to a more ideal situation and a breakdown of what makes sense. “It is the absence of divine confirmation of human values.” [2] In this way it not a way to make meaning, but is an invitation into meaninglessness, or as Meister Eckhart might say, into nothingness.

[1] Paul Hessert. Christ and the End of Meaning: The Theology of Passion. (Rockport MA: Element Inc., 1993. Out of Print), 19.

[2] Hessert, 26.

The Open Soul - Part 6

Jesus was inviting them to let go of everything – even God .

Immediately following Peter’s rejection of reality, Jesus speaks to his disciples about self-denial, 

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”  (Matthew 16:24-25, NRSV).

The self-denial that he spoke of was not fasting, or sexual abstinence, it was not giving up sleep or fun as many of the church fathers presumed, but was the emptying Miester Echkart described - an emptying of self, a kenosis that consents to be nothing, to do nothing, to know nothing.

Jesus was inviting them to let go of everything – even God (himself). In this kind of emptying, the self becomes a no-thing, sin becomes a no-thing and even more radically, God becomes no-thing.

Peter Rollins states that “speaking of God is never speaking of God but only ever speaking about our understanding of God.”[1] Our self-denial must be absolute, including even our ideas of God and our grasp on God. Our ideas of God are idols.

Simone Weil echoes Eckhart again when she says that God cannot be contained and thus our intuitions are tainted by human imagination and fantasy.[2] In this way, faith requires that God must become a no-thing to us, because God is necessarily not an object.[3] Weil adds that the object of attention must be nonexistent for another reason as well. Spiritual life is perfected in attention made of God’s love for God. Thus, the subject and object are identical with the activity of attention itself. This attention leads us deeper into the nonexistence of the object of attention.[4]

Perhaps the most radical aspect of this is the letting go Eckhart speaks of – letting go even ideas about God being good or compassionate.[5]

[1] Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God, (Brewster Massachusetts: Paraclete Press, 2006), 34.

[2] Simone Weil. Gravity and Grace, trans. Arthur Wills (Lincoln Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1997) 147-149.

[3] Hase Shoto. “The Structure of Faith: Nothingness-qua-Love” in The Religious Philosophy of Tanabe Hajme: The Metanoetic Imperative. trans. T. Unno and J. Heisig (Berkely: Asian Humanities Press, 1990, 90-96.

[4] Simone Weil. Waiting for God. (Pennsylvania: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1st ed., 2009) 107, 112.

[5] Eckhart, 55.

The Open Soul - Part 5

It is the rejection of reality that Jesus rebukes as Satanic.

Much like Eckhart, the 20th century philosopher Simone Weil described the perfection of the spiritual life as the consent to be nothing -  to recognize and accept the reality of the world, and to love it, “not wanting to tamper with it.”[1] 

It is only when we trust grace completely, and there is no fear of judgement or condemnation that we can practice consent to reality without wanting to tamper with it by making it better, purer, holier, safer.

It is grace that allows us to see beauty in ugliness and God in all things and enables us to stop rejecting one thing over another.

It is grace that enables us to cease crying out, as Peter did when he rejected the idea of Christ crucified, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you!” (Matthew 16:22, NRSV).

It is this very impulse to reject and the lack of consent to reality that Jesus rebukes as Satanic in this story.

[1] Simone Weil,  Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks, (London: Taylor and Francis : London, 1987), 101.

The Open Soul - Part 4

Grace is not the forgiveness of sin, but rather it is the space for sin. It creates the conditions under which creation can occur.

Spirituality is full of imagery of light and darkness.

The apostle John uses light and darkness imagery to describe God when he says God is light that contains no darkness at all (1 John 1:5, NRSV), and that all things are created through light that is Christ (John 1:3-4, NRSV).

Traditionally, and perhaps because of scriptures such as these, light has been equated to holiness, purity and righteousness and darkness has been synonymous with impurity, sin and evil. Access to God and God’s creative force has been understood to be a life in the light of holiness and an avoidance of darkness and sin.  Julian of Norwich’s insights into the idea of sin were a beautiful glimpse into a type of radical grace that Christendom has largely missed.

She saw that God was in everything and for this reason, sin cannot be a thing.[1] This revelation that sin is no-thing is new to Julian and she asks Jesus about it. Jesus reveals to her that “sin is necessary,”[2] because it “purges us and makes us know ourselves.”[3] In this way, sin is not a darkness that is an antithesis to the light that creates, but is instead a creative force within us and the light-as-good vs. darkness-as-evil duality is broken down.

This is much like the biological principal of error on the genome which, although it has the potential to destroy, also contains the mechanism for evolution, adaptation and continued life.

Julian concludes from her revelations that “sin is not shameful to man, but his glory”[4] This view of sin takes us away from shame, and is the very definition of grace.

In this way, grace opens a space that allows for sin. Grace is not the forgiveness of sin, but rather it is the space for sin. It creates the conditions under which creation can occur.

Grace does not reject or erect walls through shame, it embraces and makes no judgement or condemnation. It is only through grace that we can hold our souls open to both good and error. It is only through a loving embrace of all that is, that Christ can create something new in us, even when the mechanism for creation comes through sin.

It is grace that releases judgement and takes us into the place described by Meister Eckhart where we have let go of our pre-conceived ideas.[5]

Grace lets go of all things and simultaneously opens up to all things. It opens the soul to accept every aspect of our humanity and the humanity of others – even our enemies.

In this way, light is not about a purity culture that accepts some things as good and rejects others as evil, but light takes on a new meaning – the meaning of grace – and darkness becomes nothing more than not consenting to grace.

[1] Julian of Norwich. Showings, trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 136, 166.

[2] Ibid, 148

[3] Ibid, 149

[4] Amy Laura Hall. Laughing at the Devil: Seeing the World with Julian of Norwich (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 85.

[5] Eckhart, 34, 36, 49. 55.