Soliloquy

The Gospel of Luke offers us the narrative of the sower and the many different soils upon which the seeds fell. It is a parable drawn from an agricultural context, where we may assume that farmers know how to prepare the soil. That makes it difficult to understand how this sower can be so careless with the precious seeds, as he seems to cast them at will in all directions. This sower did not seem to know the nature or quality of the soil. This reminds me that I need to know and to understand my ground and what I seek to ground in it. Only as I take root in holy ground can I be grounded in the divine.  I need to be aware of myself, of what the Ground first says to me, and of the ways in which the Ground has transformed me, allowing me to take root and flourish. Unless the Word plants itself in me, takes root and becomes grounded firmly in me, it will not be able to come forth, nor to bring forth. I need to be aware that I am the first audience hearing this ancient Word for the first time, each time being a first time, because each word, story, miracle, parable, has an excess of meanings, and because of this the Word is always new, and must be heard again for the first time. Because the Word is always a transcending Word, it oversees its own progress as it takes passage through my spirit and soul. The Word grounds itself in my soul, and remains anchored, giving me stability. The Word set free my spirit, that it may wander among other spirits, alerting them to what the Word is about to bring them. The plantings of the Word is the work of the Spirit, and it is the Spirit that prepares the soil, the soul, the ground. “Dust you are, and to dust you shall return” is a reminder that the Word is never far from its ground. The Word is the ground, grounding itself in what it is, being holy in itself. Holy ground, holy word, take root in me!

Jesus went through towns and villages with his disciples. He was also accompanied by some women of power and economic means,who supported financially his work. Among them were Mary Magdalen, Joanna and Suzanna. The narrative informs us that from Mary, seven demons had departed. Popular religious literature today has much to say about Mary, and she is a person who deserves close study for what she reveals to us about ourselves and our own discipleship. I see Mary as a woman whose “demons”, that is, whose illnesses were persistent, and had often to approach Jesus for healing. She seemed to have suffered from some form of chronic illness, repeatedly debilitating her, and so invoking healing. She must have been a very strong woman to have made the journeys with Jesus and his disciples, and I believe that standing with, walking alongside, Jesus, is a nurturing, healing and redemptive thing. Mary’s “chronic” illness reminds us that illness is sometimes the result of “chronos,” time. Time takes its toll on all, even on those closest to Jesus. On the other hand, Jesus is revealed as the transcendent presence of the divine in whose light and glory the disciples find rest and redemption. The divine, as transcendent presence, incorporates what is present, and what presents itself for incorporation, and discloses itself as the horizon of healing. The horizon, the meeting place of the sacred and the profane, the divine and the human, is not temporal. It transcends time. It is the point of eternity touching the hem of temporality, blessing time and redeeming time. Mary stands with Jesus at this horizon, and it is there that she is constantly and regularly “delivered” from her “demons”, that is, touched and healed by the divine presence and the divine hand. Mary’s recurrent illness and recurrent healing reminds us that the divine is the recurrent healing horizon, drawing us into itself, and delivering us as healed and redeemed.

Poetry wrestles from the heart of myth the true likeness of the divine. So much of the speech of Jesus in Matthew does the same. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus as the Revealer is often presented as the Sophia of God, the divine Sophia. Behind Jesus’ invitation to take his yoke and so find rest is the Sophia myth of union. Myth is a grudgingly fortuitous term, as mythos precedes logos, and even now is still considered pejoratively. Rather than myth, perhaps we may say that the Sophia narratives in the background of wisdom, prophecy, gnosticism and apocalyptic, convey the creative power of the divine that seeks out the human, only to be rejected, returning to its heavenly abode until the time is right to return. Mythos, as original narrative, is the breaking forth of revelation. The content of the Revealer’s revelation is Sophia that invites the human to return to its origin. Myth is the original ground of the narrative, both its method and its content. Sophia narratives arise in a variety of contexts as the different literary forms disclose. What unites the narratives is their power to reveal the divine as wandering in search of its own. In Luke, Sophia will be vindicated by her children, or more literally, Sophia will be justified by her children for her action. She is inseparable from her children, that which has arisen from within herself, and she seeks to bring them into harmonious union, the state of redemption. Perhaps Sophia keeps a watchful eye over Logos.

Jesus compares his generation to children who cannot be pleased. “We played for you, you did not dance. We wailed, you did not weep.” They cared neither for John the Baptist, nor for the Son of Man. They accepted neither prophet nor Son of Man. He concluded with a seeming non sequitur: “wisdom is vindicated by her children.” Who is this Sophia? Who are her children? Of what is Sophia vindicated? In the reading Sophia stands alongside Logos. Is Logos one of the children of Sophia? Sophia as wisdom is something that goes forth, leaves its place, uproots itself, and spreads itself abroad. Sophia as wisdom is the Source of thought and thinking, the birthplace of reason, logos, the logical. Sophia as wisdom stands next to Logos in the market place, witnessing the rejection of what is existentially her reason for being. Sophia, the Creator’s Otherness, has equal claim to “the children” for they are brought to being in her. Her going forth is their coming to be. Her spreading abroad is their generating. The marketplace, the place of gathering for trade is a place where time is temporary. The marketplace does not embrace the eternal, it is not a place of transcendence, it endures but a little while and then is gone. The marketplace cannot embrace Sophia, the eternal. That which is heavenly, the divine, is rejected in favor of what is temporal, for until the human comes to understand that it is the child of Sophia, it will not know its eternal nature. Sophia will be vindicated, embraced by her children when that which is human comes to understand that it, too, bears the face of the divine. Sophia, standing in the Light of the Logos, in the nearness of the divine, is revealed by that Light to her children. The embrace happens in the Light of revelation.

The story of the meeting at the cemetery between Jesus and the widow of Nain calls for a closer look with each reading. The funeral procession halts before Jesus. He speaks to the dead young man, who awakens from death, and all express fear of and praise to the Lord. In the ordinary course of events, the young man would have been buried, and his life course, birth to death, would have been completed. Fortunately, there is also an extraordinary course of events, determined by hope and the nature of hope, that gives this story a new life. “We believe in the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.” This story underlines the fact that our confession is not without foundation. Here is an illustration of the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. A hope shared by vast multitudes is that each will meet in heaven after death to live eternally in the abiding presence of the Lord. In this story, that hope comes forward to meet us in this life. Where the divine stands, there heaven abides. The young man enters the presence of the divine, comes face to face with the divine, and is transformed forever. We are told that no one can look upon the face of the divine and live. To stand before the Source and Origin is to be drawn into it fully and completely and to be absorbed, re-integrated into the place of Origin and Departure. It is in essence “to lose oneself.” It is only in losing oneself in the Source that the human finds itself as free and freely living. Because no one can look upon the face of the divine and live, the divine can encounter us only by becoming other that itself. The divine protects us by transforming itself into its otherness in order to embrace us and draw us into its Oneness. The divine becomes human, for us and for our salvation, and embraces us, its otherness being the self-sameness of the human. We name this the incarnation. At the cemetery, the dis-carnate meets the in-carnate, and in the encounter, heaven dawns upon the procession, and the life of the world to come

The story of the centurion is at once informative and illuminating as concerns the meaning and nature of faith. Messages are communicated one to the other, words are received, evaluated, acted upon, without the actual meeting of the centurion and Jesus. The centurion is a man of authority, “exousia”, that is his self-definition. Jesus affirms the faith of the centurion. How are authority and faith connected? Authority as exousia is that which originates deep within the human. It is that which, ex-ousia, emerges from the very structure of the human, from that without which the human cannot be. Authority in this sense is the existential foundation that determines the life and life history of the human. Authority is human narrative striving to remain grounded, and by this grounding, remains in relationship with its world. Authority creates its world and sustains it through nurture and self-understanding. Faith is the way in which the soul understands itself, as that which has its foundation in self-surrender, in order to uncover a more original ground that turns out to be self-reflective. Faith must surrender itself repeatedly to sustain the original ground. Faith is not cumulative, nor does it accumulate. It constantly sheds whatever adheres in order to be true to itself as “pistis” that which alone can know itself, its true nature, faith. Faith understands that it can never have a foundation and still remain faith. Faith nurtures itself through this self-surrender. Authority, in surrendering itself to miracle and wonder, shows itself as the self-reflection of faith.

The Apocalypse of John makes clear that it takes some frighteningly strange creatures to bring us the comfort of hope. What is revealed for our hope in the midst of suffering is that nothing can defeat the human spirit that takes its stand on the divine and embraces suffering as the content of reconciliation. This sounds as strange as those creatures. However, it is necessary to know and to acknowledge that the completion of the act of reconciliation is not without suffering. Reconciliation is absolution unfolding its true nature, coming to itself, and seeing for the very first time that the Absolute must draw us to an original and pure unity which is the essential content of the Beginning. In that drawing back is also the forward movement of new life. For this reason, forgiveness is not a simple thing. The act of forgiveness is itself a violent act, tearing us away from what we have been, what we have become, rupturing the self and the soul in order to let it find its true and eternal home. Reconciliation is returning us to our original nature, our source, dust, earth, ground, and once we have become one again, united with the Source, we are no longer ourselves. Who am I when I am not myself? The nature of suffering is this: wanting to return to my Source, and knowing that when I have done so, I will have lost who I am. The Beginning, the violent rendering of the One into the Many is transformed in the End, with an equally violent rendering of the Many into the One. Before this happens, I will confront myself, see myself clearly through the eyes of angels, eagles and horsemen. They have come to show me the way, the journey unfolding in the spirit.