I hope you will put up with a bit of thinking out loud today. I’m sorry not to have been around lately, but things have been a bit, well, stressful as of late with a landlord who has announced that we’ll be leaving in less than 2 months. That leaves us to try and marshal together what little money we have AND find a place! All prayers and good thoughts are greatly appreciated, believe me.
But what I really wanted to say:
In Christianity there is usually an emphasis first and foremost, up front, on Jesus — and those interpretations of Jesus can vary from a wise teacher all the way to the one and only Son of God, existent since before the very beginning of time.
I’d like to suggest another approach, however, one rooted in the teachings and life of Jesus. Rather than starting with Jesus, let us, as he did, start instead with God.
Either there is more to what we can see with our eyes to this world or there isn’t. My experience has clearly been that there is, and what we cannot see with our eyes, we can know with our heart — and that is God. I suspect that has been the experience of many visitors to this site, as well, that begins to bind us together.
To use the poetry and image at hand, our goal is to live in the kingdom of God, to realize and express that kingdom not as some future event but as a Reality here and now. In short, it is to know God. We have it on good authority this Presence of God is spread across the land only we simply do not see it, that is both within us and outside us. Furthermore, in thinking on God, we are called upon not only to see that kingdom but to be that kingdom. We are, as humans, by our nature and purpose, charged with making the quest to know the Presence of God in true “kindom” — which is to say we live as children of God and, therefore, to know and treat all who walk in this world as our sisters and brothers in God.
Quite naturally, if we start from the reality of God, then what can we do but yearn for a way to know God, to experience that kingdom or live in that Presence? Once again, to harbor the very desire to do this is, quite simply, to be a mystic.
I ask you, please, forget the fundamentalist claptrap that hijacked the word “mystic” and wrongly allies it to things occult and fuzzy-headed. Instead, like so many in the Christian tradition — Paul, St. Francis, Meister Eckhart, a host of Orthodox figures, and so many more — actively claim the true meaning of the word, and walk the Christ Path, which is to desire to live the experience of God. Do not abandon that simple truth in favor of the perception born of fear that you find in some conceptions of God, no matter what particular religion the fundamentalist and concretized mind belongs to. (A reading of our daily newspaper or a few hours on cable tv “news” will show you there are no shortage of such religions throughout the world.)
Now, let us admit we are on this journey. What now? If we want to know God , experientially, what are we to do? I think the obvious answer is often not so obvious. If you want to know something, you go to a Master of that craft as an apprentice. I would suggest that for many of us, the person of Jesus is the clearest such example humankind has to offer.
In other words, we do not know Jesus because of God, but we can know God because of Jesus. It is for this reason, in fact, that we are Christians. We know God in Jesus’ perceptions of and expression of Love, compassion, inclusiveness, care for those who the least among us, and so much more. We can clearly see through him God’s topsy-turvy world in which each person has access to God, directly, without intermediary or “law” but through Love. Going even deeper, we see complete in Jesus’ actions the nature of the arrival of the kingdom of God itself, not in military garb or political edict or end-time judgment (as it has always been expected by this or that group) but in small ways measured in the size of a mustard seed, in a single lost sheep, a missing coin, a buried pearl. Journeying more, we sense God’s Love through the world around us — ravens who receive food, a woman who conceals something marvelous and active hidden within the baking loaf of bread, the forgiveness of one who has missed the mark in life and faces death by stoning, the sick and dying, the prisoners without hope and in so many more ways.
We return to the warning. I realize there are those who make of the Bible an inerrant idol, but it takes very little effort to find out such things are wrong and wrong-headed. Can we know the exact words of Jesus 100%? Regardless of what some say (and in doing so limit both Jesus and God) No. Can we, however, begin to gather and perceive the spirit of Jesus? Yes, most certainly. It is the same spirit that infused the earliest diverse communities of believers before there was anything approaching a “Bible.”
If, in all this, one gets the perception that simply knowing Jesus’ life is the be-all and end-all window to God, therein lies a very tragic (or certainly tricky) error we must work to correct. But what is that error?
Start with this — a group of uneducated, frightened, confused and often argumentative disciples somehow became dramatically changed into a force to be reckoned with, even to the point of facing death, and one does not explain such motivation and confidence and faith and change if Jesus was simply a wise teacher who died and, probably, was buried in a community grave as was the fate of all such victims of Rome.
Somehow, in ways perhaps not even the disciples could grasp, Jesus’ death was, like ours, not an end but a gateway to something far deeper, far more profound and far more powerful than life itself.
At this point we must be watchful. Different human interpretations have made for the spiritual crime (or, at the very least, prison) of fundamentalism, a human explanation voiced from a very time-bound and limited (and thus limiting) perspective.
Let us turn back to God a moment. Ask ourselves – Can God speak to others in other ways? Out of fear, no. Ignorance, no. Hatred, no. Bigotry, no. Nationalism, no. But if a person answers from a different place, surely the answer to that question must be yes, for we are not talking about a bigoted, ignorant, hating, fearful person projecting his or her limitations, but rather of God. Are we willing to be aware of making our God as small, violent, petty, and territorial as we can be?
I have to assume no one would be willing to speak for God, especially one who does not have the depth and breadth and power of an intimate relationship within God’s ultimate kingdom. Has such a thing ever even happened? I submit it did — in Jesus.
But we must know, as I began to say earlier, that it is not a question simply of who Jesus was, but who Jesus is. And here I would offer an essential point — Either the spirit at the heart of Jesus’ understanding was limited to that particular person in that particular time or it is available now, having been set free upon the world by God’s Love and mystically (beyond words) applied to Jesus’ death. In short, the more unlimited the person lives, the more unlimited the person is after life. That seems to me extremely obvious.
What does this mean to a Christian mystic? This — We are called upon by Jesus in this life to shed our shortcomings and any perceived exclusiveness in terms of love, riches, compassion, companionship, healing and more, so we might partake of the greater identity of what we really are and can be as we move from the image of God to the likeness of God, which is expressed in Jesus.
I suspect I’ve gone on too long, but perhaps something in what I said is of interest and at feebly least points, awkwardly, to the essential, living and infinitely available Truth of being.
Blessing,
Rev. Brian Robertson
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