Thursday, October 21, 2010

Sacred Space #1

Here is the first study summary in our new series - Sacred Space in the Bible: From Temple Place to Trinity Space. For a different take on the material, check out Tony's blog "Not my Shallow Heart, but, yes, this Shadow Heart" (October 4th 2010).
-Linda

Sacred Space #1 Jacob’s encounters with God 10/01/10

Sacred space is the space in which God or the divine is experienced. But what exactly does that mean? The purpose of this and the following studies is to pursue that question. The stories in Genesis are filled with sacred spaces marked by altars and the blood of animal sacrifice. For example 12:6-8.

“Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the Oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. Then the Lord appeared to Abram, and said, ‘To your offspring I will give this land.’ So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him. From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; and there he built an altar to the Lord and invoked the name of the Lord.”

Also 13:18 “So Abram moved his tent, and came and settled by the oaks of Mamre, which are at Hebron; and there he built an altar to the Lord.” Abraham is portrayed as moving through Canaan mapping out territory for the God of Israel. And the same is true of the other patriarchs; see 26:23-25 among others.

There are many important narratives associated with Abraham – to do with promises, the land and circumcision. In contrast the stories of Jacob have a more personal feel. They describe his character, his strivings as an individual, his trickery and the violence this provokes. With Jacob the concept of sacred space shifts from a place of awe and transcendence to something ultimately to do with relationship.

The story of Jacob’s ladder (Gen 28:10-22) is the first of two well-known narratives about Jacob encountering the divine. Jacob’s dream is quoted by Jesus in John1:51 when Jesus tells Nathaniel (an honest Israelite) that the Son of Man will be the new founding theophany for Israel: “Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man”. For the evangelist John, it is the raising up of Jesus on the cross that reveals God’s glory. The ladder in the dream that bridges the gap between heaven and earth is replaced by the person of Christ crucified.

This story is twinned with a second story – one of the most intimate and fascinating in the Bible - is found in Gen 32:22-32. The context of this story is that Jacob tricked his brother Esau out of his birthright – his father’s blessing. Fearful of his brother’s anger, Jacob fled to Haran in the East to relatives of his mother’s brother Laban. There he stays for many years, marrying first Leah then Rachel, accumulating family, flocks and possessions. Eventually he decides to return to his homeland, but is fearful of the reception he will get from Esau. Gen 32:3-21 describes his attempts at allaying Esau’s wrath by sending presents of flocks, slaves and even his family ahead of him. Finally he is alone. It is at this point, in the night, that Jacob encounters a “man” who wrestles with him until dawn. Even though he is wounded (struck on his hip) Jacob does not yield and demands a blessing from his opponent. The man replies “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed” and Jacob names the place Peniel (meaning the “face of God”) - for he has seen God face to face and yet his life is preserved.

In this account of the struggle between Jacob and God at Peniel God is weak against Jacob, but leaves Jacob with both a wound and a blessing. This is a different picture of God from the prevailing image in the Torah in which God is usually understood in terms of power and threat.

In Genesis 33: 1-11 Jacob meets his brother. Esau does not exact revenge, instead runs to meet him, embraces him, falls on his neck, kisses him and weeps. Esau does not want to accept any of Jacob’s gifts but Jacob responds “If I find favor with you, then accept my present from my hand; for truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God”.

There is an implied critique of the violent image of God found in Deuteronomy and Exodus here. While Genesis is the first book of the Bible, and draws on ancient traditions, it reached its final form later than many of the books of the Old Testament. In the earlier Amos1:11; Jeremiah 25:21; 49:8-10 and book of Obadiah, Edom is depicted as a hated enemy of Israel. Esau is traditionally the ancestor of the Edomites (Gen 36:9). In 2 Samuel 8:13-14 David conquers Edom. In this context the attitude of Esau in Genesis is amazing. His attitude of forgiveness and brotherhood spurs his brother, who has so recently encountered God, to liken his face to that of God. This face is of a God who does not prevail against his enemies, but wounds them and blesses them through weakness.

These two stories – Jacob’s dream and his wrestling with God at Peniel- frame the story of the conflict between Esau and Jacob. The first portrays the more traditional image of a divide between heaven and earth, in which a ladder is needed for the divine to enter into the human space. The second signals that sacred space, the place we encounter God, is ultimately to do with relationship, surrender, weakness, blessing and forgiveness. In John’s gospel the Son of Man fulfills this second pathway to perfection, and so brings the ladder of the transcendent divine into the heart of human existence.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Deep Places

I’m sure it’s already a cliché of blogging and preaching—the Chilean miners rising from their tomb two thousand feet under a mountain—but who cares, it’s irresistible in a world dying for a breath of hope.


And more than this: it’s a page cut straight from the Christian culture of South America and of all those throughout the world who celebrate Easter. “Lord, you brought up my soul from Sheol, restored me to life, that I should not go down to the Pit!” (Ps. 30:3) Who could deny that part of the thrill as each man came out of the beautiful escape capsule was its echoes of the Pascal Mystery? Because Christians say “Christ is Risen” the world had hoped that little bit more urgently, that little bit more fervently, that the thirty three miners would be saved.

But there is something even more important, more significant, than a brief media moment framed by the gospels. I used to teach a seminary student who was always talking about “thin spaces.” This person meant experiences where the normal mundane sense of the world was displaced by feelings of awe, beauty, holiness. Dead, harsh or oppressive elements of daily life were dispelled and something much more wonderful took their place.

I think, however, that “deep spaces” is a much better image. It is illustrated of course by the experience of the Chilean miners, but, beneath that, it is affirmed by the core New Testament trajectory of death, descent into the tomb and third day resurrection. John’s gospel breaks from the geometry of resurrection as an “up” movement: the passion and death of Jesus are in fact his “lifting up”. Then resurrection is simply the life-filled affirmation of that amazing, counter-intuitive “up”. And, afterward, when Jesus’ brothers and sisters learn the God-revealing meaning of all this Jesus does “ascend”, i.e. all spaces in the universe are filled with his amazing new geometry of descent.

Deep spaces are unmade space, space not controlled by the violent meanings of the world. They may be the result of violence—perhaps they always are—but those suffering in them/from them do not share the world’s meaning: rather they endure it and from the depths of their souls they cry out against it. Deep spaces are therefore the place of emptiness, of possibility, of what yet can be. They are the space of creation and re-creation.

Consequently they are the space of great love and joy. This last weekend I spent time in a monastery in southern New York. It was classic fall weather— that peculiar dry and bright intensity when all the colors of life crackle in chorus before they must turn to dust. The monastery is located high upon weathered mountains which shoulder up clouds then sweep down abruptly into carved-out stream and river valleys. There is a path at back of the monastery which leads down just such a canyon, down to the river Chemung five hundred feet below. Near the head of the path, on a wall by the last of the buildings, one of the brothers had placed a crucifix with the Christ made out of wrapped wire, like the coils of several electric motors strung together. There was something about the harshness of the medium and the way the artist made the corpus sunk entirely in death, with the knee jutting out almost at right angles. It captured the total imprisonment of the body and the fact that the only movement left for a crucified man was spiritual: either total hatred, total despair, or a total self-giving of love. Needless to say what the image captured was the last. Thus suddenly it was entirely right that the body should resemble electric coils, for it was this love that made the electrons run in the first place, across all the channels of the universe. And the crook of the knee projecting out into the void signaled the great wooded chasm below and it became filled with God’s love in a totally real and concrete sense.

This was not a thin space, suggesting a parallel, better and spiritual world. This was a deep space, the depths of this world changed and changing into what it was always meant to be. Deep spaces may not be easy. They can be filled with trauma and the imminent threat of death. But as shaped by the Crucified they are haunted endlessly by love and contain an indelible promise of life. I wasn’t thinking at all of Chile, just about the wooded canyon, about electricity, and about the mystery of love . It was only later I thought about the Chilean miners, and about all the TV stations and the Internet, their electricity buzzing with resurrection in the depths.

Monday, October 4, 2010

Not my Shallow Heart, but, Yes, this Shadow Heart.

I don’t normally comment on our bible studies, Linda does such a good job of writing them up and blogging them in their own right. But something struck me about last Friday’s study which made me want to sit down and trouble the keyboard, at least this one time.

At our first session on Sacred Space we did the story of Jacob’s nocturnal wrestling bout in Genesis (chaps. 32-33). The fight happened at a place which Jacob named Peniel meaning “the Face of God” which is explained by Jacob’s statement after the battle, “I have seen the face of God and lived.” There’s a lot of stuff going on but it’s clear the figure that Jacob wrestles is the figure of God in dramatic or story form. Jacob leaves no doubt about it and the fact is pivotal in the next story, the encounter with Esau, where Jacob says “seeing you is like seeing the face of God”. A key conclusion of the story then is that the fight at the very best is a draw for God, and given Jacob’s vastly outmatched ranking it could easily be counted as his win. In other words God loses against the human opponent. Or, God is nonviolent. (The issue of nonviolence is made certain by the doublet story of Esau— a man whose violence Jacob had provoked but who greets Jacob with love: even so seeing him is like “seeing the face of God”, i.e. the God who refuses violence).

A big lesson here.

For at the same time as God loses God wounds Jacob as a reminder of the fight. Jacob wins but he goes away limping. He has a permanent reminder in his body of God’s essential not-beating-him, of God’s nonviolence. And that’s what really wounds. It tells Jacob that no matter God’s power the greatness of God is God’s nonviolence, God’s refusal to win. The radical reading we gave is that it is God’s weakness that wounds and worries away at our obsessive human structure of violence.

Enter Jesus. There can be very little doubt that Jesus learnt from this story the character of his Father, the one who makes the sun to rise on the just and unjust alike. No perceptive reader can miss it. And then through the revelation of his total weakness on the cross Jesus makes the radical reading definitive. No doubt here about who loses the fight with human violence. Now it is the Jesus figure that worries and wrestles with humanity through its long night of guilt, anger, despair and retaliation. Jesus is the ultimate wrestler struggling in ever matchup, in every fighting cage, with all our historical violence.

Which brings me to the theological point of the reflection.

If this picture is true—if God in Jesus is wrestling with the depth of our humanity to change us—then many past theological constructions regarding grace, election, predestination are simply wrong-headed. The idea that God makes an unconditional decision in God’s mind regarding who shall get saved and get into heaven not only erases God’s nonviolent wrestling with us but it inverts it into a total smackdown every time—by God. This is what is called “high theology”, so high that it cannot see what’s on the ground, cannot see the actual human dynamic by which God wounds us with compassion and nonviolence. It may be the case that my own heart or humanity is continually violent—perverse as Jeremiah says—but the humanity, or the heart of Jesus, is in full human contact with me—wrestling so close I can hear it beat—and all I have to do is pay attention, stop fighting just for an instant (like a fighter who for an instant loses concentration), and he wounds me at once with his own nonviolent humanity or heart. This is not a matter of an arbitrary decision in God’s mind, but is a concrete effect of Jesus’ nonviolent humanity directly on me, the impact of a new human structuring breaking into the old.

There is no way of tracking exactly when and where I may get wounded by Jesus’ nonviolence, when and where this alternative structuring will reconfigure my violent structure; but what we do know is this is an entirely human process. It is an unfathomable mixture of historical and cultural situation, of family background, even of neural biology, but it is certain none of it is predetermined. As Jesus says it is as untraceable as the wind, but that is exactly what makes it human. It is the chaotic mix of factors that allows for that slightest atom of freedom, for that moment when the new humanity stands in balance against the old and I am able in that moment to surrender myself to this new way. When the new enters in to the old with a clarity that has so far been missing I am so to speak equally in both worlds—I am in the future, and I am in the past. At that point I am called to add the feather weight of my will to the situation. In fact it is precisely the miracle of the new which creates the mystery of freedom: it allows me an unparalleled moment of possibility between two ways of being me; there are in fact two “me’s” in existence at that moment and I simply have to let myself fall into one or the other.

The truth is I have a shallow violent heart, but in the depth of my night there is another heart in contact with me, and with all humanity. This is our shadow heart, the one first encountered by Jacob, and then through Jesus by everyone. There is a shadow heart beating for all humanity, for the whole earth. It is the physical rhythm of a new creation.

Oct. 4, Feast of St. Francis