Writings

The Revelation of Divine Beauty

Stages of Spiritual Development

It wasn’t an accident that I talked first about the Revelation of Divine Beauty, for it is the form of awakening that is least reliant on a tradition or a community. The Wound of Divine Love is most often felt by people who have a sense of who God is, given to them by the theology and traditions of a religious faith. Initiation requires a community to set aside a space for the initiates and imbue it with a spiritual focus. But any of us can walk in the woods, or along the lakeshore, or through the neighborhood, or become enraptured by a ray of winter sunlight falling through a window and catching at the dust motes in the air. In a secular culture, where it’s not a given that people will be in conversation with the generations of religious seekers and strivers who have gone before them, it’s most likely that when their souls awaken to God, they will do so in isolation, and without a context that can help them make sense of it.

Yet we can turn to poets and artists to help us get a feel for such awakenings, to create a mood in which their power can be understood. Take, for instance, this poem by the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer:

Face to Face
Tomas Transtromer

In February life stood still.
The birds refused to fly and the soul
grated against the landscape as a boat
chafes against the jetty where it’s moored.
The trees were turned away. The snow’s depth
measured by the stubble poking through.
The footprints grew old out on the ice-crust.
Under a tarpaulin, language was being broken down.
Suddenly, something approaches the window.
I stop working and look up.
The colours blaze. Everything turns around.
The earth and I spring at each other.

When I shared this with my friend Molly, she was most struck by the line “language was being broken down.” It’s an odd line. It treats language like old, decaying leaves that have been raked under a tarpaulin. But what Molly heard was an echo of one of her own awakenings, which happened when she was a child learning how to read. As she read successfully for the first time, she was both proud of her newfound ability, but also aware that these words would never be the same to her again. That the meaning they held in that moment and the very sounds her mouth made while saying them, were fleeting. Her lips would never shape the words in exactly the same way, and the words, which were so redolent with pride, would lose that sheen of a skill mastered, and become just words, or take on other overtones of emotion with time. It shouldn’t surprise you that Molly is a linguist, and has made language her life’s work.

But I am most taken by that word, “something,” in the ninth line of the poem. Transtromer is not going to define the ineffable “something” that approaches the window. It is beyond his understanding. It’s not the earth itself, or the colors, or even “everything,” whatever “everything” might be. It is a distinct “something,” a personage, a moment, a vaporous object — unarticulated, undefined. That one word takes me back to my emergence onto a hillside of red bushes in the John Muir Woods, and my disappearance into something that eludes my attempts to describe it.

Let’s look at another poem, “Priceless Gifts” by the 20th century Polish poet Anna Swir.

Priceless Gifts
Anna Swir

An empty day without events.
And that is why
it grew immense
as space. And suddenly
happiness of being
entered me.
I heard
in my heartbeat
the birth of time
and each instant of life
one after the other
came rushing in
like priceless gifts.

Swir isn’t just describing the day, or the “something” that enters her life in this moment. She’s describing her reaction to it. An emotional reaction, as “happiness of being” enters her. This is very different from ordinary happiness, which can be tied to accomplishments or companionship or activity. This is joy taken in the very fact that you are the person you are, in the world you inhabit. A sense of rightness both within oneself and within the universe. What a wonderful emotional reaction! But she also describes a physical reaction. “I heard in my heartbeat the birth of time.” Again, she is awakened to herself, now in her heartbeat, the working of her body. Yet she is also awakened to something infinitely greater, time itself. And she understands that she is connected with time, and time is connected with her — that time, in the largest, most theoretical sense, depends on the heartbeat of a tiny human body, just as that heartbeat depends on time. And finally, there is history in this poem, although she’s unwilling to say whether it’s personal history or all of history. “Each instant of life one after the other came rushing in like priceless gifts.” Does this mean her life, or the life of everything? Or, in these moments of awakening, is that even a distinction we can make?

Let’s turn from poetry for a moment and ask how the Revelation of Divine Beauty operates in the lives of two seekers and saints within the Christian tradition. In the seventeenth century, an ex-soldier and footman named Nicholas Herman became a Carmelite monk and took the name of Brother Lawrence. He worked humbly in the priory kitchen, but something about him led many people to seek his guidance, and he became the spiritual director to many, having long conversations and writing letters to them. A well known priest, Abbe Joseph de Beaufort, collected his letters and conversations into a book, Practicing the Presence of God, which has allowed Brother Lawrence’s wisdom to be heard by many generations since he died. The book begins with Abbe Joseph retelling Brother Lawrence’s story of his first awakening:

He told me that God had done him a singular favor in his conversion at the age of eighteen. During that winter, upon seeing a tree stripped of its leaves and considering that within a little time the leaves would be renewed and after that the flowers and fruit appear, Brother Lawrence received a high view of the Providence and Power of God which has never since been effaced from his soul. This view had perfectly set him loose from the world and kindled in him such a love for God that he could not tell whether it had increased in the forty years that he had lived since.

Of The Practice of the Presence of God : Conversations and Letters of Brother Lawrence. Natl Book Network; 2009.

Brother Lawrence’s revelation is simplicity itself. There’s nothing special about the barren tree he sees. Yet the sight of it inspires him to make meaning from it. He realizes that desolation and barrenness are not a permanent state of affairs. There is a rhythm and seasonality to all of life, and just as the desolation of winter doesn’t mean that we’re abandoned by the coming spring, we are never abandoned by God. For Brother Lawrence, this realization was deeply freeing. It set him loose from the assumption that he had ultimate, or even marginal, control over his life and the life of his society. It helped him to realize that he could rely on something far greater than himself as he went about his days and nights.

He made meaning out of this experience, just as the poets do, just as anyone does who comes into contact with profound beauty. Our capacity to make meaning is awakened at birth. It makes us human. Awakening doesn’t create this capacity, but it does heighten it. We awaken to experiences of something that we will never really understand, of a mystery and beauty that we can never wholly describe. Yet we try to describe it, try to make meaning of it, because that is what human beings do with everything we encounter. If we can’t truly explain, or even talk about, the deepest and most profound movement of mystery within our lives, we can at least talk about its after effects, the way it changes us, the way it shifts our understanding. Brother Lawrence chose the language of providence and power to talk about the reverberations of awakening within his life. Frederick Buechner chose the language of praise.

Buechner was an award winning novelist and teacher who became a Presbyterian minister. He wrote many wonderful books throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries — novels, collections of sermons, theology, and a spiritual autobiography, The Sacred Journey. You’ve probably heard his most famous quote without knowing that it was him who said it: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” That little piece of wisdom has been of great value to countless people as they consider the question of what they’d like to do with their lives.

When he was a young man, it was a question that Buechner often asked himself, and The Sacred Journey tells of how he tried, and sometimes failed, to answer that question. It is a lovely book that I recommend highly, but I am most interested in showing you this passage from it, in which Buechner describes his own awakening through a Revelation of Divine Love:

I sat in Army fatigues somewhere near Anniston, Alabama, eating my supper out of a mess kit. The infantry training battalion that I had been assigned to was on bivouac. There was a cold drizzle of rain, and everything was mud. The sun had gone down. I was still hungry when I finished and noticed that a man nearby had something left over that he was not going to eat. It was a turnip, and when I asked him if I could have it, he tossed it over to me. I missed the catch, the turnip fell to the ground, but I wanted it so badly that I picked it up and started eating it anyway, mud and all. And then, as I ate it, time deepened and slowed down again. With a lurch of the heart that is real to me still, I saw suddenly, almost as if from beyond time altogether, that not only was the turnip good, but the mud was good too, even the drizzle and cold were good, even the Army that I had dreaded for months. Sitting there in the Alabama winter with my mouth full of cold turnip and mud, I could see at least for a moment how if you ever took truly to heart the ultimate goodness and joy of things, even at their bleakest, the need to praise someone or something for it would be so great that you might even have to go out and speak of it to the birds of the air.

Buechner, F. (1991). The sacred journey. San Francisco, Calif.: HarperSanFrancisco.

I love this passage because it’s easy to think that awakening can only happen in days without events, as in Anna Swir’s poem, or when life stands still, as Tomas Transtromer describes it. Here is Frederick Buechner, in the middle of bootcamp, immersed in the chaos and fear of a war, meeting new people every day, learning things he’s never learned or wanted to learn, and it is in this moment of sensory overload that he finds himself looking into the “heart of ultimate goodness.” He reassures us that awakening can happen anywhere, that it isn’t just for those of us who are privileged to find times of silence and stillness within our days.

His awakening was an experience that demanded something of him. He felt the need to praise. But praise what, praise whom? The Revelation of Divine Beauty tends to raise these questions within the soul. All great encounters with beauty require a response. This is why art exists. It’s also why religion exists, at least in part. We encounter something beyond ourselves — some grace, some beauty, some immersion in history and time, some enlargement of the soul — and then we must ask, now what?

Three Understandings of Awakening

Stages of Spiritual Development

There are so many ways to think about spiritual visitations, so many ways for the soul to awaken to God. Evelyn Underhill, in her magisterial book Mysticism, divides this awakening into two neat categories, The Revelation of Divine Beauty and The Wound of Divine Love. The Revelation of Divine Beauty is a transcendent moment, often experienced in nature, in which the limited human soul touches the absolute and eternal presence of God, and is changed by that brief touch. These words, “absolute” and “eternal” hint at the feel of this experience – it is a release from the confines of the self, a momentary escape into something huge and unexplainable, an apprehension of what Underhill calls “the impersonal glory of a transfigured world.”

The Wound of Divine Love will not release you, but instead captivate you and bring you to see all of creation through the eyes of God. You will know the entirety of God’s love and hope for us, and understand how we reject that love and act against that hope, and it will tear you to your soul. As Underhill says, “this  intimate realization  of  the  divine  has  reference  to  the  love  and  sorrow  at  the  heart  of  things,  the discord between Perfect Love and an imperfect world.” For many of the Christian tradition’s great mystics, these types of awakenings happened at odd and unexpected moments. They were almost accidental, often inconvenient, unconcerned with any schedule, task list, or even responsibility to community or loved ones.

But there is another way in which people awaken to God. Barbara Holmes points out that initiation rites in Africa, and really anywhere in the world where they are taken seriously, are intentionally designed to awaken the soul. Initiates are taken out of their every day lives, often in community with others who are being initiated, and placed in odd spaces that have odd relationships to time — “focused spiritual environments,” as Holmes calls them. “Initiates become open vessels receiving the wisdom of the elders; more important, they take their places on the great wheel of life that turns elders into ancestors and children into adults. They learn to embrace the spirit realm and to understand that life is never linear but a cycle of spiritual seasons.”⁠1 So the conditions for awakening can be created by us, although God has to choose to participate in these initiations.

There are, undoubtably, other ways of opening to God that don’t fall within this triune schema of transcendence, immanence, and initiation, and many nuances and shades of variation between each of these three ways of understanding awakening. And I don’t think that the human soul is limited to any one way of awakening. We live a cycle of spiritual seasons, and in one season awakening might happen in nature; and in another it might happen during a moment in which love swells within us and we want to extend ourselves into that love, to swim in it; and in another season still it might happen when we are initiated by a retreat, or a pilgrimage, or a preparation for baptism or confirmation, or any circumstance in which we leave our ordinary lives and immerse ourselves in a focused spiritual environment with other people.

As you think over your own life, you might be able to name many instances of  awakening. I was awakened in a field outside a friend’s house, and in the John Muir Woods. Soon after that, I was awakened by a Mexican family from Bakersfield in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and years later I was awakened while gutting houses in New Orleans’s Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina, and, later still, while walking across campus and looking into the faces of the students. More recently, I’ve been awakened by group singing  — at a retreat that my friend Jane put together, with students hiking in the Hocking Hills, and at a funeral for a colleague. Every season, every moment of new growth within my life, seems to be accompanied by an awakening of one kind or another, and this may be true of you as well.

1 Holmes, Barbara A. 2017. Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church – Second Edition. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press.

Awakening to God: A Personal Story

Stages of Spiritual Development

I have a story I tell about my own spiritual awakening. I was seventeen, and on a family vacation. We had driven from Wisconsin across the southwest, and all during the trip I had been moved by profound natural beauty. After a stop in Los Angeles, we drove up Highway One to San Francisco — seer coastline, the ocean breaking against the base of cliffs, seals and sea lions stretched out in hidden bays. And then I found myself in the John Muir Woods beneath the giant sequoias, crossing bridges over small gorges, the air full of the scent of the forest. I wandered away from my family and started climbing along a path past carpets of ferns, and emerged onto a high hillside covered in red bushes, and there I fell out of myself and encountered God.

A simple story, not unlike many that we could tell about our encounters with the divine, but it immediately raises questions. What was the self I fell out of? Who is God? And, once a person has had such an encounter, what should be done? A life is changed, but without any understanding of what that change entails, what new life might emerge afterwards? What ways of understanding, what worlds of story and conduct, can help carry a person through such a change? And what narratives try to repress or mitigate or cancel out the aftershocks of such divine encounter?

Although I’ve told this story many times, and although it did happen, it was not, actually, my first encounter with divinity. When I stepped into the John Muir Woods, I considered myself an atheist, but I had met something strange and mysterious once before, in a Wisconsin field at dawn. I called myself an atheist because I was angry at the church, and at God. I’m a preacher’s kid, and my father struggled in the churches he served. An alcoholic’s son, he built a wall in his life to protect his wife and children from the occasional violence and deep unhappiness of the home he grew up in. But in order to do so, he needed to assert control over many things, and didn’t always know how to do so with subtlety or grace. He was an introvert in a denomination that favored extroverts, and an intellectual who served congregations whose members, in general, did not have a high degree of education. So there was often conflict in the churches of my childhood, and I came to think of the body of the church as the people who were mean to my dad. 

I rebelled. Part of my rebellion was a declaration of atheism. But the other part was a turning to drugs and alcohol and my attendance at dangerous parties. At one of those parties, in the Spring of my junior year of high school, a few months before I found myself in the John Muir Woods, I stayed up all night, tripping on acid, and then greeted the dawn in a field behind my friend’s house. I was alone, watching the sunlight shine off the top of the long grasses, and I waded out into the dew and light, my pant legs growing heavy, my arms raised in greeting, my mind dancing with something that was entirely beyond my understanding.

I didn’t make this part of my story for many years, because, after college, I gave up drugs entirely, turned my life fully over to the community of the church, and felt ashamed about my past drug use. Yet the story-world of the church is full of people who were honest about their faults and understood their failures in the light of their conversions. And the theology of the church asserts that God can work through any set of circumstances or choices. So, as I have grown in my faith, I have become more comfortable in asserting that it was God there in that field, God who I encountered while my mind was still rattling with drugs and my body still shaky with a sleepless night, and that, since I didn’t quite get the message that morning, God chose to visit me with grace twice in the course of four months.

Your Love is Better than Wine

Bridal Mysticism

The Song of Songs is about longing and passion, and rarely about consummation.  It’s about being fully present to the beloved, and if it’s carnal, it’s a carnality that includes all of the senses.  The lovers’ kisses are better than wine, more intoxicating, because they don’t deaden the senses, but bring them to life.  Often, when we are beginners at love, we are frightened by the intensity of our bodies, particularly when we’re young and our hormones hold sway.  The passions that come upon us are terrifying and uncontrollable.  So we drink to excess, because we want to experience passion, but we also want to deaden its intensity.  But by deadening our senses we only allow ourselves to experience a muted version of love.

The Shulamite, the female character who narrates much of the Song of Songs, has all of her senses open.  She loses herself in the scent of her lover, a scent of myrrh and aloes.  She doesn’t see passion as bad, but as a means of opening herself to the fullness of experience – it’s olfactory essence, its tactile nature, its sounds and sights.

Somewhere along the line, most of us learn to close ourselves off from the world, but not the Shulamite.  Evelyn Underhill talks about this closing off when she describes two men, “Eyes” and “No Eyes,” who both decide to take a walk:

“No-Eyes” has fixed his attention on the fact that he is obliged to take a walk. For him the chief factor of existence is his own movement along the road; a movement which he intends to accomplish as efficiently and comfortably as he can. He asks not to know what may be on either side of the hedges. He ignores the caress of the wind until it threatens to remove his hat. He trudges along, steadily, diligently; avoiding the muddy pools, but oblivious of the light which they reflect.  “Eyes” takes the walk too: and for him it is a perpetual revelation of beauty and wonder. The sunlight inebriates him, the winds delight him, the very effort of the journey is a joy. Magic presences throng the roadside, or cry salutations to him from the hidden fields. The rich world through which he moves lies in the fore-ground of his consciousness; and it gives up new secrets to him at every step. “No-Eyes,” when told of his adventures, usually refuses to believe that both have gone by the same road. He fancies that his companion has been floating about in the air, or beset by agreeable hallucinations. We shall never persuade him to the contrary unless we persuade him to look for himself.(1)

The Shulamite’s passionate longing teaches her to look for herself, and surely this is one of the great gifts of passion.  Her longing is egoless – it’s a deep, enraptured love of the beloved and an intense desire to use every one of her senses when encountering the beloved.  She doesn’t want anything to get in the way of her senses – no intoxication, no wine.  What would life be like if we could follow her example and open our perceptions to the one we love?  If our primary love is for God and God’s world, our experience of it will become magnificent if we can be as fearless as the Shulamite.

(1)Underhill, Evelyn (2011-03-30). Practical Mysticism A Little Book for Normal People (Kindle Locations 148-151).  . Kindle Edition.

Introduction to Covenantal Spirituality

Covenant

A few months ago I reread Walter Brueggemann’s The Covenanted Self, and realized that covenant is a profound metaphor for the spiritual life. Metaphors for that life abound, and some of them have been incredibly influential in my life. I spent a couple of years investigating, and living within, the metaphor of spirituality as a love affair between the soul and God. The road metaphor that imagines the soul as traveling along different paths of suffering and joy has been important to me for a long time now. Yet in this season of my life the metaphor of covenant has come to hold sway over me. I find myself thinking about it all the time, and viewing my faith through its lens.

Covenanting isn’t a legal arrangement, or a set of deals that I make with God, my neighbor, or myself. In Brueggemann’s words, “covenanting (and spirituality) consists in learning the skills and sensitivities that include both the courage to assert self and the grace to abandon self to another.” It is a way of being. To covenant is to engage in a spiritual practice that is active and alive, a practice in which nothing is settled beyond some bare outlines of acceptable behavior. It is a process of testing and affirming relationships. It is soul work.

According to Brueggemann, there are three main entities whom we covenant with. The first is God, and in some ways God is the easiest to covenant with. Get good at covenanting with God, Brueggemann says, and you’ll develop the skills to covenant with your neighbor and with yourself. Our covenanting with our neighbors is more challenging because neighbors are more immediate, “so near, so visible, and so daily,” in Brueggemann’s words. Neighbors will get in your face whether you want them to or not. They will, inadvertently or purposefully, take some inner crankiness out on you. The expectations they will place on you are more often meant to serve them than they are to serve you. Their love is conditional and demanding. 

But even though neighbors can be difficult, they aren’t nearly as difficult as our selves. It is very hard to escape from the self, and our selfhood is always with us, regardless of what we do. Each of us carries multiple selves within us. Sometimes they are aligned to roles. I have a priest self, a husband self, a father self, a friend self, and a self that only I know well. That private self, that self that is divorced from my many roles, is also faceted. There is the playful facet who wants to goof off, joke, dance, and escape from responsibility. There is the creative facet, who wants to write, to paint, to make some object or articulation of value. There is the “adulting” facet, the self who wants to be seen as competent and successful, who worries about processes and accomplishments. All of these selves are constantly acting up and jostling for dominance, and sometimes nothing more vital than the weather will determine which one gets to be in charge on any given day.

God, neighbor, and self is the basic framework of covenanting, but there is so much more to say. As I grow in my understanding of the metaphor, I begin to read the Bible differently, to understand my own choices and reactions differently, and to act differently towards my friends and my community. I hope to post more about covenanting spirituality in the weeks to come, and hope you will join me in my explorations.

An Introduction to Christian Midrash

Scripture

The Bible is a conversation. Soon after my ordination, I tried to illustrate this during a sermon by having two Drama majors who were sitting in the pews read out the conflicting statements about faith and works held by Paul and James. A student who was sitting in the balcony of the little college chapel was greatly offended, and took to sending me long, convoluted emails that tried to prove that Paul and James’s disagreement wasn’t really a disagreement at all. He thought that if I were taken through the right series of arguments, I would come to see that they were really saying the same thing. This encounter has troubled me over the years, since I’ve never really understood what was at the root of his fundamentalism. Perhaps he was just tired of the confusion of thought that college brings, when all your old ideas are exploded and you’re left drifting between the vociferously expressed and contradictory opinions of your friends, classroom antagonists, and professors. I remember walking back from a philosophy class during my first year of college, my head spinning with ideas, and saying to myself, “I can’t figure it all out right now — I’m just going to go party.” I dealt with the displacement of my previously held beliefs by seeking oblivion in stuporous, bad-smelling dorm rooms. Can I really claim that this was better than clinging tightly, even angrily, to those beliefs? I tell you this story because I don’t want to sit in judgment on fundamentalists, but the understanding of the Bible that I’m about to articulate is about as contrary to fundamentalism as one can imagine. And because if I truly believe that scripture is a conversation, and a model for Christian community, than I must make space for the Christians I disagree with within that conversation.

The first followers of Jesus didn’t meet in a college chapel, of course. They met around dinner tables in private homes, on riverbanks and lake shores, in graveyards (reclaiming the cities of the dead in a way that was scandalous to everyone else), in catacombs that they dug during times of persecution, and, eventually, of course, in churches. At all of these gatherings, they told stories (some of them very funny), read letters from prominent fellow Christians such as James and Paul, and argued. Many of them were Jews, and they were used to arguing over the Torah, the Prophets, the Histories, and the Wisdom writings, and supplementing these texts with stories. Those arguments and stories were eventually collected into the Talmud, and were read alongside the primary sacred texts, a process that told everyone that it was okay to approach scripture from different angles, to see it through different lenses, and to learn wildly diverse things from it. The poet Alicia Ostriker, in her lovely little book For the Love of God:The Bible as an Open Book, points out that

An extraordinary wealth of alternative ideas and possibilities exists, scattered throughout the biblical texts — ideas and possibilities that either question divine authority, or re-define it, or ignore it altogether…If we remember that the Hebrew Bible was composed by multiple (mostly anonymous) authors during a period of about one thousand years — something like the time between Beowulf and T.S. Eliot — and compiled and edited during another four hundred or so, it is not surprising that scripture is a wildly composite set of documents, and arena of mysteries, gaps, and inconsistencies. We can find in it dogma and resistance to dogma, faith and submission but also doubt and challenge, law and subversion of law, promises of safety and meaning but also assurances of utter chaos. Subliminity, but also comedy. The abstract and the deliciously sensuous. A Father God, certainly, but also hints, here and there, of the Divine Mother who was edited out of historical memory.(1)

The Christian scriptures were, of course, composed in a much shorter amount of time, yet they were composed by people who were accustomed to encountering all of these diverse and jangling voices in their religion, and who had no problem with allowing that diversity into the key texts of the new faith that they were helping to develop. That is why the story of Jesus’s life is told by four Gospels instead of one, why Paul is balanced by James, why the Acts of the Apostles is full of stories of people haggling and negotiating over what was acceptable to the church and what was unacceptable, and why a text as strange and upsetting as the Revelation to St. John got into the canon at all. 

A few years ago, I had the very good fortune of hosting a podcast with Rabbi Daniel Bogard. Every week for forty weeks we recorded a chevruta scripture study of the Book of Exodus.(2) Chevruta is simply the process of slowly reading through a passage of scripture with another person and pausing to ponder, comment, ask questions, express opinions, and tell stories. During that time, Daniel taught me about the Talmud, and about the midrashim found within, those little stories that attempt to explain something that is seemingly missing from the text. Marjorie Sandor describes midrash in this way:

the midrashist would locate a gap, an entrance point, and dive down, metaphorically speaking, expanding the brief episode from within, giving voice to the submerged characters and complexities brimming beneath the unforthcoming surface of a biblical episode. No wonder some midrashim read like short stories, complete with dialogue and scene. No wonder they tend to bring to center stage marginal or obscure figures barely mentioned in the biblical narrative, or reopen the closure of a given episode. At the heart of this exercise in interpretation, in its original incarnation, was the desire to deepen the connections between the ancient biblical text and the urgent concerns of the midrashist’s own historical moment. Nor did these early close-readers see themselves as making anything up, or in any way changing the sacred text. Far from it. For them, Torah was a living thing, a gift of teachings as rich in the unspoken as the spoken. They saw themselves as participating in that gift by making these interpretations, by filling in the gaps for themselves and their congregations.(3)

Christians have never collected our midrashim in any kind of codified way, yet we’ve created midrash throughout our history. Poets have written poems, composers have written cantatas, novelists have written novels, artists have created art, filmmakers have made films, all in response to some question that scripture evoked in them, some lacuna in the text that they couldn’t make sense of, some hint of more meaning lurking behind the words on the page. My approach to scripture is to gather a metaphorical Talmud that includes these different voices, that expands the conversation. I believe that doing so honors the very conversational nature of scripture itself, and offers us a way of encountering the sacred texts with all of our hearts, minds, and souls.

(1) Alicia Ostriker, For the Love of God, p. 3

(2) Lost in the Wilderness Podcast

(3) Sandor’s essay, “The Ram in the Thicket,” was published in the October/November 2018 issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, and isn’t available for free online. But you should still check Sandor out at her website.

Introduction to Bridal Mysticism

Bridal Mysticism, Writings

Two events led me to start thinking about, praying with, and making art in response to the Song of Songs. The first was a Bible study during a clergy quiet day. We were reading Jesus’s Parable of the Dishonest Manager (Luke 16:1-13). As we sat in a circle, annoyed and shocked that Jesus would tell his disciples to “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth, so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal habitations,” I began wondering whether I had ever done exactly that. My mind traveled to the early days of my relationship with my future wife. We met when we were twenty-two and still in college. Neither of us really knew who we were, and we acted out different social roles, imitating our peers or images in the media or, at best, some vision of who we hoped we would be someday. There was something dishonest about the way we presented ourselves to each other – not in a conniving way, just in the fact that we didn’t know who we were, and therefore didn’t have much chance of being authentic in our relationships with anyone. It was through falling in love and being faithful to each other that we learned who we were, and everything that’s real in our lives and relationships now is the result of our patience with each other as we fumbled around and made mistakes and presented ourselves falsely. Reflecting on this as I sat in that circle of priests, I realized that my wife is my dishonest wealth, and I felt how miraculous it is that she should love me, and I her, a true gift of patience and luck and grace.

The second event that led me to the Song of Songs was a planning meeting. We were at the Edge House, the Lutheran campus ministry that serves the University of Cincinnati. A trapeze company had set-up in the park across the street, and as we talked young people were flinging themselves into the air. We were trying to decide on a theme for an autumn retreat, and we started by wondering which questions our students were really asking. After a considering pause, one of our group said, “Well, I think they’re wondering who they’ll love, and how they’ll love that person well.” This was so basic and obvious that it was astounding that we had never addressed this question with our students. We turned to our Bibles and leafed through them, wondering whether scripture really spoke to this question at all. Maybe in Genesis, in those scenes when Isaac meets Rebecca, and then later Jacob meets Rachel. But more obviously, and certainly more extravagantly, in the Song of Songs.

It’s a primal question – “who will I love, and how will I love that person well?” The way we answer this question will affect not only our earthly relationships, but our relationship with God. This is what the early and medieval commentators on the Song understood so well. Until the Enlightenment, the Song of Songs was the second most preached about and commentated on book of scripture, surpassed only by the Gospel of John. It was treated as an allegory for the soul’s relationship to God, in both the Christian and Jewish traditions. To this day, many Sephardic communities chant the entire Song of Songs before Shabbat services every Friday. For Origen, and Teresa of Avila, and Bernard of Clairvaux, it was a text for celibates, a passionate enactment of human/divine relationship that could take the place of any earthly need for sex. But the Enlightenment, and the 18th and 19th century Biblical scholarship that followed it, questioned this way of reading it. The Song might be any number of things – wedding choruses, songs for fertility rites, court poetry – but it was, decidedly, not about God.

Last summer I led an adult forum on the Song of Songs, and when we came to those passages that compared a woman’s breasts to twin gazelles and bunches of grapes, one of the participants asked “should this even be in the Bible?” It seems so lascivious, and it is. But the fact that it is in the Bible should tell us something. It seems possible, and even likely, that those who compiled and canonized scripture understood that the Song of Songs is about God, while understanding that it’s also about sex. Perhaps they knew what we’ve forgotten, that the passion we bring to our earthly relationships is a training ground for the passion that we will, through much prayer and worship, eventually bring to our relationship with God. “Who will I love and how will I love that person well?” The Song of Songs suggests that the way we answer that question in our human relationships has everything to do with how we’ll learn to love God. Perhaps, through fidelity and patience, we might all come, eventually, to recognize and give thanks for the dishonest wealth we receive as we form each other in relationship, and through this recognition, come to dwell, spiritually, in eternal habitations with God.

Introduction to Stages of Spiritual Development

Stages of Spiritual Development

Many of the mystics, my friends and mentors, offer clear warnings against those who would set themselves up as spiritual teachers. So I want to make it clear at the outset that I offer these posts about Evelyn Underhill’s model of spiritual development as a student, not a teacher. I am still exploring the ideas and questions that I raise here book, and expect to explore them for the rest of my life. Nothing written here is definitive.

I’m writing because I’ve been trying to discover good ways of reading the mystics in community, and I find, as I work and learn with groups of friends, that we often need some framework of understanding to help us make sense of the author we’re reading. Great and brilliant people have provided various understandings of the mystic life, and all of them are useful. Every metaphor helps to describe something that is, in a very real way, indescribable. The mystics try to answer the question of how the human soul grows close to God, and they do so with metaphors of liturgy, of journeying, of love-making, of moving through the rooms of a house, of being burnt up by a divine fire, or blinded by divine light, of gazing into mirrors and growing like plants. Some, such as Julian of Norwich, expound on visions that they’ve received. Some, such as St. John of the Cross, describe the meaning of poems that they’ve written.

These mystics are my friends and companions as I grow in love of God and of the world. They are always gently telling me that love for God and love for the world are intertwined, that I cannot pursue only one love. The love they teach isn’t easy. So much has to happen within me for me to be capable of that love, and my capacity to truly love is only momentary. St. Teresa of Avila said that no one is so advanced in prayer that they don’t, from time to time, have to go back to the beginning. In these posts, as I talk about the mystic way, know that I have sometimes advanced along it, and sometimes find myself back at the very beginning. Teresa’s great metaphor for our journey with God is a castle with seven rooms, an interior mansion in which we move from room to room. There seems to be a kind of progress to this. Not all of the rooms are accessible to us right away, and our journey is one of receiving the gift of entrance into more and more beautiful rooms. But if you think about where you live, you will know that having access to a room doesn’t mean that you’re always in it. My home happens to have exactly seven rooms, and in the course of a day I wander in and out of every one of them. You will find, as you grow in love and understanding of God, that there are times when you’ve wandered back into the mud room, and can’t seem to move past it into the kitchen or the living room, or whatever rooms you pass through as you go deeper and deeper into your home.

One of St. Catherine of Siena’s great metaphors is that of a tree, planted in the center of a circle. The tree is the human soul, always trying to grow and flower. The earth that it’s planted in is humility, and the circle itself is God. God goes round and round, never ending, creating an earth, an atmosphere, a place in which the soul can flourish. But in order to flourish, we need to learn humility, to seek deep roots into a true and dirty understanding of ourselves, and accept that we will find worms and little skittering things in that dirt. Not always pleasant, but the soil of our humility is aerated by such things: by our little failures, our sorrows, our recognition that many things have to die within us to create that wonderful, loamy compost from which we can grow. 

I have journeyed with the mystics over the course of months and years, and during that time I have sometimes been full of grace and love, and at others I’ve been very small and broken. I have kept writing, even during the hard times, the times of my spiritual adolescence, when metaphorical bones have ached and the mind that should be centered on God has been flooded with hormonal yearnings. The child is the father of the man, or the mother of the woman, and there have been times when that child, who is still very much within me, has thrown tantrums, pouted, and done everything he can to try to get his way. Through it all, my conversation with the mystics has sustained me. They have been my guides, my mentors, my friends. I want to share their understandings with you, and hope to do so in such a way that you’ll come to love them, as I have.

But do know that I have only an incomplete understanding of them, that I see through a glass darkly. Mechthild of Magdeburg wrote that in order to truly benefit from her book, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, one must read it nine times. I have only read it once. I find, as I read the mystics, that I need a guide, someone who can converse with me and draw me into greater understanding. Evelyn Underhill has been that guide to me.

Sarah Laughs, and Her Laughter Helps Us: A Homily

Scripture, Spirituality of Improv

In the 18th chapter of Genesis, Sarah laughs, and I think that her laughter is of prime spiritual importance. It’s proceeded by three mysterious strangers appearing to her and Abraham while they’re camping by the Oaks of Mamre. These strangers tell Abraham that Sarah, who is ninety years old, is going to have a baby. She’s listening to this exchange from inside of her tent, and her response is a giant guffaw (or maybe a snigger, the type of laughter isn’t really specified). Let’s take a minute to briefly recount what’s happened to Sarah so far in the Book of Genesis, so that we can decide whether her laughter is justified. In Chapter 11, we learn that Sarah, although very beautiful, is barren. Regardless, God tells Abraham that Sarah’s offspring will become a great nation. Abraham doesn’t seem to be paying very close attention to this, because in the very same chapter he and Sarah go down to Egypt in order to avoid a famine, and Abraham says to Sarah, “Hey, you’re really beautiful,” which seems like a compliment, but then he says, “because of your beauty, Pharaoh is going to want to kill me so that he can take you as his wife. So when we get to Egypt, lie and say you’re my sister.” This plan works out, in that Abraham isn’t killed, but Pharaoh, who does think that Sarah is really beautiful, says, “Great, she’s your sister? Then she can marry me, no problem.” Good thing she’s barren, or her progeny might have ended up being Egyptian rather than Hebrew. But then God sends some plagues on Pharaoh’s household, and Pharaoh figures out that it’s because of Sarah, and he kicks both her and Abraham out of Egypt, after loading them up with gifts so that God will stop being mad and the plagues will go away. Then poor Sarah is dragged back up to the land of Cana, where her husband decides that he wants to fight in a war against King Chedorlaomer of Elam, and off he goes to battle, and Sarah must be thinking, “if he dies, there goes the great nation that God’s supposed to produce from my offspring.” But he wins and comes back with all the spoils of war, so everything is fine. But still no baby. So Sarah thinks, “maybe this really isn’t about me,” and she says to Abraham, “sleep with my slave girl, Hagar, and she’ll give you a son.” So Abraham does and sure enough Hagar has a baby, who she names Ishmael, although he never goes off with Captain Ahab to hunt white whales. Now everything seems fine, but in Genesis 17 God says, “Nope. I said that Sarah would give rise to nations, not Hagar (although Ishmael’s going to be the father of some pretty great nations, too).” So we come to today’s reading, Abraham and Sarah at the Oaks of Mamre, and Sarah is ninety years old and has been waiting a long time to have a son and see God’s promise fulfilled. And when three mysterious strangers show up and tell her and Abraham that it’s about to happen, she laughs.

But why dos she laugh? Why do any of us ever laugh? What is laughter all about? Well, according to humorologist Salvatore Attardo, laughter is all about breaking Paul Grice’s rules of conversation. Grice didn’t set the rules of conversation, of course. Those have been there from the very beginning. But in the nineteen-seventies he came up with an influential theory to explain how conversations work, and he created four maxims to describe what we’re doing when we talk to each other. His big idea, which these maxims expand on, is that conversation is all about cooperation. We assume that the people we’re talking to will cooperate in the conversation that we’re having with them. We assume that in conversation two or more people are building something together, even if they’re having an argument. When someone breaks the rules and the conversation is in danger of falling apart, we laugh, at least according to Salvatore Attardo. So laughter is a sign that the conversational contract has broken down. Sarah’s laugh seems to indicate that communication between her and God has broken down.

Here are Grice’s four maxims, with commentary and jokes:

The Maxim of Quantity – When we talk to each other, we expect our conversation partners to give us just the right amount of information, neither too much, nor too little. This is why we find mansplaining so annoying. We don’t need a dissertation on the process of carbonation when we ask for a soda. But giving too little information also violates the maxim on quantity. Attardo’s illustrating joke is this: Question – “Do you know what time it is?” Answer – “Yes.” I have to admit that when this type of joke has been directed at me, I’ve found it more irritating than amusing. And we might ask, is it enough for the three mysterious strangers to simply tell Sarah that she’s going to have a baby? Are they giving her enough information?

The Maxim of Relation – Say only what is relevant for the current purposes of the conversation. In other words, don’t digress. Attardo uses this joke to illustrate: Question – “How many surrealists does it take to screw in a light bulb?” Answer – “Fish!” In Sarah’s case, is it relevant to tell a ninety year old that she’s going to have a baby? Seemingly impossible things seldom seem relevant.

The Maxim of Manner – Be brief, but avoid ambiguity and obscurity of expression. Breaking this rule leads to Abbott and Costello’s old “who’s on first” routine. Groucho Marx also made good use of it when he said that “outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” The three strangers’ announcement to Sarah seems equally bizarre and obscure.

The Maxim of Quality – Don’t say things that you know are false, or that you don’t have enough evidence to support. In other words, don’t lie. Mark Twain was guilty of breaking the maxim of quality in his joke about Cincinnati. He said, “When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it’s always twenty years behind the times.” Funny, but obviously untrue. This is the one rule that the strangers’ proclamation doesn’t seem to break.

So Sarah laughed because the three messengers of God who visit her and Abraham at the Oaks of Mamre broke Grice’s conversational maxims, at least the first three. The only maxim that the heavenly messengers don’t seem to break is the Maxim of Manner. They’re brief, unambiguous, and the opposite of obscure. “You will have a son.” Full stop. But God is expansive, mysterious, and ineffable. Doesn’t communication with God always break Grice’s Maxim of Manner, just because God’s very nature is beyond what we’d consider mannerly?

Sarah laughed because her communication with God had broken down. God had broken the conversational rules. And God always breaks the conversational rules, just because God is God, and will never adhere to the Maxim of Manner, and doesn’t seem to have much use for the other three maxims, either. If this is true, isn’t all of our communication with God primarily marked by laughter? Or shouldn’t it be? Not because we find God funny, not because we’re mocking God, but because we find the communication itself to be so weird and abnormal that it amuses us. The communication breakdown is all on our end, not God’s. We fail to truly hear and to understand God, so we laugh. But God hears and understands us, even our laughter. And as the scripture says, Sarah gets this. She says, “God gave me laughter.” Laughter is a gift from God.

And yet, despite everything I just said, the real question isn’t why Sarah laughed, but how does the fact of her laughter help us?

Well, mostly it helps us with our internal transformations. I’ll go so far to say that there’s no transformation without comedy. When something truly life-altering and transformative happens, it breaks all of Grice’s maxims, shatters the rules of normal behavior, and leaves us feeling lost and confused. Even if it’s a good thing. Any young parent can tell you that the birth of their baby has altered their life in surprising ways. They have to adjust to new versions of themselves. And although there’s a never ending series of books to tell them how to do that, and even though they’ve taken countless birthing classes and received the unasked for advice of many older relatives, they still find themselves confused and perplexed and not knowing how to live into their new role as parents. Fights about getting up in the night to see to the baby aren’t fights about that at all. New parents are wondering whether the person they made the baby with, whom they were pretty sure loved them and had their best interests at heart, will really choose sleep over them. It all gets very tough and complicated, and if you can’t laugh about it together, things aren’t going to go very well. I say it here and I’ll say it again – there’s no transformation without comedy.

But don’t just take my word for it, take Richard Sewall’s. In his book A Vision of Tragedy, Sewall suggests that tragedy is tragic because it disorders the world. When you experience a tragedy, all the day to day assumptions that you’ve built your life around are called into question or disappear entirely, and you find yourself out on the moors with a deranged parent who’s just gouged his own eyes out, like in King Leer. Or you gouge your eyes out because you find you’ve been sleeping with your mother accidentally, like Oedipus does. There’s a lot of eye-gouging in tragedy, and very little in comedy, because tragedy leaves you feeling blind. You can no longer see the order that you thought was implicit in the universe.

Comedy seems to make fun of order, even seems to undercut order, but it secretly rebuilds it. Sewall says that comedy relies on a vision of ultimate harmony, and I think he’s right. It’s never satisfying unless the order that it makes fun of is replaced by a new sense of order – in romantic comedies, this new order is usually symbolized by a wedding.

Comedy redeems the pain of transformation. Transformation always has its portion of suffering, and no transformation is quick and easy. One of my favorite quotes from Saint Anselm comes from his poem on baptism. “After I lost the joy of my baptism,” he wrote, “I wallowed in manifold sins.” It’s hard to imagine what sins the kindly old saint was wallowing in, but I’m grateful to have him affirm that baptism doesn’t just clear away all of the tragedy from a Christian’s life. People of all faiths, and probably of no faith, have had similar experiences. You undergo a conversion, or a rite of passage, or some world-shattering life event, and then you sit there wondering, “now what?” And you find that you’ve dragged your old self kicking and screaming into the life of your new self, and the old self isn’t happy about it, and is still pretty persuasive about going back to all of your old bad habits. And because we’re susceptible to that old self’s arguments, we slip back into old, destructive ways of being, and regret it, and stew in a sense of our own horribleness and hypocrisy. So, no matter how much we wish it was otherwise, transformation involves suffering.

Comedy, with its wry, sassy approach to suffering, acts as a kind of hangover cure. Sure we messed up, but it’s not the end of the world, and we probably learned something. But we won’t really be able to accept what we learned until we can laugh about it. Once you find that you can tell a story about yourself, a story in which you look ridiculous, you know that the story has lost its shame. Yes, it’s a story of failure, but the failure has taught you something, and the new self you’re becoming delights in self-knowledge, even values it more than looking cool or being perfect.

In order to get there, you have to embrace humility, accept your foibles and failures, and shrug off the pride of perfectionism. Hard stuff, I know. But many, many mystics are agreed that without humility, the human soul can never really know God. Humility is of prime spiritual importance, and most of our transformations are, at root, about learning to be humble. Comedy is all about humility – the humbling of the great as their ridiculousness is exposed, the exalting of the humble, who are shown to be cleverer and wiser than anyone suspects, and the humbling of our social contracts, which are revealed to be nothing more than a set of rules or maxims that, granted, have their usefulness, but often deliberately block beauty and cage grace. Can laughter help us learn how to be humble and navigate the many vicissitudes of transformation, so that we can discover a new order, a new harmony, and be delighted by it?

I think it can, but only if we learn how to surrender control. And control is a hard pattern to break. We often think that control is the antidote to fear. I’m afraid that people won’t do what they said they’d do, that no one will show up, that everything will go horribly wrong and I’ll look like an idiot. So I rush around trying to control everything, which just means that if everything does go horribly wrong, all of the blame is going to devolve on me. A vicious cycle.

But in the spiritual life, you can’t control grace. For me, the Kingdom of Heaven is a place where we all help each other to overcome our fear and let go of our need for control. Where the Holy Spirit moves through us and makes each of us a leader when we need to lead, and let’s each of us be a follower when we need to follow. It’s a place where failure is acceptable and transformation is real. It’s a place where laughter harmonizes our lives and gives us back the order that tragedy takes away. Sarah laughs in the Kingdom of Heaven because she’s surprised by a miracle and humble about her own understanding of it, and because God has overwhelmed her with information and gestured towards the intense transformation that’s about to swamp her life. And her laughter has something to teach us – how to be humble, how to accept transformation, how to see things as they really are, how to live in real community, and, most importantly, how to respond to God with surprised joy.