April 2, 2006 - Soul voices and spiritual friendship
5th Sunday in Lent
2 April 2006
John 12.20-33
Soul voices and spiritual friendship
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006
Interpretation of gospel text and Bach Cantata No. 159
Cantata Part 1
1. Arioso and Recitative: Bass (Voice of Christ); Alto (Voice of the Soul)
Behold!
Come, look yet, o my mind,
Where is your Jesus going?
Let us go up
O hard way! Go up?
O monstrous mountain, like the mountain of my sins!
How bitter that You must climb it!
To Jerusalem,
Ah, don't go!
Your Cross is already prepared for You,
where You will bleed to death;
here scourges are sought, there reeds are bound,
Your bonds await You;
Ah, don't go there Yourself!
Yet, were You to remain behind,
then I myself could not go to Jerusalem,
alas, sorrowfully instead would go to Hell.
2. Alto Aria and Soprano Chorale
I follow after You
I will stay here with You,
through spitting and shame,
do not scorn me!
I will still embrace You on the Cross,
I will not leave You,
even as Your heart breaks.
I will not release You from my breast,
When Your head grows pale
at the last stroke of death,
And if You must depart at last,
Then I will hold You fast
You shall find Your grave in me.
In my arm and bosom.
(Chorale: “O sacred head now wounded,” verse 6)
Commentary on cantata part 1
“When your head grows pale at the last stroke of death,” sings the devoted soprano, “then I will hold you fast in my arm and bosom.”
The imagination of our Jan Harrington is so vivid, whenever we talked about this cantata, he could see like it was in front of him the gory head of Jesus grow pale, which seemed to make Jan go a little pale, himself. And every single time we talked about this, Jan would say, “Those Lutherans!” I think he considers their imagination too vivid.
The thing is, Jesus’ death on the cross is easy to imagine but hard to take. For the most part, we put it out of our mind. It’s too troubling. You think about Jesus hanging up there dying like that, and your face goes white, your knees go weak, your pulse goes up, and your hands turn clammy. Jesus on the cross produces anxiety, and even at your best, you get pretty jumpy.
The voices around Jesus in these first two movements are at their best, you’d have to say, and even they are obviously on the edge. The soul of Jesus, our alto Mary Ann Hart, wants to save him, of course, and you can feel her anxiety in every word: “O monstrous mountain! . . . How bitter that you must climb it!”
Jesus just has to keep saying, “Let us go up . . . to Jerusalem . . . to Jerusalem . . . to Jerusalem.” Over and over.
The alto gets really wound up: “Don’t go! . . . you will bleed to death!” She’s coming unglued. But she gets hold of herself and realizes she’d end up in hell, unless Jesus goes through with it.
Then the soprano gets into it, too. The two of them together screw up the courage to face the inevitable.
“I follow.”
“I stay here with you.”
“I will not release you from my breast.”
“In my arm and bosom.”
All the determination! But all this determination reminds you of Peter in the garden, reassuring Jesus how loyal he’d be, and of Jesus telling Peter about his three ineluctable denials. How much of it is anxious desire to be good enough, and how much is it fear of failing to hold the intention? There is so much distress and consternation, we just don’t know. “O Jesus, I have promised,” goes the old hymn, but quoting our own promises is not necessarily a guarantee of resolve.
We have heard, here, an earnest conversation among spiritual friends, but not quite the honest conversation we can rely on. There’s a deeper level of honesty to reach: less bluster, more reality; less swagger, more resignation. . .
Cantata Part 2
3. Tenor Recitative
Now, My Jesus,
I will grieve over You,
in my little corner;
Although the world may
take the poison of desire to itself,
I will feed myself on my tears
and will not long for
any other joy,
until my face
beholds You in glory,
until I am redeemed through You;
Then I will be refreshed with You.
4. Bass Aria
It is finished,
the pain is over,
We are again made whole in God out of our state of sin.
Now I will hasten
and give thanks to my Jesus,
Good night, world!
It is finished!
5. Chorale
Jesus, this thy passion
Is my purest pleasure,
All thy wounds, thy crown and scorn,
Are my heart's true pasture;
This my soul is all in bloom
Once I have considered
That a home in heaven
Is offered to me through Thy suffering.
(“Jesus suffering pain and death”, verse 33)
Jesus is about to say a couple of things. One is that you have to be willing to give up your life to save it, and if you only try to save your life, you’ll lose it. Then he’ll report on the state of his own willingness to give up his life. “My soul is troubled,” he’ll tell us, which is a dose of reality. And then, “it is for this reason that I have come to this hour,” he’ll say, resigning himself to whatever’s coming.
John 12:20-33
Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.
“Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, “An angel has spoken to him.” Jesus answered, “This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.
Sermon
After Dorothy Gale has been back in Kansas for a while, and half forgotten her friends the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and Cowardly Lion, she takes a vacation to California. Things happen, beginning with an earthquake. (What else, in California?) She winds up in an early version of what J.R.R. Tolkien might have included in “Middle Earth,” and there she bumps into the Wizard, again. They share unlikely travels and strange experiences.
At one point, they come into the Valley of the Voe, where more peculiar things happen. They notice a couple of oddities: (a) there are no creatures, only vegetation, and (b) there are homes and gardens and other signs of civilization. How could there be buildings and signs of civilization without a society of people?
Dorothy and her companions find the answer in a plant, which they discover when piglets the Wizard has brought with him eat a delicious fruit that looks like a large, luscious peach. When the piglets eat it, they disappear. They’re there, but no one can see them.
Presently, Dorothy, the Wizard and the others come upon a household of disembodied voices, who explain matters. What the piglets ate with such relish was the “dama fruit,” which makes whoever eats it invisible. Everybody eats it, in the Valley of the Voe, if they know what’s good for them.
Why would people want to be invisible? Dorothy wants to know.
Well, it cuts down on vanity, for one. People can’t see you, so you don’t fuss with appearances. That’s the up side, and there’s a down side. Though dwellers of the Valley of the Voe can enjoy the beauty of trees and flowers and fields, they cannot enjoy the beauty of each other.
There is a more pressing reason for eating dama fruit, however, which is neither esthetic nor a character issue. It’s survival. There are bears in the Valley of the Voe, and a bear will eat you, if it can see you. Safer to be invisible.
Those are the choices: (a) be seen or unknown; and therefore (b) be at risk or safely out of sight. In a way, these have always been choices for people, even beyond the Valley of the Voe.
Occasionally, Jesus chose to be invisible. He was known to disappear into the wilderness or across a lake to get away from the press of the crowd. When the crunch really came, though, he stood at the center of things. He went up to Jerusalem to stand on the hill, and that was unsettling, to say the least, for everybody. But to be meaningful to the world and to himself and to God, Jesus would have to be exposed.
Dorothy, the Wizard and all their companions, except the piglets, make the same choice as Jesus. They want to get back to real life on the surface of the world, where they belong, and there is no way to do it if they can’t see each other. Their decision could lead them face to face with an invisible bear. When the time comes, they’ll take their chances, but giving up on being who they were and apparent to the world is not an option. They choose safety in unity and interdependence rather than evasion and hoping.
We see their point. Still, don’t you like the option to be invisible, when it comes something as personal as spirituality? Like those who dwell in the Valley of the Voe, we think spiritual invisibility avoids vanity. Showing off our spirituality is unbecoming, and to be preoccupied with the appearance of our spiritual life is a little narcissistic. We’ve all seen the type who boast about their spiritual superiority, and how self-absorbed indeed they are. And we’ve all seen the type who grovel in their spiritual depravity, and how self-absorbed they are, too, in their competition to be the worst of the worst, that their salvation seem all them more dramatic.
No, we’re better than that, we reckon. We don’t need testimonials to prove our faith and humility. We’d rather risk seeming smugly prideful than falsely humble. We’d rather not look like anything at all than let someone see what our spiritual life looks like.
These might be high and noble sentiments, in their way, but what if they mask another feeling that may be closer to the truth of it? What if they simply mask our fear? The relevant fact, of course, is the fact of the bear.
What is the bear?
The bear is what comes to devour you, if you become spiritually visible. If you become spiritually visible, someone in a Bible study might find out you don’t know a lot of the stories of the Bible. So you don’t go to Bible study. Or if you become spiritually visible, someone might realize you’re confused about matters on which others seem so certain. If you become spiritually visible—if you actually tell someone what you believe and don’t believe and wished you would believe, and if you have found, all the core teachings of your Sunday school upbringing notwithstanding, that you can’t believe certain things—if you become spiritually visible, people may shun you and make you feel very, very lonely in your beliefs and disbelief.
And so we eat our spiritual dama fruit. In fact, when people first come through the door of our typical mainline churches, we hand them a serving of dama fruit by letting them know, in various wordless ways, that it’s safe here not to show your spirituality. You don’t have to say what you believe and don’t believe. You don’t have to expose your spiritual weaknesses and struggles. You don’t have to talk about your faith. You’re safe, here, from all the risks of showing your soul for others to see.
What the courageous Lutheran who wrote the text for Bach’s cantata had going for him—his gruesomely fertile imagination notwithstanding—was the notion that Jesus’ soul could be visible, and being visible, Jesus’ soul was having a helluva time with the way things were turning out. Jesus’ soul was visibly distressed and at least highly dubious of the possibilities for grace in what fate had in store for him. If Jesus’ soul had her way, he would have eaten a bowl of dama fruit and lived to see another day.
But spiritual invisibility is not really an option. Our dama fruit only seems to hide us. We’re more like the Wizard in the first Oz story, trying to hide behind the curtain and hoping no one will notice what a sham we’ve been perpetrating, but people see behind the curtain well enough. Others see what we’re trying to hide. They see when our laughter covers up our fear. They see when our busyness covers up our sadness. They see when our judgment of others covers up our own insecurity. They see when our silence covers up the thousand voices that confuse our thoughts. They see when our thousand words cover up the emptiness we keep praying God to fill with meaning.
We are never really spiritually invisible, except to ourselves. God sees us perfectly, and those who know us well see us more clearly than we dare admit. This is a grace, even if it makes us very nervous.
The grace of God and others seeing us is that we may realize, any day now, that it’s time to wear our spiritual lives for others to see. It’s time to put on garments of prayer and testimony, expressing to each other the colors of our faith, the shape of our God and the song of our soul. It’s time to quit calling it friendship to hide our spirituality from each other and to make spiritual friendship the highest purpose of belonging with one another as a church. It’s time to open our heart in its tenderness and trust others to see us and know us and embrace us as friends of Christ and of one another.
Only through visible spiritual friendship with each other may we begin to see our faith honestly within the context of our life. Only when our soul sings out loud, as Jesus let his own soul sing (if the gruesome Lutheran guessed right), may we begin to hear the harmonies and dissonances in the music we make with the raucous world.
Becoming spiritually visible doesn’t happen by accident—at the church picnic, or dinners-of-eight or the book group. The truly spiritual life, especially the spiritual interpersonal life, happens on purpose. We claim an intention, and we follow where it leads.
If you want your spiritual life to grow in strength and depth, you will ask questions about it. So not to lose your soul in ambiguous, pleasing thoughts about being vaguely “spiritual,” you will write down your answers. When you have a dream, you will wonder what it is telling you about your life. When you hear a sermon or a prayer that makes you happy or sad or angry, you will ask your soul what it is about you that you get happy, sad and angry over mere words. When you feel ashamed about yourself, you will ask what that wound is about—and what you and God can do to heal it.
You will find that all of this is more than you want to do alone. Spiritual honesty is impossible without a spiritual friend who has another set of eyes and ears noticing things you won’t see or hear. When your fears and passions blind you, you can be led by a friend through the dense spiritual jungle. When a driving inner drumbeat deafens you with ancient messages of blame, you can be calmed by a friend while the noise dies down. Without spiritual friendship, you will circle the same waterless earth where you’ve been thirsting for years. So you want a friend along for the journey.
So begin, right now, to find someone to trust, and find it in yourself to trust her or him. Deciding to trust is also a decision to be afraid, because we only have to trust in the face of some kind of danger. There is always a bear out there, and what people do with our trust can be a bear. No one is completely deserving of all our trust, which is why we also have to trust in God—either God or our invisibility. So spiritual friendship, the decision to be visible, is a test of our faith, both in persons and in God.
This is how you will be happy. You will not be happy by staying alone in the safest spiritual hiding place you could find. You will be happy because you walked in the safety of friendship with a trusted other and with God. Amen.
2 April 2006
John 12.20-33
Soul voices and spiritual friendship
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006
Interpretation of gospel text and Bach Cantata No. 159
Cantata Part 1
1. Arioso and Recitative: Bass (Voice of Christ); Alto (Voice of the Soul)
Behold!
Come, look yet, o my mind,
Where is your Jesus going?
Let us go up
O hard way! Go up?
O monstrous mountain, like the mountain of my sins!
How bitter that You must climb it!
To Jerusalem,
Ah, don't go!
Your Cross is already prepared for You,
where You will bleed to death;
here scourges are sought, there reeds are bound,
Your bonds await You;
Ah, don't go there Yourself!
Yet, were You to remain behind,
then I myself could not go to Jerusalem,
alas, sorrowfully instead would go to Hell.
2. Alto Aria and Soprano Chorale
I follow after You
I will stay here with You,
through spitting and shame,
do not scorn me!
I will still embrace You on the Cross,
I will not leave You,
even as Your heart breaks.
I will not release You from my breast,
When Your head grows pale
at the last stroke of death,
And if You must depart at last,
Then I will hold You fast
You shall find Your grave in me.
In my arm and bosom.
(Chorale: “O sacred head now wounded,” verse 6)
Commentary on cantata part 1
“When your head grows pale at the last stroke of death,” sings the devoted soprano, “then I will hold you fast in my arm and bosom.”
The imagination of our Jan Harrington is so vivid, whenever we talked about this cantata, he could see like it was in front of him the gory head of Jesus grow pale, which seemed to make Jan go a little pale, himself. And every single time we talked about this, Jan would say, “Those Lutherans!” I think he considers their imagination too vivid.
The thing is, Jesus’ death on the cross is easy to imagine but hard to take. For the most part, we put it out of our mind. It’s too troubling. You think about Jesus hanging up there dying like that, and your face goes white, your knees go weak, your pulse goes up, and your hands turn clammy. Jesus on the cross produces anxiety, and even at your best, you get pretty jumpy.
The voices around Jesus in these first two movements are at their best, you’d have to say, and even they are obviously on the edge. The soul of Jesus, our alto Mary Ann Hart, wants to save him, of course, and you can feel her anxiety in every word: “O monstrous mountain! . . . How bitter that you must climb it!”
Jesus just has to keep saying, “Let us go up . . . to Jerusalem . . . to Jerusalem . . . to Jerusalem.” Over and over.
The alto gets really wound up: “Don’t go! . . . you will bleed to death!” She’s coming unglued. But she gets hold of herself and realizes she’d end up in hell, unless Jesus goes through with it.
Then the soprano gets into it, too. The two of them together screw up the courage to face the inevitable.
“I follow.”
“I stay here with you.”
“I will not release you from my breast.”
“In my arm and bosom.”
All the determination! But all this determination reminds you of Peter in the garden, reassuring Jesus how loyal he’d be, and of Jesus telling Peter about his three ineluctable denials. How much of it is anxious desire to be good enough, and how much is it fear of failing to hold the intention? There is so much distress and consternation, we just don’t know. “O Jesus, I have promised,” goes the old hymn, but quoting our own promises is not necessarily a guarantee of resolve.
We have heard, here, an earnest conversation among spiritual friends, but not quite the honest conversation we can rely on. There’s a deeper level of honesty to reach: less bluster, more reality; less swagger, more resignation. . .
Cantata Part 2
3. Tenor Recitative
Now, My Jesus,
I will grieve over You,
in my little corner;
Although the world may
take the poison of desire to itself,
I will feed myself on my tears
and will not long for
any other joy,
until my face
beholds You in glory,
until I am redeemed through You;
Then I will be refreshed with You.
4. Bass Aria
It is finished,
the pain is over,
We are again made whole in God out of our state of sin.
Now I will hasten
and give thanks to my Jesus,
Good night, world!
It is finished!
5. Chorale
Jesus, this thy passion
Is my purest pleasure,
All thy wounds, thy crown and scorn,
Are my heart's true pasture;
This my soul is all in bloom
Once I have considered
That a home in heaven
Is offered to me through Thy suffering.
(“Jesus suffering pain and death”, verse 33)
Jesus is about to say a couple of things. One is that you have to be willing to give up your life to save it, and if you only try to save your life, you’ll lose it. Then he’ll report on the state of his own willingness to give up his life. “My soul is troubled,” he’ll tell us, which is a dose of reality. And then, “it is for this reason that I have come to this hour,” he’ll say, resigning himself to whatever’s coming.
John 12:20-33
Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.
“Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, “An angel has spoken to him.” Jesus answered, “This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.
Sermon
After Dorothy Gale has been back in Kansas for a while, and half forgotten her friends the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and Cowardly Lion, she takes a vacation to California. Things happen, beginning with an earthquake. (What else, in California?) She winds up in an early version of what J.R.R. Tolkien might have included in “Middle Earth,” and there she bumps into the Wizard, again. They share unlikely travels and strange experiences.
At one point, they come into the Valley of the Voe, where more peculiar things happen. They notice a couple of oddities: (a) there are no creatures, only vegetation, and (b) there are homes and gardens and other signs of civilization. How could there be buildings and signs of civilization without a society of people?
Dorothy and her companions find the answer in a plant, which they discover when piglets the Wizard has brought with him eat a delicious fruit that looks like a large, luscious peach. When the piglets eat it, they disappear. They’re there, but no one can see them.
Presently, Dorothy, the Wizard and the others come upon a household of disembodied voices, who explain matters. What the piglets ate with such relish was the “dama fruit,” which makes whoever eats it invisible. Everybody eats it, in the Valley of the Voe, if they know what’s good for them.
Why would people want to be invisible? Dorothy wants to know.
Well, it cuts down on vanity, for one. People can’t see you, so you don’t fuss with appearances. That’s the up side, and there’s a down side. Though dwellers of the Valley of the Voe can enjoy the beauty of trees and flowers and fields, they cannot enjoy the beauty of each other.
There is a more pressing reason for eating dama fruit, however, which is neither esthetic nor a character issue. It’s survival. There are bears in the Valley of the Voe, and a bear will eat you, if it can see you. Safer to be invisible.
Those are the choices: (a) be seen or unknown; and therefore (b) be at risk or safely out of sight. In a way, these have always been choices for people, even beyond the Valley of the Voe.
Occasionally, Jesus chose to be invisible. He was known to disappear into the wilderness or across a lake to get away from the press of the crowd. When the crunch really came, though, he stood at the center of things. He went up to Jerusalem to stand on the hill, and that was unsettling, to say the least, for everybody. But to be meaningful to the world and to himself and to God, Jesus would have to be exposed.
Dorothy, the Wizard and all their companions, except the piglets, make the same choice as Jesus. They want to get back to real life on the surface of the world, where they belong, and there is no way to do it if they can’t see each other. Their decision could lead them face to face with an invisible bear. When the time comes, they’ll take their chances, but giving up on being who they were and apparent to the world is not an option. They choose safety in unity and interdependence rather than evasion and hoping.
We see their point. Still, don’t you like the option to be invisible, when it comes something as personal as spirituality? Like those who dwell in the Valley of the Voe, we think spiritual invisibility avoids vanity. Showing off our spirituality is unbecoming, and to be preoccupied with the appearance of our spiritual life is a little narcissistic. We’ve all seen the type who boast about their spiritual superiority, and how self-absorbed indeed they are. And we’ve all seen the type who grovel in their spiritual depravity, and how self-absorbed they are, too, in their competition to be the worst of the worst, that their salvation seem all them more dramatic.
No, we’re better than that, we reckon. We don’t need testimonials to prove our faith and humility. We’d rather risk seeming smugly prideful than falsely humble. We’d rather not look like anything at all than let someone see what our spiritual life looks like.
These might be high and noble sentiments, in their way, but what if they mask another feeling that may be closer to the truth of it? What if they simply mask our fear? The relevant fact, of course, is the fact of the bear.
What is the bear?
The bear is what comes to devour you, if you become spiritually visible. If you become spiritually visible, someone in a Bible study might find out you don’t know a lot of the stories of the Bible. So you don’t go to Bible study. Or if you become spiritually visible, someone might realize you’re confused about matters on which others seem so certain. If you become spiritually visible—if you actually tell someone what you believe and don’t believe and wished you would believe, and if you have found, all the core teachings of your Sunday school upbringing notwithstanding, that you can’t believe certain things—if you become spiritually visible, people may shun you and make you feel very, very lonely in your beliefs and disbelief.
And so we eat our spiritual dama fruit. In fact, when people first come through the door of our typical mainline churches, we hand them a serving of dama fruit by letting them know, in various wordless ways, that it’s safe here not to show your spirituality. You don’t have to say what you believe and don’t believe. You don’t have to expose your spiritual weaknesses and struggles. You don’t have to talk about your faith. You’re safe, here, from all the risks of showing your soul for others to see.
What the courageous Lutheran who wrote the text for Bach’s cantata had going for him—his gruesomely fertile imagination notwithstanding—was the notion that Jesus’ soul could be visible, and being visible, Jesus’ soul was having a helluva time with the way things were turning out. Jesus’ soul was visibly distressed and at least highly dubious of the possibilities for grace in what fate had in store for him. If Jesus’ soul had her way, he would have eaten a bowl of dama fruit and lived to see another day.
But spiritual invisibility is not really an option. Our dama fruit only seems to hide us. We’re more like the Wizard in the first Oz story, trying to hide behind the curtain and hoping no one will notice what a sham we’ve been perpetrating, but people see behind the curtain well enough. Others see what we’re trying to hide. They see when our laughter covers up our fear. They see when our busyness covers up our sadness. They see when our judgment of others covers up our own insecurity. They see when our silence covers up the thousand voices that confuse our thoughts. They see when our thousand words cover up the emptiness we keep praying God to fill with meaning.
We are never really spiritually invisible, except to ourselves. God sees us perfectly, and those who know us well see us more clearly than we dare admit. This is a grace, even if it makes us very nervous.
The grace of God and others seeing us is that we may realize, any day now, that it’s time to wear our spiritual lives for others to see. It’s time to put on garments of prayer and testimony, expressing to each other the colors of our faith, the shape of our God and the song of our soul. It’s time to quit calling it friendship to hide our spirituality from each other and to make spiritual friendship the highest purpose of belonging with one another as a church. It’s time to open our heart in its tenderness and trust others to see us and know us and embrace us as friends of Christ and of one another.
Only through visible spiritual friendship with each other may we begin to see our faith honestly within the context of our life. Only when our soul sings out loud, as Jesus let his own soul sing (if the gruesome Lutheran guessed right), may we begin to hear the harmonies and dissonances in the music we make with the raucous world.
Becoming spiritually visible doesn’t happen by accident—at the church picnic, or dinners-of-eight or the book group. The truly spiritual life, especially the spiritual interpersonal life, happens on purpose. We claim an intention, and we follow where it leads.
If you want your spiritual life to grow in strength and depth, you will ask questions about it. So not to lose your soul in ambiguous, pleasing thoughts about being vaguely “spiritual,” you will write down your answers. When you have a dream, you will wonder what it is telling you about your life. When you hear a sermon or a prayer that makes you happy or sad or angry, you will ask your soul what it is about you that you get happy, sad and angry over mere words. When you feel ashamed about yourself, you will ask what that wound is about—and what you and God can do to heal it.
You will find that all of this is more than you want to do alone. Spiritual honesty is impossible without a spiritual friend who has another set of eyes and ears noticing things you won’t see or hear. When your fears and passions blind you, you can be led by a friend through the dense spiritual jungle. When a driving inner drumbeat deafens you with ancient messages of blame, you can be calmed by a friend while the noise dies down. Without spiritual friendship, you will circle the same waterless earth where you’ve been thirsting for years. So you want a friend along for the journey.
So begin, right now, to find someone to trust, and find it in yourself to trust her or him. Deciding to trust is also a decision to be afraid, because we only have to trust in the face of some kind of danger. There is always a bear out there, and what people do with our trust can be a bear. No one is completely deserving of all our trust, which is why we also have to trust in God—either God or our invisibility. So spiritual friendship, the decision to be visible, is a test of our faith, both in persons and in God.
This is how you will be happy. You will not be happy by staying alone in the safest spiritual hiding place you could find. You will be happy because you walked in the safety of friendship with a trusted other and with God. Amen.
posted by J. Christy Wareham at
11:05 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home