The Sabbath
For six days God created the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh he rested, so relates the sacred narrative of Genesis. Judaism encoded within this tale the basis of its division betwixt labour and leisure. The consecration of rest for man on the seventh day gradually embosomed rest for cattle, land, and crops, the hallowing of the seventh year as the time for the retirement of the bonds of servitude and debt, and the capping year of a jubilee, the seventh return of the seventh year. The sacredness, the fullness, of the seventh day was elevated into a holistic cynosure. While the ideal endured, the prophets give evidence that practice was inconsistent. In Jesus’ day, Judaism, faced with the internationalizing challenges of Roman imperialism, recoiled on many fronts into conservatism, fundamentalism, literalism. Jesus challenges the drubbing of religion into legalism; he allows his disciples to pick grain on the Sabbath, he heals the sick on the Sabbath, for the Sabbath, says he, is for man, and to invert this ideal creates servitude, not leisure. Such humanitarianism served him not well.
According to the gospels, in a year when the celebrations of the Passover and the Sabbath were adjacent,[i] Jesus was crucified. Three days after, on the first day of the work-week, certain disciples of Jesus went to visit his tomb. Visions informed them that he had been risen from death. Fifty days later, on the feast of Shavuot or the Pentecost [from the Greek for fiftieth], in that year the first day of the work-week, these and other disciples were gathered for prayer when a heavenly vision overwhelmed them and transformed them from disciples into Christians.[ii] The first day of the work week suddenly acquired a new meaningfulness, a sacredness that seemingly challenges the sacredness of the Sabbath day. The first day of the work week, the day after the Sabbath rest, here marked the beginning of a new creation, of a new divine work. It was a sacred work day, the first day of God’s making a new heaven and earth. It was the “Lord’s day”. Some named it the “eighth day” of creation. During the early history of the church it was kept as a day of eucharist, of communal gathering, thanksgiving, and prayer along side of and intimately conjoined to the Jewish Sabbath day of rest. By the third century, the Jewish roots of Christianity were being lost to common consciousness, the Christian flock was no longer under the umbra of Judaism, Christians were either born into the community or converts from among non-Jews, and the church was entering the world stage as a sanctioned member of the Roman imperium.
On the first Lord’s day, that handsel of resurrection, the disciples that encounter Jesus are told to go and tell others. On the next Lord’s day of note, the Pentecost, that telling becomes the realistic and relatable preaching of the church to the whole of the world (“from every nation…they were amazed…saying: “…how is it we each of us hear in our own language”). Is there here a tension between the ideas of rest and an eighth day of creation, Sabbath and Lord’s day? The Lord’s day with its eucharistic celebration is about, not only the creation of community in partnership with Jesus as the Christ, it is about that community’s apostolic vocation. It is about proclamation (kerygma), service to others (diaconia), and the building of a new community of man in concert with all creation (koinonia). How can this be integrated into the idea of Sabbath rest? Is the Lord’s day about action or reflection? Is it a day of rest and renewal or a work day consecrated in partaking with God in the remaking of the universe? Is this a time of rest from the world, of rest for man and world, or is it a time to apostolically, to actively in the world, celebrate the joy of being in the world, the world God so loves as to redeem and sanctify, the world in which the Spirit of God and his Christ is now infused? Is this the basis of a profound and worldly spirituality or simply the moving of a line upon a calendar, a Christian co-opting and propelling of the Jewish Sabbath rest into the first day of the week? Is this merely making Sunday the new Saturday? Is it essentially about remembering and being thankful (eucharist) or about saturating the world in the active proclamation of God’s triumphant love (baptism)? Is Christianity essentially insular, about the gathered community, or is it embracive, about the greater community within which it exists? As Ernst Troeltsch marked, in a world where “church and state” are coextensive, the question cannot arise, but in a world wherein the church is merely a segment of a greater commonwealth, a secularized society, the question demands response.
Every religion acclimates itself to the world around it by incorporating the autochthonous sensitivity for the sacred into its rites and practices. By the third century Christianity was accomplished at this. On many fronts it had accommodated the feasts and ritualizations of Rome into its celebrations. It would “baptize” all manner of European religious sensitivities throughout the following centuries. Heroes, real and mythic, would be reconstituted as saints.[iii] Divers agricultural, seasonal, and social rituals would be given “new life” and meaning by being incorporated into Christian usage. Any glance upon the calendar of saints and feasts, any perusal of the sundry rites gives evidence that the church has long been busy baptizing in the West not just persons but their cults and cultures.[iv] To some degree, the church “by grace”, instinctively or subconsciously if you will, was aware that Christ stands as the ultimate trans-valuation of all things, and that all things are open to God’s usage for the salvation of the world. Admittedly, such openness of mind and heart were not and are not universal, and much was denounced, destroyed, lost. By the end of the mediaeval period, wherein church and state were indeed coextensive, the instinctual power to accommodate other cultic and cultural inclinations had atrophied. We tend to gloss over this simply because all such items we consider connatural to Christendom have been en-cult-urated into the cult and culture with which we identify. Thus, we tend to feel any contemporary accommodation of other cults and cultures is a tottering off into the unorthodox.[v] Most do not see our Jewish, Roman, European, pagan [the literally un-cult-ured] roots, but are stirringly disposed to opine against “watering down” the Western face of Christendom when missionaries would “baptize” the devotional practices and cultic imaginings [image-makings] of the Orient, Polynesia, or the indigenous cultures of Africa and the Americas. We, to the peril of the world’s salvation, harden our hearts to the fact that Christ means God wills to live among us all, be incarnate among all men and cultures, and by that potent mystery, both reveal the depths of himself and give a depth of meaningfulness to all men, to all cults, to all cultures. Christ did not come to preserve Judaism. Christ did not come to consecrate the ideas of Greco-Roman civilization. Christ came to initiate a new heaven and earth, a new understanding of, a new appreciation of, a new evaluation of God and man and world. Christ came to reveal the truth, the value, the sacred vitality that animates all men, all cults, all cultures. Christ is present wheresoever the reality of this world in all its variety is suffused with an openness to the sacred and divine creative power, to the saving power of openness moving all things forward, for(ward)giving all men and all items of our life together into a new meaningfulness, a new depth of appreciation, a “new” heaven and a “new” earth, a new cherishing for where God, where “heaven”, is—in the world, the “earth” he has made and wills to continuously sanctify in his Spirit and incorporate in his Word. That sanctification and incorporation is not–nor can it ever be–sequestered in one culture, its ideals, its philosophical inclinations. Its scope is universal. Man, however, is not uni-cultural. Any confusion about that reality only acts to blockade the Creator-Redeemer-Sanctifier of all.
This being said, it is patent to all that as Christianity emerged a distinct discipline of worship, it retained the Judaic ideals of rest and focus centred on the pillars of society–the social units of family and faith, incorporating them into its act of remembrance and thanksgiving, the eucharist. It, by grace or felicitous serendipity, realized Sabbath rest, as Jesus had taught, was for man’s re-creation. It had a sapiens for creation’s having begun with Spirit hovering above the abyss, the unknown, with light being separated from darkness, with a groundwork that is not principally a bifurcation of reality, but an ordering, an externalizing. It understood the spirituality of the creation tale. Divine action orders, moves outward. It is not isolationist. It is communal. It speaks: “Let us”. It is reflective, knowing pause, surveillance, judgement. It is blessing and affirmation. It speaks: “It is good”. In giving thanks the church gives space to dis-member, to shed individuality and its faults, its insularity, its sin, that it may re-member as a holy communion incorporating into the “Body” of the Christ whose vitality, whose life, must ever be spent, “poured out”, for the well-fare of the world. Eucharist is the principle action of the Lord’s day, the celebration of a Sabbath in God, a resting in the divine font of all creation, an openness for re-creation.
The early church did not enjoy the luxuriance of the Lord’s day and its Sabbath rest as a statutory holiday. The eucharistic rest had to be a moment of church at once joyful and silent in God. It was a moment away from the world, but not antithetical to the world. That moment did not last. Time and circumstance stood potently against it. The church gained recognized status within the workings of empire. The stoic, gnostic, and conservative inspired movements that ripened in the setting sun of Roman rule infiltrated the church and eventually gave rise to efforts to suppress and halt whatsoever was judged to be mundane or frivolous, and to legislate against all activities considered non-spiritual. Sabbath rest celebrated in eucharist began to veer toward being a labour of liturgy, a rehearsing of the letter of scripture, and the enforcing of the accepted notions of social convention and moral correctness. It veered toward being neither re-creative rest nor the silence of joyous thanks. The result of such a constriction of the human into merely the rational and anti-corporeal–confusedly understood as the spiritual and superior–is ultimately a vision of a day for sobriety. Sobriety, however, as the disembodied remnant of serenity or solemnity, manifests as the drab and dour, and impertinently denigrates the work of the God it clamours to please. Man is authentically an animated, a soulful, body. The creedal acclamation of the resurrection of the body affirms that essential and proper unity. Authentic Christian spirituality is always worldly spirituality, spirit animating world, spirit giving meaning, purpose, life to world reflecting the creedal affirmation that God has placed his Son, his flesh, into the world and that God has chosen to comfort and guide the world forward by gifting it his living Spirit. The world and spirit, the body and soul, exist in harmony ideally, in balance practically. Thus, no person, having compos mentis, spends all day either exercising the body at the gym or the soul at the prayer-desk. Spirituality is always about the harmony of heaven and earth, Nietzsche’s Apollo and Dionysius, reason and passions, body and soul, transcendent and immanent, order and freedom, rest in God and apostolicity, Spirit and world. They temper each other, “define” each other, create together the dynamic of creation, salvation, and sanctification. One without the other is sterile, non-creative, repetitiveness confusedly taken as constancy, Freud’s Thanatos.
Because it is more Thanatos than Eros, the cultic deflation of Sabbath rest into a day for going to church has in our culture worn thin. Most are not disposed on a “day off” to report to head office. The potential value of the public disciplines of worship, disciplines which must inextricably be a matter of proper form, focus and force, cannot be lightly dismissed. No created thing cannot be turned and consecrated to the glory of God and the wholesomeness of man, but the discipline for so doing, for so valuing, must be a matter of diligent consideration and due foresight as to how such will impact the formulation of spiritual, of psychic muscle and tone. Any communal immersion in focus is defective, delusional, and self-defeating if it suffocates rather than invigorates, if it devalues and deletes the very item God makes and treasures, the creation in which he enwraps his presence. It must speak to man in his time and place, in his age and its culture. Sabbath rest and Lord’s day revelation and eucharist exist for the sake of man, his vitality. That which is dioristic, that which is constitutive of the church’s life, its vitality, must be pliable, malleable, adaptable to person, times and circumstance.[vi]
Going to Church or Keeping the Sabbath
For too many “going to church” has lost both its lustre and meaningfulness precisely because churches have allowed their disciplines to either atrophy or decompress, have failed to locate the world they have been sent to inform, have neglected to adapt their presence, their voice, their mission and vocabulary, have not well discerned where there is current value in things past, where fondly held items present as detriment and deterrent, and rather consistently offered a culture disemboguing its inherited religious visions a smorgasbord of rehearsed performances rather than structure and substance, mature guidance, and the experience of a reliable forum for (holy) community and growth. Our lives, the whole of our lives, including the disciplines of private and public worship, as is our world, are a matter of balance in a cosmos of sundry, dynamic, evolving forces. The church must address that reality with unabashed gratitude and strength, with gracious and sacrificial receptivity for both God and the world. The ideal of Sabbath we inherit from holy writ is not a foretaste of eternal rest, not a rehearsal of readings and rituals, but a moment ripe for re-creation on every front. How to this time and place does the church speak the meaning of its great symbols? How does it embolden its ministers to speak plainly those symbols such that each may hear in his own tongue? How does the church speak with truth and honesty, with wisdom, with a hearable relevance to the world in which commercial enterprise operates without end, and consumerism, for good or ill, is become a “social” activity? How does the church engage a world where technology has made life more complex and demanding, and therein diminished human attentiveness to the cretinous? How is the church to make its voice heard in an ersatz world where new social ideals demand the impossible standard of continual busy-ness, where the very idea of community has been ceded to a web of computers and cell phones ravishing both time and intelligence? In a world bursting at its seams with silly, mindless distractions, and pseudo-self-aggrandizing opportunities, a world wherein every-one is the star and centre of their own imagined uni-verse shouting from screens small and large: “Look at me”, “Love me” but wherein the Self of that every-one will never dare look upon itself, nor plummet its own depths to find the love of itself, how, in this cosmic detrital of personhood, does the church raise its proclamation of creative, abiding, and true love? The cheap, the tawdry, the fleeting moment of celebrity or notoriety (the two are often now indistinguishable) are converting the world into a wasteland of the sensational and senseless. In this miasma of a dying civilization, how does the church speak? How, with eucharist, with thankfulness, in hand, does church stretch out it hands to the absconding of humanity from itself? How does the church bolster itself to be the light into a new world?
There was once given me to read a collection of sermons by an itinerant Methodist preacher in nineteenth century Upper Canada (the present-day Province of Ontario). There were rants on the evil of every possible socializing venue: dancing, going to theatre, playing sports and games, sharing casual time together, attending to fashion and home, etc. I am patently aware everything, including scripture, charity, and religion, can be used for evil. I realize also this preacher was confronting social issues orbiting around excesses in some of these arenas, but as Albee’s American Dream espies of the events set in motion when amputation and anathema are the only tools of therapy, we end with—in both body and soul, individual and society—mutilation and death, vacuity and merely the façade of verity. In the mind of this preacher, everything “outside religion” reeked with the stain of damnation. There seemed by his recounting little to do other than warily work the week, and observe the sabbatical of the Lord’s day reading the Bible, or sitting in church and hearing about the Bible, the woefulness of the world, and perhaps on festive days singing “joy, joy, joy in my heart” without pausing to reflect upon and bemoan how irretrievable is that joy considering it is in that fleshy thing, the heart.
But fleshy things we are. Flesh is our modus operandi, our principle mode of communication, and by divine predestination, the mode of our salvation and the mode of living out our redemption. The flesh sustaining elements of water, bread, and wine are made to stand as the symbols for the “Body” into which God incorporates the world. The Word is flesh proclaims the Johannine gospel. This is meaningful for us only if this Word, this divine Logos, refers not merely, as some would take it, to a hapax-legomenon named Jesus of Nazareth, but to our very identity and mission as Christ-ian, to our life and life-quest. There is in holy, in wholesome living a space for focus and control, for spiritual examination and exercise, for reason and reflection, for action for the welfare and well-being of all this world; there is also room for play, for laughter, for silliness, for society and sociality, for the delights of this God’s so beloved world. The sabbatical component of keeping a sacred time is the space, the forum, the leisure, and the freedom wherein to take the deep breath in and out that creation in all its multiplicity be treasured and celebrated. It cannot ignore the fact that this “rest” exists to connect man to, to make man aware of, to make man open to, his truth, his other, his world, his God, his soul. Insofar as the sacred icons of Sabbath, Resurrection, Pentecost denote new life, they can be ritualized within a special, a sacred, time and space, but they cannot be confined to a certain time, a rite, or a place. They are images and ideals integral to Christian spirituality that bespeak the value of the body and this world, and of their summons to fulness and joy. There is ever need to pause, to allow an empty space, an extraordinary space, a new space, an open space, “the abyss”, toward novelty and the sheer power of the creative. Only here can be heard within the meaningfulness of Resurrection and Pentecost, the proclamation that man’s mortality dissipates and the divine spirit intoxicates. Pause, however, is not creation; it is catching one’s breath, one’s divine breath. It is purposeful, meaningful. It is not the end, not an end, simply the means.
For Christian churches this enabling and creative grace has always been—ideally, at least–focused within the celebration of eucharist. For this reason, even the early reformers sought to keep in place a weekly communal celebration of eucharist, although it very quickly came to pass that the sense of unworthiness and a fearful distaste for ritual, for sacramentalization, suppressed this thrust. There was in the reformed community a distinct aversion for the Roman idea that the eucharist is a re-presentation of the effects of the Christ’s sacrifice of self. The eucharist is, however, the place of a true and living sacrifice. It is the moment wherein all partakers in Christ-hood become definitively—once and for all time—The Christ. It is the forum wherein, aided by ritualized symbol in act and word and song and varied other arts, the ordinary world and its cares, the sundry masks men create for the self as means of dealing with self and the varied venues of worldly encounters and negotiations are purposefully put aside. It is the place for shedding the cosmic coordinates of daily life, and for falling into a moment whose coordinates are transformed by and in being the symbolic, the subliminal, the supernal wells of meaningfulness. Eucharist allows everything to become Christofericly charged and changed—readings, bread, wine, man, community, world.[vii] Eucharist, Holy Communion, the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, is not merely significant of, but ritually, symbolically, and therefore, deeply and truly constitutive of the whole community which man and nature are summoned to become and to celebrate. It needs be underscored: symbol is creative, in-form-ative, and thus, the truth of this rite is formative of the concrete reality of church, the “Body” into which both man and world are summoned to their truth.[viii] Thus, eucharist must be first a place for silence, for hearing and reflecting—as community. Second, eucharist is the place for participatory honesty and humility, for the confession of both sin and faith, for patent honesty about self and toward self, and sincere openness toward others and to the ultimate other as the value embraced under the mask of God that proclaims the Creative One is Love itself. Third, eucharist must be a gracious acceptance of self, other and world as a gift of incomprehensible magnitude and responsibility. Unless the church is a body of cultural anthropologists of a limited academic scope and interest, to what other end does the church, the sacred Spirit infused “Body”, continuously recount the chronicles of Creation, Pasch, and Pentecost?
Ceaseless Prayer
Say the word “prayer” and most will think of a composition consisting of several sentences addressed to God concerning some matter, concluding with “Amen”. Most compositions on the topic of prayer will set these prayers into certain categories. The number of categories vary, but most will concede the Holy One is usually addressed in adoration, worship, thanksgiving, surrender, consecration, supplication, or contrition. When the Apostle Paul enjoins the Christian to be in a state of “ceaseless prayer” he is not proposing one spend day and night reciting compositions of pious phrases. All such are particles reflective of a fuller communication, of a communion with God. They are, without being trivial about this matter, akin to those cards we are accustomed to send them fondly held for birthdays and other special occasions. They speak for us our ideas, the words of our heart. They are ancillary to our relationship with another. As with all words, they are portals into the heart and mind, temporal and cultural incarnations indicative of something other. Portals have their value. Some are better than others. They are, admittedly, useless unless they lead somewhere, open us to a space, a new space, an-other place.
They who have been happily, successfully, and long married know a fully formed and felicitous situation did not all at once fall upon them, enwrap them, and make all things, themselves included, perfection. A good marriage is a process, a long process. Simply coming together as a couple is usually resultant of times and efforts of multifaceted and prolonged communications–shared experiences, dialogues both subliminal and spoken, listening, not only to words, but being attentive to actions, reactions, and the plethora of unspoken responses. It takes time for routines to synchronize, for dispositions to accommodate, ideas and ideals to shed their adamantine edges, prejudices to erode, and a harmony of two differing hearts and minds to evolve. Rare is such venture without dark moments, breaking moments. A living, a working unity does not occur without lines of cleavage and fracture being exposed. It is a fine thing to speak of “star-crossed lovers”, but when stars cross each other’s path, there is raised a great deal of cosmic turmoil. Should they intersect, the heavens quake. Love does not make of two one without something more than a kerfuffle. But love’s commitment can keep a sinking ship afloat while storms are weathered. An identity of being is not the goal. Differing dispositions, tastes, concerns, vocations and avocations must endure, such is the nature of human individuality. Yet, as the union ripens, each finds there is affected a “ceaseless” consciousness of the other’s dispositions, tastes, concerns, vocation, and avocations. It might be said a good marriage is not so much a union of hearts and minds as the indwelling of one another’s hearts and minds; and the one who so dwells within is honoured and loved, or as prayer books would put it, “worshipped and adored”. There is an awareness of each other, be the other near or far. There is a congruence both overt and subliminal.[ix] There is a delight in each other. It is that path which weaves and meanders through inclination, fascination, fondness, love of certain qualities, love of being-with, toward that love that says: “I am for you”.
Such an unfolding communion with God is called prayer. They that have read Theresa of Avila or John of the Cross will comfortably see in the above the trace of their ventures with God, their journey in prayer. They that reach a certain certitude in that communication even refer to it as a marriage, a spiritual or mystical marriage. Ceaseless prayer is a state of abiding, dedicated and devoted communication with God. If one thinks of God as merely a projection of the depths of Self ever summoning to psychic maturation and wholeness, it matters not. If one believes that the Self is a spark of the all-transcending of the world, the “soul”, the ever-evoking image of God, or the grace of God illuminating and fortifying the depths of self, it matters not. The communion is a depth relationship with “an-other”, and the “mask”, the name, the icon, one places upon that other is ancillary and aliunde provided it is reverently and sincerely personalizing, acknowledging on some level the inherent personhood of both communicants. The communion, the uniting of heaven and earth, of self with depths of self, requires all the disciplines and dedication enunciated at the beginning of this series. The other of a communion is always the direction toward which one is oriented. It is here that is made, not ego, not psychic mask, but person. It is here one sees one’s soul, knows one’s soul. Thus, spiritual writers speak of God as the mirror of truth, as light. The other becomes the mirror before which, in which, one sees self, knows self. In prayer, it is the ground whereon one can come to have that confidence in the Other as to truly say: “Thy will be done”, for the mirror is known as not one who is good, trustworthy, and loving, but as the very surfeit of Goodness, Truth, and Love.
It is necessary to add to the above three caveats.
First, there is in Western spirituality the persistent and dangerous propensity to isolate God in heaven, to deny God access to and delight in his creation, to think of the God to whom we are oriented as simply Spirit, and thus unworldly. Christianity, in theory, but confessedly not in practice, has always maintained that God is worldly, that the world is the locus of his love, his action, his concern, the place he wills to be incarnate, not only in one man, but through the church, the “Body” of his Christ, in all, and that the world is the place he pours out his very creative and sanctifying Spirit that all may be enwrapped in his creative self-giving to the world as his other.[x]
Second, there is the ancillary propensity to deny the fullness of our worldly reality and to wrap oneself in endless self-examination, critique, and condemnation. Any state of authentic personal communication requires one be self-honest. Such demands one not only reflect upon, analyze, and acknowledge one’s failures, shortcomings, but the reality and full compass of self and of the world, the world of God’s making and command to love and saturate in godly care and creativity, in his Word and Spirit. The negativity that can too easily encrust self examination is simply hell by another name if it is not held in balance with one’s considered and enunciated human needs, desires, hopes, and, most importantly, its myriad, acknowledged and cherished blessings. Those personal items are very much, it needs be stressed, about ego if they are rift from the context of the God-beloved and blessed world in which they occur—the needs, desires, and hopes of men, the needs of creatures and the earth for which we are given to care, the needs and concerns of God who wills of all well-being, wholeness and fulfillment, or as biblical writers are wont to term it, “salvation”. Thus, the ceaseless prayer, the abiding communing with God is about not merely self, its paucity, but also its riches, its talents and graces, its blessings, and those of the world within which all that resides. Such prayer knows all facets of being human. It knows therein its grace, its God. It knows therein the mystery of being and the silence it evokes. It knows the silence of being-with, and it knows that silence both in its darkness and its comfort. It knows human words fail; and it knows, in the ripeness of that moment, the trusting silence wherein the Spirit is unboundedly free to speak. Any communicative state that is all about “me” and my wee world is not a coming into union, not communication, merely ego babbling before another reduced to being one’s audience. There exists in such no desire to be-with another, simply to fawn upon oneself—and that usually in droningly negative manner.[xi]
Third, religious language is a sacred tongue. It may, for the most part, sound like the tongue of ordinary everyday encounter and communication, but it is not. It is a ritual language. It speaks about those items that defy ordinary indication and definition—about soul, God, faith, hope, love, and their momentum on the most intimate and cosmic stages. There is in this statement neither inclination toward iconoclasm, nor disparagement of the images of things divine and holy conjured up by religious language. One cannot, however, catechize using these images as if they are the realities they denote. Once one is enfolded within the community of believers, one may then speak the language of these symbols without translation. Even then, however, to take them literally is idolatry. To give this sacred language to the un-initiated is sacrilege from the religious perspective and sheer absurdity from the pastoral. To pronounce in the confession “Almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Maker of all things, Judge of all men…” is neither to define God nor conjure a mental picture of he “that dwellest in light impenetrable”, of the absolute beyond all visage. It speaks about self, the placing of self before the Mystery within which and out of which all that is is. It acknowledges the unspoken and unspeakable consciousness of freedom and responsibility. It is an affidation of allegiance to the vision, to the spirit, of life that flows from the life of Jesus called Christ. It places the soul, the self, before God and confesses sin, faith, hope. It is ultimately an act of love. As is every prayer, it looks humbly for a better self, a better world. To “pray”, to invite, to request, someone past or present to join in such prayer is to tether the self to them. It acknowledges the terms past, present and future describe only one’s consciousness of a moment and not the nature of time, that all moments, good and ill, persist and we within them. It therein does not propose a theory of time-travel, simply that the sins of the past can be healed in the present, for it has confessed that the Saviour descended into hell, or as it is alternately read, “unto the dead”. It acknowledges that all are interwoven, a society, a community ever in progress. It acknowledges a communion of believers, and that “more things are wrought by prayer than this world knows”. It acknowledges that there is real power in focusing the heart and mind, and that openness and love are the root of creativity and creation, of life and its salvation.
The Sabbath Prayer
Ceaseless prayer, a state of speaking, sharing, listening cannot exist without moments of simply being with and being for, without faith and love. Sabbath rest imbues the Lord’s day with the Spirit, the Spirit that before the “new” creation, as at the first creation, hovers over the abyss, over the yet-to-be. There is a silence before the creativity of God allowing man to be the vessel of God, the one given rest, the pause, the sleep wherein God can dream the dream that stirs, inspires and therein sets the foundation of the under-standing of God and his purpose. Here resides the initiating moment of all theology, the base of all apostolic action.
The Lord’s day is about this world. Sabbath rest opens the path to it. It is God and man and world in pause to relish, to savour, to know in silence and depth of creation’s joy. Sabbath rest is rightly made the centre of the Lord’s day. It is the moment of pause wherein God acts, and because, as the Apostle Paul has marked, Christ is risen, acts under the sign of victory. Whatsoever be the formatting of celebration the church conjure, worthy liturgy, true liturgy, both inspires silence as much as worldly sociality.
To become the channel of divine action is not a passivity. We misread Paul, Augustine, Luther, and their confreres if we take it man has not part but to be passive to God. Passivity has a role. Silence has a role. They are prefatory to action, to being partaker with God in his action, to being his incarnate presence, sharing with Jesus in his Christhood, his sovereign willful action for the maturation of all his creation. Man is made in the image and likeness of God—free, creative, open to the new and never yet been. The image shines through, and where it is encumbered by masks of ego, self-care, self-glorification, the power of the Creator’s seed within (call it Self, soul or grace), will not cease its summons: “Be!”, will not disparage its evaluation of that which it has set in motion: “It is good!”. Communication, holy communion, is about a dialogue. It is union making. One can never look in only one direction if there is to be a true communion of hearts and minds. God may have been first to speak, but man was made to speak as well. God may have been first to act, but man is made to act as well.
Silence is not only the prefatory, it is the conclusive. It is the comfortable quiet that speaks the “Thy will be done”, for it is faith become knowing, trust become certainty, hope become reality. It is Word falling back into the silent Godhead. It is creativity fulfilled, satiate, accomplished. It is life at-one, at peace, at bliss-filled rest—ecstasy, being being out of its being. Such is not denial, denigration nor departure of this world, but a grasping of it in its fulness, its boundless font, its absolute immanence, its open-most futurity. “Heaven” is not about leaving this world but about being knowingly appreciative and thankful for the harmony of this world, this blessed now held between the sacredness within its past and spiritedness of its futurity, about that which the great symbol of trinity irradiates: God–the creating font, the incarnating word, the living spirit–One through all ages without end.
Postscript: In this final lecture on spirituality, it is patent that I have no answers. I have only to offer grounds for questions, openings for a quest. Indeed, there are no final answers to our spiritual quest, and were that not so, faith and hope would have no space in which to venture, love would be cozened of its creativity, and that Spirit driven Word of endless creativity we with John adore would have for us no more to say.
[i] In the gospel accounts of the passion and death of Jesus, the celebration of the Passover and the Sabbath are approximate, but there seems to be among biblical scholars no consensus on when this Passover begins in relation to the Sabbath. The church’s early preaching and the canonical gospels connect the symbols of the Passover with the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. From that, it may be assumed that Jesus was crucified during the time, the seven days, the Passover feast was being kept. In this matter, the narrative of the triumphant entrance into Jerusalem on “Palm Sunday” cannot be used as a basis for deciphering the questioned relationship between Passover and crucifixion as that narrative is undoubtedly a postdating of an event that could only have taken place in the autumnal celebration of Sukkoth. (Cf: on John, endnote vii, February 2016). Given the ambiguity of the four gospel texts, and the fact that gospel is theology and not history, it may be asked if the first day of Passover preceded or followed the crucifixion. Further, given the nature of gospel’s usage of Hebraic liturgical symbols and prophecy, it may legitimately be asked if this connection of symbols is the cause of the crucifixion and the Passover being conjoined in the church’s preaching. More simply put, is the connection of the crucifixion to the Passover simply symbolic, meant to reinforce the delivering (salvific) nature of Christ and his mission? If, as some scholars opine, the first preaching of the church, the first “Pentecost”, was removed from the crucifixion by, not fifty days, but by one or more years, would memory of a historical proximity of the two events be something commonly accessible or challengeable? These are, admittedly, arcane questions of academia.
The truth of Christianity is not dependent upon history, the historical continuity of events, or the historical verifiability of any event. The truth of Christianity is a revelation. That revelation can only be embraced by faith, trust. Like every revelation, it is not physical but psychical, spiritual, non-material. The embracing of it in faith or trust is a value judgement claiming “Here, in this valuation of reality, I set the surety, the foundation, the bedrock, of my life”. The value judgement becomes incarnate in living out life in accord with the value embraced as truth. The great revelation of Christianity is that the power that stands behind all that is can be embraced as an act of creative love, as according to scripture, parent, or as according to spirituality, lover, and that while it is beyond all, it is constitutive of all, incarnating, and is evocative of all potentiality, fore-giving reality in all its dimensions toward satiation and fulfillment. In traditional dogmatic terminology that reads: God is creator, incarnating redeemer, and the spirit that brings creation into its wholeness, into holiness. On this one dogma of a triunity of divine nature rests all Christian teaching and action.
It is the “myth” of Christianity that is true, because myth, as sacred narrative, as symbol story, alone can convey a truth about being’s profundity, its meaning-full-ness. There can be no scientific theory to spell out for us the meaning of life. There can be no mathematical formula for being human. The revelation, the vision, enunciated as ever it must be, in symbol, parable, story, in “mythic dress”, unveils for us the unspeakable, shines for us the light, shines within us the light and its power. The vision Christianity imparts is God as love, Christ as the temporal incarnation of that love to which all, partaking with Jesus, are summoned, and Spirit as an existentially graced openness to novelty and creativity that ever challenges, and guides to hear, listen, serve, and make of creation a holy communion of God and man and nature, a cosmos made one, a uni-verse redeemed, thankful, worshipful, and adoring. It is a sacred theory of time, of “salvation history”, a telling of Power as at once living all past, present, and future. Jesus may have been the historical inspiration for Christianity, but the truth of it resides in its proclamation that God has acted in and through him and wills in like manner to act in and through all men, in all times and places, that creation in its fulness be at-one (atoned).
[ii] Discipleship is adjuvant to being Christian. The Sacrament of Regeneration, of Baptism, does not make disciples, it creates Christians. If Resurrection and Pentecost are to have any practical, any realistic spiritual meaning, if they are to be something more than tales told, curiosities of cultural anthropology, then we must ask what is their true, their living meaning. Resurrection proclaims Jesus is fully alive in God. Pentecost affirms the Spirit, at once of Christ and of God, is implanted in the progeny of Jesus’ mission as Christ. To what end these things? Do they not say stop looking for Jesus, for what Jesus of two millennia ago, of a time and culture far away, would do? Do they not say stop looking to sacred writ for answers, for something more than inspiration? (Cf: on the use of scripture, January 2012). Do they not say the Spirit of Christ and of God dwells in the heart and soul and flesh of him who has, by grace, been plunged [baptized] into, not the imitation of Christ, but the very, the true and living identity of Christ, the office of Christ initiated in the words and actions of Jesus? Do they not say that Spirit lives there ceaselessly to effect the transformation and maturation of human into agent divine, into Christ-ian? Do they not say you are, by grace, by election, charged to be my presence in this world? Do they not say stop holding on within to that mask of the quotidian self with its pains and prejudices, to the cover of ritual and institution, and turn yourself around [repent], turn yourself outward, and be, Be! as I Am—free, creative, open to the not-yet, the never was, the ever new. That is not to claim self-examination, reflection, and discipline are unnecessary, merely that they are ancillary and preparatory to freedom, self-truth, transparency to self, to other, to ultimate Other. The church, the Body of Christ, is the sacred place and time, the station of that moment when the Holy presents itself evoking a personal revelation–a revelation of self. That revelation attests to the depth of divine love and care that patiently awaits the fullness of time, the moment of each man’s ripeness that opens one humbly to create, and to commit to the unfolding maturation and perfection of this world—in a divine partnership without end. (Cf: on Kenosis and Eschaton, April 2013).
Further to the issue annotated, while each is summoned to be Christ to one’s particular temporal encounters, the fullness of Christ-hood resides always as the universal church in union with Jesus as its Lord, as its true and living image of the eternal Godhead, a mystical communion, a communion of saints enduring through all times, all temporalities. Christ-hood is never a solitary event. It is the fundamental revelatory act of the sociality of God, the gracious sociality of God.
[iii] On St. George’s day past, a question was raised concerning the propriety of keeping the feast. George’s was one of several feasts removed from the universal calendar of the Roman church in the aftermath of Vatican II. Rome’s move did not sit lightly with Her Majesty. She was pointedly not amused that Rome saw fit to delete the patron saint of England from Catholic celebrations. Confessedly, Rome did allow for the feast of George and the other demoted to be kept in those places where devotion and custom mandated. Thus, the Roman church in England was, if it saw fit, free to keep the feast of St. George.
Before Rome took up the task of coordinating who could be named a saint, local custom sanctioned by the local bishop dictated to whom Christians might look as exemplars of Christly life, and as having indubitably by God been rewarded with celestial crown. Those who suffered martyrdom for the faith were automatically admitted to the rank. For others, a life of verifiable virtue and charity were expected; the attribution of a miracle or two was also helpful. George and several other saints seemed to have no verifiable biographical background to support their inclusion in the rarified realm. That they had an ancient cult in certain places was undeniable, but they lacked any viable evidence that they had actually existed. Their stories pointed more to myth and legend than anything concrete.
The question given, however, stood: “Do you think there really was a George, a soldier who slew a dragon and thereby rescued a captive maiden?” The response: “No”. Even though the Greeks, the English, and the Russians put great stock in St. George, one may doubt his humanity. One may not, however, doubt his significance, his “saintliness” or his great feat. George is, think I, one of those mythic heroes and gods whose sacredness to a certain culture was “baptized” by the early church, and the devotion given him incorporated into the spiritual embrace of Christendom. The name George comes to us from the Greek for farmer. I opined George was, akin to Ares and Mars, a divinity of the fields, who besides tending to the welfare of the fields, became also the defender of the same against foriegn encroachment. As did Ares and Mars, farmer George became a warrior, protector of fertility (the maiden) against even the fiercest of challenge (dragon). St. George may not reference an individual of history. The sacred narrative of George, however, presents a profound personification indicative of the sacredness of the earth that sustains us in its fecundity, and of the divinely mandated task that we tend to its well-being and protect it from harm. In this regard it is possible also to look upon the dragon as a type of serpent, and as with Vritra and Indra, Python and Apollo, a destroyer of life vanquished by the hero-god-saint. Admittedly, such is my un-researched conjecture, set here, as there, to stimulate reflection not only on George and his diminished confreres, but upon how the church in ancient times did kindly act to consecrate the world, and the pleasant and well-loved devotions of its peoples.
[iv] Beyond the primal feast of the Pasch with its deep Hebraic roots, virtually every other feast kept by the church is Roman or European (read: Pagan) in origin. Certainly, the most popular feast, Christmas, while looking to the gospels of Matthew and Luke, is the Roman feast of the “Unconquerable Sun”, the winter solstice, “baptized”, given a Christian vesture. The ancillary feasts of Annunciation, Circumcision, and Presentation are part of the Christmas cycle locked into it by calendar and Jewish rituals. However, all the trappings around Christmas and the Yuletide are rooted in European pre-Christian culture. It is Empire and Europe, not scripture, that give us the harvest festivals, Rogation and Ember days, the exequies for the dead, the ceremonials around marriage and ordination, and this truth was not lost to the sensitivities of the reformers, Calvin and the Puritans in particular, who deeply despaired of them all. The liturgical enunciations of these feasts may have attached to them readings from sacred writ, but that is merely a parcel to their being enwrapped into the fabric of the church’s proclamation. Christianity, like Judaism and every other religion known to man, endeared itself, made itself lovable, embraceable, by embracing digestible bits of the cult and culture into which it moved, into which it wished to be incarnated and encultured.
[v] Beginning in the baroque era, when the great orchestral and choral works for liturgies and devotions began to appear, many who were weaned on chant as the music of church objected that this new music was not authentically religious and thus, inappropriate.
[vi] Cf: on Being-church [an edited letter to a friend situated toward the beginning of this forum to stimulate reflection], January 2012.
[vii] Bread is bread, except when it is set aside in faith and hope as symbol for the exposition of the Holy. Then it is literally con-sacrated, made one with the Holy. Thus, at lunch bread is eaten; at Holy Communion bread is the icon of worship, the instrument of incorporation into fellowship with God and the community of all called into his new heaven and earth.
It is, likewise, one thing to kneel before Holy Scripture and receive it as the medium of prayer, the meditative passage-way into the silence of the inner chamber wherein one may hear the heart and mind of God, and it is another to approach these texts with the heart and mind of the academy. Too often academics or would-be academics forget this distinction. The academic, whether a person of faith or not, must address the text as that which within the academy it is–an entity of academic investigation–and thus, clinically. That which in one context is the medium of faith and prayer is here the object of study, the objectified. Being clinical and objective is not, however, antithetical to being reverent; it requires merely that the eye that reads be that of science, not faith. And it carries, likewise, that as one’s own sacred writings must be reverently approached even in the context of the clinic, so too must all sacred writings.
Scripture is a portal. As marked Jesus more than once before the Pharisees and scribes, it is not a text of pre-ordained answers or a history of the future. Where it in faith, hope, and honesty leads may well vary. The love of God and man is the truth of its verity, its sacredness, its inspired-ness, its God-spiritedness. In spiritual direction one may assign the same text to two different individuals to stir movement in two different directions, in the hope, the considered hope, the prophetic hope, that it will lead each to see the path that ought to be taken, his/her God-graced truth. The same is true of preaching. One verse may give rise to a great many sermons of differing scope. Scripture is not about history, past, present or future; it is about revelation and that which is revealed is twofold: the self in the light of God, and God in the light of his active, spirit-filled presence, his temporality—his Christ.
[viii] Cf: The Serpent and the Symbol, January 2016.
[ix] It is possible for two who work together to create something akin to this state of communication. They can come to know, appreciate, and anticipate each other. As such a relationship is usually bounded by the work shared rather than love’s personal commitment, such relationship usually begins and ends with and in the delimited arena of work. It is a synthetic communion. Admittedly, it may become open to becoming more.
[x] The synoptic gospels each contain a narrative of a “last supper” wherein Jesus takes bread and wine and uses them to ritualize the ultimate sharing and giving of his life for others. The Gospel according to John notably omits this eucharistic action. Before proceeding on this point, three facts need be kept in mind. First, gospels are not telling a history, merely on occasion utilizing something rooted in the historical to open life to a deeper sensitivity for its meaningfulness. The very term “gospel” means a proclamation of victory, and here the victory is of God through his Christ over all opposition to creation reaching its fullness, its “salvation”. Second, the Johannine text is the most symbol laden of the canonical gospels (Cf: on John, February 2016), and although it is the last of the canonical four to receive final form and admittance, it bears the most evidence as originating in the preaching of one intimately familiar with the land, the Hebrew religion and its rites, and with personal details. Third, this gospel shouts the divinity of Jesus in every possible way, at every possible turn, and with a force unthinkable to the earliest gospel, Mark’s.
When the synoptics and Paul speak of the eucharist, of “This is my life given…poured out”, they are muchly speaking of the sacrificial nature of the Christhood. Jesus as Christ, as vicarious victim, as sacrificing priest, has offered up his life for the sake of all. They understand the event on Calvary as an offering to God for the salvation of the world, that as in the slaughter of the Passover lamb and the signing with its blood, the new Israel is delivered from the angel of death, here of eternal death, that is, sin. The stress seems to be upon the act of Jesus, and resultant of this, many theologians throughout the ages have spun out eldritch ideas that man must pay God for sin, sacrifice for one’s sins, that the devil must be bought off that God may rescue man from his grasp. (Cf: on Sin, March 2013). The Johannine community, concluding its theological reflections fifty or more years after Paul, Mark, Matthew, and Luke, has here a more articulate understanding. The salvific action of both the eucharist and Calvary is God’s. It is God who is “poured out”. In all four canonical gospels, Jesus makes a loud cry and gives up his spirit. In the synoptic gospels, this marks the end, and everything moves toward the burial. In the Gospel according to John, it is not the end. John alone tells of the piercing of the side of Jesus, and of witnessing flowing therefrom both blood and water.* In Hebrew thought, and the Johannine text knows this better than even rabbinical Matthew, blood is life as life is spirit(ed). The piercing of the Messiah’s side after he has given up his spirit en-symbolizes that the core, the animation, the soul of Christhood is God himself, and it is here definitively given out for others, for all. While it is Jesus the Christ who dies upon the cross, it is God who from his heart is poured out upon the world. God, the inexhaustible one, the “one who cannot have a last breath”, cannot die, now totally gives of his self, not as creation (a passivity), not as Christ (an activity), but in his very essence, as “Life itself”, “in blood”, as Spirit. Having introduced the symbol of “the bread of life” at an early point in Jesus’ preaching, and having omitted the eucharistic words of institution in its recounting of the “last supper”, it places the pouring out of the life, of blood and water, “of Spirit”, as the very end of Jesus’ mission. Further, in John, his same Spirit is then given to the disciples the very day of the resurrection, and not as the others have it, at the ascension or on the day of the Pentecost. The Johannine text, thus, places the release of the Spirit of God upon the world as the final act of Jesus’ worldly existence, and the entrusting of that same Spirit to church as the first act of Jesus in the full glory of God, as risen and glorified Messiah. God has been en-fleshed in Jesus from the very beginning, has animated him, been his soul, his identity. In his death that divine soul, that Spirit, is released, and in his tangible, experiential, triumph over death, in the resurrection, it is entrusted into the church for the continuance of the divine plan of universal salvation. The Johannine text, ever fond of layering symbols and meanings, ever fond of sacramentalizing, couples the ideas of baptism (water) and eucharist (blood), as the two rites that release Spirit as church, that make church the living continuance of the God’s presence in and for the world.
* It was often debated as to how water could flow from the open wound, and many opined the text was simply creating a joint symbol of baptism and eucharist in part inspired by Ezekiel, chapter 47. However, there was last century an interesting notion set forth on the issue by Pierre Barbet, M.D. If, he conjectured, as would have been customary, Jesus was severely flogged before being crucified, the pericardium would probably be swollen. When it was pierced by the lance, its clear fluid, along with blood from the pierced heart would be visible, and because of differing viscosities, seen as flowing side by side.
[xi] One may disparage of them that seek to flee the world and its ways and find unity, peace, serenity, wisdom by some negation of the world accomplished in ascetical practices from fasting, abstinence, infliction of pain, ingestion of drugs, etc., but one must also be appreciative of the parameters of personal, social, and cultural expectation. Wholeness of person and authenticity of self within one’s world ought always to be the fruit whereby practice is judged. For anyone to claim there is but one discipline for all saps of hubris more than wisdom before a God, the power omnipotent, that spins out countless worlds and souls.