[Oe List ...] 1/31/19, Progressing Spirit: Syrdal: Wild Christ, Wild Earth, Wild Self: Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Jan 31 04:27:23 PST 2019
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!important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv9560659431 #yiv9560659431templateBody .yiv9560659431mcnTextContent, #yiv9560659431 #yiv9560659431templateBody .yiv9560659431mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv9560659431 #yiv9560659431templateFooter .yiv9560659431mcnTextContent, #yiv9560659431 #yiv9560659431templateFooter .yiv9560659431mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } The evolutionary goal of both the universe and humanity are inextricably bound together
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Wild Christ, Wild Earth, Wild Self
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| Essay by Guest Author Rev. Matthew Syrdal
January 31, 2019
“But now I see you: wind, woods and water/roaring
at the rim of Christendom.” – Rainer Maria Rilke
Rilke poetically gives voice to a longing and lament, a sense of both awe and terror I want to explore for a moment. What we perceive as this seismic collapse of Christendom, our fractured institutional ways of self-organizing in Western culture — and perhaps even ecological disaster — is in some ways a necessary part of the comprehensive change of consciousness that is upon us. Many mainline church Pastors that I have spoken with or coached have experienced burn-out and disillusionment — an ominous foreboding, that like Lewis and Clark, we don’t have the necessary equipment for this next stage of the journey.
The truth is, our problem has never been a lack of ‘knowledge’ as such, rather we have become dissociated in our human experience from the natural world. We lack a more intimate, experiential knowledge of Self, God and the World that is at the same time participatory, unified with the cosmos, and wildly alive. I am speaking of a somatic, intuitive and imaginal relationship with landscapes, seasons and deeper Earth processes themselves. What I am advocating for in this article is a perceptual shift, in our human modalities of relating to a living universe which is itself rooted in the Mystery and of Mystery — a wild discipleship, an apprenticeship. “To say that the root of every person and creature is in God, rather than opposed to God,” Newell confesses, “has enormous implications for how we view ourselves, including our deepest physical, sexual, and emotional energies” (J.P. Newell, Christ of the Celts: The Healing of Creation, 13).
When Carl Jung said we are living ‘between myths’, he meant we are living in an age severed from a storied relationship with a Sacred world, in particular the more-than-human world of rivers and canyons, coyotes and birdsong, fungi and old-growth forests. Thomas Berry wrote, in The Great Work, "The universe was the world of meaning… the basic referent in social order, in economic survival, in the healing of illness… The drum, heartbeat of the universe itself, established the rhythm of dance, whereby humans entered into the entrancing movement of the natural world… That the human had such intimate rapport with the surrounding universe was possible only because the universe itself had a prior intimate rapport with the human as the maternal source from whence humans come into being and are sustained in existence… we, the peoples of the industrialized world, no longer live in a universe.” (Italics mine. The Great Work, 14) In Biblical terms, what we need are new wineskins.
What has been missing from the traditional Christian sense of the imago Dei is what Berry termed the inscendent dimension of what theologians have termed divine perichoresis, or ‘sacred dance’ — the depth dimension of what Bill Plotkin calls the realm of soul. One might say that soul is not our ‘essential center’ or even animating principle as such, but rather our unique psycho-ecological purpose and place in the world. Soul’s purpose is much deeper than role, or religious vocation. The soul speaks in revelatory vision. It awakens us to a numinous world only discovered through the pan-human journey of psychospiritual descent. The apostle Paul captures this intertwining arc of destiny: “For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed… in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time” (Romans 8:19-23).
Paul is not just speaking of the creation metaphorically as our mother. Rather he is offering a profound insight that is both mystical and ordinary. It is an insight of cosmic intimacy – in a very real sense we are engaged in a courtship with the world in which we participate, a courtship expressed through the deep perceptions and movements of the soul. This includes a recovery of the divine feminine including the erotic energies which celebrate full bodied life to the fullest of all creatures and bioranges, By virtue of our creaturely humanity, and our capacities of soul, the depths of our inner nature is rooted in a greater conversation with the whole realm of nature itself. (Syrdal, The Indigenous Christ).
It is as if the universe itself longs for our awakening. Perhaps this is the dreamworld meaning of Jesus’ parable, the Pearl of Great Price. Ancients across all cultures have attempted to explain this mystery. For the Aborigines it is The Dreaming, for the Greeks, the Anima Mundi. For Christians this dynamic depth dimension of the universe, the imago Dei, in which humans participate in a unique way became lost in translation.
What I submit, is that the evolutionary goal of both the universe and humanity are inextricably bound together, and in order to discover our planetary role and calling we must reconnect to the deep wisdom of nature, an experience of the Indigenous Christ.
It’s true, the word indigenous refers to something growing, living or occurring naturally in a particular region or or ecosystem. Indigenous originates from the latin indu meaning “within” and gignere meaning “to beget.” In other words, something is indigenous when it is born from within. This definition applies to that which is human in origin, or aboriginal, and of natural origin in the cosmos itself, with the implication that it has not been introduced from somewhere else.
The mystical creation poetry of John chapter 1 speaks of this primordial begetting from within, “The true light that enlightens everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him…” (John 1:9-11)
This means that incarnation is native to the human species — but we have forgotten, we fail to “recognize” — an undercurrent theme of the gospels. The Self, which is much larger than our conscious life, is rooted in the soil of a deeper memory and grounded in the imagination of the world itself.
The miracle and mystery of being human is that we are actually incarnated beings, we are native to the cosmos, indigenous to the Earth — we belong. Original Belonging and Exile are twin themes that are patterned into the myth of the Garden, the most ancient stratum of Hebrew experience (and any indigenous people who are displaced from their land). David Abram writes “The Jewish sense of exile was never merely a state of separation from a specific locale, from a particular ground; it was (and is) also a sense of separation from the very possibility of being placed, from the very possibility of being entirely at home.” (David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 196)
There is a part of each of us that re-members a preverbal and instinctual relationship to the world and all things wild. That childhood (or child-like) part of us is originally animistic, it remembers when we experienced the world innocently as alive and pregnant with diverse meanings. This element and energy of ‘wildness,’ of which animals and children are an expression, participates in a small but integral way in the cosmogenesis of the universe itself. Through our full human participation in the wild world — we are an expression of that original ‘wildness’. Wildness is at the sacred root of all being, it is the human and more-than-human diversity of life in its own unique, authentic, spontaneous, and instinctive creative expression and energy that enables all creatures to find food and shelter, to give birth, to sing and dance. These meaning are not assigned to the natural world or projected onto it by humans. The world in actuality participates in its own a priori meaning by virtue of the universe’s capacity for self-differentiation, communion, and self-organizing autonomy (Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story).
This wild, indigenous aspect or dimension of the world in each of us, through the Self, I believe is our way back to becoming fully human again in a world that has gone mad with self-absorption and greed. This wild, indigenous one remembers of how to fully belong to the world, in a way that is life enhancing — that we might participate in the healing of the world. In memory of a poet and earth elder who has shaped so many lives — including my own — Mary Oliver, I ask, “What will you do with your one, wild, and precious life?”
~ Rev. Matthew Syrdal
Read online here
About the Author
Reverend Matthew Syrdal M.Div, lives in the front range of Colorado with his beautiful family. Matt is an ordained pastor in the Presbyterian church (USA), founder and lead guide of WilderSoul and Church of Lost Walls and co-founder of Seminary of the Wild. Matt speaks at conferences and guides immersive nature-based experiences around the country. In his years of studying ancient Christian Rites of Initiation, world religions, anthropology, rites-of-passage and eco- psychology Matt seeks to re-wild what it means to be human. His work weaves in myth and ceremony in nature as a way for people to enter into conversation with the storied world in which they are a part. Matt’s passion is guiding others in the discovery of “treasure hidden in the field” of their deepest lives cultivating deep wholeness and re-enchantment of the natural world to apprentice fully and dangerously to the kingdom of god. Matt has been coaching, and guiding since becoming a certified Wild Mind nature-based human development guide through the Animas Valley Institute and is currently training to become a soul initiation guide through the SAIP program.
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Question & Answer
Q: By Pat
One suspects that some institutional churches are still AFRAID if reality demands that scriptures are not to be taken literally. Why?
A: By Rev. Mark Sandlin
Dear Pat,
Put simply, we prefer the self-serving feelings of charity to the self-sacrificing realities of justice.
Charity does help those in need, but only temporarily. Who it helps the most is those of us who have a need to help, who feel it is our calling to aid those in need. Charity lets us feel like we are doing something to respond to need in a world that is overwhelmed with people in need. There’s really no risk in it and people are usually very supportive of such efforts.
Justice, on the other hand, is hard. It frequently requires a great deal of sacrifice and you probably aren’t going to get a lot of people cheering you along the way. Probably quite the opposite. So, most spiritual communities simply don’t do it.
Justice looks like words of love put into action. Justice looks like activism and spiritual communities tend to shy away from that. Justice requires you to not make nice with abusive systems. It requires you to rock the boat a bit and to take a stand on issues that are frequently political hot buttons. For too many churches, that sounds very… well, un-Church like. Too many of us think being “church” means being liked and all that standing up for something means standing against something and we just don’t like the thought of people not liking us because of it.
After all, why risk having our friends think we are being “too political” or have them think we aren’t a nice, polite, docile reflection of Jesus? Why? Because Jesus was not nice and docile – at least not the way people have come to think of him.
He not only confronted systems of injustice, but he tried to teach us to do the same. He did it standing in the tradition of great prophets of Judaism who never failed to stand up against abuse of power. They risked everything. They frequently were run out of town or put to death for it.
Maybe that’s what we’re afraid of – the proverbial crosses we’d have to bear. I’m not sure.
I certainly don’t think it’s because we’d rather see ‘the least of these’ carry the overwhelming burdens of a society structured to benefit the wealthy, than to be thought of as anything less than “nice.”
Maybe we just haven’t thought it through enough. Maybe we just need new leaders to stand up and say “philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary,” with the passion and prophetic voice that Dr. King once did.
Then again, maybe WE are the new leaders. It is time for us to reclaim the place of prophetic voice in the midst of our struggling society. As the wealthiest of folk step on and abuse the poorest in our nation by co-opting our government (supposedly “for, of, and by the people”) through the voice and influence of the almighty dollar, we must reclaim our prophetic voice.
We must not stop doing the necessary and much needed work of charity, but we also must not stop there. We must push on, risking ourselves, risking ridicule, risking our places of privilege, and reclaim the biblical and prophetic voice of justice.
Because, you see, charity and justice? They are a matched set. It is time to let justice roll.
~ Rev. Mark Sandlin
Read and share online here
About the Author
Rev. Mark Sandlin is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) from the South. He currently serves at Presbyterian Church of the Covenant. He is a co-founder of The Christian Left. His blog, has been named as one of the “Top Ten Christian Blogs.” Mark received The Associated Church Press' Award of Excellence in 2012. His work has been published on "The Huffington Post," "Sojourners," "Time," "Church World Services," and even the "Richard Dawkins Foundation." He's been featured on PBS's "Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly" and NPR's "The Story with Dick Gordon.” Follow Mark on Facebook and Twitter @marksandlin
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
Miracles VI: Bartimaeus and the
Healing of the Man Born Blind
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong on December 6, 2006
In this continuing examination of the miracle stories found in the gospels, I turn this week to the second “sight to the blind” narrative in Mark (10: 46-52), the story of blind Bartimaeus. Then I will look briefly at the only Johannine account of a miraculous restoration of sight (John 9: 1-41). We will, I hope, begin to see that while there are six ‘sight to the blind’ stories in the gospels, four of them look like little more than a retelling of one of Mark’s two episodes.
Matthew gives us two versions of the blind Bartimaeus story (9: 27-32 and 20: 29-34) and Luke gives us one (18:35-43). John’s single restoration of sight narrative, even though he uses elaborate language and enfolds his story inside the interpretive web of Johannine theology, is still nothing but a retelling of Mark’s first story of the blind man from Bethsaida. So the first thing a modern expositor of the gospels needs to embrace is that there appear to be only two original traditions behind these six presumed to be miraculous accounts. As I tried to show in the previous column on this subject, Mark’s first story about the blind man from Bethsaida is filled with hints that it is not a miracle story at all, but is rather a parable about Peter who, like the hero of this story, was also remembered as a blind man from Bethsaida who came to his ability to see only slowly by degrees. Today, I will look at all of the biblical versions of Mark’s second story about blind Bartimaeus, and then to complete this analysis of sight restoration miracles in the gospels, I will look at John’s single story, to demonstrate that it too is not a new episode but just another version of Mark’s account of the man from Bethsaida.
In Mark’s gospel, the story of the healing of blind Bartimaeus is set in Jericho just before the Palm Sunday procession sweeps down into Jerusalem. That proximity is important to embrace since the healing of Bartimaeus seems to feed directly into the Palm Sunday events. The first thing about this story that we need to note is that this blind man’s name is peculiar. Mark calls him “Bartimaeus, the son of Timaeus.” When that name is read by those who understand Hebrew, its strangeness becomes obvious. In the Hebrew language “bar” means son; so Bar-timaeus literally means ‘son of Timaeus.’
This means that Mark’s phrase, “Bartimaeus the son of Timaeus” is an odd redundancy. This man is described as sitting at the side of the road begging, when he learns that Jesus of Nazareth is passing by. Emboldened, presumably by Jesus’ reputation as a healer, this blind man calls out to Jesus, using one of the popular messianic titles, “Son of David.” The idea that the messiah had to be the son of David, and thus the legitimate heir of David’s throne, had been a growing part of the Jewish expectations for some time. That theme would later inspire the genealogies of Matthew (1:1-16) and Luke (3:23-38), both of which were written to assert that Jesus was in the direct line of succession to the throne of King David. This “Son of David” designation also inspired what is surely the legendary tale of Jesus’ Bethlehem birthplace since that was the city of David and the messiah’s destiny as the “Son of David” seemed to imply that he had to be born in David’s place of birth. This idea entered the Jewish expectations in the words of Micah (5:4) in the eighth century BCE. Matthew quotes Micah to explain why Jesus had to be born in Bethlehem. Luke also alludes to Micah when he has the angels sing: “Unto you is born this day, in the city of David, a savior who is Christ the Lord.” The association of Jesus with King David is a theme that will gain much favor. This information alone ought to alert readers that perhaps this story is not a simple miracle story that has to be understood supernaturally. This story is in the service of the messianic claim that Jesus fulfills the expectation of being the heir to David’s throne.
In Mark’s Bartimaeus story, we are told that when this blind man hears the procession moving toward Jerusalem and learns that it includes Jesus of Nazareth, he is encouraged to cry out. Perhaps we can assume that he has heard tales of healing power attributed to Jesus. We noted in the previous column on this subject that Isaiah had said that when the Kingdom of God dawns, it will be marked by the ability of the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the lame to walk and the dumb to speak. This means that if Jesus was to be the messiah, healing power must be said to have marked his life.
So this blind man, using a messianic title, cries out to Jesus as the “Son of David.” Mark tells us that those with Jesus rebuke him, ordering him to be silent. That too is a familiar gospel theme, suggesting that the in breaking Kingdom can actually be kept under wraps, if people try hard enough to suppress it. His disciples had also rebuked the children who sought to come to Jesus. In Luke’s version of Palm Sunday (19:28-48), the Pharisees ask Jesus to rebuke his disciples, who were saying of him, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” In that story, Jesus responded by saying that the Kingdom of God cannot be suppressed and that if the voices of the crowd were silenced, “the stones would immediately cry out.”
Sensing that their rebuke of the blind man was not shared by Jesus, the people informed Bartimaeus that Jesus was asking for him. Mark records that the blind man threw off his cloak and with great exuberance, sprang to his feet and came to Jesus. “What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus asked. “My teacher, let me see again.” The blind man responded. To which Jesus simply affirmed that the request was granted, “Your faith has made you well,” Jesus said. The text then says, “Immediately he gained his sight and followed him on the way.” Since the next episode is the Palm Sunday Procession, presumably the blind man was part of the parade. A contrast is clearly being painted in the entire passion narrative between the blind who know they do not see and yearn to have sight and the blind who do not know that they do not see and who, therefore, do not seek sight. The blindness in this story may then not be physical blindness at all. Mark has already described Jesus as speaking to those who have “eyes to see but see not and ears to hear but hear not.” (8:18). To see the meaning of Jesus, one appears to need more than simple physical sight, perhaps this is a reference to insight, second sight or the ability to see underneath the obvious. The story of Bartimaeus is filled with this kind of meaning.
The differences found in the versions in both Matthew and Luke also provide data that suggest that later generations tended to literalize into supernatural tales what were originally interpretative signs. Matthew, first of all, is clearly confused by the duplication of the names, “Bartimaeus, son of Timaeus.” He deals with this confusion by omitting the names altogether and assuming that there are two people not one in this episode. Other than this change, he is fairly faithful to the Marcan original.
Luke reverts to Mark’s single blind man but he too deals with the confusion of Mark’s peculiar naming by omitting the name altogether, then he follows the story line faithfully. In Matthew’s earlier version of this same story (9:27-31), Matthew still has two blind men who use the title, “Son of David.” Jesus touches their eyes, gives them sight immediately and enjoins silence upon them. One wonders why Matthew essentially tells this same story twice. One note that might cast light on this debate comes with the realization that the Matthean version of blind Bartimaeus comes in his text long after Jesus tells John the Baptist that he should look at the messianic signs of wholeness that gather around him to answer his query about who Jesus is. Perhaps Matthew needed to include a sight to the blind story before that claim by Jesus made sense, so he related one version of this story before his messianic claim was made to John the Baptist and the second afterward.
Everywhere one turns in the several versions of this story, they all appear to have been originally messianic interpretative narratives, which were slowly turned into being healing miracles.
When we turn to the Johannine story, it is also clearly a sign of the messiahship of Jesus. The single blind man is described as having been blind from birth. The theological interpretation of that tragedy is debated. “Who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?” Neither, Jesus says. He was born blind so that God could be manifested in him. Jesus next claims to be the “Light of the world” who enables all to see. Then spitting on the ground to make clay Jesus anoints the blind man’s eyes. Once again the healing was not instantaneous. He had to go and wash in the pool of Siloam first. Only then does he see. Then he becomes the subject of a great debate. People wonder how his eyes were opened.
For one to see things that others do not see in the world of darkness is threatening to the religious establishment so they excommunicate him from the synagogue. Since this man’s sight did not come through the established religious authority, it has to be evil. That was the conclusion of the “blind” ecclesiastical hierarchy. The story concludes with Jesus asking the now-seeing man, “Do you believe in the Son of God?” The man responds, “Who is it Lord that I might believe?” Jesus then overtly makes the divine claim for himself and the man worships him. John concludes this narrative with the words that seem to make it clear that this is not a supernatural miracle at all; it was about the people’s ability to see light in the world’s darkness; truth in the world’s distortion of truth: “I came so that those who see not might see and those who see might be made blind.”
When the texts of the gospels are looked at deeply enough, they do not appear to be supernatural tales that defy the laws of the universe at all. Rather they are interpretative signs by which people processed the Christ experience. Thus, to read the miracle stories of the gospels as supernatural events is not only wrong, it is actually a distortion of the original intention of the gospel writers. It is a pity that literalists do not understand this.
Our study of miracles will continue in the weeks ahead. So stay tuned.
~ John Shelby Spong
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