[Oe List ...] 11/12/2020, Progressing Spirit, Jennifer Wilson: Surrendering to the Will of Earth; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Nov 12 08:11:05 PST 2020
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Surrendering to the Will of Earth
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| Essay by Jennifer Wilson
November 12, 2020
I didn’t know what surrender really meant until I went through labor with my first child. I had always considered myself excellent at surrendering, interpreting the word in a passive way. To surrender meant not speaking my mind. It meant keeping quiet to keep the peace, letting injustice happen to me and around me, without complaint, lulled as I was into a comfortable “c’est la vie” spiritual bypass approach to life. I had confused the concept of surrender with a murky blend of ideas like serenity, tranquility, humility, passivity and nonviolence.
As I write this article, I am 39 weeks pregnant, two days away from my due date for my second son. The leaves are falling around me in the Appalachian Mountains and fires continue to burn near my childhood home in California. I cannot help but experience again the relationship between surrender, death, and birth, and the profound power of transformation that we see everywhere in the natural world.
On the eve of Jesus’s arrest, on the precipice of his crucifixion he visited the Garden of Gethsemane with his disciples. Intuiting what was in store for him, he went into prayer while Peter, James and Paul stood watch. Jesus prayed for three hours and in an ultimate, and beautiful moment of human expression, was succumbed by fear. Speaking to God, he said “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me.” He meant the cup of suffering, pain and death. He pleads for a moment to be spared, his fear and doubt overcoming him. But then, I like to imagine, he looks at the garden around him, glowing under the moonlight. He takes in the abundance of life, the beauty of the spring blossoms, and he sinks into a deeper place of communion with that ever present cosmic, life-giving energy. Finally, he says “Nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be done.”
Real surrender is anything but passive. I had a home birth for my first child. As I approached my due date that first time, people often asked me if I was nervous. I told them that I was only excited. After all, I believed in myself - that I would stay grounded and present through any kind of pain. I had a strong meditation practice, I was physically fit, I had a practice of jumping in ice cold water, swimming in the blustery Pacific Ocean, participating in consciousness-altering ceremonies, running half-marathons, practicing hot yoga and the list went on. I was confident that I was physically and mentally prepared for anything.
I wasn’t.
The twenty-hour excruciating labor shattered me. There was a record heat wave that year, the first year of the catastrophic fires in California, and the headlines of the newspapers on my son’s day of birth read “San Francisco Reaches 115 Degrees on the Hottest Day in Recorded History.” In most of my memories of that day I can see myself lying on our bed, looking down from somewhere above, which tells me that my consciousness flitted and hovered outside of my body for part or most of it. I remember visualizing thousands of generations of women standing behind me, supporting me and sometimes jeering at my apparent weakness. I remember feeling my midwife’s fingers trying to guide the direction of my pushing.
I pushed for three hours, I screamed, I vomited, I cried, I sweated, groaned, contorted my body and bled for three hours, thinking I was dying, and now I wonder if like Jesus in the garden, what I was actually doing was praying.
I remember utter blackness all around me, my face pressed into an abyss of mud and squirming things, darkness and heat, an all-consuming, frightening Kali of a presence telling me that there was no running away or hiding, transcending or bypassing. For a long time, I thought that voice was an inner demon, gloating at me. Now, three years later, on the threshold of another labor, I understand that that voice, that dark presence, was actually the Earth, teaching me how to surrender.
We are now, as a species, in the wildly terrifying threshold of the birth canal. The contractions have been building for countless generations, and we have not been able to see far beyond this fertile tunnel to the light just on the other side. The only true spiritual practice is the one that midwives this brutal transition, guiding our species into the new. I learned during my labor what I believe humanity needs to remember now: that in order to be a part of the birth of a new world, we must surrender, and even more importantly that surrender is a verb. It is not a passive state.
The origins of the word surrender come from the French roots for “to give back,” and “over.” And that is exactly what surrender is. It is not laying down our arms, it is not choosing peace over justice, it is not breathing deeply and meditating our way out of our pain. True surrender speaks to our relationship with our common mother, the Earth. It means to give back to her, over and over again, above and beyond what we think we are capable of giving.
This is also the lesson of the Fall, and the fires, and the breakdown of the world we are witnessing in a million ways every day from the pandemic that continues to spread like wildfire, to one of the most polarizing presidential elections to date, to the ever-present threat of a dying planet, crucified by its own children.
I look now at the orange and yellow leaves on the trees outside my window and am reminded that when the time for rebirth comes, something changes in the very nature of things, seen and unseen. The leaves begin to lose their chlorophyll and turn from green to red, the fetus sends out a hormone to its mother’s uterus that initiates contractions, a microscopic atom is dispelled from a bat’s tongue and floats gently through the air, landing on a human lip, the tiniest spark of light is caught on a wind and expands through the air to become a massive fire. These changes can be beautiful like the rich autumn foliage of the season, painful like a contracting uterus, hot and fast like an uncontainable wildfire.
Out of the compost of the fallen leaves will grow new saplings and mushrooms. Out of the birth canal will come a beautiful child telling a new story. Out of the ashes will emerge a new forest. Out of the surrendered body of a man, a new way of living and loving will spread. The trees, the laboring mother, the fire, the martyr, they give themselves back over to the Earth, and from them the Earth births something new.
There are many ways one can interpret the significance of Jesus’s moment of doubt and fear, and his ultimate surrender to God, happening in the Garden of Gethsemane. One of the most profound to me is that in that garden olives were pressed into oil. To make oil from olives, the olives must be crushed under extreme pressure until a blood-red juice runs from their bodies. When this fluid hits the oxygen in the air an alchemical process occurs, and it transforms into the fresh light green color we associate with the most delicate olive oil. We use this oil to create food that nourishes our bodies, and to anoint other beings, honoring the sacred within them.
The most beautiful irony is that immediately after Jesus surrendered to the will of the divine, “then appeared an angel unto him, strengthening him.” The giving of himself did not weaken him, but bolstered him, and as we know of the rest of the story, ultimately led to his metaphoric rebirth, and also to the birth of a new philosophy with new ways of being human. New opportunities sprang forth, opening the possibility for a civilization rooted in love.
This is the type of surrender all mystic warriors are being called to experience at this transformational time on our planet. The kind that crushes us, that makes us bleed, that brings us to our threshold and dares us to step beyond. This is what true surrender looks like - when we give ourselves to the Earth so that these parts of ourselves can be made by her into the material of new creations.
When friends have asked me during this pregnancy if I am nervous for the labor again, I tell them the truth. I am terrified. I want to beg anyone willing to listen “please take this cup away from me.” I am terrified because I know that I will meet the edge of my abyss again. I know that my ego will be shattered, again. I know that I will experience pain unlike anything I can describe with words, and I know that the only way through the process is to, well, go through it, giving myself away to the cosmos, letting myself, as my husband loves to say, be eaten by the Gods. To become something more. This is what I have learned about surrender: we must be willing to turn back to the Earth and scream from the depths of our bellies “Dear mother, not our wills, but yours be done,” and then to prepare the way for what will be born.
~ Jennifer Wilson
Read online here
About the Author
Jennifer Wilson is the co-author of Order of the Sacred Earth: An Intergenerational Vision of Love and Action and works in book publishing as a private consultant for authors assisting with manuscript editing and book publicity. She is also the co-director of Wild Awakenings, an adult Rites of Passage organization dedicated to fostering the thriving of Earth, life, and humanity. Jennifer was on the Board of Trustees at the Unity in Marin Spiritual Community for three years, serving as the Board President for 18 months. Also at Unity in Marin, Jennifer was a guest speaker for Sunday mornings, she led Rites of Passage groups for teenagers, and founded a young adult interfaith group committed to conscious connection, community service, and social activism. She is a passionate hiker, reader, writer, and public speaker.
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Question & Answer
Q: By Jackson
“I stopped going to church because it just seems to be the same thing all the time. Same sermons, same actions, same results. I'm not sure we were actually changing anything. We helped the poor, but they always came back still needing help. Why don't churches do more to change things?”
A: By Rev. Mark Sandlin
Dear Jackson,
Unfortunately, most spiritual communities have become much better and much more comfortable at giving people a hand out than giving them a hand up.
Put simply, we prefer the self-serving feelings of charity to the self-sacrificing realities of justice.
We feed a person for a day, we turn their power back on for now, we give them shelter for a night, and that’s a good thing, but we fall miserably short of challenging and changing the systems that will have those same people starving in a week, sitting in the dark next month, sleeping in the streets all too soon.
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 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.
But here's the thing, Jesus 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.
The thing I am sure of is that charity is love for the moment and justice is love extended into the future.
Or as Dr. King once said, “Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.”
Don't get me wrong, 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. We must stand in the footsteps of the likes of Dr. King, Dorothea Day and Gandhi for without justice, charity falls short.
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
The Origins of the New Testament, Part XVI:
The Elder Paul — Philemon and Philippians
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
February 25, 2010
The process of aging works wonders on the human spirit. Battles once so emotional that they seemed to pit life against death lose their rancor in time, and the differences that once divided people so deeply lose their potency. Age brings both mellowing and perspective. That was surely true of Paul. In this series I have tried to read Paul chronologically — that is, in the order of his writings. It is an inexact science, but I am comfortable with the order we have adopted. In that way we can see the changes taking place before our eyes. In I Thessalonians, written about the year 51 and thus Paul’s first epistle, he was concerned about the fact that the second coming of Christ had not yet arrived. Why, they wondered, had Jesus not returned by now to inaugurate the desired kingdom of God on earth? Paul tries anxiously to explain the delay. In Galatians, his second epistle, we see the white hot anger that separated Paul from those he called “the Judaizers,” who are symbolized in Galatians by James, the Lord’s brother, and by Peter, both of whom were demanding that all converts keep the Torah and only be allowed to come into Christianity by way of Judaism. Paul, deeply touched by what he came to call “grace,” would never submit to this legalistic point of view from which he had fled, namely that salvation came through one’s deeds, one’s obedience to the Torah.
The Paul of the middle years of his career was thoughtful, systematic and good at problem solving. In this phase of his life, he penned his letters to the Corinthians and his masterpiece, his epistle to the Romans. In the Corinthian letters, he was majestic in spelling out the meaning of love: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal” and also in that epistle he wrote the fullest understanding of Jesus’ resurrection that we possess. In Romans he comes as close as he ever would to systematizing the meaning of Christ in beautiful words that ring across the ages like “Nothing can separate me from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus.”
The years rolled on for Paul, however, as they do for all of us and he grew mellow. He was no longer convinced that Jesus would come again in his lifetime, so he settled into long range plans and even began to contemplate his own death. In this phase of his life, which is true for most of us, he lived more in the “now” and less in the future and so relationships grew in importance for him. It was at this stage of his life that he wrote the two epistles that we consider today, Philemon and Philippians, both of which reflect the more contemplative Paul. With the completion of our consideration of Philemon and Philippians, we will have probed the seven epistles about which there is no debate as to their being the authentic work of Paul. Next we will look at those epistles that have much Pauline substance, but increasingly scholars suggest they are “pseudo-Paul,” that is,written in Paul’s name but not by Paul himself. They are II Thessalonians, Colossians, and Ephesians. There are other epistles that bear the name of Paul, namely I and II Timothy and Titus, that are in a third category. Universally they are regarded as not authentic and they are actually dated later than some of the gospels, so we will look at them later. If we are trying to study the New Testament in the time sequence in which its various books are written, we will have to place Mark and perhaps Matthew ahead of these “Pastoral Epistles.” For now, however, we focus on Philemon and Philippians, the epistles of the elder Paul. Both are written, according to majority opinion but certainly not the unanimous opinion of the reputable scholars, while he was imprisoned in Rome only a couple of years before his martyrdom.
Philemon is fascinating in that one wonders why it was preserved at all, and why it was placed in the collection of Paul’s letters that circulated among the churches before the first gospel was written. It is so different in essential ways from every other epistle. Philemon is a personal letter of his, less than one page in length. It is addressed to an individual, not to the church community. It has to do with a request made by Paul to have a runaway slave named Onesimus, who has become Paul’s valued companion and primary caregiver, be set free so he can once again be in Paul’s service. Paul makes this request even as Onesimus is being returned to his master because, in the culture of that day, it was the right thing to do. Paul hopes that by obeying the law, his request to allow Onesimus to come back to him will be granted. Paul tells his friend Philemon, to whom he writes this letter, of Onesimus’ conversion and of his indispensable faithfulness in Paul’s service. Paul wants Onesimus pardoned so that he can freely come back to be Paul’s assistant. It is hardly the kind of letter that would rank inclusion in a group of epistles written to various churches that also included the carefully reasoned argument of the Epistle to the Romans. Yet here it is.
John Knox, a top-tier 20th century Pauline scholar, offers a fascinating explanation as to why it was included. Basing his argument on an epistle written by one of the church “fathers,” Ignatius, in the early years of the second century that indicates that a man named Onesimus had become the Bishop of Ephesus after Paul’s death, Knox suggests that this was the same Onesimus about whom Paul was concerned in the Epistle to Philemon. The reason it might have been added to this collection of Paul’s letters, says Knox, is that it contained significant material that was important to the church in Ephesus, which scholars now believe was to have been the destination of this first collection of Paul’s epistles. It is an interesting speculation and worthy of being passed on, so long as it is clear that it is a speculation. There seems to be no other plausible argument as to why this private and very short letter became treasured church property.
When we move on to Philippians, we come to the most affectionate letter Paul ever wrote and also to the picture of a Paul who knows that his life is nearing its end. The Philippian congregation clearly cares for Paul emotionally and Paul clearly cares for them. He writes them as “saints” for whom he gives thanks “upon every remembrance” of them. Philippi was the first city in Europe that Paul had visited and where his first European church had been planted. The Philippians had sent him gifts in prison and they were clearly worried about both his safety and his personal well being. Paul’s agenda in this letter is to thank them and comfort them about his situation. He fears he may never see them again. He promises to send Timothy to assure them of his well being. He fills the epistle with words of joy, hope and consolation. He no longer expects the return of Christ in his lifetime and so he wrestles with his own death, which he assumes to be imminent. He wonders out loud whether it is better to depart this life to be with Christ or to persevere for the sake of his churches. He suggests that when one stands at last in the presence of Christ, this earthly life will be seen as being of no great value. “To live is Christ, to die is gain” is his conclusion. There is a deep-seated contentment in Paul that finds expression in this epistle. “I have learned,” he says, “to be content in whatever state I find myself.” I can do all things, he assures his readers, through Christ who strengthens me. In his conclusion, he does not go into a long ethical treatise as he does in so many of his earlier epistles, where he moves from spelling out his understanding of Christ to drawing from that the implications for those who seek to live out the Christ life. In Philippians, his ethical teaching is one verse (4:8) “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”
The most memorable passage in Philippians and one of the most mysterious and oft-quoted of all Paul’s work is found in 2:5-11. It is called the “self-emptying” passage. My sense is that in these words there is a powerful affirmation that for Paul, all that we mean by God has been experienced in Christ, but when these words were translated into English, they reflected the ancient battles in which the church sought to determine how it was that Jesus could have been both human and divine. I do not think that the Jewish Paul ever thought in those categories. The way it is read today is that Christ did not grasp after the divinity that was his, but rather emptied himself, taking the form of a servant and he was, therefore, exalted by God to the status for which he was qualified. So Paul then draws his conclusion by stating that “At the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow.” Many scholars believe that Paul is quoting in these “self-emptying” verses an early Christian hymn. That may be so but I believe it also reflects Paul’s vision of Jesus as “The New Adam.” The first Adam did grasp after the dignity of God. The serpent’s temptation in the Garden of Eden story was that if Adam would but eat the forbidden fruit, “you will be like God.” The people in the Philippi church had tensions in their lives over how to worship, what to believe and how to act. Each side in each debate claimed superiority. Paul urges them to let the mind of Christ be their mind. Then he explained that Christ did not grasp after a superior status but emptied himself. It was in the fullness of his humanity that he found the freedom to give his life to others and that was how God was seen in him.
The ultimate purpose of human life is to love the face of hatred, to forgive the face of pain, to live in the face of death. In doing those things one must be free of the need of self exaltation. That is what it means to reveal the divine in the human. It was this concept that convinced Paul that the God presence has been experienced in Jesus. The pathway into divinity is through humanity. The pathway into eternity is through time. This is the closing theme in what we now believe was the final authentic letter of the Apostle Paul.
~ John Shelby Spong
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