[Oe List ...] 5/05/2022, Progressing Spirit: Rev Matthew Syrdal: Be Opened: A Post-Easter Reflection; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu May 5 05:40:07 PDT 2022
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Be Opened: A Post-Easter Reflection
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| Essay by Rev. Matthew Syrdal, M.Div.
May 5, 2022
That day I saw beneath dark clouds
the passing of light over the water
and I heard the voice of the world speak out.
I knew then as I had before
life is no passing memory of what has been,
nor the remaining pages in a great book waiting to be read.
It is the opening of eyes long closed.
It is the vision of far off things
seen for the silence they hold.
It is the heart after years
of secret conversing
speaking out loud in the clear air. I walked out of our church in ritual silence with the procession at twilight and was met—stunned—by the radiant face of the nearly full moon. I started to weep. Especially tired this particular Maundy Thursday, I was hit by the welling up of unprocessed emotion from a particularly hard year. So I paused, bathed in her luminescence and tuned into my body just long enough to fully open my senses, to fully feel the underlying emotions, and notice any memories or images arising in the moment. I sensed something more was shifting and moving underneath my ordinary awareness.There is something about the darkness. In a daylight culture that presses everything into commodified solar units of value, womb-time is much needed. Our minds and bodies crave dark-space to slow down into the deeper rhythm of the night, to sink down into a kind of womblike formlessness. At night we are quickly transported into a quiet storytelling spaciousness and a simpler ease together.Since I was a child I have been drawn to mystery, impelled time and again, back and forth, across the limen between my childhood home and the forest behind my home, between my structured world of school and family and the deep world of imagination, mystery, and symbol. I grew up with direct access to undeveloped woodlands behind my home. These woods were my portal to immediate and animate imagination—an ongoing conversation with tiny and unseen beings both hidden and revealed in the interplay of light and shadow cast down from the canopy. Every moment was revelatory—life bursting into billions of tiny worlds within worlds. I still don’t know exactly why I cried. But I am trying to pay attention. It is something about the moon. The Easter feast follows the moon-path, a thread connecting the old pre-Christian nature-based traditions with the resurrection of Christ. The Paschal full moon, the first full moon appearing on or after the Spring Equinox has, from ancient times, been used to calculate the approximate date of Easter. Easter, of course comes from the word Eostre, assumed to be an old Germanic goddess of the dawn who was also connected with the moon and celebrated at Spring Equinox. Jacob Grimm, of the Brothers Grimm, wrote about these older ‘pagan’ elements that were woven into the great Christian festivals. Maidens clothed in white would ceremonially celebrate the returning spring at Eastertide. At dawn, during the setting of the full moon and the rising of the sun, they would appear in the clefts of rocks and on mountains, suggestive of this ancient goddess.Before the mid-third century CE, churches in Rome and Alexandria calculated this appearance of the paschal full moon to determine their own dates of Easter Sunday, to distinguish from the Jewish calendars which sometimes placed the preparation for the Passover before the spring equinox. As the moon in her cycle crosses over from total darkness into the full radiance of light, so we in the church witness and celebrate this deep and universal wisdom of the pascha, the cosmic crossing-over from darkness into light, death into life, unconsciousness into consciousness, by which many pre-Christian cultures have oriented their lives ritually in diverse ways since the dawn of humanity.Perhaps this is why I wept. The moon reflects the light, the presence, of that which remains unseen in the darkness of the night. She holds the memory of all we have lost, the divinity we no longer recognize in the world. But it is possible, if resurrection is an “opening,” that nothing is ever truly lost, only hidden in the darkness, where it sheds old forms only to return to us something new.“When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him (knew him); and he vanished from their sight.” - Luke 24:30-31The Emmaus story is one of my favorites because it speaks in the semantic of lunar consciousness. It holds all the complex tensions of doubt and faith, the opposites and paradoxes we can’t resolve within our typical solar framework. We all need access to this untended incognito realm of deep psycho-spiritual processes, symbol and archetype in order to illuminate the mythic terrain that Jesus lived—that lived through him—the kingdom of heaven.This “opening of the eyes long closed” motif appears first in Genesis, chapter three and again in the stories of Jesus healing the blind. Now, at table with the incognito Christ, this “opening” points to an activation of resurrection energy now being transmitted to and through the disciples. It is a kind of experiential and initiated knowledge that opens new apertures of possibility and awareness in ourselves, in our understanding of the divine and the world itself.I am reminded of an interesting essay by Walter Wink called “Easter: What Happened to Jesus?” where he writes that “it is a prejudice of modern thought that events happen only in the outer world. Resurrection and ascension are not just historical, but archetypal, meaning that they are objective events that also take place in the deepest substratum of human existence where the most fundamental changes in consciousness take place.”Perhaps it is enough to wonder. Can this image of the “opening of the eyes” offer a different paradigm for resurrection today? A softer, deeper, more inclusive, generative and poetic paradigm for our age, one that can both address and resist our dominant cultural images, even resurrection images of lifting up and raising away from Earth, of victory over enemies reinforcing our denial of death rather than an embracing of death as an integral part of life. Unfortunately, these masculine-adolescent-hero-archetypes have gotten us into the most of the trouble we find ourselves in today.In my view it is not religion itself that is the problem. It is the fact that all these great unconscious forces and archetypal energies are no longer contained in our religious structures. As Barbara Hannah says, “they have come loose from their moorings” and have been marauding through society in acts of violence, ignorance, hatred, and greed with a sort of religious zeal.It strikes me that spiritual communities today can serve as a kind of liminal container, to hold space for our “eyes to open” collectively to new possibilities of faith. When our institutions no longer fulfill this deep need, people are searching for spaces to hold them as they deconstruct, unravel, traveling without a map between who they were and who they are becoming. Intentionally held and guided space for people to show up disoriented, grieving, hurting, longing. We need to explore the nature of the symbolic life and the power of ritual and ceremony for enacting healing and wholeness on the imaginal plane and in the lived community. The breath and body, touch and symbol, words and imagination become activated in healing community.Jesus looked up to the sky and with a loud sigh he groaned, “Ephphatha," that is, “Be opened!” - Mark 7:34
~ Rev. Matthew Syrdal, M.Div.
Read online here
About the Author
Matthew Syrdal M.Div., is a pastor in the Denver area, visionary and founder of Church of Lost Walls, a Denver-based wild church and co-founder of Seminary of the Wild, an eco-spiritual training program for leaders on the edge of spirituality and ecology. Matt has begun a new venture seeding an online project called Mythic Christ, developing a mystery school for awakening mythic imagination and ritual embodiment, and is launching a new podcast coming in September of 2022. Matt speaks at conferences and guides immersive nature-based experiences around the country. Matt has a mentoring and coaching practice as a certified Wild Mind nature-based human development guide through the Animas Valley Institute. His work weaves in myth, archetype, dreams, deep imagery 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. |
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Question & Answer
Q: By Hal
As one who understands the place of The "Big Bang" in evolutionary theory, I'd like to ponder the thought of whether God preceded or followed the "Big Bang? Which likely came first and created the other? Could it not be that God and the spiritual world developed as some part of the evolution of life itself?
A: By Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox
Dear Hal,Thank you for your provocative question. I think it is a real plus that we are again asking questions about the universe. (And not just about our egos, “I think and therefore I am.”) As Howard Thurman says, “Contemplation concerning origins is a part of the curiosity of the race.”
The fact that you and I and many others today are curious about cosmology is important. “Awe begins with wisdom,” says Rabbi Heschel, and he defines awe as “the human mind confronting the universe.” It is time for our species to move on from our narcissism (Pope Francis’s apt word) to fit again into the universe (and therefore the earth because “ecology is functional cosmology” as Tom Berry insists). Thereby do we recover a sense of the sacred as Berry insists.
And Teilhard de Chardin warned us, “because it is not exalted by a sufficiently passionate admiration of the universe, our religion is becoming enfeebled.”
Aquinas insists, “we do not know what God is. Only what God is not.” This path of the apophatic Divinity that “has no name and will never be given a name” (Meister Eckhart) recognizes Divinity as mystery behind the mysteries of the Universe.
It is surely time for deconstructing our God-talk (Eckhart: “I pray God to rid me of God”) and reconstructing it. I was deeply struck several years ago to read in Aquinas that “every being is a name for God and no being is a name for God.” Brian Swimme, the cosmologist, told me it “took the top of his head off” just to hear that.
Based on that invitation from Aquinas, I wrote a short book on Naming the Unnameable: 89 Wonderful and Useful Names for God…Including the Unnameable God and drew from scientists and others. Included were names like Life, Flow, Mind of the Universe (Erich Jantsch), Planetary Mind, Justice, Compassion, Energy, Joy, Love, Wisdom, Mother, the Black Madonna, Consciousness, and much more. In my first book, written 51 years ago, I defined prayer as a “radical response to Life.” Life still works for me as an understanding of Divinity and it opens the door to both our deep response of Yes (which, as William James says, is our mystical faculty) and our No (which is our prophetic calling). Aquinas: “God is Life, per se Life.” Christ: “I have come that you may have life and life in abundance.”
I think there is a danger in the West, especially for those out of touch with the mystical tradition and the apophatic tradition, to overly personalize Divinity whereas sometimes the East under personalized Divinity. I think a dance between the impersonal and personal is advisable.
To me Divinity as consciousness works and seeing the universe as an extension of the divine consciousness holds considerable appeal. I am more at home with Consciousness birthing the “big bang” (which was in fact a big silence) than following on it.
I think it is significant too that even Genesis 1, when it says, “let there be light,” is NOT talking about the sun. The sun came later in that creation story as it does in our current scientific creation story. Much later. So there is light without the sun--many kinds of light. Might it include radiation and the fireball and even the light of consciousness? ~ Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox
Read and share online here
About the Author
Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox holds a doctorate in spirituality from the Institut Catholique de Paris and has authored 40 books on spirituality and contemporary culture that have been translated into 78 languages. Fox has devoted 45 years to developing and teaching the tradition of Creation Spirituality and in doing so has reinvented forms of education and worship (called The Cosmic Mass). His work is inclusive of today’s science and world spiritual traditions and has awakened millions to the much neglected earth-based mystical tradition of the West. He has helped to rediscover Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Aquinas. Among his books are A Way To God: Thomas Merton's Creation Spirituality Journey; Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior For Our Times; Hildegard of Bingen: A Saint for Our Times; Order of the Sacred Earth; The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard Times; and Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic – And Beyond; Original Blessing; The Coming of the Cosmic Christ; Stations of the Cosmic Christ; A Spirituality Named Compassion. To encourage a passionate response to the news of climate change advancing so rapidly, Fox started DailyMeditationswithMatthewFox.org |
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
"Think Different-Accept Uncertainty" Part XI:
Beginning a Probe of the Miracles Attributed to Jesus
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
June 7, 2012Deconstruction is always easier to do than reconstruction, but it is not nearly so important. It is never enough to say who or what Christ is not, but we must move on to say who or what Christ is. The task is complicated, however, by the very fact that the Jesus story, as related in the gospels, has been literalized for so long that breaking through the literal window to establish some new possibilities is quite difficult. This is especially true when we realize that the old mindset, no matter how dated or nonsensical it is, is nonetheless reasserted in the hymns we sing, in the prayers we pray in our liturgies and in the sermons we hear in church every Sunday. All of these activities assume a pre-modern frame of reference that most educated men and women today simply can no longer affirm. So I have to approach this task piecemeal, week by week, in order to lay the groundwork for a radically different perspective. There is no silver bullet of understanding that can be fired to create in us this new point of view. So, today I will begin a unit in the series “Think Different-Accept Uncertainty” that will look at the miracle stories in the gospel narratives. Did the miracles really happen? If they did, do they still happen? If they did once, but no longer happen why did they cease? As one person tried to explain, “Perhaps ‘the age of miracles’ is over.” To which I need to respond, “Perhaps there never was an ‘age of miracles’ and the things we once called miracles are now understood in a very different way.” Those are the possibilities.I begin this unit by probing the level of reality that still remains among my readers in regard to the miracles recorded in the New Testament. I ask each of you to do a test just with yourself, aimed at discovering whether or not you really believe that miracles can or did happen?Here are the questions:
- Can a star really wander through the sky so slowly that wise men can keep up with it?
- Can that star really stop in its journey, first over the palace of King Herod for the wise men to get additional directions and then over the house in Bethlehem where the baby Jesus lives with his mother?
- Can a virgin conceive?
- Are there really angels that can break through the midnight sky to sing, presumably in Aramaic, the only language that the shepherds understood, about the birth of Jesus? Could these angels really send these shepherds in search of this child, armed with only two clues: he would be “wrapped in swaddling clothes” and he would be “lying in a manger?”
- Do you think that anyone can literally walk on water?
- Do you believe that anyone can feed a multitude of 5,000 men, plus women and children, with five loaves and two fish?
- Can one curse a fig tree and cause that tree to wither down to its roots and die?
- Can one still a storm by speaking to it and commanding it to cease its fury?
- Can one raise from the dead a man named Lazarus, who has not only been dead for four days, but who has also already been buried?
- Can a blind man be made to see by the laying on of hands or the anointing of the eyes with clay? Why did this procedure not work in one gospel episode until there were two applications? Is it any harder to bring sight to a blind man if he was born blind?
- Can the mentally ill or those suffering from epilepsy be cured by casting out the demons that cause them to be other than “normal”?
- Can the mute be enabled to hear and to speak if the healer can only get Satan to stop binding the tongue of the victim?
- Can a withered hand be restored to fullness of operation or a man crippled for 38 years be enabled to walk by another’s command?
- Can water be turned into wine to keep a wedding party going? Why was it necessary, as the Bible states, to create on that occasion 150 gallons of wine?
All of these are questions that arise from actual stories that are included in the gospels and all of them are attributed to Jesus. Did any of them literally happen?If you are convinced that all of them happened, can you explain how those feats were accomplished? If they did not literally happen, what does that do to our understanding of Jesus? Is the concept of God as an invasive, supernatural force necessary to the maintenance and certainty of the Christian story?Does Christianity really live or die, as many claim, on the one supreme, supernatural event that all the gospels record as the climax of their narratives, namely, that a man dead from sundown on Friday, is restored to physical life by Sunday morning in such a way that he could walk out of his tomb and invite his followers to handle his flesh and even to finger his wounds?Many people cannot imagine Christianity surviving without these things being literally true. Many other people cannot imagine any of these things ever being literally true. That is the dilemma facing Christianity today. Believers become more and more literal and fundamentalist, while those who cannot and do not believe any of these things can find no place in the life of the church for them and have no desire to continue as part of a worshiping community that pretends that these things really happened. So how can we understand miracles and how can we understand the role they played in the original telling the Christian story? That will be our task in this series over the next few weeks.First, some biblical observations. There is no unanimity in the New Testament about most of these miracle accounts. For example, there are only two miraculous events that all four gospels record. Gospel unanimity exists only on the resurrection of Jesus and the expansion of the loaves and fishes to feed the multitude. Yet when one looks at the texts of each of the gospels the details surrounding both of these narratives vary enormously.In regard to the resurrection, Mark, the earliest gospel to be written, has a messenger instruct the women at the tomb to tell the disciples that the risen Christ will meet them in Galilee. None of the women ever sees Jesus in this first gospel and Mark records no account of Jesus ever meeting with the disciples in Galilee. So in Mark no one ever actually sees the risen Christ. In Matthew the women are said to have seen the risen Christ quite literally in the garden on Easter morning and the disciples, or at least eleven of them, were said to have seen him on a mountain top in Galilee. In Luke the women do not see him at the tomb on Easter morning and no disciple ever sees him in Galilee. Then Luke says that two disciples, but not members of the twelve, see him in Emmaus, but he disappears into thin air. Later the twelve do see but only in Jerusalem. When we turn to John we read that Mary Magdalene alone sees the risen Christ at dawn on the first Easter and then the disciples, minus Judas and Thomas, see him in the upper room in Jerusalem at the time of the evening meal. In both instances, this gospel tells us that they conversed with him. A week later, John writes that the disciples see him again this time with Thomas. Finally, months later, John says seven of the disciples see him in Galilee, but not on top of a mountain as Matthew claimed, but beside the Sea of Galilee. There is no consistency in the details of these sightings.In regard to the stories of the miraculous feeding of the multitude, Mark and Matthew give us two versions. The first one has 5,000 people fed with five loaves and two fish, the second has 4,000 people fed with seven loaves and a few fish. Each feeding takes place on a different side of the lake. Luke and John reduce the feedings to one. There is, thus, no gospel unanimity in this episode either. Then to complicate the picture still further, Luke alone has Jesus raise a widow’s only son from the dead. John alone has Jesus turn water into wine. The witness of the gospels to the reality of miracles is thus far more confused and ambivalent than most Christians realize and more than most of them can believe when it is spelled out for them.We add to that complex analysis the fact that as far as we are able to discover or to read no miracle was ever associated with Jesus before the 8th decade when Mark’s gospel came to be written in the early seventies. Paul, who wrote between 51 and 64, never mentions a miracle in association with Jesus. The Q document and the Gospel of Thomas, which some, but not all, scholars believe might be pre-Marcan sources, do not mention a miracle being associated with Jesus. The Virgin Birth does not enter the Christian tradition until the 9th decade of the Christian era or some 55-60 years after his death. The physical resuscitation of the deceased body of Jesus as the way resurrection is to be understood does not enter the tradition until the 10th decade or some 60-70 years after his crucifixion. These are the factual data about the miracles of the New Testament. It is not the stable picture that believers claim and that skeptics reject. It is also not a simple study. This is enough, however, to raise the subject to our consciousness, to allow it to play upon our minds and our imaginations, to stimulate our interest. I also hope it is enough to bring you back to this column in succeeding weeks when we begin to unravel this material. So stay tuned! Same time, same place!~ John Shelby Spong |
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