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!important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv7316013581 #yiv7316013581templateBody .yiv7316013581mcnTextContent, #yiv7316013581 #yiv7316013581templateBody .yiv7316013581mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv7316013581 #yiv7316013581templateFooter .yiv7316013581mcnTextContent, #yiv7316013581 #yiv7316013581templateFooter .yiv7316013581mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } A Wisdom text has the capacity to foster the soul’s growth or unfolding.
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Liturgy As Corporate Spiritual Practice
Of Embodiment: Part II
Column by Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D.
January 10, 2019I ended my last column with these words: With the universal human desire to be a human being of Being as our starting place, the question I raised in “Terrifying and Terrible Texts” remains the plumb line: is a particular formal liturgical text a Wisdom text (be it a eucharistic prayer, a collect, or a hymn)? A Wisdom text has the capacity to foster the soul’s growth or unfolding, helping her to realize that she is an utterly unique expression of Being that is present as boundless love.A Wisdom Liturgical Year Informed and Transformed by BeingLet us now see how this reformed vision of liturgy as spiritual practice of embodiment can transform the Christian liturgical year of corporate worship. In my next column I’ll complete this exploration with a look at some examples of eucharistic prayers of presence from liturgical texts I have written.Liturgy needs to be reformed by being informed and transformed by the human desire to become an embodiment of Being here and now. As we look at the conventional church liturgical year, which begins with Advent and closes with the Season after Pentecost, not only is nostalgia problematic. The seasons and their prayers orient the soul to an external Savior, rather than an experiential discovery of the healing presence of ever-present Being. When Being becomes the leaven transforming the liturgical year, we can discover new, meaningful, dimensions, in the unfolding pattern of gathering for spiritual practice. Here is one possibility for reimagining the Christian liturgical year, which builds upon the basic human experience of realizing that Being is the very leaven of human experience calling forth our unfoldment into living Christs.
- Birthing of New Life
At the heart of the liturgical triptych of Advent/Christmas/Epiphany is the mystery of birthing new life. The spiritual path is integrally a journey in and through birth and death and birth. John’s gospel, as well as that of Thomas, captures this exquisitely. The birthing process invites us to discover the value of vulnerability and the centrality of trust. We are swallowed by life and then emerge once again, as the story of Jonah depicts so well.
- Awake, O Sleeper
And yet we fall asleep, spending most of our lives operating unconsciously. The spiritual path requires that we wake-up from our mechanical repetitiveness; wake-up from our survival driven panic; wake-up from our fear clutched hearts and practice living lives with open hearts, open minds, and open bodies. Ash Wednesday is a reminder that our body, not our being, is from dust and returns to dust. There is no curse here, no judgment. Rather, here is an opportunity to acknowledge that embodied life is short beyond belief; time is precious. The present moment is a gift inviting us to become aware beings.
- Transfiguration/Transformation
In Eastern Christianity, transfiguration is a mystery central to spiritual practice. To become embodiments of Being means to become translucent, no longer cut-off from our unconscious and no longer dulled to the passion of our deepest longings. Lent is not about self-mortification or denial; it is a time to enter the desert, which means the willingness to reexplore those attachments that derail our soul’s growth, driving us through life without awareness of our true motivations. We feel and explore our soul’s hunger, our egoic drivenness, and our personality’s fear of being alone. The desert is our soul facing itself without distraction discovering that her true nature is Being, with the inherent capacity to live life with authentic joy.
- Reign of Wisdom
Rather than being a quaint party with vegetation, Palm Sunday confronts us with the truth that the Christ movement is a counter-festival, which means it is a liturgy that draws us to critique the dominant hierarchy in society and church, and bids us to live lives in which the Wisdom Way embodied in the life of Rabbi Jesus captures our hearts. We rediscover the courage of being the holy fool who serves.
- Sent to Serve
Here we reconceive the conventional “Great Three Days.” Spiritual practice as a life of service is restored to the integral heart of the Christian spiritual path. But this is a sense of service that flows freely from boundless love; the human heart becomes free from being driven by guilt or shame or requirement. Instead of washing and anointing feet, which bears little meaning in this culture, we can wash and anoint hands for service, as we roll up our sleeves and get to work in a broken world.
- Companionship & Cross: Mary Magdalene and Rabbi Jesus
Fidelity and friendship are discovered and celebrated anew as the core dimensions of the story of the Cross. Good Friday is not a tale of abandonment, but of the capacity of human beings to remain faithful companions in face of tremendous loss. The spiritual path is not easy and, in the end, requires all that we are. Mary and the other women embody the virtue of constancy with Jesus up to, into, and thru his death.
- Light Renews our Life
Being itself is the light that is luminescent in darkness as well as daylight; it is Being, manifested so resplendent in Rabbi Jesus and his companions, that renews our spiritual lives. Even more, in Easter we glimpse the deep truth that non-Being, or emptiness, is the actually timeless source of Being. The emptiness of death is the womb of life. This means that not even death can terminate the unfolding mystery of Being that is you and me.
- Love Through and Through
Spiritual practice becomes our way, our rhythm, of life. Realization is asked to mature into actualization, which means practicing embodiment becomes our very way of living in this world. We awake not to flee this world, but to become full participants without being held captive. This is what it means to be quickened in the Spirit, and to be in this beautiful yet broken world, but not of it. Boundless Love is never captive. Authentic human embodiment is characterized by Love through and Through. The Season after Pentecost is thus a discovery of Boundless Love as the fabric of existence permeating all experience; which is why the emptiness of the grave is not terminalIn my next column I will offer some explicit examples of such prayers of presence from liturgical texts I have written that follow a Wisdom-based liturgical year. Although my focus will be eucharistic texts, the goal is to create collects, eucharistic prayers, and hymns that embody and express with clarity and simplicity and beauty, this fundamental truth: we are to realize ourselves as embodiments of Being.~ Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D.Click here to read online and to share your thoughts
About the Author
Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D. is an Episcopal priest, a student of the Diamond Approach for over a decade, as well as a certified teacher of the Enneagram in the Narrative Tradition. He is the founder of the Healing Arts Center of St. Paul’s Church in Marquette, Michigan, and the author of five books, including “I Have Called You Friends“, “Holding Beauty in My Soul’s Arms“, and “My Heart is a Raging Volcano of Love for You” and “Beyond my Wants, Beyond my Fears: The Soul’s Journey into the Heartland“. Visit Kevin’s Blog: Essential Living: For The Soul’s Journey |
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Question & Answer
Q: By Charles
Pelagius’ view of Original Sin and his conflict with Augustine might be something one of our gifted writers would write about. The ninth Article of the Anglican 39 Articles don’t look very favorably on him and his followers.
A: By Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox
Dear Charles,
Thank you for your question. I too have felt that Pelagius (born 354) has gotten something of a bad rap over the centuries. Like most so-called heretics much of the dust-up between him and Jerome and Augustine was deeply enmeshed in the politics of the time. Saint Augustine was very much a son of the Roman Empire which was in its last gasp of decadence in the early fifth century. Much pessimism and negativism pervaded the Mediterranean mindset at that period. Pelagius on the other hand, derived from the Gallic or Celtic lands either Briton or Ireland) outside the empire. His worldview was essentially earth-based and more like the tribal world that Jesus derived from in Palestine than it was from an Empire soon to be baptized Christian (so-called). He fiercely opposed Manicheism and the dualisms it was based on.Augustine was imbued with dualisms thanks to his immersions in Manicheism and in Neo-Platonism—it was he who said “man but not woman is made in the image and likeness of God” and “spirit is whatever is not matter.” He separated nature from grace and developed the ideology of original sin that identified original sin with our sexuality. Pelagius would have none of that and he emphasized human choice over human inheritance. Reinhold Niebuhr has remarked that Augustinian-based Christianity over emphasized the grace of pardon at the expense of the grace of power and Biblical scholar Krister Stendahl says that Augustine’s preoccupation with an “Am I saved?” concern is neurotic and not Biblical at all. Meister Eckhart, himself deeply imbued with a Celtic consciousness, heals the nature/grace rift this way. “Nature is grace” he writes.Unfortunately, the Western Church has followed Augustine’s dualistic consciousness far more than it has the Celtic awareness—but remember that Augustine’s worldview that triumphed prevailed in a context of building a Christian empire. A nature-based consciousness does not lend itself well to empire-building; dualism does. Not only Pelagius and Meister Eckhart but also John Scotus Eriugena (who translated many of the Greek Orthodox theologians into Latin) and Hildegard of Bingen (raised in a Celtic monastery along the Rhine), Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, Mechtild of Magdeburg, Julian of Norwich and Nicolas of Cusa also followed the Cosmic Christ in opposition to the anthropocentric (and narcissistic) preoccupations of Augustine. The Eastern Church rejected Augustine and rehabilitated Pelagius after his condemnation in the West.Pelagius visited Rome, Sicily, Carthage and Jerusalem where he met Jerome and the two clashed deeply. Jerome, who violently opposed the Jovinianists, accused Pelagius of being of that school of thought—Jovinian claimed that marriage was as holy a state as celibacy (marriage was not declared a sacrament until the twelfth century and then it was a very controversial opinion which, by the way, Hildegard endorsed). Jerome also was scandalized that Pelagius had many friendships with “mere women” and complained about the “Amazons who attach themselves” to Pelagius. (Celtic women can be strong women and clearly neither Jerome nor Augustine were at home with such.)Like Eckhart and Blake, Pelagius talks of redemption as reminding—Eckhart called Christ “the great Reminder.” Sin is primarily our forgetting our way and our origins as images of God. “If you wish to measure the goodness of human nature, look to its author,” Pelagius wrote in a letter. With this awareness of our blessed origins (original blessing?), comes responsibility however for we can all fall into forgetfulness which can even build as a nefarious habit. So said Pelagius.*
~ Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox
Click here to read and share online
About the Author
Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox holds a doctorate in spirituality from the Institut Catholique de Paris and has authored 35 books on spirituality and contemporary culture that have been translated into 71 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. 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. Recent books include The Lotus & The Rose: Conversations on Tibetan Buddhism and Mystical Christianity with Lama Tsomo; Naming the Unnameable: 89 Wonderful and Useful Names for God...Including the God Without a Name; new paperback version of Stations of the Cosmic Christ with Bishop Marc Andrus. A Special Eckhart@Erfurt workshop in June, 2019.
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* I highly recommend the following article by Mary Aileen Schmiel, “The Finest Music in the World: Exploring Celtic Spiritual Legacies,” in Matthew Fox, ed., Western Spirituality: Historical Roots, Ecumenical Routes (Santa Fe, NM: Bear & Co., 1981), 164-192. |
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
Miracles IV - Interpreting the Healing Miracles
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong on November 8, 2006
When we begin to dissect the miracle stories of the gospels, it is easy to notice some fascinating connections. The nature miracles, for example, are clearly the retelling or reworking of earlier biblical stories about Moses or Elijah. One can see the similarities between Moses asking God to feed the multitude in the wilderness with heavenly bread and Jesus feeding the multitude in the wilderness with five ever-expanding loaves.
The story of Jesus walking on water has its ultimate root in the story of Moses splitting the Red Sea. That feat was then celebrated in the psalms and prophets in such words as God is able to make “a pathway in the deep” and God’s “footprints can be seen on the water.” When those words are then applied to Jesus in the gospels they represent a God claim far more than they are a story of the supernatural.
When we come, however, to the narratives in the gospels that portray the power of Jesus to bring healing to the people, the problems get more intense and the debate becomes more emotional. Miraculous healings by Jesus have been associated with his divine nature for so long that many feel that to question the literal accuracy of these stories is to attack the very essence of the Jesus story, which portrays him as a God-presence. If God can do miraculous healings, the argument goes, could not Jesus, as part of who God is, do the same? It is an interesting thesis and demands a careful and considered approach to the definition of both God and Jesus.
I begin this discussion by noting that we have no record of Jesus doing supernatural acts of healing until the gospel writing tradition begins around 70 C.E. That means that we know nothing of this miraculous tradition until at least 40 years, or two full generations, after the earthly life of Jesus had come to an end. There are some biblical scholars who date what is called the Q material, which appears in Matthew and Luke, and the recently discovered Gospel of Thomas as earlier than any of the written gospels. Whether those claims can be sustained or not is still hotly debated in New Testament circles and I personally tend to doubt them, but the fact remains that neither of these two sources contains a description of a miracle story or a healing episode. There are also no accounts of Jesus doing miracles in the writing of Paul (50-64 C.E.). Certainly no one can suggest that this fact diminishes Paul’s view of the divine Christ, since Paul has one of the highest Christologies in the entire New Testament. So the door is pushed ajar just a fraction to the possibility that the narration of the supernatural healing miracles might have a purpose other than that of being descriptions of events that actually occurred. I ask you to hold these possibilities in your minds for just a moment while we proceed to uncover some biblical data and to assess some biblical facts that might put new light on this subject.
There is a fascinating narrative told us only in Matthew and Luke, which may offer us a clue as to how miracle stories came into the Christian tradition. These two gospel writers take a story from Mark describing how John the Baptist was imprisoned and executed and expand it.
In their expansion John in prison sends a messenger to Jesus asking the messianic question: “Are you the one who is to come or must we look for another?” It is a question that could not have arisen until the debate
about whether or not Jesus was the anticipated messiah began to be engaged, which surely occurred well after his death. The way Jesus was made to respond to John’s question is also noteworthy. He did not say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ He said, rather, “go back and tell John what you see and hear, the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk and the mute sing.” No miraculous tales were included in the narrative, but Jesus was portrayed as claiming that these signs have gathered around him. What was that answer all about? What did it mean? What was Jesus being portrayed as trying to convey?
Only those who are deeply familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures would have any clue as to the context out of which Jesus was speaking. He was referring to the 35th chapter of Isaiah, written in the late years of the 8th century B.C.E. The historical situation was that the Northern Kingdom of Israel had fallen to the Assyrians. Its citizens had been carried off into captivity, where they became the “Ten Lost Tribes of Israel,” disappearing into the DNA of the Middle East. The Southern Kingdom of Judah would, in that same critical moment of history, accept vassalage to the Assyrians and pay tribute in exchange for tiny vestiges of freedom. It was a bleak time in Jewish history and that bleakness gave rise to intensified messianic hopes.
The Jews began to dream about the coming of the Kingdom of God. In time tales about the one who would usher in that kingdom would be added to that dream. This figure was called by a variety of names: ‘the anointed one’ (maschiach in Hebrew, messiah in English), ‘Son of Man,’ the ‘new Moses,’ the ‘new Elijah’ and even the ‘Son of God.’ When Isaiah wrote he went on to depict the signs that would accompany the dawning of this Kingdom of God. The pain of the world, he said, would be transformed, wholeness would replace brokenness and perfection would overcome imperfection. What Isaiah was really doing was to create a new image of the Garden of Eden into which all people would be invited to enter. He described this vision in these words:
“The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad; the desert shall rejoice and blossom like the crocus. It shall bloom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing. The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it. The majesty of Carmel and Sharon, they shall see the Glory of the Lord, and the majesty of our God” (Isa. 35:1-2).
How would people know that the Kingdom of God had broken into human history? Isaiah answered that question with what he called the signs of the Kingdom: “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then shall the lame man leap like a hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing for joy, and a highway shall be there and it shall be called the Holy Way. And the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing, with everlasting joy upon their heads. They shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away” (Is. 35: 5, 6, 8a, 10, 11).
Jesus in his answer to John the Baptist was portrayed as making the claim that in his life Isaiah’s signs of this in-breaking Kingdom were present. Go tell John what you see: the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk and the mute sing. When the Kingdom comes, the gospel writers were saying, all of those things that represent the reign of God must become visible. So, when people ascribed messianic claims to Jesus, they also had to attribute messianic acts to his presence. That is how and why, I believe, the tradition developed in which healing miracles were attributed to Jesus. It was not that these things actually happened so much as it was, that this was the way his followers interpreted who Jesus was, and how they described the power that they experienced in his person.
The next step required of those of us who want to become proper interpreters of the gospels is to expand our definition of these aforementioned infirmities. What kind of blindness, for example, was it that was to be overcome? Was it physical blindness or spiritual blindness? Did it have to do with sight, insight or second sight? Was it more about those who, despite the fact that they had eyes, could not see who Jesus was? Was it about those who, though they had ears, were in fact deaf to his message and reality? Was it about those who were physically crippled or spiritually crippled? Was it about those who could not speak because they had not yet entered the experience for which these words were originally formulated?
When we analyze the healing episodes in the gospels, we find that all of them speak to the wholeness, the fullness of human life. In Mark’s Gospel there are two episodes about sight being restored, two episodes about hearing being restored, three episodes in which the physically lame and the mentally impaired are cured, and two episodes in which the tongues of the mute are loosened so that they can speak of the new reality. These are the data that cause me to suggest that these stories were not literal events that happened but interpretive narratives added to the memory of Jesus in those years between his death and the writing of the gospel accounts. They were designed to interpret both his life and his death in the light of their dawning understanding of him as “the first fruits” of the Kingdom. He had become the life in whom they first saw what the Kingdom of God was all about.
If that reconstruction has substance, it would account for why miracle stories are not attached to the memory of Jesus in earlier writings. It would also suggest that even healing miracles were originally designed to be interpretive symbols, not descriptions of literal events. If such was the original intent of the gospel’s healing stories, one thing becomes immediately obvious. That is, that the literal minds of the western Gentile Christians clearly distorted these interpretive symbols because they did not understand the Hebrew texts that lay underneath these stories. It also suggests that if these stories were never intended to describe events that actually happened, that fact ought to be obvious in the stories themselves.
Next I will begin to focus on representative miracle stories in the gospels to see how well these ideas play when the texts themselves are analyzed. I will look in particular at the “sight to the blind” stories in the gospels to see if we can find in them interpretive, non-literal hints of their original meaning. I believe we can and, when we do, a whole new level of understanding the Bible in general and the gospels in particular opens before our eyes. So stay tuned.~ John Shelby Spong |
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