Interlude played by Michael Baum ‘Somewhere over the rainbow’ from The Wizard of Oz by Harold Arlen & Yip Harburg
This Lent has felt like the longest because of the long lens ‘Paniversary’ has lent to it, If lent feels like its been happening for a year its because we’ve begun to understand the concept of wilderness not rationally but physically.
I offered a suggestion last week that paradise and wilderness operate as opposites and, like the Yin and Yang symbol, the seed of each opposite can be found in the heart of the other. I used the image of the walled garden, from the original meaning of the word Paradise, which contains lurking somewhere within it the seed of the wild, just enough to be fruitful; or to bring total destruction…
but what of the wilderness – what is the trace element of paradise which is to be found in wilderness?
Jesus public ministry as described in the accounts in the Christian scriptures begins with his retreat into wilderness and concludes with his bringing the element of wilderness into the orderly confines of the city, the moment we celebrate today; when riding on a unbroken colt through palm branches in an apparent inversion of Imperial authority, the wilderness returns to Jerusalem.
It is easy to see what Paradise offers, contentment, security, stability, a lazy river flowing through, plenty to eat, grazing land and planting, places to play.
But where in wilderness does the seed of paradise lie?
If we are able to set down defensiveness, put off the armour that everyday life in a competitive commercialised society imposes on us, what is revealed might be open; vulnerable, gentle and tender – and the curious side which is revealed, the side with engages with uncertainty and discovery, is also the side which attends to what is described as the numinous: the awareness or sense of the sacred or divine.
When Jesus turns over the tables in the outer Temple he upsets the notion of religion as a structure which participating in the state upholds the values of the state and offers a different notion of radical possibility – and goes on through the tumult of his ordeal in the final week of his life to outline the most radical vision of society ever articulated: hear it:
Love God and love your neighbour as yourself.’
Last week we broke off with the sense of teetering at the brink of the numinous; affirming a sense of the sacred, not just as an inner experience of our own deepest self but, setting aside defensiveness, and fear of being seen as crazy, living fully into the sacred, leaning in with tenderness and curiosity to live fully; beyond the boundaries of the known… over that rainbow…
Beyond ourselves, beyond our own boundaries, in ways which our modern rationalistic selves find unconsionable and strange, ways we mock as ‘woo’. But in our twenty first century rationalist paradise we’d all far rather be the authors of our own fate thanks very much, and we are all addicted to the modernist myths of new thought: that we must determine our own happiness, make our own luck, that our wellbeing is the consequence of our best personal effort, fought for insisted upon, relentlessly manifesting our own blessings.
Of course this self curated sort of paradise is one that emphasises the wall, rather than the garden, and when such walls crash down, as they are wont to do, we crash down with them. It is when we crash, when our self-built tower falls that we are forced to re admit the force of change that is beyond us, not within us:
On Wednesday I read again these great words of Paul Tillich –
Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, .… It strikes us when our contempt for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when … the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us … when despair destroys all joy and courage.
Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!” If that happens to us, we experience grace. After such an experience we may not be better than before, and we may not believe more than before. But everything is transformed.”
In the relentlessness of our drive to self sufficiency we barely even know what grace might be, its definition evades us, but as the great Paul intimates we do not need to know, we are the recipients not the authors, and grace falls to us not according to our will but another.
Even in our dislocated culture there is one place we still experience the sense of life beyond ourselves – in this idea of love, which resonates outward from the Gospel of Mark ringing like a great bell chime rolling on throughout literature, fine art and music. The words of Berowne from Loves Labours Lost which Erik read are not by any means Shakespeare’s only attempt to sound the depths of human love but it may be one of the most beautiful in an admittedly crowded field –
love doesn’t exist walled up in the brain but seems to flow with the the energy of all things just as quickly as thought, through all things, and curiously at the end of that speech the character, Berowne, makes an interesting clarification: “For charity itself fulfills the law,
And who can sever love from charity?” he says, who can distinguish between love and justice ?
The love of God the love of neighbour and the love of self are the same force, leading us ever outwards from the walled garden out into the great beyond:
Next week it is Easter Sunday and we’ll hear that scriptural text the poet was referring to – Now exist these three: faith hope and charity but the greatest of these is charity, as we go further beyond the self, beyond the farthest limit of the known – beyond death into…
Ultreya,
by Carli Di Bortolo.
Walk
Alone with others,
Thou thyself thy rivals
Thou thyself finding thy companions
Thou thyself seeing thy enemies
thou thyself making thy brothers
Walk
Thy head knows not where thy feet take thy heart
Walk
Pilgrim of the world
Walk
Thou art born for the way
Walk
Thou hast an appointment
Where? With whom?
Walk
Thy steps, thy words
The road, thy song
the fatigue, thy prayer
And thy silence, finally thy speech.
Walk
thou art born for the way
That of pilgrimage
That other way leading to thyself
and thy quest
Walk
So that thou may find
at the shrine at the end of the world
Thy peace
Thy joy
Walk
Already, God walks with thee.
A Space of possibility 