Days of Visitation

The wise one’s heart discerns both time and judgment. – Ecclesiastes

Opening the butsudan (Buddhist shrine) for meditation, I see among the Buddhas and bodhisattvas an image of Thomas Merton. The Trappist monk, who through his writings was a mentor for me from the time I was twelve years old, died almost forty-three years ago at the age of fifty-three, electrocuted during one of his few trips away from the monastery. I was nineteen years old then, losing my Catholic religion to reason and ethics, at loose ends in every way, a long way from making peace with my heart. And, although I could not have known it and would not have believed it in that time of war, I was a long way from death.

Nineteen then; sixty-one now. Almost a lifetime of seeking and struggling has passed, suffering of the sort that is lost unless it bears fruit for the future. Scripture tells us that there is a proper time for everything: now, I see, is the eschaton, the time of judgment, for me. However long it may last, this is my hour of krisis, the time for my life’s harvest to be gathered, weighed, and shared.

For most of my life, I have followed Jesus’ advice to allow tares to grow with the wheat. I have had little choice: tares and wheat are confusingly similar. I have never been adept at distinguishing them, even after the more differentiated fruits, or ears, have appeared. And now I am presbyopic as well. If I were to attempt alone to separate and destroy the weeds, little wheat would remain. With the harvest at hand, how will I manage?

Fortunately, the discerning is not my task. I can reap everything and reserve the sorting to an abler wisdom. In the years since Merton first described it for me, I have met that wisdom, whose name is agápē, in my own heart, have seen its discerning power working carefully and effectively there. By now, I know that I can trust its judgment.

Feeling agápē‘s strengthening power within me, I am learning to allow it to shine continuously on the fields of my soul. In its light, differences are clearly seen. Shining on the harvest, the light of agápē will show me the wheat and the weeds. That which it identifies as useful and compassionate, that which reflects the light, I will store as treasure for distribution; that which it identifies as useless or harmful, that which absorbs the light, I will burn.

I will fulfill the time’s imperative and promise, then, by means of recollection, mindfulness, surrender, and fidelity. I will gather the harvest of my life. I will attend to agápē as its unsparing light illuminates my soul and leads me to divide aright. I will accept agápē‘s judgments and act on them, saving and sharing love’s fruits while I still live. This is the task and opportunity that remains for me, and, with gratitude to Merton and others who have helped to guide me here, I vow to devote myself to it.

Beginning now, as I take my seat on the cushions before the butsudan, and continuing through each uncertain day that remains, I will live this vow as if there were no tomorrow. For the time that was coming is now, and there will be no other.

The Sacrament of Peace

This post is dedicated to Quaker House, which courageously says “YES to the troops, NO to the wars.”^*

 

Moloch the vast stone of war! — Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”

 

Abraham takes a sharp knife, some rope, and his son Isaac, the hope of God’s promise for the future, up the mountain. Isaac carries wood for a fire, asking where the sacrificial victim might be. The answer he gets is no answer: “trust my God.” At the sacred place, Abraham makes an altar of stone, binds Isaac, and prepares the kindling. He will offer his son to him who will be known as the Lord God of Armies. That Lord, Moloch, demands it.

Abraham is about to slit Isaac’s throat when he hears the call of an angel of God: “Do not sacrifice your son!” His raised arm is stayed in grateful surprise. God provides a ram, a substitute, for the slaughter, and Isaac is spared. The promise, the future, is saved.

But the Lord God of Armies requires human life, and so the sacrifice of other sons continues. In response, God offers the ultimate substitute. “I give you my own flesh and blood as the lamb to be slain,” he says. “Slaughter my son, the seed of the promise; take the life of my being. Spare your children. Let this my sacrifice be once and for all.” The world accepts his offer; it pierces his flesh and pours his blood upon the mount, not understanding that they were to become its life and nourishment. And when the body has been sealed in the earth, the world turns and, in obedience to its Lord, begins again to bind its children for sacrifice. The Lord God of Armies laughs as God weeps.

The children, carrying the burden that will burn their bodies, follow their parents, as did Isaac, in trust. Bound by their parents’ beliefs, unable to resist, they will do, finally, what they are told: the Lord requires it. The slaughter, it seems, will never end. Even divine intervention seems powerless to stop it.

But the light of hope does shine, if dimly. The promise that was killed and buried is risen in human hearts. Those hearts cherish sons and daughters above gods, plead for them, protect them as best they can, even offer themselves as lambs in their place. And, however hopeless it seems, they – we – never lose hope, never stop working to end war, to bring down Moloch from his throne and to raise up this world into the Kingdom of Heaven.

For we, too, are sons and daughters, the only-begotten seed of the promise, the Lamb of God among Moloch’s wolves. The blood of Christ flowing in our veins, we are the angels who cry out to stay the hand of blood sacrifice. We cannot be or do otherwise: love leads and moves us, our light and life. The first-fruits of the divine sacrifice, the body of Christ, the sacrament of peace, the spirit of a new world, we stand before Moloch a sign of contradiction, the sign of the cross. We live and die in faith, hope, and love.

It may seem that we are fools, that the raising of Christ in us is delusion, the hope of peace an empty dream. But we know firsthand that human life and death are given meaning and power, redeemed from the merely animal, in their consecration to love. And we know the power of love to create peace within and among us. Whatever the world is led to do, we are faithful to that power. It is our light, Christ in us the hope of glory, which we dare not, cannot, cover. It is, God help us, who we are.

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* This post is not intended to represent the views of Quaker House; the ideas expressed here are solely the author’s.

Text and Antitext

There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in. — Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”

Sometimes we speak of those whom society neglects or rejects as being “marginalized.” It’s a revealing term. The margin is, of course, the area outside of the text. To be marginalized is to be written out of the text, out of the common narrative. It is to be subtracted, or excluded from the outset; to be relegated to the periphery; to be defined as an inessential footnote, even a meaningless mark. One may be noticed, but only as an adjunct to or distraction from the text, always and only in context of the narrative. Because the text, the narrative, defines reality for a society – not only explicitly, but, more importantly, in an implicit and therefore pervasive and immensely powerful way – to be marginalized is, effectively, to be made unreal.

Like the Ancient of Days in Blake’s wonderful illustration, the common narrative, that which we hold together, takes a compass to the face of the deep, to the surface of what looks like primal chaos. With that compass, it circumscribes, from infinite possibilities, a more manageable set. All outside the circle is declared void; all within is arranged in patterns or subsets, named, assigned to categories of meaning. We who are created by and absorbed in the narrative call this circumscribed set “the world,” “the universe.” We believe that the circle is somehow all-encompassing, that its area comprises all of “what is.” We believe so because the narrative, of necessity, tells us so.

The narrative is, after all, our Father God. What he has included, we include; what he has marginalized, we marginalize: otherwise, we could find ourselves in the primal chaos. And so we who are on the inside gratefully accept the circumscription of his compass. We thank our God for enclosing us within the circle of meaning. And if we should see a crack in the wall that surrounds us, we automatically repair it, because living inside the circumference of what we hold together is how we “hold it together” in the face of chaos.

But sometimes we encounter one who calls all of that into question, someone who bears the name of Christ. He is not a reviser of narratives, nor is he the bringer of a new, competing text: he is himself the Anti-narrative, the Antitext. If we attend to him, we soon sense that he will break the circle beyond repair. So we turn away, tame him into objects and images, or replace him with a narrative-friendly dead ringer (Antichrist, a.k.a. religion and spirituality), because we are instinctively afraid. For we know that the text, in creating and sustaining the universe, creates and sustains us. If this new man destroys the narrative, we will no longer know names and places. Chaos will claim us. We will perish.

But we cannot wholly avoid him. Even if we succeed in blocking his presence in our hearts, his words won’t pass away. And although those words have been woven into the common narrative and thus rendered popularly impotent, they still harbor a ray of light, a spark of power. Now and then, some of us are curious about what his light might reveal as it filters weakly through cracks in our enclosure. Venturing trust in his wisdom and power, we stop patching the cracks awhile, and they widen. And when in his brightening light we see and feel the oppressive nature of our constructed, constricted universe, we are open to his offer of hope for a real world without walls, without margins – a world beyond the text.

Paradoxically, then, he raises us out of the text by means of words. According to our scriptures, Jesus the Antitext relied on story as a primary teaching tool. He used narrative against itself – that is, not to take a stand in one place or another within the circle, but to deconstruct the circle itself and thereby to bring down the walls, indeed the entire world, in which we and our marginalized exist. A case in point is his story of the rich man and Lazarus. It goes something like this.

The rich man lives in a gated estate, surrounded by a wall. He has everything he could want and more, including a social subnarrative that not only justifies his manner of life but praises him for it, even decrees it a sign of divine election. Just outside his gate, relegated to the margin of the text, lies the beggar Lazarus, bleeding and starving. The rich man, who never leaves the estate, knows that someone is suffering out there. But that anonymous someone is beyond the pale, outside of the narrative that both creates and justifies his condition; ironically, the wretch’s failure to be included confirms the narrative’s determination that his reality is defective. The rich man feasts with a good conscience. Although I believe that I, being morally superior, would occasionally toss a piece of bread over the fence, he doesn’t do even that. Lazarus dies and is carried away by his kind; as is usual in our world, justice is relegated to the (marginal) hereafter. Life goes on.

For millions or billions of people who hear that story, life within the narrative does indeed go on. Where else could life take place? But for some, those for whom it serves as a visitation of judgment here and now, the story breaks the narrative world apart, revealing that its life is death. As the story goes on to make clear, Lazarus, socially marginalized but spiritually innocent, dies in and into life; the rich man, socially accepted and admired but spiritually guilty, lives in and into death. Ultimately, implies Jesus, turning the common narrative upside down in a Zen-like trope, Lazarus is real and the rich man is not.

When we Friends sit down together for worship, we form a smaller circle within the narrative circle. Comfortable there, we may be tempted to celebrate the place we’ve staked out, which seems morally superior to others, within the universe of the text. But sometimes, allowing the text to subside into silence, we hear the weak cry of Christ’s Lazarus who lies bleeding at our gate, and our hearts begin to crack, to break open. It is then that the light shines in, the light known to the world as Christ. It is then that, if we can find the courage to stop making repairs, the power of the light will widen the cracks and shake the foundations until the wall begins to come down. Waiting through that awful experience in faith, in trust, we enter the sacramental heart of Quaker worship. Our world and our identities having been deconstructed by the light, crucified by the power of love, we are buried with Christ in spiritual baptism. Living now in Christ, no longer in the text, we are “raised a spiritual body,” formed and fed not by words but by the silent life and power of God-who-is-love. In this new being, which no words can wall in, we know experientially the truth of the apostle Paul’s observation that “the text is of killing, but the spirit makes alive.”

When there is no text, there is no margin. No one is encompassed within, and no one is written out. In the life and freedom of Christ the power of love, all are included.