Kairos: A Meditation on Some Words of Mary Oliver

Every morning
the world
is created.¹

And every moment may be a morning.

The word “moment” comes from the Latin momentum, a form of the verb movere, “to move.” The present moment is movement, the past’s momentum into the future. Yet the now opens into the new: in any and every moment, you may see the day dawn and the day star arise in your heart,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.

When dawn breaks in your heart, you may dare to be happy. And you may dare to be unhappy, to be broken, because in this new day you dare to love, and love encompasses both. Indeed, in loving another you may find that your happiness consists in embracing sorrow for her sake. And as you learn to love all, you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of love in every one, receiving both happiness and unhappiness as blessing.

Every morning
the world
is created.

In the book of Mark, Jesus begins his ministry with the proclamation that “The time is fulfilled; the Kingdom of God is at hand.” Biblical Greek has different words for time. Chronos, from which we get words like chronology, signifies quantitative time, time as ordinary, measurable flow. That’s not the term Jesus used; there was nothing ordinary about his experience of time. Jesus spoke of time as kairos.²

Kairos, which is thematically related to krisis, is extraordinary time, a time of judgment and decision, the present moment as profound opportunity. Kairos has been defined as “the right time to do the right thing,” and as “a passing instant when an opening appears which must be driven through with force if success is to be achieved.”³ According to Giorgio Agamben, biblical kairos-time is neither prophetic nor eschatological-apocalyptic, but messianic. He quotes Walter Benjamin as saying that “every instant can be the little door through which the messiah enters.^“4

“Knock, and it shall be opened to you.”⁵

“The kairos is fulfilled,” says Jesus; “the Kingdom of God is at hand.” The moment of decisive action, the right time to do the right thing, is now, because God’s morning, the dawning of a world of justice, peace, and mercy, is at hand. Not in hand, but at  hand: you must reach for it. You must reach inward to your heart, where the past, yours and ours, is judged in the light of love, “for behold, the Kingdom of God is within you.”⁶ Thus empowered with truth, you reach outward to the future as it presents itself, redeeming the time,⁷ answering that of love in it and so helping it give birth to the Kingdom it carries within.

“Behold,” says Paul, “now is the most-acceptable kairos; behold, now is the day of salvation.” In this kairos, every moment is a morning, and every morning is the dawn of a new world. When you give yourself to live in this kairos, the Logos arises in your heart as the day star, shines in you as the light of a new day, fills you with grace and truth as you behold its unique beauty and power. Then you shine forth as the sun in God’s Kingdom; in you the living Word of love lightens the darkness of human life with justice, peace, and mercy. Through this kairos-door, the messiah enters: Christ is come in your flesh,⁸

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.

________________________
NOTES

[1] This hopeful meditation began, as have other recent posts, as vocal ministry. Last Sunday morning at Homewood Friends Meeting, I participated in two meetings for worship. During the first, which was captured on video for a documentary on Friend Inazo Nitobe (1862 – 1933), a Friend spoke of the Quaker life as movement. During the second, some time before I spoke, a Friend read Mary Oliver’s “Morning Poem.” The lines quoted in this post are from that poem. I would have preferred to write in the first person plural, but with the poem I address the reader — and myself — as “you.”

[2] For simplicity (which includes saving me, whose education unfortunately bypassed Greek, some effort), I’ll anglicize, using the unitalicized nominative form from this point forward.

[3] The former is from Richard Norquist at About.com. The latter is from E. C. White, Kaironomia, p. 13, as quoted on the Wikipedia page on kairos. White’s definition reminds me of Matthew 11:12, “And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.”

[4] Giorgio Agamben, “The Time that Is Left.” University of Verona, 2002. Epoché. Vol. 7, No. 1, Fall 2002, pp. 1–14. Agamben sees Paul as experiencing time as messianic rather than eschatological or apocalyptic. I think that Jesus’ experience of time is pictured in scripture as being similar (and I think that Agamben might agree). But it is not my intention to argue that issue one way or the other here. I tend to read scripture as theopoetic literature rather than as history or doctrine, and to use it accordingly in these posts.

[5] Matthew 7:7.

[6] Luke 17:21.

[7] Exagorazomenoi ton kairon: see Ephesians 5:16 and Colossians 4:5.

[8] My final paragraph contains a number of biblical references. The first is a direct quotation of Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 6:2. Others include 2 Peter 1:19 (“until the day dawn and the day star arise in your hearts”), Matthew 13:43 (“Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the Kingdom of their Father”), and 1 John 4:2 (“Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God”). There is also a reference to John 1:14, which in a close translation (in the spirit of George Fox’s) is “And the Word became flesh, and he tabernacles in us, and we behold his glory, glory as of an only begotten beside a father, full of grace and truth.” An alternative rendering of the final phrase charitos kai aletheias might be “loving-kindness and truthfulness.”

The Religion of the Broken-Hearted

The following is developed from vocal ministry offered at Homewood Meeting on 2/12/2012.

* * *

There’s an old cartoon that, as I recall, depicts a smooth, wide, level path on which smiling people, some holding hands, walk toward an idyllic scene. A sign next to the path identifies it as “The Road to Heaven.” That’s on one side of the cartoon panel: on the other side, a man struggles to scale a steep, bare mountainside. He reaches for handholds, clings to roots.¹ He looks tired but determined. We get the idea that, though his feet may often slip, he will continue despite the cost. There’s a sign on that mountainside, too: it says “The Quaker Road to Heaven.”

Why should the Quaker way be so difficult? And, given that our path evidently goes in a different direction from the other, what and where is the Quaker heaven?

A religion of the New Covenant, Quakerism is a religion of the heart — the broken heart. We enter the New Covenant when our heart is changed. One biblical passage that is read as a prophecy of that event is Ezekiel 11:19:

I will give them one heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh.

That may sound like a promise of a spiritual heart transplant, but I’ve always conceived it in a somewhat different image, one informed by the knowledge that “that which can be known of God,” namely love’s “power and divine nature,” is in our heart.² It seems to me that, in a natural reaction to our harsh world, we wrap our in heart a hard, stony covering. But that protective carapace must be broken apart if the living heart is to be revealed and flourish. Our spiritual life begins when we allow our heart to be broken by the suffering, the plight, of the world.

That’s beautifully reflected in one of my favorite scripture passages, one that I’ve quoted here before, from Odes of Solomon 11:

My heart was cloven and its flower appeared,
and grace sprang up in it, and fruit from the Lord,
for the highest one split me with his holy spirit,
exposed my love for him, and filled me with his love.

His breaking of my heart was my salvation,
and I followed the way of his peace, the way of truth….³

When our heart is opened by God-who-is-love, we are exposed to our own pain and to that of others, and we naturally want to close it again, to reseal the shell as quickly as possible. But if, as the early Quaker Isaac Penington suggested, we allow the wound to remain open while we wait in faith, we find that a flower of life, beauty, and hope for the future springs up in us. And as love conquers fear, the flower is multiplied: from the tiny seed, from “that of God” which had been dormant in the darkness of the armored heart, grows a field of flowers, a blossoming on the longing earth of the “Kingdom” of justice, mercy, and peace. With the odist we then can say

I became like the land which blossoms and rejoices in its fruits:
And the Lord was like the sun shining on the face of the land;
He lightened my eyes, and my face received the dew,
And my soul was refreshed by his fragrance;

To be thus is to abide in the blessedness of Paradise,⁴ despite the continuing pain and sorrow of life in this world.

And he carried me to his Paradise,
Where I knew joy and worshiped his glory.

Blessed are they who are planted in Paradise,
Who grow in the growth of your trees
And have changed from darkness to light.⁵

As we are “changed from darkness to light” and yet remain, so pain and sorrow, too, remain but are transfigured. We do not transcend them,⁶ do not leave them behind, but we no longer attempt to deny or repress them. We allow ourselves to see them in a new light, as opening us into deep humanity, into the life of the God known only in our participation in the kenosis, the self-emptying, which is the divine nature.

And so we begin the ascent by allowing the reality of life and love to break our heart. We begin in faith and hope, trusting that, however others may travel, this difficult climb is the way to the Kingdom of God. This is the way that is marked for us, the path that leads us into the Paradise of innocence in this life so that, our open heart manifesting love’s power and nature, we shine divine light into the darkness of our infinitely suffering world.

____________________________
NOTES

[1] I am reminded of, or am conflating the cartoon with, the Zen story of a man clinging to a vine on a cliff wall: see “Of Smiles, Secrets, Strawberries, Sunyata.” I saw the cartoon long ago and am unable to separate memory and imagination at this point.

[2] See Romans 1:19-20. The Geneva Bible’s note on verse 19 tells us that the locus of that manifestation is “in [our] hearts”: online at The Reformed Reader. As always, I am using God-language on the basis of the identification of the nature of God with the universalizing love that manifests itself in justice, mercy, and peace: see 1 John 4.

[3] Verses 1-3. This rendering is mostly from the translation by Willis Barnstone in The Other Bible, p. 273, with minor modifications based on the translation by J. Rendel Harris in The Lost Books of the Bible and the Forgotten Books of Eden, pp. 125-126.

[4] George Fox also spoke of being taken up into Paradise. This passage, remarkably similar in part to the Ode, is from his Journal:

“Now was I come up in spirit, through the flaming sword, into the paradise of God. All things were new, and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter. I knew nothing but pureness, innocency, and righteousness, being renewed up into the image of God by Christ Jesus; so that I was come up to the state of Adam, which he was in before he fell. … But I was immediately taken up in spirit, to see into another or more steadfast state than Adam’s in innocency, even into a state in Christ Jesus, that should never fall.”

[5] This and the previous block are verses 11-16 in, again, a combination of translations.

[6] Thanks to Maggie Ross for reminding me of the importance of the difference between “transcend” and “transfigure”; see her Voice in the Wilderness blog.

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.

The Turning of the Wheel (1): Jesus as Poet

In observance of National Poetry Month, I offer the following transcription of vocal ministry from December 29, 1991 (reprinted from my journal). I hope to follow it soon with another post on the topic of “the turning of the wheel.”

Images and quotations have come together for me this morning, bring­ing with them reflections on our relationship with Jesus and the Kingdom of God.

“Finally,” wrote Walt Whitman, “shall come the poet worthy that name; the true Son of God shall come singing his songs.” Whitman’s image has led me to think of Jesus as being a poet—our greatest poet of the spirit, whose creation, the Kingdom of God, remains the highest expression of the power and beauty of what we Friends might call “that of God in every one.”

I know that Jesus did not invent the idea of the Kingdom. What he called the Kingdom of God was a dream shared by the oppressed in his day, a dream that looked to the end of this world of suffering, sin, and death and the birth of a new world of tsedeq—righteousness and justice—and shalom—peace, health, prosperity, even, perhaps, immortality—everything that makes for human well-being and fulfillment. Although Jesus did not create the dream of the Kingdom, and although he seems to have shared a popular expectation of its imminent but future fulfillment, Jesus nonetheless so incarnated the dream in his life and in the possibilities he opened up for those he touched that he moved the dream from the realm of the ideal to the real. Through the power of his poetic genius and the depth of his love, Jesus reached into God’s future and brought a living seed of that future back into the present—a seed that, as he described, grows in darkness and breaks forth into light unexpectedly.

Another image, a striking one, is from Albert Schweitzer’s book The Quest of the Historical Jesus. Schweitzer said that Jesus threw himself upon the wheel of history in an attempt to bring it to a halt, to bring this world to an end and to usher in the Kingdom of God in its fullness and power; but the wheel continued to turn, and it crushed him. Even now, said Schweitzer, his mangled body hangs on that wheel as it turns, and “this is His victory and His reign.” I’ve meditated on this image often and over many years, and I can only agree that Jesus’ sacrifice was a victory, not because it placated a vindictive God, but because by it he diverted the wheel of history onto a new course, opening up a new world of possibilities within the old.

But the wheel turns yet, and the innocent still are crushed by it. Sometimes in the silence of worship I seem to hear the voices of those who fall under the wheel in our time. They seem to be crying out for the presence of Christ, the Christ we meet in Jesus, the poet who brings the light of tsedeq and shalom into the darkness of their world. And as I reflect on their cries in the light of Whitman’s query, “Who shall soothe these feverish children?”, in the light of the new possibilities opened up by the poetic genius of Jesus, and, in particular this morning, in the light of our Quaker tradition, I must acknowledge in fear and trembling that the longed-for poet is I—is each of us.

For this is the central experience of Quakerism, the basis of our way of life and our witness to the world, that the spirit that was in Jesus is in us and can be the Light and Life and Power by which we live. As Paul said: “With faces unveiled, we reflect as in a mirror the glory of the Lord and are transformed, from glory to glory, into his image…. I live now, no longer I, but Christ lives in me…. We are all members of the one body of Christ; we are all members of one another.”

So although I know that the turning of the wheel of time crushed the poet Jesus long ago, I take courage in the knowledge that his spirit lives on and seeks to be incarnate in us, and I pray, therefore, for our transformation. May the seed that grows in dark­ness and blossoms where least expected grow and blossom and flourish in me—and in all of us. May we, in the unveiling silence of our worship, be joined to the incomprehensible suffering of humanity and of all creation, powerfully typified in the crucified Christ, and in that crucible be transformed into his image, made of one mind with the poetic genius that creates the Kingdom, made fully conscious and cooperating members of his universal body, that we, too, may become poets of the Kingdom, bringing songs of tsedeq and shalom for those who suffer.

Gnosis of the Heart

The yearning for purification and transformation, which is especially intense today, has been with me for a long time. It often brings to mind the promise of Ezekiel.

A new heart also will I give you,
and a new spirit will I put within you:
and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh,
and I will give you a heart of flesh.

More than once I have referred to that passage (Ezek. 36:26) in vocal ministry, at least once offering something like a prayer: “Take away this heart of stone, and give me a heart of flesh.” But again today I wonder, as I do each time the passage comes to me, if such complete re-creation can ever really happen.

Ezekiel’s promise is interwoven in my mind with a passage from Ode of Solomon XI (trans. Barnstone). I once mentioned part of it — lines 1, 2, and 5 — in vocal ministry, and those same lines often come to mind during worship and at other times, such as now, when I’m feeling the weight of the world’s sadness. Here’s the entire passage.

My heart was cloven and there appeared a flower,
and grace sprang up, and fruit from the Lord,

for the highest one split me with his holy spirit,
exposed my love for him, and filled me with his love.

His splitting of my heart was my salvation,
and I followed the way of his peace, the way of truth.

Picturing those lines, I usually see a rock being cracked open by the force of the world’s random suffering. I see a small stem emerge, blossoming: the flower of compassion. But then I remember the passage from Ezekiel, and the image freezes; I am unable to imagine how a small blossoming of compassion would lead to the removal and replacement of my heart. Today, however, perhaps because of the urgency of my feeling, which is tinctured with the intuition of nonexistence, I need to resolve this, to understand. But I don’t want to uncouple the two passages, which both speak to me powerfully and which together seem to form a gestalt. And so I read more carefully, noting that the ode’s author says, in the lines I usually overlook, that he or she was filled with the Lord’s love when her own love was exposed. And I look within more carefully, allowing imagination to illuminate.

Peering into the cleft, which is growing wider as I look, I see that the stone is hollow, a mere shell. Within the stone is earth, and I recall Jesus’ reference to the fertile ground in which the seed of the divine Kingdom of justice, mercy, and peace is rooted. I perceive that the flower of compassion proceeds not from a simple stem but from a vine, and I understand that this vine of the Kingdom is the Christ, “the hidden human being of the heart” (1 Pet. 3:4). The vine grows as I watch; it fills the empty space within the stony shell and begins to wrap around the outside. Soon it covers the stone completely, so that the shell is both filled with and covered by the life of compassion and justice.

“Seeing” that, I feel that my eyes have been opened.

In my naïveté and pride, I had imagined that my stony heart would dramatically be destroyed and replaced; that, as I thought Paul said in Galatians 2:20, I would be crucified and live no longer as I. But today I am edified and humbled by this vision. In my case at least, pace Ezekiel, the stone is not removed; it is covered, inside and out, by the spiritual vine Christ, the divine-human form of love — or is that equivalent to removal and replacement? And, pace Paul, I am not crucified; I am broken, yes, but I am also covered, knit together in my brokenness, by suffering love — or is that equivalent to crucifixion and resurrection? (Does not the risen Christ continue to bear his wounds?) The images, icons, take me beyond themselves into the reality of my heart.

As understanding deepens, I see and can say this: I have never had a heart of stone. My heart has a stony carapace, but by the grace of love it has never been fully enclosed within its shell. And the shell itself is increasingly opened and covered by love’s flesh and blood, the Christ-vine of compassion whose seed lives in the humus, the God-breathed earthly humanity, that has always been my heart of hearts.

Knowing that life and love are suffering and will always be so, I understand the shell’s formation and function: it is the original innocent transgression, the protective human sin that is with us from birth. I understand, too, that for now it must remain, although eventually it may crumble, no longer needed, within the vine’s embrace. No matter. “Blessed is he whose sin is forgiven, whose transgression is covered” (Ps. 32:1). The vine lives in me and offers its healing life to me: freely may I receive; therefore, freely may I give. As compulsion yields to compassion, I see the end of law; I know more fully the peace of freedom in the face of nonexistence; I feel the blessedness of a heart of flesh.

The Heart of Quakerism

I want to speak about the heart of Quakerism. In order to do that, I must speak about Jesus, Christ, God. I am not a theist. So when I speak in those terms, I’m not pushing a standard Christian, or even theistic, belief agenda; I’m using the religious metaphors of our tradition to point to the heart of our identity as Friends. That heart is a very specific, ongoing experience that is, as Quakers have insisted from the very first, available to believers and nonbelievers alike, an experience that is, in fact, as our ancestors pointed out repeatedly, very often blocked by religious belief. So I’m not talking at all about belief, or what normally passes for belief, but about the experience of transformation, of having our fundamental ways of thinking and feeling be “turned around” — converted — from the normal, commonsense “wisdom of the world” to the foolish wisdom of the spirit of Christ.

If the question then is “how do we know what we mean by ‘the spirit of Christ’?” then the otherwise meaningless slogan is correct: Jesus is the answer. The spirit of Christ is the spirit that animated Jesus, that is shown to us in his life and death and teachings.

Two thousand years ago, Jesus, “the visible form of the invisible God” who is love, announced the coming of the Kingdom of God, the wisdom of which is not of this world. What does that image, “Kingdom of God,” mean? The evangelist Luke has Jesus define the Kingdom clearly, at the very outset of his ministry, in words borrowed from Isaiah, a great prophet of social justice: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me, and has sent me to proclaim good news for the poor….” He continues, but I think it’s highly significant that the very first phrase Jesus uses to describe the new order, the Kingdom of God, is “good news for the poor.” That’s the agenda of the spirit of Christ in nutshell: “good news for the poor.”

And what would be good news for the poor, except that those of us who have more than enough would learn to share much more than we do now, so that justice would be realized? In another place, Jesus tells the story of two men. One, well off, relaxes comfortably in his spacious home every evening, enjoying his plentiful and delicious dinner, perhaps planning his postprandial pleasures while he eats; the other, the poor man Lazarus, lies just on the other side of the well-off man’s locked gate, bleeding and starving to death, hoping for crumbs from the other’s table — as if human beings can survive on crumbs, as if we well-off should consider ourselves generous if we give our crumbs to the poor. If you don’t know the rest of the story, you can find it in the same Gospel of Luke (and read George Fox’s “sermon” on it here): briefly, it graphically illustrates just what Jesus thought of that well-off man and those like him, who use the rationalizations of accepted worldly wisdom to justify their pleasures while the poor lie bleeding at their gates.

[T]he Lord has anointed me, and has sent me to proclaim good news for the poor, healing for the broken-hearted, freedom for the imprisoned, sight for the blind, liberation for the oppressed: to preach the year of the Lord’s favor.

“The year of the Lord’s favor” is the Jubilee year, the year in which the commonsense, private-property economic rules of society are set aside for the sake of justice, a year in which land is taken back from those who have hoarded it, slaves are freed, and debts are forgiven. In the Kingdom of God, the Jubilee year is now. Justice, healing, liberation, vision: the agenda of the spirit of Christ.

So we’re talking about a man who put the poor first, who fed the hungry when he could, healed the sick when he could, associated with sinners and outcasts, insisted that we care for the just and the unjust alike, openly challenged religious people whose religion is a mask for unacknowledged self-centeredness and aggression, turned on their heads the commonsense rules of conventional morality — which always favor those who have and hoard wealth and power — and was therefore tortured to death. But he passed on his vision of the Kingdom, and he passed on the Spirit of Christ, and he became the key to our realizing that Kingdom and Spirit in our lives.

Some sixteen hundred years later, our ancestors, too, were tortured, sometimes to death, because they dared to assert their right and their obligation to be possessed of and by the Spirit that was in Jesus — the spirit that gives and then gives more, that forgives and then forgives more; that willingly sacrifices for justice, for love of the other, and that calls on all of us to do the same, to open our hearts to the suffering of the world and to be moved to action.

They, in their turn, passed that Spirit on to us. And they handed down to us this institution called Quakerism, all of the accomplishments of which come out of that transformation of individual hearts. They gave us our unique forms of meeting: for worship in silence, and for making decisions in the Spirit of Christ — both expressions of the unique gift which Quakerism offers the world. And these forms of gathering together have deep and serious purpose and meaning: the crucifixion of the “natural” person, the raising of the spiritual Christ in our hearts, and the manifestation of that spirit in and among us and, through us, in the world.

I’ve been told that Quaker meeting is a place where all opinions are respected and can get a hearing, and that Quaker decision-making is a process of arriving at truth through attending to each person’s expressed opinion. Our ancestors, however, tell us that the only place personal opinions have within the meetinghouse walls is on the cross, as we courageously allow them to be crucified by love so that the spirit of Christ, which they have been trampling and trying to destroy while telling us they’re doing the opposite, can be raised in us. As the first Friends read Paul, “if Christ be not raised [in us], then our faith is in vain.” Our faith, our coming together, our going out into the world under the name of Quaker: all vanity unless we allow our worldly wisdom to die in silence so that the spirit of love can be raised in our hearts, can break open our hearts and make us new — unless we help each other set aside our cherished opinions and ways of seeing the world in order that we may, as Paul said, “have the mind of Christ,” that we may be brought into one mind, one heart, one body.

That is not easy. The logic of the Kingdom of God is illogic to the natural mind; the agenda of God seems to be madness. But I ask myself which is more of madness: an open life of giving and forgiving, filled with the joy and pain of love, or a life centered on the smallness of self, a life that closes its heart to Lazarus at my gate. Certainly, the life of love is very difficult and costly. But I can only echo Paul, who said that “Our present sufferings I count as nothing compared to the glory that us now unfolding within us.” Our ancestors taught that each of us has a measure, more or less of the divine glory of love within us. May we be faithful to that measure, help it grow, and help each other in that process.

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The little essay above is reprinted, with minor changes, from the current section of my journal, where it was originally published in April of 2008. I post it here in order to offer it to a new readers and to permit comments and discussion. — G.A.