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In Christmas Time: The Authority of Love

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I am feeling my way towards something here. Please be patient. You know what I’ve forgotten, and the trail is growing faint.

1

Lately I’ve been riding the insomnia train again. Do you know it? I mean insomnia like, it’s three a.m., you haven’t slept for twenty some odd hours and you have to get up at six and go to work.

Insomnia always sucks but at the margins it becomes toxic. It hinders judgment, upsets the mind/body connection, and fast-tracks descent into depression. I wish it on no one.

One of the tricks I play to try and sleep is, I become a hobo. I wander around the house with a blanket looking for any open surface. Sometimes it’s a rocking chair, sometimes the floor beneath the dining room table, sometimes the back porch.

Sometimes I just wander.

The other night – huddled on the living room couch, shivering and floating on nightmares through fitful sleep – a question occurred.

To what are you clinging, Sean?

2

Earlier this summer, I walked with Jesus to the river out back, knelt by a clump of Forget-Me-Nots, and begged him to heal me.

He trailed his fingers over the tiny blue flowers and didn’t answer right away. The sun was bright; the river a low hum to our left. In the distance, sheep bleated.

It reminded me of the time he intervened to save a woman accused of adultery. Do you remember? He knelt between the woman and those prepared to murder her with stones and traced circles in the dust with his finger. We talk about it now as if it were a neat and tidy wisdom lesson: Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.

But it wasn’t that. In that moment he was angry. And when he spoke, it wasn’t the words that made folks put their stones down. It was the fire in his eyes and voice. His was the authority of Love. He could’ve said anything.

“Sean,” he said gently, there by the river. “Forgiveness is the end of suffering. No one who clings to even one illusion will remember himself as sinless because he still cherishes this one error. He calls it unforgivable and makes it a sin.”

We tossed stones in the river then, lost in our thoughts. The afternoon passed in silence. He always liked that. I do, too.

3

What, in the end, can you not let go?

Down in depths I cannot risk without the Holy Spirit (and even then, man, even then) the answer is: life itself.

I do not want to die. I want to live.

Beyond the drama and mundanity of my day-to-day existence, there is this drive to live. It eclipses everything.

Everything – what I eat, how I pray, who I love, who I will not in a million years love – is subsumed by – is forced to serve – the survival instinct.

And for which, in a nontrivial sense, God bless! I love this life. I love moonlight and grandmother stories. I love the sound of the river at night in summer. I love conversations that last lifetimes, and walking with you in the forest, and watching you turn towards me in certain shades of light. I love apple pie and fresh-baked bread. I love spider webs at dawn. I love kisses and Marianne Sawicki and hot coffee. I love being wordy and I love the silence that makes wordiness possible.

“And you would defend all of it to the death,” he says quietly, from the interior bower where he often rests.

Is that so bad? I ask at last. I hate disappointing him but like all good teachers he cherishes honesty. There is no helpful pedagogy without it.

“If you can cling to it it’s not love,” he says, and then goes silent for days, as if giving me time to get clear on – or remember maybe – a lesson he taught us lifetimes ago. Why am I so forgetful? What grief or loss do I insist on worshipping instead of Love?

Why is healing so fucking hard?

4

Here is the truth.

I was not one of the disciples. Nor was I one of the ones with stones. I was the one telling the ones with the stones they were right. I was the one saying, she deserves to die for what she did.

I was the one saying, throw the fucking stones.

Sister, I was the one he confronted. I was the one whose confusion he so brutally and perfectly corrected.

I couldn’t sleep that night. All I saw was the fire in his eyes; all I heard was his clear and fearless voice. His was the authority of Love. For days I did not sleep or eat. Demons came, and devils with swords and spears of fire. Gehenna opened its gaping maw and bid me enter.

And knowing I deserved nothing but Gehenna, I fell to my knees and cried out from the ashen ruins of my heart, please don’t let me die. Please let me live.

5

Sometimes when I am lost in the insomniac trials, you touch my shoulder and murmur, Sean, there is another way. Most times I don’t hear, but sometimes it echoes just so and I remember. You said it two thousand years ago as well.

“There is another way,” you said, and knowing exactly what you meant, I joined you and we followed it together. We gave up everything to follow him. And when we found him, a handful of villages down the road, I dropped into the dirt like a dog and begged him to forgive me.

And he laughed! Do you remember? He laughed. He laughed, lifted me to my feet, and kissed me on the mouth. “My brother,” he said. “Of course you are forgiven. Of course you are.”

6

The personal existence passes. Life does not. The body and its stories pass. Creation does not. The earth will pass and the sun will collapse into itself and creation will go on.

We are creatures (critters, Donna Haraway says) of creation, inseparable from the cosmos which is our Creator and to which we bear witness in love, which is our creativity – our potential to be kind to one another, to feed and be fed by one another, to play together and walk together, to come in from the rain together, to laugh together and cry together.

To say to one another, Bill Thetford-like, there is another way.

“I don’t want to let all that go” arises from the mistaken idea that I am holding any of it in the first place. And that mistaken idea arises from the even more mistaken idea that I am something other than Creation.

I am a part of what I fear I am apart from. I can’t be let go. There is nothing to let go. Including – as you know – this personal existence.

7

This summer, when we turned to go home, I picked two Forget-Me-Nots and offered one to Jesus, who cradled it in his hands. The other I carried home to you. This is it.

Together in Community: ACIM and Loving Our Enemies

Yesterday’s post over at Substack raises implicitly an important question: how do we live together in community? Especially with folks we really don’t want to live with?

Community is easy when we agree and are confident we can reasonably resolve conflict – when we trust everybody to put the community’s well-being ahead of their individual own. Most of us intentionally locate ourselves in situations like this, or as near as possible. But it’s not always.

Community is hard with folks who want to destroy us, or our way of life, or who will only accept us if we’re subject to diminished rights and freedoms.

The thing is, Jesus is not unclear about how we are to handle this problem.

You have heard that it used to be said ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’, but I tell you, don’t resist the man who wants to harm you. If a man hits your right cheek, turn the other one to him as well.

“If a man wants to sue you for your coat, let him have it and your overcoat as well. If anybody forces you to go a mile with him, do more—go two miles with him. Give to the man who asks anything from you, and don’t turn away from the man who wants to borrow.”

These practical examples support Jesus’s radical re-interpretation of a long-standing Jewish ethic.

“You have heard that it used to be said, ‘You shall love your neighbour’, and ‘hate your enemy’, but I tell you, Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Heavenly Father.

One thing I am trying to make clear in today’s post is that Jesus is still saying this, even in the clunky prose of ACIM. One way or the other, we have to figure out how to love the ones we don’t love, especially the ones we feel justified in not loving, would rather die than love.

And this “figuring out” isn’t an academic exercise – it has to sugar out in a practice in the world, with our so-called enemies.

Gert Theissen says that this teaching (if it’s going to become a practice) obligates us to renounce our power to rule over others. We have to surrender all our claims to status. We have to – in his terribly clarifying phrase – “self-stigmatize.”

The Son of God voluntarily accepts the role of the crucified one, which is despised in social morality, in order to win over God’s enemies to God. He seeks to change them by delivering himself over defenseless to human wickedness and violence (The Religion of the Earliest Churches 89).

The suggestion is that whatever community meant to Jesus and to his early followers, it meant adopting the posture of a servant, not as a performance or a ritual, but as an embodied living expression of God’s Love.

A Course in Miracles helps me understand and contextualize this suggestion, as follows.

My “enemies” are acting out of fear. Their fear means they are confused about God and love, and thus confused about their brothers and sisters, and the world we all share. Their insistence on separation – which often becomes murderous – protects them from their fear of God and love.

I, too, experience fear. I, too, experience an irrational desire to promote and sustain separation. I, too, know what it’s like to feel alien unto love, a stranger to God. I, too, use projection and denial to avoid looking at my fear of God.

For me, realizing that my so-called enemies suffer from the same fear I do – and use it justify dangerous attacks on our brothers and sisters – awakens the Christ in me. It awakens the Christ in us.

When the Christ in us awakens, our emphasis turns away from conflict (from taking sides) to healing. Suddenly we don’t have enemies – we have brothers and sisters who suffer from the same illness we do. And we know there is a way back to health – to wholeness and holiness – and we want to share it. Sharing is how we get to keep it.

When Christ awakens in us, our minds blaze with light and our hearts open like cathedrals and soup kitchens. The way is neither mysterious nor especially difficult. It is inherent in us. We are created in love to create in love.

Even in our present world crisis – and given the obvious work that remains to be done – we can glimpse this. We can taste this. And we can share this.

A big change for me came when I stopped being afraid of fear. When I was able to just sit with fear and look relatively calmly on it, I learned there was another way. Fear arises as an illusion of guilt and punishment. It is a defense against recognizing our innocence, which is shared.

When we are no longer afraid of fear, but know it can be healed, then our relationship with the world changes. The world is a fearful place; it is beset by evil. And yet we can – merely by giving attention to our experience of relationship – transform it to a site of peace, happiness and sharing. The possibility is always there.

On a personal note, all this often feels to me like swimming in deeper waters than is safe or familiar. The way is clear – indeed it has never been clearer – but I continue to doubt my right, capacity and even willingness to walk it. I have miles to go.

It is also increasingly clear to me that the only way to end doubt is in relationship – with the world through God, and with God though Jesus, and with you through the world. Nothing and nobody can be excluded from this potential for healing. That’s what I’m working through today. How do we allow God to create in and through and for us a just world? A world of peace? A world in which the difficult work of remembering our shared innocence and reclaiming our holiness can happen in natural, serious and supported ways?

There is no other work now, and who else will do it?

Split Minds are Bananas

A Course in Miracles suggests that we “not allow the body to be a mirror of a split mind” (T-8.VIII.9:5). I want to understand this in order to practice it. What would that practice look like? And what is its relationship to Love?

A Course in Miracles suggests that our mind is split between its belief that separation is real and the truth, which is that there is no separation anywhere (e.g., T-12.I.10:5, T-16.V.15:1, M-12.4:6).

Separation – which always sugars out in separate interests that generate conflict – is an egoic fiction, a self-sustaining error. It repeats a lie in order to be able to repeat the lie again. But because we identify with ego, the lie appears as truth and separation as real.

To support this argument and keep us invested in it, ego argues – and we consent to be persuaded – that we are bodies, and that the body’s vulnerability and the inevitable permanence of death are our vulnerability and our end.

The body is the ego’s home by its own election. It is the only identification with which the ego feels safe, since the body’s vulnerability is its own best argument that you cannot be of God (T-4.V.4:1-2).

All of that is an analogy! It’s not literally true. It’s a way of telling a story that makes clear that suffering is something we do to ourselves. The body isn’t bad; we’re just confused about our relationship with it. That is why ACIM advises us not to let the body become “an image of our own perception of littleness” (T-8.VIII.9:6). The body’s vulnerability is its vulnerability, not ours.

When we conflate ourselves with a body, we also generate a world in which survival, not love, is the game we play. We believe we have to compete over scarce resources, a zero-sum conflict in which the prize is putting off death one more day. This places us in opposition to others in ways that make suffering inevitable. We reinforce the separation in others by treating them as potential enemies but this reinforces separation in us as well. If we can “have'” enemies, then we can “be” enemies. This, too, is an error. We are called to never let the body “reflect your decision to attack” (T-8.VIII.9:7).

Go slowly with that last quote. The body doesn’t attack, we attack. Bodies are beside the point. The suggestion is, we choose a way of seeing the world that obligates the body to behave as if it’s fighting to the death for a cookie. And the course is saying, don’t do that. Own your decision to be violent and own the effects of the decision. Don’t pass it off on biology or evolution. Don’t pretend it’s somebody else’s fault. “Men naturally defend their property.” “Of courese I killed my neighbor – he was going to kill me.” Just see how the potential for violence exists in you and then ask if there’s a better way.

In my experience, relationship with Jesus and the Holy Spirit means we stop thinking of the body as the self. That’s all! We simply give up on the 1:1 equivalency. We don’t deny the body – starve it, train it, punish it, spoil it. We simply accept that it reflects messages sent to it through a thought system that is uninterested in love. There is – thank Christ there is – another way. Adopt a thought system that is interested in love. What happens then?

Well, one thing that happens is that we become better at acceptance as a spiritual practice. Acceptance – which is a form of letting go – lightens us and allows us to experience our natural talent for holiness.

Health is seen as the natural state of everything when interpretation is left to the Holy Spirit, Who perceives no attack on anything. Health is the result of relinquishing all attempts to use the body lovelessly (T-8.VIII.9:8-9).

Really the suggestion is, use the body for loving acts – feed the hungry, pay for a stranger’s coffee, grow flowers, pat a dog. Keep it simple and clear; have fun if possible. We are demonstrating to ourselves and others that there are grounds for hope. Heaven is not a future state available to some of us, but a present state of grace presently unrecognized that is given to all of us. It’s easy – just look!

And yes, ego is going to push back. Ego is going to fight. That’s what ego does! But sooner or later we reach a juncture where we don’t want to fight anymore. We surrender and walk away. “Forget it, ego. You win.” But those are not the words ego wants to hear. Contrary to popular belief, ego could care less about winning or losing. It cares about the game itself. You can’t stop playing.

But when we do stop – when we walk away from the shallow ego con game – the Holy Spirit is there to teach us how to live in bodies in the world, and how to use our bodies to enlarge the domains of peace and justice for all of us. This is how we achieve right-mindedness, a state of joyful acceptance of all life that “must be achieved before One-mindedness is restored” (T-4.II.10:1).

The suggestion the course makes is that right-mindedness ensures “right perception” which is “uniformly without attack” and thus undoes both wrong-mindedness and all its effects (e.g., T-4.II.10:2-3). We become “right-minded” in order to eventually remember the one-mindedness that is our inheritance and in which we are no longer confused about what we are, what the world is, and what relationship looks and feels like in truth.

The split mind doesn’t suture itself back together. It doesn’t come up with a better, prettier, holier idea to babble about. It simply sees that the “split” is an illusion, which is healing. There is nothing to do, and only we can do it. Shall we?

A Stranger to Fear

. . . notes on the nonviolence of Jesus

In my post on itinerancy I wrote that Jesus’s directive was clear: we are to live in such a way that makes clear our unconditional acceptance of our total dependence on God.

He did not limit that directive to the practice of sharing (of not possessing even) material resources! He also extended it nonviolence. Again, I don’t think serious historians and theologians dispute this, though a lot of us do seek legalistic ways to water down its apparent lack of exceptions. The Catholic church’s concept of “just war” is a good example. We can live with “justified violence” but “no violence under any circumstances” is a bridge too far.

The problem is, that’s precisely the bridge Jesus built and asked us to cross. Nonviolence, like love, “is incapable of any exceptions” (T-7.V.5:7).

Still, looking for loopholes is understandable. The teaching is uncompromising which makes it easy to attack. We’re supposed to let the Hitlers and Pol Pots of the world just do their thing? Serial killers and rapists? Come on.

I understand those examples and appreciate the spirit of inquiry behind them. They are based on fear and I am not a stranger to fear.

But the lack of exceptions is what makes the lesson so valuable. The lack of exception is what makes nonviolence meaningful and relevant. If God is not violent, then we cannot be violent and remain one with God. Recognizing and accepting (i.e., living in accordance with) our unconditional dependence on God is the mirror image of God’s unconditional love for us. When we accept those terms, the relationship becomes a source of strength, not weakness, and it reveals our shared innocence which is our strength.

Nonviolence is strength. Innocence is strength. And strength arises from our unity with God and, through God, with each other and all Creation. The truly nonviolent have no enemies. That is because “there is no will except the Will of Love” (W-pII.331.1:6-7).

Recourse to violence as a means of solving problems (and the belief that such recourse is rational) is one of the personal prerogatives that Jesus calls us to let go of. Who lives and dies, who gets to wear the mantle of hero and the mantle of monster, is not up to us. God makes the rain fall on the just and the unjust alike. Just as we can’t say when or where it will rain, so we cannot say where death and loss will appear. It’s God’s call because it’s God’s Creation.

But Jesus goes deeper than that. It’s true I can’t say where or when it will rain but also I can’t make it rain. I can’t turn sunshine into water. In other words, Jesus is saying not only that we can’t know if or when violence is justified or appropriate, even if we did know we wouldn’t be able to execute it. We can’t be responsibly or justifiably violent. Ever.

On that view, when we are practicing nonviolence we are simply bringing ourselves into accordance with – we are cohering with – God. We are recognizing – we are realizing, whole-heartedly and open-mindedly – our utter dependence on God.

The Lord will keep you from all harm –
he will watch over your life;
the Lord will watch over your coming and going
both now and forevermore (PS 121:7-8).

It’s good to be nonviolent. In our lives there is a lot of conflict and resolving it nonviolently makes us and others happier, in a way that echoes and reechoes across relationships and the world. Nor is it an error to extend our practice of nonviolence to political and economic domains. Systemic violence is not separate from our individual participation in the system. We have differences – serious ones sometimes – and resolving them shy of war and destruction matters.

Therefore, don’t yell at people. Don’t lie. Don’t plot revenge for harm done and don’t harm someone preemptively to avoid greater harm down the road. Don’t break things. Don’t gaslight people. Don’t use your talents (a sharp tongue, a quick wit) or privilege (access to inside information, immunity from certain consequences) to oppress others. Weaponize nothing and partake of no defense. Resist inequality in loving and peace-filled ways.

That is the practice. And – for most of us – it’s a local practice, a close-by practice. We tend to think of nonviolence on global scales – Gandhi’s salt marches, MLK in Birmingham, Dorothy Day on a picket line – but for most of us, a local application of nonviolence is our mission and, for most of us, that’s enough. It’s more than enough.

It’s not a crime against God or nature to make mistakes in this regard. I do, often. But nonviolence remains the practice. When I fall short, the practice calls me to reflect on the error. What confusion does it represent? What pattern or conditioning does it depend upon and extend? Who can help me think it through? Who can help me find a way to live in which those errors occur with less frequency and intensity?

When I screw up, the clear seeing inherent in my commitment to nonviolence allows me to make an authentic apology – one that is sincere and non-dramatic. Understanding makes possible creative amends that are reasonable and mutual. I don’t have to dwell on the error or hold my happiness hostage to perfection. We all screw up. God’s Love is not conditional on our behavior or intention. I’m not forsaken just because I hurt your feelings or worse. I have work to do, yes. But I am not less loved by God.

Nonviolence, like itinerancy, is an understanding and a practice. It’s a way of living in the world with others that is only possible because we are itinerant. The two coalesce in a practice that to outsiders looks like love and to us, on the inside, feels like love, albeit one that is greater than we are, and to which we owe our existence, and on behalf of which we are grateful to labor and love.

Nonviolence, like itinerancy, seems impossible. But that’s fear speaking. The real problem with nonviolence is our desire to hold onto the privileged self – the one that gets to justify this or that act of violence, the one who gets to decide who deserves punishment or invasion or torture. The one whose values and ideals matter just a little more than anyone else’s – the one who’s just a little better than everyone else.

And, in the same way that the practice of itinerancy redresses our fear of itinerancy, nonviolence redresses our resistance to nonviolence.

When we practice nonviolence – and recognize how bad we are it and how much help we need – we fall into step with Jesus. We tend to idolize Jesus, right? He sits at the right hand of God and all that. We’re like the disciples arguing who’s next in the Kingdom (e.g., Luke 22:24-30). But when you’re on the road with Jesus – when you are living with Jesus, falling and being lifted by Jesus, over and over – then you fall into step with him. The way harmonizes. The response to “nonviolence is impossible for me” is a lived response.

You want to get better at nonviolence? Practice nonviolence. There is nothing new under the sun. When you study Walter Wink, march or fast, hold your tongue, bear patiently the arrows of misfortune or whatever, you not only touch the hem of Jesus’s robe, you put it on. And here is the thing – when you put on Jesus’s robe, you realize there is no space between you and Jesus. You learn instantly that the first victim of our proclivity for violence is our own self, and so a practice of nonviolence must begin with mercy, kindness and forbearance towards our own self.

I found this remarkably difficult. When I began to imagine God’s Love for me – to treat myself the way God would, to see myself the way God saw me – I ran headlong into a hatred and destructiveness that both terrified and saddened me. I beheld my willingness to endure self-imposed harm – blackout drinking, homelessness, loneliness and isolation, refusal of helpful medication, turning away from helping hands, et cetera.

I did not feel worthy of God’s Love. I felt like punishing myself was what God wanted. I did not understand – I did not want to understand – that nonviolence begins with self-love, i.e., respecting oneself, caring for oneself, sharing oneself, being oneself. In order to share, we have to have something to give!

This is a hard knot to unravel – nonviolence is inner work that binds itself to changes in the external world, specifically, shifts from fear to love. You can’t have one without the other. The paradox would be insufferable save for the simple truth that the knot unravels – the paradox resolves – itself. Rather than fight self-hatred and despair – rather than try to destroy the one inside who wanted to destroy me – I loved them. I made space for them. I stopped being angry and defensive. I listened.

I became willing to forgive myself and slowly – so slowly! – self-forgiveness began to reach the world around me.

This is still a struggle! But the thing is, when I realized how hard it was to love myself, I also realized the utter injustice of failing to love others, whatever the reason. I began to see others – even those who had hurt me or hurt folks I loved – as collaborators in a vast delusion. The delusion was that we are separate beings fighting for survival in a world of scarce resources.

In fact we are entangled beings whose lives are intrinsically bound to all life. We do not live alone or in separation. I became gentler when I saw this. I could handle abusing myself but I didn’t want to abuse you. Not really. And in that (admittedly dysfunctional) revelation lay true salvation: we are in this together, and what I experience you experience, and what you experience I experience. Walt Whitman was right – “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

Nonviolence is about relationship and, in particular, prioritizing the relationship over the ones who comprise it. Itinerancy undoes our right to possess anything apart from others, and nonviolence undoes our right to act without regard to others. In both instances, God’s Love for us manifests in relationship. God is the energy of unity, of uniting. Division is an illusion and so the conflicts division engenders are also illusory.  

I don’t have to undo violence. I can’t undo it. Rather, I have to practice nonviolence in my life where and as it is – with myself, my family, my neighbors and co-workers. Doing so creates pockets of grace in which it is easier to recognize the harmful systems and systematizing – truly, power and principalities – and then not buy into it. We don’t have to work on relationships so much as see the way in which there is only one relationship and we are it.

Nonviolence begins with an understanding that this is not my world but God’s, and God has shared it with me, and that means that I have a responsibility to share as God shares it and, to the extent I cannot share in that way, work at learning how to.

For me, a practice of nonviolence – which is a practice of understanding, mercy and forgiveness offered to myself and everyone else – must be grounded in awareness of our shared innocence and its potential. Shared innocence is creative and alive, in the same way that jazz and knitting are creative and alive. It’s out there, you can encounter and participate in it, and doing so can be immensely rewarding and enriching. 

Everything Belongs to God

Notes on the Itinerancy of Jesus

Jesus was itinerant. I don’t think many historians seriously dispute this; I don’t think many theologians do either. It’s right there in the text.

And He said unto them, “Take nothing for your journey, neither staves, nor pack, neither bread, neither money; neither have two coats apiece (Luke 9:3).

See also Matthew 10:10 (Take no bag for the road, or second tunic, or sandals, or staff) and Mark 6:8-9 (Take nothing for the journey except a staff – no bread, no bag, no money in your belts).

Sometimes folks say that Jesus’ itinerancy was incidental to his message and program. He was poor, yes, but being poor wasn’t the point – it was just a fact of his life and community in that time and place. 

But I think the directive is pretty clear across the gospels and related texts. We are to live our lives in a way that makes clear our acceptance of – indeed, our embrace of – our total dependence on God, materially and spiritually.

Still, what does itinerancy mean in practice? It’s fun to say that we are totally dependent on God but what does it look like in application? 

Most of us push back on a literal reading of those gospel teachings. John Crossan makes a good case that Jesus followers were already watering down Jesus’s radical itinerancy in the first century. No shoes? No food? No coat? That’s dangerous and naive. Maybe I’ll buy a second-hand coat or bear with the hole in my shoe but give it all up? Come on.

Nor has heeding him gotten any easier. We are so much more comfortable than our ancestors; we have a deeper understanding of the natural world and its resources; there are systems in place to protect us – legal, economic, political. The rules have changed! We have houses and yards, Netflix subscriptions, popcorn poppers and air fryers, regularly-scheduled doctor’s visits and gym memberships. We carry phones in our pocket. We take vitamins. 

Who amongst us wants to let that go? Who amongst us should? It’s not like I’m scratching this essay on tissue paper by candlelight.

However, there’s an important subtext to the itinerancy directive of Jesus that can help us discern its application. If you are a wandering pilgrim bearing witness unto God, and you rely on strangers for food and shelter, and if the Kingdom of God really does depend on you wandering in this way, then . . .

 . . . then the Kingdom of God must also depend on folks who will support your wandering. That is, folks who maintain a home, gardens and livestock, clean wells, wine sacks without holes, coats and shoes they can donate, maybe even some spare change.

Nor does it make sense to valorize one role over the other – the wanderer vs. the homesteader. The one supports – indeed, makes possible – the other. Itinerancy is not about being right or even better. It’s about sharing our lives in a deep and sustainable way, always in order to remember the Love and Providence of God.

Deeper than the role of wanderer or homesteader – and deeper than the performance of the role – is an underlying theme that upends easy analysis. Jesus isn’t prioritizing a talent for gardening or a calling to beg. Rather, he’s speaking directly into the very nature of possession and ownership itself. He is counseling us about what – if anything – we are allowed to possess, over and against everyone else with whom we share the world.

And on that view, both the wanderer and the homesteader face the same divine mandate: possess nothing but what you can share with others. And, critically, share with others.

Therefore, also, possess nothing (including pride of self or place or object) that would obstruct or hinder your ability to serve others in this way.

This then is the essence of itinerancy, of a Jesus-informed relationship to ownership: Everything belongs to God, God is right now sharing it all with you and so you – in the spirit of God – are called to share it with others.

This invitation reaches everything – the bread we eat, the water we drink, the clothes we wear, the air we breathe, the songs we sing, the stories we tell. Nothing is excluded. If you have it, God gave it to you and invites you to share it as He shares with you. It’s not ambiguous.

Or rather, it’s only ambiguous if you are afraid of what it means to recognize – and relate with one another in and from – our shared total dependence on God.

Abhishiktananda, a Catholic monk who spent decades practicing Advaita Vedanta in India, reached a juncture late in his practice where the itinerancy of Jesus (mirroring as it does the Sanyassin of Hinduism) literally terrified him.

I have understood [the demands of non-possession] too easily as the relative absence of signs of wealth. But it is the very possibility of possession that is attacked . . . There is no longer an ego to be the possessor (Ascent to the Depths of the Heart 383).

The possessions and their absence weren’t the issue; the issue was the very concept of ownership – that I can have what you do not and can, by right, exclude you from it and keep it from you. That’s where the terror comes in. You have to let go of everything – including even your right to hold anything at all in the first place.

Abhishiktananda realized that it was relatively easy to perform poverty and generosity. But the invitation Jesus makes isn’t to a performance but rather to a practice – and that practice requires letting go not only of all our material things but also the very concept of possession at all.

Even for Abhishiktananda, an experienced practitioner of both Catholicism and Advaita, this was profoundly destabilizing. He understood why he and others tended to overlook it, preferring to remain focused on the performance. Itinerancy meant letting go of everything – including the very right to own or possess anything, up to and including life itself. If you go into it, you can appreciate his fear. It’s a big ask – a really big ask. How can we disappear?

Do I think that Jesus was making that kind of argument? About undoing the self? Not explicitly. Jesus was not a mind/body dualist (Abhi kind of was, and A Course in Miracles absolutely is) and so his focus was less on interior transformation than on a collective eschatalogical awakening. There’s a reason the tradition is silent on his transformation from Jesus to Christ (a point to which Abhi often returned).

The real question is: does itinerancy, understood this way, work for you? Or maybe, does it work for us? Now?

Because Jesus’s program – with its emphasis on itinerancy – didn’t disappear two thousand years ago. It remains a way of being alive in the world with oneself and others. Even as it evolves, the fundament – you cannot possess anything, including a self – remains intact.

So our work in this regard is to understand Jesus’s message and program then so that we can apply it now, with the full force of the life-affirming love that characterizes God and Creation.

Are you a wanderer? A homesteader? Are you a little of both? It’s okay to start with identity – to locate ourselves in a familiar narrative framework. But those frameworks are not ends in and of themselves; they are scaffolds that facilitate deeper inquiry. Eventually they have to be released.

Ask yourself: to what aspects of selfhood do you cling? What will you not let go of ever? How is the world affected either way?

For me, in my practice, those inquiries and inquires like them all sugar out in, I am scared and don’t know what to do with the fear.

It doesn’t seem to matter what I’m scared of – fear finds a way to keep going. Fix the monster under the bed and one shows up in the closet. Fix the one in the closet and suddenly something’s tapping at the window.

That is my problem, right? That is where so much of my confusion, error, sin and all the rest of my separation-based pathology takes root and flowers. Demon seeds abound! I am scared and don’t know what to do with my fear.

And Jesus comes along and says, hey Sean? Give everything away, forget every value you hold, hit the road and help others as much as possible. And my response is, no. I will not. That’s crazy. Nobody can do that. I’ll die without a savings account, a stocked pantry, a good therapist, a cozy pair of PJs, a yoga mat.

But here is the thing. When we take a few steps on the road after Jesus – when we lean ever so faintly into the itinerancy that is so essential to his way – we discover that we can let go of fear as well.

What we are in truth is upstream of fear and when we are ready to accept this, we will know a peace that surpasses in every way the limitations of our understanding.

Fear, like hunger or fatigue, desire or anger – like our addiction to comfort – can be set aside. It’s just another thing we hold onto in order to validate our personal existence, like a reputation or a bank account or a mood. I’m not saying it’s easy to release; I’m saying that it can be released. And that releasing it is in practice no different from releasing anything else.

And doing so calms us, which allows us to give attention differently, which allows us to show up for life in ways that really do affirm and sustain and give grace to it.

I want the love of God more than I want fear. My life changed when I was finally able to say that with integrity. It changed me. However slowly, grudgingly and imperfectly I do it, I place nothing between myself and the love of God – including cherishing that self more than I cherish the Love of God – and the effect is happiness and peace. The effect is clarity and simplicity.

Becoming itinerant is a process. It takes time to learn what it is and what it is not. It takes time and energy to practice it. There are ups and downs, often significant ones. It also takes the company of folks who share the commitment. We cannot do this alone.

Following Jesus is in many ways about emptying ourselves of everything but a sincere desire to know and obey – to become subordinate to – the will of God, which is Love. As this clarifies, our living simplifies, and we remember the joy that is our inheritance as innocent children of a loving God. 

Holiness Forgotten, Holiness Remembered

. . . Notes on Relationship with God, Jesus, and the Woman at the Well

I Jesus

However half-heartededly, however gracelessly, I am committed to healing the mind that believes it is separate from the rest of creation. But I cannot do it alone. Hence this writing, this way.

Healing must be lived. Love is not meant to be merely talked about but applied (T-11.VIII.5:3). In Love I want nothing, because I both have and am everything (T-4.III.9:5). But in order to live that way, I have to go from fear to love. And for me, that journey runs from a crucifix to an empty tomb and then beyond them both into a wilderness.

The Jesus myth of Christmas, like the Jesus myths of crucifixion and resurrection, are pointers to interior stages of awakening to a shared remembrance of love, not historical evidence supporting some institutionally-approved theology. They prepare your for the wilderness. But in the wilderness, you let them go.

Relationship with Jesus takes us beyond comforting psychological narratives and reassuring social rituals. It takes us into a state of dangerous unknowing, beyond what the self wants or understands or even thinks. It shows us what the self is: a blazing fire against an even-vaster darkness.

II The Woman at the Well

I met the woman at the well. It’s hard to talk about. She exists in a space (beyond scripture, beyond history) that is mostly unreachable. I don’t know if I’m meant or allowed to talk about her.

The woman at the well is an image – a scriptural construct – that sometimes lends itself to relationship. She tells you what the gift of God is and how to find it. She understands in a way you don’t that relationship with her exists only to bring you both to Jesus. Like you, she knows that relationship with Jesus is the light that undoes the darkness. Unlike you, she has actually experienced both the relationship and the undoing of darkness. There is no deceipt in her about this; there is no uncertainty.

The woman at the well was my first experience of a Bodhisattva. When you meet Jesus, the woman at the well ceases to matter. She knows this and show you the way to Him anyway. She knows that she is a light that points to Jesus, and that the better she points, the brighter she burns, and the brighter she burns, the less of her there is. When we can say honestly that we want the peace of God more than anything else, she disappears.

Lets you go? It’s hard to say. She rejected the profanity of displacing truth in order to worship its absence a long time ago. There is nothing new under the sun. Her hand is the hand you let go of in order to take hold of Jesus.

III Relationship

Healing happens in relationship. Relationship depends on – really, is a form of – exchanges of information about the relationship. What is working, what is not, what the relationship is for, what it can never be for. If you look at relationship, you’ll see a lived expression of our shared power to connect with and love one another. Our goal – which we share with Jesus and the Holy Spirit – is to rest in balance with that power, allowing it to come to coherence in us. In that state of relationship, it is easy to behave as Jesus behaved, and to bring about a world in which we are all itinerant and nonviolent, happy and at peace, beyond even the need to fantasize about Heaven, let alone the ones who show us the way.

Advent Journal: The Last Day

Today is the last day of Advent. The past couple of years I’ve kept an Advent journal. Last year I was grateful to reach the end; this year it’s different.

For a long time I identified as a seeker. I sought God or enlightenment. Happiness and inner peace? It doesn’t matter. Really I was searching for a way to search. Wondering if I really did want to search? Well, I was always more removed from the process than I pretended to be.

This Advent, that removal – that distance – undid itself. It was just busy work anyway, the mouse frantically cleaning itself while the snake unfurls. I was pretending. The suggestion that hovered over the season was, Sean, you are using “seeking” to avoid responsibility for what is given.

Jesus calls us to an ethical stance. Faced with a politically hostile and untenable situation, and a religiously sclerotic one, he enacted a rigorous social and behavioral response: nonviolence, shared meals, and free healing, all in the Name of God for whom justice was the fulfillment of love.

A Course in Miracles is an attack on that man, that mission and that message. It suggests that what Jesus really meant to say was that the world is an illusion and we are not actually bodies. All of the drama around imperialism, oppression and violence are errors in thought. They can’t be solved in the world, because the world isn’t real.

Some people – I am one of them – reinterpret that to mean that violence and oppression are physical expressions of mental or intellectual confusion. The illusion and the confusion are one. But I don’t think that’s fair to the course, which states repeatedly that it’s clear and simple and doesn’t need interpretation. Take it or don’t take it, but don’t pretend it’s something it’s not just because you don’t like it. I think that’s rough but fair.

As is this: follow Jesus or don’t, but don’t pretend he’s something he’s not just because you don’t like it.

On the other hand, I seem congenitally incapable of following Jesus. I mean, The Catholic Worker is right there. Am I really so confused?

The thing is, I think Jesus represents a way of living with God, one that does not abide any assault in or on God’s Creation. But to reach that level of serenity and calm, that abundance of peace, we have to do interior work. We do have to heal our minds. Itinerancy is not merely a form of doing without, but also with undoing the self that believes having and being are separate.

I am saying that you can’t really “follow” Jesus without healing your mind of its addiction to fear. But also, it’s very hard to heal the addiction to fear just by studying it. You have to live it, in a body in a world. Jesus emphasized application, not theory.

A Course in Miracles takes an ontological stand – the world isn’t real, we aren’t bodies, and this is all an illusion. It’s a bad dream of which even God is unaware. Wake up!

On the merits, those ontological claims are reasonable. Our cognitive and perceptual lenses are limited. We are physically restricted from seeing and understanding the whole. Even our tools, which are nontrivially impressive, can’t compass the whole of reality. A kind of humility makes sense.

But the course is not advocating humility. It’s saying that it knows the truth, and that you can as well. Not a relative truth but an absolute truth.

I believe that claim is an error.

I know that not a lot of folks care about this, but it matters to me. Epistemic integrity is fundamental to our ability to communicate and be in relationship. Pretending to have the answer, rather than an answer that’s helpful in context, is dishonest.

More importantly, it reinforces the very separation that it professes to undo. If there is a “right” answer, then some folks will be “wrong.” There will be the ones who get it and the ones who don’t.

And that – the lovelessness of ‘I get it and you don’t’ – is the source of all our conflict and suffering.

Anyway . . .

Clear understanding and effective application are connected. The one makes possible the other. At the level of experience, which crystallizes in the holy instant, understanding and application are one, the way the dancer and the dance are one.

We have a vast potential for healing, both individually and collective. Individually, we can be calm and supportive, we can keep things simple. Collectively, we can ensure that folks are fed and housed in sustainable reliable ways, we can live harmoniously with all life.

I’m not saying any of this is easy, just possible.

In the present moment, our potential is clear. In the present moment, our potential is alive and ready to flow. When we are present to one another and our focus is on healing, the way to act – what to do next – is easy. Following Jesus is easy in the present; it’s not a mystery and it’s not an impossible challenge. It’s just the realization of my potential in and as Creation.

This Advent, the work has shifted from seeking to acceptance and application. The way is given. There is nothing to seek. Mary and Joseph have arrived at Bethlehem. Love prepares again to reveal itself. Will you accept it? Will you share it? This time will you choose again the way of love and not forget?