Advent Journal: Holiness Rose Like A Fierce Gorgeous Tide

I’ve been sick the past few days. Welcome to the body, yet again. Last night I sat in the dark coughing, waiting for the light to change, which it didn’t. I dozed off in darkness, chest aching but happy.

Happy because I have seen the Lord, and he speaks to me from beyond the reach of suffering and pathology – really from beyond any conditioning at all. Jesus is always a projection, but when we know he’s a projection, then we can engage with him as a defense. All projections are a defense against love, futile attempts to innoculate ourselves against fear. But if you investigate the fear, if you stay with it, then it dissipates. You see the illusion upon which it’s predicated and so something else becomes possible – the end of fear, which reveals a coherence, a gentleness, a trustworthiness, that makes us happy and give us something to share with the world.

Happiness is meant to be shared. It’s not happiness until it’s shared. Just ask Jesus. He wasn’t wandering around lower Palestine because he was counting steps. His function was healing, and healing included undoing the systemic evil and oppression to which human minds all incline. He went everywhere because the need was everywhere. You have to be in the world, it turns out. You have to be in the body. You have a function and it’s to become happy, which means becoming holy – but in a context. This context. I couldn’t do it without him – or the ones who reveal and disclose him. We are in this together. It’s happening now.

Sometimes when I sit quietly in the dark, prayer or no prayer, I sense the old energy from the old days, before the cross and the long shadow it has lain across the centuries. I think you remember too? The optimism, the radicalism, the confidence. Happiness was a side effect of the sense that a new and just world was being ushered in, one that excluded nobody and included everybody, and whatever resistance appeared it would not prevail. And yeah, it went sideways. But also the gift remains available. He offers it still.

It is a gift I did nothing to earn or deserve and yet which was given to me anyway. Marianne Sawicki provided the missing technical expertise; the rest was handled in relationships in which holiness rose like a fierce gorgeous tide, taking everything – sometimes including the relationship – with it. I am speaking here to the experience of seeing Jesus, knowing Jesus, and being guided by that relationship accordingly. One’s heart expands beyond the reach of word-based communication and the effect is love but a love that is wild and impersonal, like a fire that provides light and warmth but without any intention as to who or what is lit and warmed.

Tides and fires in that preceding paragraph: symbols of an apocalypticism that need not be violent. Transformation happens.

Oh, I am stumbling these days, a lot. I’m sure it’s obvious in the writing. Stumbling happily though, even disarmingly. When you let go of the cause for conflict, it seems at first you’re just letting go of this or that difficult aspect of your personality. But really, you’re letting go of all of it. You are dying to yourself, and to a way of being in the world that doesn’t work because it’s premised on separation and specialness, not connection and holinesds. And you have to say yes to this to this dying, this ending, this letting go. This wild – from the clouds down, from the roots up – transformation. Jesus says, let go of everything that obscures love, and you will be made whole and healing will be your whole function. Nor is he joking. I attest to the truth of this, but also the challenge.

Another thing about Jesus – you can feel my mind wandering today, losing itself in the sentences – is that you can’t lie to him. There’s no reason to. That’s what’s fascinating. Dishonesty is a defense, a viable one in the world the way it is, but Jesus is unique in that he is not in any way a threat to us. There is nothing in him to defend against. The idea of Jesus can be threatening, and the Love to which he points can be threatening, but Jesus himself? No. That’s how you know you’ve met him rather than just indulging the projection (yours or somebody else’s) yet again. You feel grateful and ready to abandon everything. You can see the way forward and nothing matters but walking it. Emmaus is no joke; I beg you to recover that memory.

The interior editor asks if I need to mention the woman at the well, to which I respond, isn’t she implied?