Yesterday it snowed a little as the sun set: prismatic flurries tracing faded planes of light down western hills slowly darkening.
I stood shivering on the front porch, breathless and grateful, now and then remembering to take a sip of coffee. I cannot bear the loveliness sometimes; I cannot compass the love the loveliness reflects.
Elizabeth Fiorenza invites us to set free “the emancipatory power of the Christian community which is theologically rooted neither in spiritual-sexual dimorphism nor in patriarchal ecclesial dominance, but in an egalitarian vision and in altruistic social relationships that may not be ‘genderized'” (In Memory of Her 92).
Everyone gets a seat at the table; everyone takes turns cooking, serving and eating. All power belongs to God; everything else is shared.
All day – coffee and writing, driving with C. to buy grain for the horses, dinner with friends and family – I kept coming back to that sentence of Fiorenza’s. It called and called but apparently I am still learning how to respond.
Yet later, laying in bed, on the horizon of sleep, something softened in the neural matrix, and I got it.
Fiorenza is clear about something I hadn’t noticed in Sawicki, but which is there, and which I cannot now unsee: those women are not interested in Jesus so much as they are interested in the wisdom movement that birthed and then resurrected him.
They’re not opposed to Jesus – not at all. They’re just not buying the whole “special guy who saved the world” schtick. That’s the order that he helps undo. It’s not about him; it never was.
They want to get to what it’s about – healing, comforting, feeding, sheltering, nursing.
Their work decenters Jesus by shifting focus to his program, his mission, and being clear that it’s meant to be lived now, in whatever context is given to us. It’s meant to be enacted here. Peace, happiness, fulfillment, love – all that follows the interior “yes” which activates our cooperation with God in and through Creation.
(Tara Singh often wrote how Helen Schucman told him the course was meant to be lived, and pointed at Mother Teresa as the premier example).
So Fiorenza is “ecclesial” – it takes a village, a community, a collective. Call it a church or whatever you like; it takes at least two to manifest the Lord. And as Lynice Pinkard says, it’s okay to be messy in community. It’s okay to be beginners when it comes to holy relationship.
There are no blueprints. And there is no space of purity from which to act. We must begin imperfectly from within the messiness, in ways that respond to and engage with our concrete and particular contexts and circumstances (Revolutionary Suicide).
I got distracted for a long time by oneness. I got distracted by my own personal “special guy who saved the world” schtick. I objectified myself as a spiritual hero in at least two religious traditions and resisted anything that suggested I was not.
Maybe that’s what I’ve been holding apart – a fantasy of spiritual accomplishment and the reality of how hurt I am and how needful of spiritual help.
But Sawicki and Fiorenza (and Pinkard, too) would say, you’re still keeping the focus on yourself, Sean. You’re still indulging the fantasy of going it alone, being a saint, a monk, whatever. Self-improvement is always an ego project. You’re making it personal. That’s the problem, they’d say. That’s what keeps you separate from the help you need and want.
Earlier this year, I wrote a post called Christ is a Collective, a kind of homage to Helen Beeth, whose writing and teaching feel so liberating to me. It felt like a deep interior cleansing, writing that post. It felt like coming to coherence. But also, I was concerned. Is this my reality or is it a fantasy? Am I hiding behind writing?
But now I see those questions aren’t real. Sometimes what we write isn’t our reality now, but can still function as a light making clear the next step or two. Just keep swimming. Don’t stop sharing.
So at last, I am beginning to piece together a practice – one that harmonizes with my eclectic study and innate wordiness, and liberates me from the confusion wrought by obedience unto men and orders of men who are often sincere but nearly always deeply confused. There is indeed another way and it is being revealed. Nor can I find it without you.
Yesterday Susan asked how am I keeping the Christ-embodied Mary outside of my heart, and my own heart briefly caught fire. Yes! That is the inquiry. But then everything slipped back into its familiar groove with one tiny exception: I knew I was not alone. And I thought then of Emily Dickinson, who wasn’t alone either, and yet still managed a vast and fertile solitude. She wrote these lines in I think 1870, after the “white heat” had passed and she was ordinary again.
A not admitting of the wound
Until it grew so wide
That all my Life had entered it
And there were troughs beside –
How I wish I could have heard her read her own work! Can you imagine it? In the quiet seclusion of her bedroom after dark – moonlight and a lantern – and the world at her window leaning in?
Healing and attention are intimately connected. Admitting the wound is the way the wound heals, because the admission beckons the healers, in the same way a light calls weary travelers off the road.
I cry out and you are here, as if you always were. You lift me and ask am I ready – not to travel but to be home. Or am I lifting you? And does the distinction matter?
We begin again, again, companionate.
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Sean, thanks for making coffee a part of every post! More importantly, you ARE lifting me. Thank you for the constant reminder to keep swimming. Oneness can also be a distraction for me, and I need to remember that it INCLUDES being present here – it is mysterious. I feel too that Jesus’ mission is to be lived now. Am I open to how this is presented to me each day? Do I fight it? Sometimes. Why? I really don’t know anything at all. This morning I pulled a card from my A Course in Miracles quotes deck, and I think it aligns with your post: “Determine, then, to be not as you were. Use no relationship to hold you to the past, but with each one each day be born again.” (T-13.V.5:1). Here I am Lord.
Yeah, coffee is a big part of my morning routine (and late afternoon too). There is no more sacred beverage for me 🙂
Thanks for sharing here, Susan. It means a lot. I’m kind of a sucker for “why” questions – indeed, a big part of my ACIM experience has been learning to shift the focus to “how” questions. But still. when I find myself resisting obvious healing, I do ask why. And the answer is usually, because some part of me – some aspect of me – some way of being “me” – doesn’t want to be healed. It wants to remain unhealed. The “how” question sometimes helps by shifting my focus to mechanics, stuff that I can actually change. You said in an earlier comment something to the effect of being careful of analysis, as if you were saying “it’s a tool that can sometimes be used on behalf of healing but it’s not the healing itself.” I both identify and feel helped by that. Yes – here I am Lord. Do you know the Leonard Cohen song “You Want it Darker.” Hineni, Hineni . . . but in a context that scares me.
Thanks for being here, Susan. One of these days we’ll sit down for coffee 🙏🙏
~ Sean
It’s what I want, to save the world … it’s a joy even to save the world from myself. When I don’t dictate how things should be, when I don’t think I know what someone’s walk with God should look like. I don’t know what wars are for or climate change or any of it, I don’t feel special it feels like humility. I want to save the world from my grievances, my dictatorship, my I know stance, it feels like all I can do.
I’m heading out into a wilderness today, camping, no phone reception.
Thank you Sean for the space/venue for me to share Advent wilderness with you all, it’s been extremely challenging and immensely rewarding.
With love, amanda
Thank you, Amanda. You’ve been a fierce and helpful light here. I’m very grateful 🙏🙏
Love,
Sean
Thank you for this, Sean.
As you say, admitting the wound beckons the healers, which means at least two must be in relationship for that to happen. Relationship as a state of mind first, before action might follow. I can’t know what Emily meant, but when I’m suffering and take the risk to speak about it (scary since conditioned to take care of all my needs, which is just another form of separation) I long for the presence of someone who knows how to call forth the Christ-embodied Mary I mentioned the other day. Even if my crying out is feeble, I want the “Witness” Emily could not allow earlier in her poem. I want someone to be present to me. I want to be seen and heard by an engaged human being. I may want my hand held and a comforting arm around me. My tears wiped. Moreso, I want to cultivate this kind of Christ Buddha remembrance in myself so I can be available to others who are suffering, who feel separate from or othered. What a better time to cease othering than the season of Advent.
As you remind us, we are not actually alone at all—because we have never been apart! We are and always have been in relationship. No separation, therefore no distinctions to concern ourselves about. In a recent dharma talk, the monk reminded us to go beyond all distinctions. Stop making the simple complex, he said. It is only ourselves that keep us outside the Gate, or in my case, outside the Inn Keeper’s door—the door I built myself.
Thank you, Susan. I really appreciate your clarity here. You are describing a familiar work but perhaps one I have not committed to? Have not yet completed? I feel like I know what to say but the application piece is confusing, the living in out. It’s possible I’m making it more complex than it needs to be – that’s ever a risk. Anyway, I really do appreciate your presence and calm insight – it’s truly welcome right now.
~ Sean
🙏🙏. I am so grateful for introductions to authors and concepts I haven’t been aware of but that point to, along with your own writing and inquiries, things I’ve been wondering and questions I have. “ Self-improvement is always an ego project. You’re making it personal. That’s the problem, they’d say. That’s what keeps you separate from the help you need and want.”
I’m longing for a week with nothing planned to just read and write with coffee and and the lit Christmas Tree.. and the woods are lovely, dark and deep,
but I have promises to keep. Family arriving. I think this is the healing, comforting, feeding, sheltering, nursing as you write. The ecstasy and the laundry, a bit, always coexisting and needing the other. So grateful for you, Sean, and this community. Looking forward to more spaciousness in the New Year. Each year, by the way, there is a little more and a little more.
“The ecstasy and the laundry . . . ” man, that is so much it!! And finding a way to co-exist with it all, peacefully, gently, not asking it to be other than what it is . . . thank you for being here, Denise. I am so grateful to be able to say I am not alone, and everyone reading and sharing makes that possible. Thank you 🙏🙏
~ Sean