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.