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I’ve spent a lot of time in this life with the cross, and somewhat less time with resurrection. The one makes the other necessary – a kind of grim cycle I wish on nobody. Yet recently, another way has shown itself. Late, but not too late, I am called back into the desert where it all began, and you are going too.
1
A big part of my “story” is that I have not always been a good guy. Today I am a good guy, or at least an okay guy committed to minimizing harm. But not always. And even so, things still go sideways sometimes.
I am the predictable result of a genetic predisposition to addiction and a culture that celebrates enduring suffering as a sign of strength, violence as the only valid means of conflict resolution, and shame as a religion.
Hell, not Heaven, is my mode, my location and my journey’s singular goal.
Nor am I alone. A long line of fathers, uncles and brothers stand behind me – ancestors who died in jail, died drunk on winter streets, died alone in hospitals in strange cities. When my great-grandfather was able to move his parents’ bodies to a private plot overlooking the Taunton River, he only moved his mother.
I understand why he did that.
And I understand that part of his heart – and mine – remains in that unmarked – that unforgiven and unforgiving – grave.
2
I have committed crimes. I have hurt people’s bodies and minds with my words and my fists. I have practiced a brutal indifference to all this – I have refused accountability – leaving me lonely, sad, and angrier at God than I can say.
And yet.
It’s the “and yet” that gets us, right? No matter how bad it gets – and it gets bad, it can get really really bad – there is always some undercurrent of light, some thread of hope, some interior glimmer of goodness and love that calls us away from the cross and the empty tomb.
Marianne Sawicki and Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza are clear: Follow Jesus or don’t, but if you are going to follow him, then accept responsibility for creating anew and sustaining now his discipleship of equals.
The new kinship of the discipleship of equals . . . is sustained by the gracious goodness of God . . . The “father” God is invoked here not to justify patriarchal structures and relationships in the community of disciples but precisely to reject all such claims, powers and structures . . . The woman-identified man, Jesus, called forth a discipleship of equals that still needs to be discovered and realized by women and men today (Fiorenza In Memory of Her 150, 154).
No more going it alone, no more refusing to console or be consoled, no more willful embrace of physical and psychological pain, and no more indifference to the well-being of any brother or sister anywhere.
Now is the time of becoming familiar with Christ by becoming family to one another, but familial in a sense that transcends the limitations of both biology and culture. It’s new, right? Familiar but new.
Critically, this new family does not include a father. As Fiorenza makes clear, this is neither an accident nor an insult. It merely reflects the corrective impulse of Jesus. Patriarchal rigidity – man as the locus of power – is gently set aside. In its place is God, Who is Love, and the only locus of power anybody needs.
Are you ready for that? Am I? Is anyone, ever?
3
There was a terrible storm on the day I met her. I stood on the steps of the law school library, happier than I’d been in a long time, her phone number tucked in my pocket, and watched dark clouds sweep across the sky. Wind whipped and howled, driving leaves from the trees; rain fell in heavy sheets, drenching everything.
I don’t remember how long it lasted. Ten minutes? Twenty?
I stood there and watched. I stood there and witnessed.
My life had changed in a matter of minutes and I knew it. I don’t think I have ever felt with such clarity and precision the graceful movement of God. I had been brought into a relationship that refused the rubric of suffering, the pedagogy of hate and the ontology of fear. In it, seeking ended and creation began.
My heart was joined with another who would not forsake me but rather teach me – in time, in the world – how to not forsake others, including my own self.
I remember later driving to the store to buy lunch. I wandered up and down the fruit and vegetable aisles, admiring the colors, amazed at how happy I was, how alive. Everything was full of light. Vast rivers of healing rose through the earth into my body and from there flowed out into the cosmos, filling it with the energy of creation.
I left without buying anything; of course I did. I needed nothing; I had been given everything.
And yes. That moment, like the storm before it, passed. But the gift did not. It remained in me as the potential for healing, and the possibility of joy. The relationship itself was beautiful and difficult, like crossing a desert. In it, an ancient prayer was answered yet again. An even more ancient love took form – yet again – in the world. What else did I expect?
4
Emily Dickinson knew. The Divine finds us in relationship, and in relationship we learn from one another how to be divine.
With thee, in the Desert —
With thee in the thirst —
With thee in the Tamarind wood —
Leopard breathes — at last!
In relationship, we realize that the only power is that of Love. Everything else is subsumed in it. Creation alone is. In the desert, we remember our fundamental poverty and thus reclaim our identity in Creation. We are dependent and relational. Grace is a matrix whose output is love and we are it.
There’s a reason I like writing that, that way, and a reason you like reading it. The leopard – my God this love – draws yet another breath.
5
Fiorenza again, same text: “Structures of domination should not be tolerated in the discipleship of equals” (148).
I hear you. I see you. I will not take another step without you.
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Sweet perfection beyond all words. I’m at the end of the lessons again and re-reading the teachers manual. A bridge is burning behind me. I’m lost and found at the same time. Sweet Mother of God in surrender I find victory.
Thanks for sharing the way, Bill . . . I’m more grateful for your clarity and passion than I can say . . . thank you for not leaving me alone 🙏🙏
~ Sean
Sean…
The way you write! Yes the cross ..sometimes that’s all there is …thank you for reminding me of resurrection, communion and sharing .. of discipleship, of love..of creation..the paradox of living this human life infused by Love in so much of what appears to be its opposite.. 🙏🏼🙏🏼
Thanks for sharing and being here, Roanne . . . I appreciate it and the kind words . . . it’s good to be seen . . . thank you again 🙏🙏
~ Sean
I have been in the desert for well over 10 years now. I have listened to so many sages, read the Buddhists texts, Eckhart tolle, Alan Watts, Wayne Dyer, Marcus Aurelius, The Bhagavad Gita, Vedas, the Bible, the Kabbalah and most certainly A course in miracles multiple times. I am still angry at God as I see so much pain in this world. Yet I still remember chapter 31 extolling me to ‘choose again’. My heart breaks even though now I choose more readily jesus’s way. Peace is ever fleeting. And so often I don’t forgive myself.
Thank you for sharing, Jim. Peace is fleeting but sometimes it stays longer than we expect. Practice helps me, and watching my expectations. Self-forgiveness is hard – I hear this. Thanks for being here – I appreciate it. It’s good to know we’re not walking the path alone.
~ Sean
Sean,
Part 3 of your missive reminds me of something I read a while back about an encounter Jesus supposedly had with a “foreign” woman—a pagan gentile Syrophoenician seeking help for her sick child. Caught up in his own culture of supremacy, Jesus evidently dismissed her, some say he insulted her by an ethnocentric remark. But the woman gently called him out on his prejudice and engaged him in a riddle-like exchange. Jesus listened to the woman (he listened to a woman!) and remembered who he was. And so, the child in the story became healed—healed not just by Jesus, but co-creatively in tandem with the foreign woman.
Thank you for introducing women theologians in your studies that you share with us.
Yes! This is a story that comes up often in my reading. And the interesting thing is not whether it did or didn’t happen in the historical Jesus’s life but that a community of his followers, decades after his death, still tell this story which clearly upends both the patriarchal imperative AND Jesus’s own rabbinical role. It is so radical! It is so amazing. Someone, I think it is Fiorenza, says it is the only (or one of the few?) time(s) that someone other than Jesus gets the last word in dialogue with him.
I was re-reading parts of Crossan’s The Birth of Christianity and found Sawicki in a footnote, tried to find her online (not much luck) and ended up tracking down Seeing the Lord. She pointed to Fiorenza, who I think is actually pretty well known. Sawicki less so. I have about eight books of Fiorenza’s to read, and then Mary Daly. It’s like coming home. The feminism of the mid-to-early eighties is deeply intellectually comforting to me. I find myself wondering why I’m only reading them now. The trajectory of my spiritual life would have been very different had I encountered them in thirty-five years ago.
And yet (as the man says). I understand the argument that everything happens when it’s supposed to, but I also want to hold a space for grief and loss and what-could-have-been. There is a poignancy to this reading that that somehow lends grace to aging, and the letting-go to which aging continually invites us.
(I think? Late fifties here – I know there are miles to go)
Also – I’m rambling – there is a permission structure in the work of these women that enables a non-supernatural connection to Jesus quite unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. I KNOW a lot but these women locate the knowing deeper in the body, where “the body” is inevitably associated with other bodies of all kinds – physical, philosophical, communal, et cetera. It’s really quite exhiliarating.
Thanks for reading and sharing, Susan.
~ Sean
Thanks for this, Sean.
I never heard of Marianne Sawicki until your mention of her in the Advent essays. I just picked up Seeing The Lord at the library over the weekend and went straight to Ch 8, Bodies Born and Grown. Geez, I wish I knew about this woman (same age as me) when I was writing up my final project on Bio-Psychosynthesis for the KY Center for PS in Lexington back in the eighties. I just learned tonight that Sawicki was teaching at the Lexington Theological Seminary only five miles away during those same years! Would have loved to talk with her about “the body” given her deep understanding of the Resurrection. “The body of Jesus that came down from the cross fell into the lap of the teaching church . . . as well as mother Mary.”
Have you read Body, Text, and Science: The Literacy of Investigative Practices and the Phenomenology of Edith Stein by Sawicki? Stein was an editing assistant to philosopher Edmund Husserl (phenomenology of embodiment) for a few years and Sawicki suggests that Stein (a Jew converted to Catholicism) understood embodied personhood in a way that Husserl did not. It’s an expensive book to purchase so I’m trying to track it down at a university library.
Thank you for your newly encompassing embrace of “the body” when it comes to ACIM. With your help, even the course could be a lap one could fall into.
Thanks for this, Sean.
I never heard of Marianne Sawicki until your mention of her in the Advent essays. I just picked up Seeing The Lord at the library over the weekend and went straight to Ch 8, Bodies Born and Grown. Geez, I wish I knew about this woman (same age as me) when I was writing up my final project on Bio-Psychosynthesis for the KY Center for PS in Lexington back in the eighties. I just learned tonight that Sawicki was teaching at the Lexington Theological Seminary only five miles away during those same years! Would have loved to talk with her about “the body” given her deep understanding of the Resurrection. “The body of Jesus that came down from the cross fell into the lap of the teaching church . . . as well as mother Mary.”
Have you read Body, Text, and Science: The Literacy of Investigative Practices and the Phenomenology of Edith Stein by Sawicki? Stein was an editing assistant to philosopher Edmund Husserl (phenomenology of embodiment) for a few years and Sawicki suggests that Stein (a Jew converted to Catholicism) understood embodied personhood in a way that Husserl did not. It’s an expensive book to purchase so I’m trying to track it down at a university library.
Thank you for your newly encompassing embrace of “the body” when it comes to ACIM. With your help, even the course could be a lap one could fall into.
You’re welcome, Susan. Thank you for sharing here. I have not read that – I have tracked down a few of her essays about teaching but by and large, her work is just hard to find. I bought “Seein the Lord” back in the fall because I had an intuitive sense I’d need it for longer than a library lend though I did start with the libraries. “Her deep understanding of the resurrection” is perfect, that’s it with her for me. I share your sense of wishing you could’ve connected with her – I was hoping she might be a professor emerita somewhere so I could reach out. There are a lot of essay she wrote I wish I could find.
I haven’t read any other books of hers, I don’t know if I will. I read “Seeing the Lord” three times between October and December and I’m already hungry to return to it. It’s a rare gift in my life to find a writer/teacher like that. I find Husserl fascinating but have never had the time to read him close enough, I don’t think I could do that anymore outside of a rigorous academic setting like a seminar. Let me know what you think of “Body, Text and Science” if you are able to track it down. If it was easier to read Sawicki, I doubt I’d leave anything untouched. She’s that kind of thinker and writer.
And thanks for recognizing the tenor of what’s going on for me in my practice and study right now. On the inside it feels like a calamity unfolding and it’s hard to trust that it’s connected to healing even though it seems sort of obvious that it is. Sawicki jogged a lot loose – a lot that was ready to fall, I suppose, but still.
Have you read Donna Haraway at all?
Thanks for being here, Susan. I’m very grateful.
~ Sean