Comments for Jim Other sermons.

The devotional singer Krishna Das ends a recent recording with a chant, the lyrics of which unite an old gospel recorded by Mahalia Jackson with a newer song by Eric Clapton. The words go like this:

This combination of African-American gospel, Hindu devotion, and rock – touches a universal yearning. It is the yearning for God to be real. It is the longing to know God.

The beauty and poignancy of Mary Magdalene’s encounter in the garden is her yearning for Jesus. Think of the depth of her emotion. First she loses Jesus because of his execution. Then, coming to the tomb, she discovers the body is gone. Suddenly the man whom she has assumed to be the gardener says simply "Mary" – her name. It is Jesus. But Jesus’ very next words are, "Do not hold on to me,.." And he explains that he must ascend to God. He is leaving. She has just experienced the presence of the living Lord. Now he will go. How will she find a way to live in the presence of the Lord, when she has been told to "Let go"?

Anthony de Mello insists that God is essentially beyond the grasp of human thought – a mystery – so anything said about God is true not of God but only of our concept of God. He even suggests that whenever we use the word God – we ought really to say my "God-concept." And he adds that all God-concepts are ultimately idols. "What you seek, alas, is to talk of God rather than see God; and you see God as you think God is, not as God actually is. For God is manifest, not hidden. Why talk? Open your eyes and see." See? But see what, especially when Jesus seems to have left us, just as he left Mary? We are being told that what God actually is is what actually is. Mary in the garden did not recognize Jesus. Why not? Because she could not conceive that Jesus was alive, she had conceptual blinders on that made it impossible for her to see that he was actually standing before her. It was Jesus who uttered her name and pierced the veil.

We may have to let go of God in order to really see God. Psychiatrist Gerald May has written a new book on the 16^th century Spanish saints John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila entitled The Dark Night of the Soul. In it he stresses that we misunderstand this phrase if we think it refers simply to going through a painful or difficult time. He says instead that the dark night means the recognition that God works mysteriously, hidden from our consciousness. Even when we experience only the absence of God, still God may be working secretly, transforming us from within. He writes:

As John makes clear, it is not God who disappears, but only our concepts, images, and sensations of God. This relinquishment occurs to rid us of our attachment to these idols and to make possible a realization of the true God, who cannot be grasped by any thought or feeling. At the time though, it seems like abandonment, even betrayal.

A poem of longing by Teresa reminds me of Mary in the garden.

My afflicted soul
Sighs and faints.
Ah! Who, from her love
Can bear to be absent?

What must you and I let go of in order to see God? What must we relinquish so that we can recognize that we are in the presence of the Lord? It might be our concepts about God’s power. It might be concepts about God’s gender. Jeremiah had to let go of concepts about God’s trustworthiness and Job had to let go of his concept of God’s justice. But more than this, it may mean letting go of the experience of God’s existence, the very feeling of God’s presence. Such concepts and such experiences exist to help us, but when we become attached to them they become idols – idols that may have to go.

John of the Cross suggests that it is possible to live in the presence of the Lord, unattached to concepts of God or experiences of God. When this happens our understanding of the very heart of Christianity – faith, hope, and love - is transformed. Jerry May writes:

In their truly contemplative and transformed state, faith, hope, and love are tied to no particular ends; they have no object. Contemplative faith is not faith that God exists, that life is essentially good, or that this or that is true. All such things are beliefs, not faith. Faith is, instead, a way of being, completely open, empty, as John would say, of all specifics. Contemplative faith is more like a continual fire of goodness, warming and illuminating every breath. Contemplative love is completely beyond comprehension. It is not love of some things to the exclusion of others, for that would be attachment. True love is like some infinite way of being that we become part of: a flowing energy of willingness, an eternal yes resounding with every heartbeat. And contemplative hope, the transformed hope, is also completely open and free. It is not hope for peace or justice or healing; that also would be attachment. It is just hope, naked hope, a bare energy of open expectancy.

He continues with a personal story:

And in the summer of 1994 I joined a small pilgrimage to Bosnia. I had the opportunity to speak with poor people who had lost everything: homes, possessions, entire families. As they told us their stories through tears of grief, I sensed deep hope in them. Through interpreters I asked if it were true.
"Yes, hope," they smiled.
I asked if it was hope for peace.
"No, things have gone too far for that."
I asked if they hoped the United Nations or the United States would intervene in some positive way.
"No, it’s too late for that."
I asked them, "Then, what is it you are hoping for?"
They were silent. They could not think of a thing to hope for, yet there it was – undeniable hope shining in them.
I asked one last question. "How can you hope, when there’s nothing to hope for?"
The answer was, "Bog," the Serbo-Croation word for God.

He concludes by saying that, in the end, he cannot fathom nor comprehend such transformed faith, hope, and love. Yet, mysteriously, "to discover them, in oneself or in another, brings the deepest reassurance I have ever experienced."

That was Mary’s challenge and perhaps ours as well. How do we find a way to live in the presence of the Lord, when we experience only the absence of the Lord? The mystics say that to find God you must simply surrender to the form the present moment is taking. There you meet God. In the mystery and awe of what is. Dag Hammerskjold wrote:

I conclude with these words from the peerless Christian poet George Herbert:

Teach me, my God and King,
In all things thee to see,
And what I do in anything,
To do it as for thee.

Amen

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