Christian Mystics

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December 31, 2008

“Discovered in Egypt in 1945 as part of the Nag Hammadi Library, the Gospel of Thomas was long considered irrelevant to the study of Jesus’ teachings. Stevan Davies’ influential The Gospel of Thomas and Christian Wisdom overturned this view, and enabled the Gospel of Thomas to be taken seriously as a source for the earliest Christianity.”

The Gospel of Thomas is a remarkable document within Christianity, and if you’re not familiar with it I suggest you get ahold of Stevan Davies’ book as well as a good translation of the short, stunning Gospel itself. If you like, there are plenty of sources on the Web to keep you busy!
I won’t kid you — Davies’ book is a bit dry.  Within it’s pages is a glimpse into what many, including myself, believe are the closest one will come to the words of Jesus. The manuscript has a fascinating story, buried as it was in the desert for short of 2,000 years. Found with a cache of gnostic books, an early Christian movement later decried as heresy by the “winning team” in terms of Christian communities, it has convincingly been proven by scholars not in and of itself to be gnostic. (Plato’s Republic, or a fragment of it, was found in the same cache and I don’t hear anyone suggesting such a label belongs to it!)

More to the point, the Gospel of Thomas avoided much as it slumbered in the sand, placed there by concerned monks/Christians who were alarmed that the powerful wing of Christianity was burning everything that didn’t support thair particular view/version of Christianity. For one thing, the document is unadulterated by two hundred and more years of the editorial decisions and “official” (meaning winning) strand of Christianity that, one amongst many in the first years, became dominant and remains so today.

The general themes of the Gospel of Thomas are wonderful - the idea of discovering God not as a concept or a distant concept, but rather here and now. Jesus’ message had nothing to do with his death (this is a sayings gospel and doesn’t even mention such things or alude to them) but everything to do with life - how to move from being dead to alive, from the darkness to the Light, from the image of God to the likeness of God, the latter being a common strain of belief in Eastern Orthodox.

Jesus said, “If your leaders say to you, ‘Look, the (Father’s) kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is within you (one manuscript adds: and it is outside you).

What I’d like to do as I have the opportunity is to look at various sayings from Thomas and reflect on them — how they may be far more accurate words closer to Jesus than some of their more well known counterparts in the New Testament. That’ll take more than one entry, though, so I’ll work through them from time to time. As you get a chance to study a bit on your own, you might find yourself struck, as I was, by their power and the remarkable picture it shows us of Jesus and the early Christians.

Blessings,

Brian

Technorati Tags: christian mysics, christianity, gospel of thomas, mystic christians, bible, new testament, gnostic

Religion is a metaphorical language that arises in response to an encounter with that which we might call The Unknown.

I’m sure we’re all familiar with the Hindu/Buddhist story (depending on your source) of the blind men inspecting the elephant. Afterwards, they argue — the elephant is a rope (tail), the elephant is like a tree (leg) the elephant is like a snake (trunk), and so on. Further in the story, these men’s pronouncements get them into a fist fight!

To put this another way, I remember Alan Watts talking about a cat who walks back and forth on the other wide of a fence in which there is a board missing, meaning you never see the entire cat at one time. A person who watches the cat pacing, Watts suggested, and watches long enough might come to the conclusion that the Head causes the Tail. Never in the watching does the tail come first, always last, and so the hypothesis seems to prove itself over and over. The person’s statement of belief fails in one major respect - it fails to take into account that the cat is one thing!

As Christians — or, for that matter, any specific religion or language that we adopt as our own — we have a most remarkable saying to ponder and it comes from the midst of some of Paul’s best writing. It’s found in 1 Corinthians 13: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

One thing I have found in Christianity that I love is that faith and spiritual growth becomes less the “Ah-ha!” moment found, let’s say, in zen traditions  than a journey. It is a journey that, little by little, we ourselves become until there is no difference between the journey and who we really are, that, somehow, the searching is our most natural language of being.  There is one other remarkable thought that arises from within Christianity, voiced by Quaker Rufus Jones quite a while back — that we are searching, yes, but that even with more intensity and more longing, God is doing the same in what becomes a remarkable double search, like friends, like lovers who in a great crowd search from the heart for the one face they know and yearn for.

Blessing,

Brian

Technorati Tags: christian mystic, mystic, rufus jones, alan watts, mystic, christian, spiritual search, searching

Tibetan Storyteller

Joseph Campbell, that marvelous expert on mythologies of the world, was once discussing his new computer, and he spoke back at a time when personal computers were often populated with names like Osborne, Commodore and others. He was asked if his computer suggested any kind of a mythological meaning to him. He replied, “An Old Testament God — lots of rules and no mercy.”

I would suggest that Jesus seems to have had little regard for the idea of an Old Testament God with lots of rules and no mercy - the rules seem far clearer, simpler, and less tribal-oriented; at the same time an almost unthinkable Mercy seems to be at the very heart of God’s Love. Further, it strikes me that the most authentic of Jesus’ intentions and sayings inevitably come in the form of his stories. These are tales of widows who lose coins, a man who stumbles upon a treasure in a field, bridegrooms who are either foolish or wise, a woman who needles a judge until, exasperated, he decides in her favor to shut her up. It is not a question of “God says you’d better do this …” as opposed to what you do get — “Once upon a time.”

A good story points beyond itself, of course, to something much greater, something that can’t be spelled out and captured anymore than you can trap wind in a bottle, to paraphrase my old friend Alan Watts. Jesus did no less in his life, constantly pointing beyond himself, leaving it to later spiritual communities and writers to make him the center. He brushed aside much of the esteem and worship that the crowds tried to foist on him, protesting, “Why call me good? There is none good but God.” He obviously refused to give interpretation to his stories, and if you’ve ever been in a position of having to explain a joke to the point that it dissolves like wet tissue paper, you can sympathize with him. Still, to make sure that people didn’t miss the point, usually one espoused by the spiritual community of the specific writer, an “afterwards” was often injected in which the desired explanation is dumbed-down and explained, usually to puzzled disciples in a literary device that we can make the mistake of focusing on instead of the story.

Let us state the obvious, which means it is often overlooked. A story tells a story. It is that simple. From my days in college studying Communications, I remember the most basic model — one must have a Sender and a Receiver. Both are essential to complete the process known as communication, but while the Sender is active in giving the message, the Receiver must be active as well, must participate in the same way that one’ s mind and being participates in reading a powerful novel or hearing a radio play as opposed to the decidedly less participatory experience of being on the couch and watching a television program.

Jesus, as one gospel writer noted in an aside, only spoke to people in these stories, known as parables. I take that to be largely the truth and that when one stubs one’s toe on a clunky interpretation you’re very likely reading the writer’s words, not Jesus’. Add to that the so many of the stories have been drilled into our heads in Sunday School lessons, obligatory sermons, and more until they have become pale, often altered versions of their original intent and power.

All this serves to bring Jesus as a person more squarely into focus, to call from the heart a wish that we could hear that voice as it surprised and delighted, confounded and confronted, pointing all the time to something just beyond our daily life to our daily life as a road to something utterly profound and mysterious. Storytelling is the language of the Poet, and at the heart of it is the belief that each person will hear the story and, at some level, understand it or find that it speaks to them, often in ways hidden and mysterious such that it haunts you again and again, perhaps springing into surprising clarity at a moment when one’s mind is sometimes elsewhere, a kind of time bomb planted that may burst forth if not the following week, perhaps the following year.

It is also impossible to be dogmatic about a story, to insist one take it as the same as a creed or a law. It is, in some ways, the opposite of a law and, I suspect, a person can only trust in storytelling if, underneath it all, he or she is aware, however dimly,  of a great and flourishing Mercy beyond rules, beyond our own limitations, beyond our own dreams.

Blessing,

Brian

Technorati Tags: joseph campbell, storytelling, jesus, christian mystic, mystic christian, mystic, storyteller, poet

Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians 3:18-19: “Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.”

My recent entry, “Only a Hobo,” has drawn a surprising range of comments, some I would take issue with, some I am in awe of because they seem to get right to the very core of things.  I’m grateful, of course, for all those who comment and those who read whether they choose to or are moved to offer up thoughts.

Why, I ask myself, are we so angry with people who are in obvious bad straits. Perhaps they are not panhandling for money for breakfast, but for a morning bottle. Perhaps they really have money and are “posing” as poor and destitute when their SUV is parked two blocks over, waiting to take them to a nice house somewhere for a shower before the “work day” begins again tomorrow.

Sometimes, I think, the anger is really fear, fear that the lot of these people’s lives could become our own if we are living paycheck to paycheck or if the money we spent has proven to be teetering on the brink of vanishing down a collapsing mortgage. More often, it seems, we are apt to turn away from someone homeless or poor, scornful, because we simply don’t want to be the victim of some wild-eyed con artist who makes us look like a fool, a softy, a sucker.

Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians, makes a point that I think is too often missed by Christians today — but it is a concept that has played throughout the heritage of the faith. Examples are found in the Eastern Orthodox tradition and in the more “Western” church in the form of St. Francis. The idea, of course, is that one is to be “a fool for Christ” as a way of expressing faith and reaching out to other people.

A “Fool for Christ”, as the preacher used the term, is someone who is secure enough and devoted enough in their Christian faith that they don’t mind looking foolish and socially unacceptable for the sake of their faith. The term can be a bit difficult to wrap our heads around nowadays, but harkens back to a day in the early church when living as a Christian meant violating all sorts of social codes and taboos. This might have meant inviting lepers, Samaritans, tax-collectors, prostitutes and adulterers into your home. What fool would do that? A fool for Christ. Or it might mean disobeying some of society’s commands about class and gender and rank. What kind of fool would worship with slaves? A fool for Christ.
….Rev.Thom Belote

Loving the unloved is a risk. We are always an inch away from being taken in life, and not just by those on the street but by politicians and advertisers and, yes, ministers. The question is, if you are eventually going to be a fool, if you’re not a Fool For Christ than, pray tell, who or what are you a fool for?

In a very real sense, Paul is making a simple comment — that the person who is “a fool for Christ” risks reputation and image and propriety and the resulting derision from the world in order to be pleasing to God. Think, if you will, not of insanity but of a different kind of sanity, the kind that breaks through the countless stories of the eccentric and childlike monks of the great Zen tales. Think of St. Francis speaking to the animals, telling a wolf that feeding on people will never do and that the villagers will bring the wolf food daily to keep him from attacking. Think of countless figures in the Eastern Orthodox tradition with their often zany ways of dealing with the world.

Now think of yourself. If you give the man on the street corner a dollar or a coupon for a free hamburger or a prayer, you step that much away from hate and toward God, decidedly foolish in the eyes of the world but precious in the eyes whose gaze is boundless, who looks out from our very soul and sees something of itself in the tarnished, hungry or battered soul of another.

Blessings,

Rev. Brian

Technorati Tags: christian mystic, mystic, st. paul, fool for christ,   mystic christian, christianity, st. francis, eastern orthodox

“Maybe the drunks will just run over the homeless and solve both problems.”

Sgt. Sam, KLBJ Radio 3/27/08

I stopped listening to AM Radio a long, long time ago, which, given the garbage that passes for comments and the hatred that passes for punditry, shouldn’t come as a surprise. For reasons I can’t quite explain, the only exception on a very now and again basis is a Catholic radio station which sometimes, though never very predictably, seems to veer blindly into the truth.

Just yesterday morning, though, I was doing a scan of the AM dial as I drove and came across an often lame talk show that happens each morning, local to Austin. The discussion was about panhandlers on the street corners and I assume what started the ruckus was that the anti-panhandling law in the city of Austin had been declared unconstitutional. The host, whose name is Ed, and his co-host, who is a retired police officer who swaggers with the name Sgt. Sam, were stunned that anyone would show some measure of common sense resulting in the decision.

The suggestion was that people could panhandle between midnight and 4am, and the comment was made that the only people out that time of morning were drunks. This setup Sgt. Sam’s comment featured above — that the drunks would run over the homeless and solve two problems at once.

“The poor you will have with you always,” Jesus said, although he didn’t mention cardboard signs and street corner pleas for money but, then again, why should he have to? The comment was among the most heartless, brazen and, frankly, stupid things I’ve heard over the radio in as long as I can remember, and that includes Rush Limbaugh, the hillbilly heroin user who espouses his own brand of hate and vitriol last I heard and, saving a heart transplant, probably still does.

What is a sad comment about our world is that such a statement as Sgt. Sam’s passes without comment, without even the sharp intake of breathe on the part of his co-host to indicate what little line such a person would honor has been crossed. Yet these are the view that pass for politics in our world today, that go unchallenged and unchecked, that reflect a darkness in the human soul that is stunning in a room with small people and toxic in a broadcast on what once was the people’s airways.

There has been, it seems, an escalation in the deaths and injuries to those experiencing homelessness, according to nationalhomeless.org who is, I submit, a better source to get suggestions and information from than Sgt. Sam and KLBJ.

• The number of homeless deaths has risen by 67% since 2002.
• The number of non-lethal attacks against homeless people has risen by 281% since 2002.
• These crimes occurred in 140 cities in the past six years.
• These crimes occurred in 39 states, plus Puerto Rico.
• The age range of the accused/convicted ranged from 11 to 65 years of age.
• The age range of the victims ranged from 4 Months old to 74 Years of age.
• Gender of victims: 296 Male and 44 Female.

These numbers exist because of people running their mouths such as I heard happen yesterday. The most remarkable thing is that all this occurred on a radio station which reflects the name of it’s one time owner — Lyndon Baines Johnson. It was just a week ago that, randomly, I heard an old speech Johnson had given on civil rights and on poverty and their horrid effects on this country. As someone who remembers LBJ with great disfavor largely for the Vietnam debacle, I was forced to pay homage to the other side of the person, the one who took into account the ravages of this society and how our country does indeed have the sick, the old, the homeless, the discriminated against; how eloquently and forcefully he articulated the idea that these unseen must become seen, not run over by drunks on the roads at night.

If the station hadn’t long since vanished down the corporate rabbithole of ownership and still belonged to LBJ, I have a feeling there would have been a housecleaning and the time would have been filled this morning with polka music or gardening fertilizer tips, either of which might remove the stench.

Blessings,

Brian Robertson

Technorati Tags: klbj, lyndon johnson, homeless, homelessness, poverty, am radio, christianity, poor, panhandling, vietnam, sgt. sam

Please note, Comments Closed on this thread.

Easter is over, although, in a very real sense, it’s never over. The miracle behind it is ongoing and profound, and occasionally peeks out at us, hoping to be seen.

I’m not at all sure that if you put a video camera outside the tomb where Jesus was buried the story told in the New Testament would be what plays out in front of you on your screen. In fact, many thoughtful writers point out that it is most likely that the body of Jesus was, as befitted a criminal upon execution, tossed out in a mass grave for the animals and the elements to finish the dreadful work that the authorities began. Others will say that the time span between Jesus’ death and the reemergence of the disciples was more likely six months or longer, and the events were collapsed into a three-day folk tale that, while not at it’s center something untrue, simply did not happen in the telescoped version of events that we have come to know.

So where does that take us? It is true that the different accounts, with Mark being the earliest, seem to share a common story that, like the individual gospels, have been monkeyed with in order to put forth the theological beliefs of the particular person who pinned each of the gospels and letters. This is hardly surprising that no true harmony exists. The idea of the four versions sitting side by side captured in the same book in the pews of millions of Christians in churches wasn’t even remotely on the minds of the original writers. Instead, they each had their particular take on the story and their own specific brand of belief to peddle to their community, and the result is that there are many, many little differences in the Bible’s Easter story that cannot be dovetailed to form a unified account that would stand as, say, a newspaper account. Certainly that shouldn’t surprise us in the Easter accounts. After all, the birth stories clash in the same kind of way if not greater, melded together by our minds until shepherds and angels and wise men and sheep and straw form more of a Hallmark card cover than anything that must resemble the often hopelessly conflicting facts of that particular day.

Yet, first and foremost one must look at the experience at the heart of Easter as being not historical or journalistic, but, rather, born of the heart,  not in some sentimental way but in a revolutionary intuitive moment that reaches us at the core, bypassing the jumble of conflicting stories and the big bunny, the special sales at the big box stores and the family reunions over ham and green beans. If we are to understand Easter and it’s effect, we have to strip it to the very bare bones with which it first began and take from that insight the power and the promise that it exudes, mystically and practically, through all time, much like the ripples from the impact of a stone that move, not just along the surface but into the most human depths of each of us at the same time.

So, start with this - people do not happily die for lies. The fearful and the cowardly do not suddenly find courage and purpose in a mere belief or in word-of-mouth mutterings. Those closest to the events of Jesus’ death had every reason to be disillusioned and afraid, paralyzed by guilt and loss and, indeed, that is the very picture we’re given of the disciples, sometimes dense and often clueless, and all this must lie very close to the truth of things. Yet we must seize on the fact that something happened to those 11 (and obviously, to a tragic extent, to Judas) to change them.

The telling of the Easter story begins all wrong, not with power but with women, a fact that must have shocked the patriarchy of the time. Still, if we read carefully about Jesus’ life, none of that should come as a surprise Actually, what would really discredit the Christian claims would be if Jesus’ survival had been trumpeted only to the rich and the powerful and, perhaps in time, with sword or payola, filtered down to the poor and downtrodden. Instead, the shattering fact of Jesus’ continued Presence not as a mere inspiration but something altogether different radiated out from the group that Jesus knew and loved the best– the rejected, the outcasts, the broken, the alienated; those who had far more reason to cower back on their fishing boats, spending the rest of their lives gazing into the mystery of the slow moving currents of the waters around them, men and women forever broken or lost, aching or puzzled.

But, pause, and let me mention this question — Are all our facts straight about Easter? No. Yet I remember when I was doing a great amount of storytelling, I’d tell a story that would inevitably be followed up with a question from someone, usually very young, “Did that really happen?” My reply? “I don’t know if it happened or not, but it’s true.”

The presence of Jesus after his death was that kind of true, pointing to such powerful magnitude that it drove one who had been complacent or supportive in the killing of Jesus’ supporters to become one of his greatest early-times believers. But even before Paul, the window into the workings of God took the ones who betrayed him or misunderstood him or doubted him or denied him and in doing so took them from a place of such despair, of feeling fooled or betrayed in a way that we can ourselves only touch lightly upon in our own lives, and propelled these very same people into walking knowingly into the hottest fires of hell that this life can offer, each one of them changed and naked, armed with one thing and one thing only — certainty. Not in a story, not in a newspaper account, not in a pew in a church listening to the minster, not in a crafty marketing move, but something more. Something much more.

Those disciples and followers, did they even understand it all? The question is as absurd as asking, “Do we?” Of course they didn’t understand it and neither should we expect it of ourselves. They knew one thing and it is that one thing we can know — the foibles of humankind, the ultimate mystery and destruction of death, the basic meaning and destiny of human beings were forever changed. First with words of Jesus and then with the validation of God, a message that God may surely do the same for us in private miracles that have their roots in the public miracles of two thousand years ago.

Of so many things it can be said that we simply do not know, that we cannot know, but we are still left certain that we can be grateful as we travel hopefully, aware of our beliefs and lovingly cradling to our breast our disbeliefs because they, too, are often the most real part of what it means to be human.

To that end, we have one thing we can know in those hideous moments when our backs are against the wall — and that is to know that the question, “Who was Jesus” has, in some small part for each of us, somehow been transformed into the more mystical and powerful question that can never be answered with dogma or theory or belief, but only with the heart and it’s servant, the fingertips, namely, “Who is Jesus?”

It’s not a new question. “He said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’” (Matthew 16:13-15)” The answer may not be new, either, but it will be and should be your answer, which is all God can expect of us, couched in the hidden phrasings of your own sacred heart.

Blessings.

Brian Robertson

Technorati Tags: christian mystic, easter, mystic, mysticism, christian mysticism, christianity, who is jesus,

Everybody who stops by here knows it’s no secret that I have a great admiration for Frederick Bueckner. I was browsing today and found several quotes that brought me up short, that sent me in that strange direction where you find yourself peering through the words into something so much more than day to day life that you are speechless, stunned.

Wanted to share a few with you.

“It is as impossible for man to demonstrate the existence of God as it would be for even Sherlock Holmes to demonstrate the existence of Arthur Conan Doyle.”

“If it seems a childish thing to do, do it in remembrance that you are a child.”

“The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It’s for you I created the universe. I love you. There’s only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you’ll reach out and take it. Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.”

“In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints.”

“The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.”

Something terrible happens, and you might say, “God help us!”, or “Jesus Christ!” — the poor, crippled prayers that are hidden in the minor blasphemies of people for whom in every sense God is dead, except that they still have to speak to him, if only through clenched teeth.

“Religion points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage.”

I hope one of them gives you that indescribable moment of, “Ah ha!” however small it may be.

Blessings,

Brian Robertson

[/tags] frederick bueckner, quotes, god, christianity, jesus christ, religion, mystery, christian mystic, mystics [/tags]

People who believe in God are happier than agnostics or atheists, researchers claimed yesterday.

A report found that religious people were better able to cope with disappointments such as unemployment or divorce than non-believers.

Moreover, they become even happier the more they pray and go to church, claims the study by Prof Andrew Clark and Dr Orsolya Lelkes.

The research, presented at the Royal Economic Society’s annual conference, echoes academic studies that have found religion can improve people’s sense of wellbeing.

Using data from Britain and Europe, the study found believers enjoyed higher levels of satisfaction and suffered less psychological damage from unemployment, divorce or the death of a partner.

However, it also found that religious people across Europe tended to be more socially conservative and opposed to Government intervention in areas such as employment.

Believers, for example, were less likely to look for a new job if they were out of work.

Countries with a more religious electorate had lower unemployment benefits.

The study, Deliver Us From Evil: Religion as Insurance, found that less than a sixth of churchgoers in Britain believe it is better to divorce than stay in an unhappy marriage.

The authors of the study said: “Religion tempers the impact of adverse life events.”

Blessings,

Brian Robertson

Technorati Tags: religion, christianity, christian mystic, mystic christian, churchgoers, God