Mystics – Peculiar Faith

We’re smack in the middle of them at this very moment, these ten peculiar days on our liturgical calendar. These are the days between the Ascension of Jesus and Pentecost, between the departure (yet again) of Jesus and the gift of the Holy Spirit.

These ten days make a bit more plain what is always true of this entire Easter season—there’s no neat or tidy conclusion to the Jesus story and Easter itself is full of complex emotions that are not easily named.

Early on in this season we might recall that the risen Jesus still bears the marks of crucifixion—not just subtle hints or merely a trace of scar tissue but grossly obvious marks. Thomas is invited to thrust his hand into the wounded torso of his beloved.

That’s a rather graphic reminder that Easter does not erase the past but invites instead a deeper integration of painful histories for the sake of healing and new life.

So here we are in these ten days—the wake of another absence without any palpable sense of presence.

I’ve come to think of these ten days as in some fashion emblematic of our entire lives as Christian people. We are continually confronting departures while also anticipating the unimagined gifts still to come. This is the story of our whole lives, a story of the inevitable intertwining of love with grief.

That’s not typically how we frame the Ascension of Jesus, of course. Our hymns and prayers for the feast are brimming with images of triumphant glory, of crowns upon crowns adorning the head of our mighty king who now resides in the heavenly realms.

I admit to loving those images and singing them with gusto. But they are woefully incomplete without the texture of loss and the scars that accrue on a long journey.

The lectionary didn’t give us any clear or direct references to the Ascension yesterday, but we did hear about departure and loss. We heard about the disciples lamenting the loss of Judas and the need to replace him with another (Acts 1:15-17, 21-26). We also heard from what is often called the “Farewell Discourse” in John’s account of the Gospel (17:6-19).

This is a touching moment as John’s Jesus prays for those whom he loves and who will miss him terribly when he leaves. These are complex emotions among the disciples and also for Jesus. He is giving himself over to events he cannot control, and he does it for love and with love, knowing all the while the loss that will come with it and thus the grief.

Remarkably, this emotional complexity is not only a key feature in the story of Jesus but also and therefore a vital component of God’s own life, what God feels and experiences, and who God is among us.

I realized some of these complexities in a new way while I was searching for a visual image for yesterday’s liturgy leaflet. My search term was “Ascension,” but one of the images that appeared came from an artist in Islamic traditions. She gave that image the title “The Blue God.”

I suddenly imagined the “blueness” of God who feels both pain and regret, who knows something of loss and of grief, and also the passion to find a path of thriving for the whole creation, no matter the cost.

What an astonishing image of God—of the Blue God—dwelling among us, longing just as we do for the flourishing of life. Perhaps this reorients the fantastical story of Jesus ascending, not up and away from us but up and deeper into the life of God—the God who dwells among us, especially in that most poignant confluence of love and grief, of presence and absence, of regret and yearning.

Modern psychotherapists, like Francis Weller, heartily endorse these emotional complexities. Weller urges us to travel toward wholeness by holding grief in one hand and gratitude in the other. Holding both equally cures our despair and cultivates compassion.

Or as poet and visual artist Khalil Gibran once wrote, “the deeper sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can hold.” He doesn’t mean to glorify pain but rather to invite us below the mere surface of things and into the depths of mortal life; it’s exactly there where God chooses to meet us, those depths into which Jesus ascends.

Hints of these complexities show up in biblical writers quite frequently. I’m so grateful to be using the First Nations Version of the New Testament in this Easter season, which has helped me notice some of those hints more directly. In the first letter of John, from which we also heard yesterday, the writer describes the kind of life Creator has gifted us in Jesus as a life “full of beauty and harmony (1 John 5:9-13).

That word beauty is too often mistaken, especially these days, for glamor and celebrity, for flawlessness, for cosmetic perfection. But for artists of all kinds, beauty nearly always shimmers with poignancy; compelling art seems regularly to retain a lingering shadow; or, we might say as Jesus “ascends,” glory carries with it a tint of blueness.

I am endlessly intrigued by this: mystics in all of the world’s religious traditions quite often experience divine presence as a turquoise, or aqua, or a sapphire blue light.

These ten little days carry quite a weighty glory indeed, with richer insights that I usually tend to imagine. These ten days invite us to see a truly fierce beauty when our exalted loves are wrapped in skins of grief.

Might we suppose that beauty itself is love saturated with grief? After all, we would not grieve as we do if we did not love so passionately. This must surely mark the road toward healing and wholeness: to harmonize these powerful energies in beautiful textures.

I cannot help but think of the Eucharist here, about the space created at the Table for living a life of beauty and harmony, a Eucharistic life of both memory and hope.

The wider world around us offers precious little space for any of us even to name our grief, let alone integrate it into our higher loves. But there’s space the Table. There’s space to hold the worst possible memories—betrayal by a friend, public torture, state execution. And there is also space to cultivate the best possible hopes—the love and grace of God in our rising to new life.

The beauty of the Table, just as the beauty of our lives, emerges as we harmonize such brutal memories with such vivid hopes.

These ten days are for just such a lifetime as that, because I’m increasingly convinced that there is no other path toward healing and wholeness than the one that harmonizes love with grief.

And that is a beautiful thing.

Lent always seems drenched with thick symbols (meals, foot-washing, the cross). The Easter season seems populated with big words, with words that carry with them a rich and complex history—words like “doubt” and “belief” and “trust”; words like “breath,” “spirit,” “forgiveness,” and “peace.”

I’m kind of obsessed with etymology, so a season so packed with richly-storied words becomes a treasure-trove. Those words I just noted, for example, punctuate key moments in what some scholars call the “mystical Gospel according to John.” The word “mystical” in this case I take to mean the endlessly mysterious presence of God in us, in other animals, in our shared creaturely flesh, in every ecosystem, in Earth herself—a presence that animates everything with divine life.

John and his community of believers could be described as a group of first-century Jewish mystics, deeply rooted in the traditions of ancient Israel, and who loved reading the wider world of God’s creation in the light of the risen Christ, and even more, always doing so while gathered around the Eucharistic Table.

This past Sunday—the second Sunday of Easter, which is always devoted to the familiar story of Thomas (John 20:19-31)—offered at least three “mystical moments” worth considering for a world in need of healing—and how a wordy history might help.

The first moment occurs in what can easily be overlooked as a random detail in the story. The risen Jesus appears to his closest friends, but of course Thomas wasn’t there at the time. He shows up again about “a week later”—or that’s what most of our translations indicate, about a “week.” The original Greek is much more specific: the risen Jesus appeared among them again eight days later.

For ancient Israelites, this is not a random detail. It evokes a way of thinking about the Sabbath, especially among the later Hebrew prophets, weary of war, longing for justice, laboring hard for peace. For them, the Sabbath is not merely for rest; the purpose of Sabbath is to inspire and anticipate that great day when all work will be finished at last and brought to its completion—that’s the “Eighth Day.”

John points toward that great hope with Jesus on the cross; he dies there, John says, on the day of Preparation for the Sabbath—and not just any Sabbath, but one of “great solemnity.” Anticipating that final Sabbath when all work shall at last be completed, John’s gospel is the only one in which Jesus dies by declaring “It is finished.”

John seems to underscore this point when Jesus blesses his friends with peace—not once, not twice, but three times in the Thomas story. Much more than only “peace,” the Hebrew word shalom means more richly wholeness, coming to fruition, completion.

The second mystical moment comes to us on a gentle breath of soft wind. The Greek word pneuma can mean both breath and spirit; that pun also works in Hebrew. The Spirit is the breath that God blows into the first human’s mouth in Genesis, giving life to that creature made from the mud of a garden.

In John, Jesus is buried and rises in a garden; he then breathes on his friends, not only with the Spirit of life but also of forgiveness.

I’m grateful to be using the First Nations Version of the New Testament in worship this Easter season. That indigenous translation renders the notion of sin as “bad hearts and broken ways.” In that sense, forgiveness is actually a path toward healing and wholeness, and not only for individuals but communities.

That path shed some surprising (for me) light on an otherwise familiar section of that passage from John. I’m accustomed to hearing the risen Jesus warn his friends about retaining the sins of others, because then they will be retained (20:23). Sins aren’t actually mentioned in that Greek phrase at all. The original Greek suggests instead that “whomever you hold, hold fast.” When you forgive someone, in other words, hold on to that person, keep them close in the community, where they and you belong together.

For the third mystical moment from this story, we might recall that the verbs for “seeing” and “knowing” are directly related in Hebrew. In the third chapter of Genesis, the serpent tempts Eve to see in order to know, and so she reaches out to take the forbidden fruit that looks so delightful.

In John’s account of the Gospel, Thomas demands to see the wounds of Jesus in order to believe. But John’s Jesus invites Thomas into an even greater intimacy. “Reach out and touch the wounds,” he says. Put your hand here—or as the Greek word more directly means, thrust your hand into my side, Jesus says, and then believe.

That old saying “seeing is believing” has its origins in this story about Thomas. More accurately, however, Thomas is invited to “reach out and touch to believe.”

“Doubting Thomas with Jesus,” Krishen Khanna

This is underscored more than once in what the lectionary provided from the first letter of John this past Sunday: We saw the risen Jesus with our own eyes, he says. Even more, we touched him with our own hands; we touched the One who is life—not just any life but the unending life of “beauty and harmony,” as the First Nations Version describes it (1 John 1:1-2).

These powerful words and images are addressed to John’s future readers, like us, the ones who were not in that upper room with the disciples. Just as Jesus urges Thomas to reach out and to touch, so also Christians gathered around the Eucharistic Table are invited to reach out, and to touch, and then still more, to take, and to eat—just like Adam and Eve did in the garden, but we do it for life, not death.

I love the story of Thomas. I love John’s account of the Gospel and John’s letters. I love these ancient texts because they show us it looks like and how it feels to live as a community of believers with some wonderfully rich words. Believing is the operative word in this case, which is not the same thing as knowing.

Faith is not knowledge, and certainly not certainty; faith is a posture of trust not only toward the infinite mystery of the living God, but also each other. And that’s what makes belief so invigorating and sometimes terrifying.

The verb “to believe” comes from an old Germanic phrase to indicate the “giving of one’s heart to another.” If I say, “I believe in you,” I don’t mean merely that I know something about you; I mean quite brashly and beautifully that I’m willing to give my heart to you in trust.

The figure of Thomas in John’s gospel stands not as a cautionary tale about doubt—all of the disciples doubted at some point and in some fashion. No, Thomas stands as a reliable spiritual guide, reassuring us that risks are worth taking for a life of trust; I may just need to get that tattooed on my body somewhere where I can read it every day. Trust has never been easy for me—and maybe it’s not ever easy for anyone.

Surely this is what makes John’s mystical Gospel a matter of some urgency in the world today, a world experiencing a profound crisis of trust on so many levels.

Would it matter in such a world for a community of believers to risk giving their hearts to each other, to show a world in pain what trust looks like? I believe so, not because the church does this perfectly or even well but because that’s the only path I can see—and touch—toward healing.

Tag: Mystics

Ten Days for a Lifetime

Seeing and Touching, Trusting and Healing