David McKee’s Homily, July 3, 2016

Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

July 3, 2016

Isaiah 66:10-14

Galatians 6:7-16

Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

In meditating on today’s readings, I remembered an experience I had at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in northern Kentucky; the Trappist monastery made famous by Thomas Merton, who spent most of his adult life there.  Like the experiences of “The 70” who were sent by Jesus to spread the Good News, my being at Gethsemani Abbey was a bit serendipitous.  This was when my wife Alison’s and my children were very young and we were taking–or thought we were taking–an early autumn camping trip to Mt. Mitchell in western North Carolina.  This was the year of Hurricane Hugo and, on our first night of camping, the tail of that storm lashed the mountain, and our tents, with wind and rain.  We were, in effect, washed out of the campground and blown off the mountain.  After drying out at a motel, our trip turned into an unplanned pilgrimage to the monastery.  We attended the Sunday mass there and were given permission to picnic in the woods.  These events, along with the tour of the Jim Beam distillery nearby, were very memorable.  But the thing I remember most distinctly about the monastery were the words engraved in the arch over the gate to the cloister:  GOD ALONE.  Two simple, yet challenging words:  GOD ALONE.  This is the message–the exhortation–given to anyone who would choose to live their life inside that cloister:  that one would live for and by God alone.  So was the message given to The 70 in today’s reading from Luke:  “…carry no purse, no bag, no sandals…”  Leave behind all those sources of comfort and security over which you think you have some control and give yourself over to divine providence.  Jesus is calling his followers to practice renunciation.  Yes, I know that’s a severe word, but I’m going to use it anyway this morning.  It is a word, like asceticism, that is not very well understood.  It is also a word that is a great challenge to the dominant ethos of our culture; an ethos that a good friend of mine once described in just four words: everything all the time.  Our culture tells us, in innumerable ways, that we can, we deserve to, we even must, have everything all the time. To renounce one’s smartphone or hand-held blender, or a second (or third or sixth) pair of sandals…well, that’s a very countercultural idea.

In the dramatic accounts of the lives of the saints, we have many examples of this message being taken literally.  The renunciations practiced by St. Francis of Assisi probably are the most famous.  But, as I look down at my own feet, and look around this room, it is clear that we are not taking Jesus’ exhortation literally.  We all have sandals and bags and purses.  And I imagine that the writer of Luke’s gospel was wise enough to know that very few of his (or perhaps her) readers would go for a literal interpretation.  As I understand it, from my own small amount of scriptural study, Luke’s gospel had its origins in and was particularly addressed to the Greek communities in the eastern Mediterranean.  I imagine these were people like ourselves who were living in the world.  I don’t know if they had mortgages, but they had children to care for, laundry to do, bills to pay.  We’re the sort of people who The 70 were visiting and evangelizing.  So, how are we to take this message of renunciation?  And how and why do we not often heed its call?

As I have pondered the mystery of renunciation, I’ve always come back to attachment as the pith of of the matter.  It is not the fact of our having things that is the problem, but, rather, our attachment to those things.  But what does that mean?  The great Japanese Zen master, Shunryu Suzuki–the originator of the increasingly familiar phrase, “beginner’s mind”–put it succinctly:  “Renunciation is not giving up the things of this world, but accepting that they go away.” Renunciation is accepting–really accepting–that things go away.  So, the opposite of renunciation is the belief that things don’t go away; that they are permanent.  This is, at bottom, the illusion that is the basis of attachment:  we all cling to things, to other people, to beliefs, thinking that they won’t go away.  We all know, in our thinking minds, that this is an illusion.  When we awaken to the reality of life as an ongoing river of ceaseless change, of both loss and growth, we know, for a moment or two, that this is an illusion.  But most of the time we are not awake.  We are, if you will, asleep, and dreaming; dreaming of how we might obtain a thing, or a person, or a relationship, or even a God that will keep us safe, secure, comfortable…that will make us invulnerable.  Or we dream about how we might change ourselves or others so that we will be safe, secure, comfortable, invulnerable.  Even though we believe–or have been told by our teachers, or by today’s reading from Isaiah–that God loves us like a mother loves her child…that we “…shall nurse and be carried on her arm and dandled on her knees”…even though we profess believing this, we don’t often act as though we have faith in it.  Even though we believe, as Paul tells us today, that “…neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything…”; in other words, that no practice or ritual action has any true reality; only the “new creation” of God alone is real…even though we believe this, our actual thoughts and actions, betray how much we don’t trust it; how much we don’t have faith.  And this lack of trust means that, inevitably, we will suffer, because the finite things of this world, including even our ideas and beliefs about God, won’t stand up to reality.  They are all finite and, hence, perishable.  They will always disappoint our hopes in them.  As the great 16th. century Spanish mystic, John of the Cross, makes clear, even our experiences of God, much less our beliefs about God, are infinitely less than God.  The more we cling to the world as the source of our happiness, the more distant we are from God. We may find our happiness in and through the world, but not by clinging to it.

So, what’s the deal here?  I mean, we know these things are true.  All these wise people throughout the history of the contemplative traditions tell us just to let go; to let God take control of our lives; to wake up from our dreams of controlling our experience and live in the boundlessness of the present moment.   So, if I may lapse into the jargon of my profession as a psychotherapist:  What’s the resistance?

I’m reminded here of one of my favorite cartoons.  It’s the usual “heaven in the clouds” scene and there are two lines of people in their white robes.  The first line is rather short and the people are going under an arch which says “Heaven.”  The other line is very long, stretching out on the clouds; and the arch over that line says “Seminar About Heaven.”  It seems that we, more often than not, prefer the menu of life to the actual food of life itself.  Is this because, as T.S. Eliot put it, “…human kind / Cannot bear very much reality…”?  I don’t know.

The neuroscientists tell us that we are hard-wired to have better, stronger, more detailed memories for negative, painful experiences than for positive, pleasurable experiences.  It seems that our default setting is for self-protection, rather than for openness and vulnerability. Is this the reason why we resist God Alone?  I don’t know.

My Zen Buddhist teacher offers another view:  that the ego (the false self, the persona) is very strong and persistent…it doesn’t want us to give up the illusion of control.  The ego doesn’t want to disappear into the truth of, as Paul tells us today, “…the cross of our Savior Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.”  Accepting the Cross of Christ mean that the “I”, the ego, is crucified to the world.  Is it our reluctance to give up this “I” that keeps us from living by God Alone?  That keeps us dreaming a life of illusory invulnerability by clinging to the impermanent things of the world?  I don’t know.  I don’t have a definitive explanation to offer.

What I do know is that there are moments when I have a glimpse of something else:  walking at sunset, watching the purple darkness rise from the prairie into the sky; or seeing a cloud of starlings suddenly shift direction and turn itself inside-out; or when I am with a close friend and another layer of protection dissolves from around our hearts and our tears flow. As a contemporary haiku poet puts it:

whisper of aspens

coming back

to my senses

These are the moments when time and the the self fall away, and we sense that God is always present; that, as Luke says, “…the reign of God has come near…”; that we already are continually living in God, and God is living in us and through us.  In such moments, we have the intimation that this is our true life…in God Alone.  We just have to wake from our dreams and know it.  The effort to wake up and receive these moments is the spiritual practice of our lives.  Right here, right now.

Returning to the words of T. S. Eliot:

Go, go, go, said the bird…
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

Amen.