On Wednesday morning I came to
work and opened the church for our public service of Centering Prayer. It was still early, so I went to my office for
a time, and when I returned at 9:25 I was surprised to find some people in the
church I didn’t know. They were two women
and a man, I would guess in their mid-twenties, standing uncertainly back by
the baptismal font, and I asked them if they had come for Centering Prayer. They said that they had, and they’d never
done it before, but wanted to try. So I invited
them to follow me up here to the chancel and said “Let me put out a couple more
chairs, and then I tell you what we’re going to do.”
Just then, Jeannette Myers’
cousin Lani arrived, as she usually does, and she engaged them in conversation
while I arranged the furniture and lit a candle. The man said his name was Martin, and he
lived in Texas, but was out here doing some work. On the plane to California, he’d read a book,
The Wisdom Jesus, by an Episcopal priest
named Cynthia Bourgeault. And although
he is Jewish, this book had moved him deeply, and he was inspired to want to
try for himself some of the contemplative practices it describes. So that is how he did an internet search for “centering
prayer,” that turned up our website, and drove down that morning from
Healdsburg, and brought his sister-in-law and her friend along. When he finished telling his story, everything
was ready, so we took our seats, and I gave a brief instruction to guide us
into meditation, and we sat together for a half-hour in silence and stillness, bringing
our awareness again and again to our desire to know the intimacy of God.
When we think of how it is
that people come to the Christian faith, and pass it along to others, we don’t always
imagine a kind of simple truth that becomes evident when people put it into
practice, and verify it in their experience.
It is more common to see it as a set of beliefs that come down from
above. We accept its testimonies and articles
of faith because we trust the authorities who hand them down to us. But people nowadays are inclined to be suspicious
of authority, and prefer to rely on their own judgement. If they place any stock in religion at all,
it is because they have had, or hope to have, personal experience of the
reality of which religion speaks.
And this has led to a great
enthusiasm for what is commonly called “spirituality,” which has come to mean
the psychological and mystical dimension of religious practice, and the search
for illumination of the self with the experience of God. With this there comes a renewed interest in
Jesus, not as a cosmic redeemer, but as a historical teacher of practical
wisdom for the transformation of personal consciousness. Such is the figure we find in The Wisdom Jesus, who led Martin and his
friends to St. John’s in search of Centering Prayer.
And some find corroboration
for this image of Jesus in the so-called Gnostic Gospels, recently-unearthed texts
from the early centuries that didn’t make it into the official New
Testament. These documents, such as the
one known as the Gospel of Thomas, are collections of Jesus’ sayings without
the elements of his life story that we find in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Many of these sayings are not found in the
canonical Gospels, or differ significantly from their more familiar form, and
this adds to their allure. Reading them
can give us the thrilling experience of catching snatches of lost conversation,
and listening with fresh ears to the living voice of Jesus. We can
imagine that this is his teaching, not as it has been mediated to us by religious
institutions, but as direct communication from mind to mind of religious truth.
But there is something missing
from the Gnostic texts that is at the very heart the canonical Gospels’ portrayal
of the historical Jesus. If all we have are
words that he said, we amputate the limbs of his teaching. Because Jesus didn’t simply give private instruction
in inner development—he acted. He
welcomed sinners and ate with them, and healed the untouchable. He took his teaching abroad in the world, out
onto roads, and into the villages and the city squares.
And when crowds gathered to
hear him because he spoke with the authority of personal experience, he gave
them practical instruction. Not only about
prayer, and the love and generosity of God, but also about the world they lived
in—about social and economic relations, about wealth and poverty, conflict and
forgiveness, solidarity, perseverance, and hope. He
spoke of the arrogance, and violence, and hypocrisy of those who styled
themselves as rulers and lords, and he taught the crowds to look close at hand for
the signs of God’s kingdom.
Jesus bore witness to God’s
truth about us, and the political powers killed him for it. But God raised him up, the first-born from
the dead, to vindicate the truth of what he said. And his disciples experienced this event as a
decisive shift in the balance of power in the world. They went on, bearing their own witness, not
only in words, but in the life of a new community in which God’s truth of
wholeness and unity overcame divisions of social class, and gender, and ethnic and
religious identity. They began to call Jesus
“Lord” and “King” and “King of Kings” and “Lord of Lords” because they refused
to acknowledge any greater power, any higher authority, than the truth that
Jesus knew, that Jesus spoke, and Jesus enacted on the stage of human history.
This makes the Christian
religion more than a search for timeless truth—it is also a practice of historical
remembrance. The central ritual of
Christian worship is a not only a celebration of the spiritual power of God’s
transforming love—it is also a commemoration of the decisive event that manifested
that love to us. Likewise, the ancient
practice of pilgrimage, of going to the places where the martyrs lived and
died, of walking in their footsteps and venerating their relics, springs from
the desire to know, from one’s own experience, that those people really lived in
those places in the world, where those things truly happened. Which helps us remember what they proved with
their witness—that the powers of the present darkness are not the real rulers
of the world.
And no less than the
indwelling presence of God, this is a truth we can experience for ourselves, if
we do our religious practice. When
Mohandas Gandhi set out to liberate India from British colonial rule, he did so
trusting in what he called Satyagraha,
or “truth-force.” His political strategy
was nonviolent resistance, taking confrontational actions in order to make what
was invisible and unconscious plain for everyone to see. By breaking unjust laws, his campaigns of
civil disobedience aimed to tear away the façade of morality from a social
order based on relationships of exploitation and oppression. The more the British resorted to violence and
terror to maintain their control, the more it revealed about the underlying
logic of their rule, and undermined their legitimacy. But this strategy was not complete without
the spiritual philosophy of Satyagraha, which holds that if the oppressed can
maintain their faith in the humanity of the oppressor, and continually meet his
hatred with love, sooner or later the truth will out.
The truth is that we are all
brothers and sisters in the family of God.
The truth is that when we violate and oppress one another, even if only
by our complacency, we obscure the image of God in ourselves. But when for love a faithful witness bears the
truth, unwavering in her heart, through fires of hate and storms of dread and
even down into the grave, the true human image rises out of the darkness. In its light, no ideology of racial or
cultural or religious superiority, no rationalization for oppression and
violence, no denial of the spiritual cost to both sides of an injustice, can
stand for ever. The transcendent worth
and promise of being human comes into view, the truth of which doesn’t derive
from any human institution, but only from the purpose for which God created us
in love. Only God knows the fullness that
purpose, but we can abide in it, in practices of prayer. We can celebrate it, as we practice communal
festivals of joy. And we can bear
witness to it, in practices of resistance, solidarity, and reconciliation.
