News from Sophia Christi

Thinking about the Messiah, a Rabbi tells this story: “The Messiah finally arrives. Jews and Christians, after waiting for so many centuries, rush to meet him. The Jews cry out, ‘This is the first time you have come, is it not?’ The Christians, raising their voices above the Jews, insist, ‘This must be Your second coming that we have been waiting for!’ The Messiah smiles wearily and waits for the noise to subside. Then, in a quiet and gentle voice…says, ‘My dear, foolish people. I have come not once, not twice. I have been here hundreds of times. But you have all been so busy fighting with one another you have never even noticed.’ “ [i]

By the time the Acts of the Apostles was written, almost 60 years had passed since Jesus’ death and resurrection. The early church had been waiting for Jesus’ immanent return for decades. While Jesus’ followers waited they retold stories, prayed, encouraged each other, watched and listened. They took up Jesus’ mission and carried on, alert for signs of his return. Twenty-one centuries later Christians are still waiting for Jesus to return, and Jews are still waiting for the Messiah. There is that part of us, as human beings, that longs for a savior, someone who will come with both authority and power to rescue us, and to end suffering everywhere. We project that longing onto Jesus, Adonai, Allah, Krishna, various Divine Beings—and wait. We wait. And our better angels say to us: “Why do you citizens of earth stand here looking up at the skies?” Stop fighting with each other and recognize the only savior there is lies within—within you, within the community you are—no exceptions. The kingdom of God is within You. (more…)

Easter is two weeks ago now, but it is still Easter in today’s Gospel. Just before the passage we read a moment ago, two disciples are walking home from Jerusalem to Emmaus. It’s afternoon and it’s been a painful, confusing day. Some women in the group had reported seeing a vision of angels who told them Jesus was alive. Afterwards others had rushed to the tomb and came back confirming that Jesus’ body was gone. These two don’t know what to believe. They are in shock. As they walk along, sharing their experiences, they are joined by someone who doesn’t seem to know what happened three days ago. So they tell him. He listens, then shows them how Scripture foretold these events they are describing. They clearly want to hear more, so when they reach home, they invite him to spend the night. As they sit down to share a meal, he blesses and breaks bread then gives it to them. Suddenly they recognize who this stranger is, and he vanishes from their sight. Not losing a minute, they get up and rush back to Jerusalem. They find the other disciples and tell them what happened to them on the road. This is where today’s Gospel begins. (more…)

It is still Easter as the Gospel opens today. The disciples are huddled in a room behind locked doors fearing the Roman authorities who executed Jesus just three days ago. Suddenly, there he is, standing in the room with them, showing them his wounds, speaking to them, breathing on them, proving he has risen and is somehow physically alive! Until now Mary of Magdala is the only one who has seen him. Now they all do, all except Thomas, that is. He isn’t there. Because he needs the same tangible experience of the risen Jesus the others have had, he will forever be known as “doubting Thomas.” It’s interesting no one seems to recognize the other disciples also needed ‘proof,’ or that Jesus appeared to all of them for precisely that reason! Thomas wasn’t satisfied with simply going along with what others reported, even though they were presumably his circle of friends. He needed to see for himself and to ground his faith in personal experience. When you think about it, he isn’t asking for anything unusual. It is our personal experience of Spirit, of Divine energy, of Mystery, that is the source of our spiritual lives. So when Jesus returns a week later to speak with Thomas he doesn’t criticize. He simply says “Touch me.” “Believe what your hands tell you, and what you see.” Jesus respects Thomas’ need for a relational, numinous experience.

Our physical senses are doorways to faith. This is why we have sacraments. When mysterious claims are made it is only natural to want evidence. We can’t always trust what we are told, nor should we. What we can trust is what we ourselves experience as we live into the deepest questions of our lives. Those of you around my age may remember bumper stickers in the 60’s and 70’s that advised us to “Question Authority.” In the West we’ve come a long way in that department, to the point that almost every iteration of authority is either suspect or actively refuted. How do we discern what’s true? Who and what do we trust? How can we build a just and caring society, the reign of God, if we trust no one and, at the same time, can’t trust ourselves or our own experience? The Spirit within us calls us home, requiring that we be faithful to our inner truth. Call this conscience. Call it integrity. We know what it is. Thomas directs our attention there. (more…)

There are at least seven different Marys mentioned in the four Gospels. In an earlier chapter of John’s Gospel, Jesus visited with his friends Martha, Mary and Lazarus in Bethany. This was six days before Passover, just hours before he rode into Jerusalem that fateful day seated on a donkey. While at their house Mary anointed his feet with perfumed oil and dried them with her hair. It was an action foreshadowing his death by symbolically preparing his body for burial. In Luke’s Gospel, a Pharisee invites Jesus to his home for a meal. An unnamed woman enters the house carrying an alabaster flask of ointment. She stands behind Jesus, weeping, and bathes his feet with her tears, dries them with her hair, then anoints them with the ointment. She is referred to only as ‘a sinful woman.’ At the end of the 6^th Century in the year 597, Pope Gregory I gave a sermon in which he combined these separate stories to create a single narrative that identified Mary of Magdala as the sinful woman in Luke and as Lazarus’ sister, Mary of Bethany. The idea took root in the artistic and literary imagination of the Middle Ages and Mary Magdalene came to be seen as a prostitute. This is the image we’ve inherited, and it persists to this day, despite scholarship to the contrary. In churches throughout the world she continues to be portrayed as a weeping, penitent sinner. That sermon of Gregory’s and all that followed undermined her status as a recognized and highly respected leader of the early church. Mary was, in fact, a prophetic visionary, an esteemed spiritual teacher and a leading apostle in her own right. And she was viewed as such by early church fathers such as St. Augustine who called her “the apostle to the apostles.” Up until the 4^th Century when male church leaders spoke of her it was in a generally positive way. It wasn’t until 1969 that the Church finally refuted Gregory’s mistaken view of her by distinguishing between Mary of Magdala, Mary of Bethany and the penitent woman in chapter 7 of Luke’s Gospel and declared these were three separate women. This came out of the Vatican Council’s renewed appreciation for biblical scholarship. (more…)

“The eye adores the visible world,” John O’Donohue wrote. “Once it opens, it is already the guest at an unending feast of vision….[It] falls in love with the… visible. This fascination is addictive; then almost immediately our amnesia in relation to the invisible sets in. We live in this world as if it had always been our reality and will continue to be….Fixated on the visible, we forget that the decisive presences in our lives—soul, mind, thought, love, meaning, time, and life itself—are all invisible.” John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 187-88.

That fixation on the visible prevents us from seeing beneath the surface of reality more often than not. And, more often than not, it leads us to believe our perspective is accurate and to mistrust those with a different point of view. Our opinions and actions are colored by the play of dark and light. Even the words I’m using are visual—color, dark, light, view, perspective. As O’Donohue says, the visual is captivating. It is covertly addictive. It seduces us to remain on the surface because we falsely believe if we can SEE something then we both KNOW it AND understand it. The problem is we don’t just SEE. We interpret and judge and form opinions about what we see and then, without knowing, we plunge ourselves into darkness and are totally blind. We think we see but all we are seeing are our own biases, opinions, anxieties and judgments.

This is the problem facing those poor Pharisees accompanying Jesus in John’s Gospel. “Are you saying we are blind,” they ask? And Jesus says “yes.” In believing they already ‘know’, they are making no effort to see what’s in front of them—that God is doing something new in Jesus. That the Spirit is working through him. The face of the Divine is staring them in the face and they can’t see it. So—yes—they are blind without realizing it! How often does this happen to us, I wonder? How often is God staring us in the face and we don’t know it? We think we know what’s happening but we are only seeing the top layer while God is looking up at us from below the surface, from the actual heart of the matter? (more…)

In Mark’s Gospel Jesus’ deep sensitivity to human suffering is quite obvious. He suffers ‘with’ the broken people he encounters. His emotions are real, visceral. He can be angry, sad, surprised and indignant, just like us, and when he is ‘moved with pity’ his own heart is wrenched, and tender compassionate acts follow. In her commentary on today’s reading, Mary McGlone says: “the [leper’s] request for healing stirred Jesus to his depths. Even before he could speak, his hand was reaching out, touching the man’s spurned and suffering body, transforming it with tenderness. Then, pronouncing the words that explained his gesture and made his will effective. Jesus said, “I do will it. Be made clean.”

I also imagine Jesus must have had a sense of humor. He couldn’t possibly feel such deep compassion without also experiencing the comical, even hilarious aspects of ordinary life. I like to think of Jesus out in the desert having a belly laugh with God after his encounter with the leper in Mark’s Gospel or over some ridiculous experience he’s had while preaching in the town. The leper story surely must have given them a laugh. Here’s this guy who has been isolated from family and friends for who knows how long, possibly with sores all over his body, and he gets up the courage to do something that is absolutely forbidden. He comes right up to Jesus, comes within inches, in fact, and begs to be healed. He must be pretty desperate, right?

And when Jesus sees him his own insides convulse with empathy. He reaches out his hand, does another forbidden thing by touching the man, and says with deep feeling, “yes, I do will it. Be healed.” And the leprosy vanishes. Then Jesus STERNLY orders the man to tell no one, but to go immediately to the priest and do what is required by law to prove he’s clean so he can return to his family and friends. And what does this guy do? He runs around town telling everyone he meets what just happened to him. He didn’t follow the rules before and doesn’t follow Jesus’ strict orders now. I can almost see Jesus rolling his eyes and shaking his head in disbelief as he watches the man take off running, wildly excited, not for a minute remembering what he was just told to do! Now Jesus can’t go anywhere, can’t freely walk in and out of the city without people falling all over him! So he goes out into the desert to get a little space and tells God what just happened. They both have a good laugh. “Geez!” says Jesus. “What have I done now, dad?” (more…)

On August 23rd, 1963, the March on Washington for jobs and freedom brought 250,000, mostly African-American citizens, to the nation’s capital. Near its climax Martin Luther King, Jr. came to the podium. At a critical moment during his speech, his good friend Mahalia Jackson who was sitting behind him said, “Tell them about the dream, Martin.” At that moment, as anyone can see watching the tape, King set aside his notes and began, “And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that [ALL people] are created equal.” King believed modern societies had solved the problem of producing wealth. Now we needed to invest that wealth in the solution of social problems, starting with the overwhelming problem of poverty. That was 55 years ago!

In his book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? King declared: justice “cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society.” The “black revolution,” he said, “is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism and materialism. To those statements written in 1967 we must add classism, gender privilege, and misogyny. This last year has brought us face-to-face again with racial and gender tensions, and the growing social and economic inequalities at the heart of our current system. The newly passed tax code will surely exacerbate these tensions. King’s question remains for us to answer as a society: will we choose chaos or community? If community, then how do we reweave the ragged fabric of our nation? What part might God be asking us to play in the evolutionary drama playing out across the globe? (more…)

Author Molly Srode introduces her book on Spiritual Retirement with these words: “As the New Year dawns crisp and clear, a bell goes off inside my head. Rather, it is more like an alarm….Passing another decade, I see my life very much like a car that has a quarter tank of gas left. Three options loom ahead. I could just keep going until I run completely out of gas. I could park the car along the side of the road, hoping that I will never use up the fuel, or I could acknowledge that the tank has a limited supply of gas and make plans about where I need to go. My choice is the latter, and now I have to decide where and how far I go with my quarter tank of gas.”

With Srode’s words in mind let’s look over at those ten attendants waiting for the bridal party. They are in a similar predicament not knowing how much time they have or how much fuel they will need for the responsibilities that lie ahead. Wisdom advises the attendants and the author to make decisions about these matters so they can prepare. All will need fuel. The element of time is a complete mystery in both cases. Still, they need to be ready.

Life presents us with unknowable realities and also with limits. Still we have to make decisions that will determine the course of our lives and the quality of our experiences. We instinctively look for signs. Our inner compass, which is the light of Wisdom within us, draws our hearts toward people and places that resonate with something deep inside. Wisdom lights the path that leads to fulfillment of our soul’s purpose, though we don’t always take it. Sometimes we choose a path through the dark woods instead not realizing how desperately we are relying on that inner light to help us find our way home. As we learn to move in step with Wisdom, the light within grows stronger. If we move out of step it grows dimmer, but it never goes away. The light within us is God’s own life, and it never leaves us. It never dies. (more…)