Elijah went and dwelt by the brook Cherith, that is before Jordan.
And the ravens brought him bread and flesh in the morning,
and bread and flesh in the evening; and he drank of the brook.
1 Kings 17:5-6
Starting a new monthly series here, sharing selections from what I’m reading devotionally as well as what turns up in my research for sermons, writing, lectures, or whatever. I’m praying it can be a little provision for you, as it has been for me.
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Someone shared this dark gem of a Jane Hirshfield poem with me—“Late Prayer” (the title, needless to say, is crucial):
Tenderness does not choose its own uses. It goes out to everything equally circling rabbit and hawk. Look: in the iron bucket, a single nail, a single ruby— all the heavens and hells. They rattle in the heart and make one sound.
We mustn’t read the first line or the last as fatalist. The poem is not confusing good and evil, grace and nature. It’s reminding us there’s a wider circle in nature, a deeper magic within and under the influence of which the wheel of predation turns (see the reversal in the third line). Just so, there can be within the human heart a holding together, a gathering of all that happens into a single sound. But what sound? A cry? A groan? A laugh? A prayer-song that contains them all—that’s why it must come late.
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I can’t remember what led me to it, but I somehow stumbled onto The Holy Fire by Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto. It is indeed a burning:
“At first our relationship to God is on the order of ‘I am my beloved’s, and he is mine’ (Song 6:3): in response to our yearning for Him, He draws close to us. Now at first this divine closeness corresponds only to the measure of our ability to elicit such closeness. But as the Jew continues to give himself over to God, then God’s yearning for us is aroused, and that divine yearning is more than just reciprocal, more than measure for measure: it is greater than I am. Furthermore, since God’s yearning for me is in a measure larger than my self, then I grow to become a greater human being; I now overshadow my essence.”
“Every Jew must work to assure that God speaks to him individually. The way to do this is through prayer, by saying ‘Thou.’ That effects a divine revelation to the individual, an encounter. At that moment, God speaks to him; God teaches him Torah individually. God too employs the word ‘thou’ in direct address. Each person sees and grasps his portion of the Torah, the part that God addresses to him and teaches him, which no one else can grasp…
“It is also the case that for each individual, others grasp aspects of the Torah that he cannot. We find this idea in the holy work Ma’or va-Shemesh as an explanation of the verse ‘The secret of the Lord is with those that fear Him’ (Ps. 25:14): the study of Kabbalah alone cannot be considered esoteric wisdom. After all, since the teachings of Kabbalah are written in books and are available to be studied, what is really secret about them? Rather, the true esoteric knowledge is that realization of divinity which each individual attains, and which no other individual attains. When you achieve a certain grasp of the divine, and cannot communicate it to anyone else—that is the true esoteric wisdom!
“Now this can be attained by means of prayer: prayer can make it happen that one stands facing God, addressing Him as Thou, and that God speaks to him personally with the word ‘thou,’ as we’ve explained. But in order for our words of direct address to effect a Presence, a divine revelation, the individual who is praying must first reveal his own self in the words of his prayer. That is, his essence must be present in the words. Then, ‘as in water face answers to face’ (Prov. 27:19), —in a fully reciprocal mirroring—this effects the revelation of His blessed presence. Even if this heartfelt, interior prayer is prompted by a calamity, God forbid, it nevertheless has the effect of eliciting a direct, personal revelation.”
“Prophecy is impossible in the state of sadness.”
If you’re interested in learning more about Rabbi Shapira, here’s a place to start.
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I’m pretty much always reading Maggie Ross (an Anglican solitary in vows to ++Rowan Williams and spiritual director for Desmond Tutu). Lately, I’ve come back to these passages in Writing the Icon of the Heart on “beholding” because of something I’m hoping to share in my sermon for the ordination service at our upcoming convocation:
Behold is the marker word throughout the Bible. It signals shifting perspective, the holding together or even the conflating of radically different points of view. It indicates the moment when the language of belief is silenced by the exaltation of faith as these paradoxical perspectives are brought together and generate, as it were, an explosion of silence and light. This silence holds us in thrall, in complete self-forgetfulness. Our settled accounting of ordinary matters is shattered and falls into nothing as light breaks upon us. Beholding is not confined to monastic cells: it is the wellspring of ordinary life transfigured…
Julian of Norwich understands the importance of the word behold. Her Revelation of Divine Love is an explication of this single word. Behold is profoundly theological. It describes a reciprocal holding in being, the humility of God sharing the divine nature with what it creates. God, the creator of all, God who is beyond being, in humility allows us, created beings, to hold God in being in space and time, even as God is sustaining us in existence and holding us in eternity.
Behold. Behold the God who is infinitely more humble than those who pray to him, more stripped, more emptied, more self-outpouring—and we need to remember that humility and humiliation are mutually exclusive. Humility knows only love, and God is love. The scandal of the incarnation is not that we are naked before Emmanuel, God with us, but God is naked before us, and, in utter silence, given over into our hands and hearts. And it is in the depths of this beholding, in the silence of the loving heart of God, that the divine exchange takes place most fully, where each of us in our uniqueness and strangeness is transfiguredtransfigured into the divine life. And it is for this that God comes to us, the Word made flesh, stable-born and crucified.
There is something else, too, in this beholding: the great commandment tells us this seamless love applies as much to our neighbor as to God. Beholding makes it possible to live out the great commandment. It invites us to abandon our very limited perspectives and ideas, so that many aspects of life in community become not so much less difficult as irrelevant, to the point of not being noticed.
This living beneath the level of personality unfolds without denying or wasting any of the richness of the human person; it brings us, in our entirety, warts and all, to fullness. To behold God in everything is the antidote tο frenetic activity, to stress and busyness. It enables us to live from, continually return to, and dwell in the depth of silent communion with God. And as this is something God does in us: we have only to allow it, to cease our striving and behold.
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I’ve also recently returned to Donald McKinnon, one of ++Rowan’s teachers. Here he is on revelation, salvation, and theological method:
The theme of Christian theology is the revelation of God, his final and absolute self-disclosure in Christ Jesus, who is the making-flesh of that Eternal Word, which in the life of the Godhead is the Eternal object of the Father’s love. Apart from revelation there would be no special science of theology distinct from metaphysics. To the Christian absolute truth has been revealed, for the Messiah on the eve of that Passion, which conditioned the whole movement of his earthly life, called himself the Truth. Theology is the scrutiny, within the Mystical Body, of the burden of that self-disclosure, and theology is accounted as queen of the sciences in virtue of the fact that, apart from its relation to the scrutiny of Divine revelation, the scope of no human science can be properly understood.
The aspect of theology, that is of course most closely akin to metaphysical anthropology, is the study of the mystery of grace. It is a fact, familiar to the student, that the doctrine of grace is sheerly incomprehensible apart from the general doctrine of the work of Christ—conventionally called soteriology. What I want to suggest to you is that, if metaphysical anthropology, or that branch of cosmology, which is concerned with man’s origin and destiny, is to be saved from the presumption and Titanism that the Barthians infallibly detect in almost all theologizing it can only be so saved by being offset by a stern soteriology. With the late Dr P. T. Forsyth I am increasingly convinced that, if we are wise, we will derive our Christology from our soteriology and not vice versa. It is through the scandal of his work that the Messianic secret is disclosed to his Church which must forever bear it. Soteriology is the very nerve centre of specifically Christian theology. The Cross reveals the final secret of the relation of man and God. Apart from the darkness of Golgotha, we know neither what we do, nor what we are. Its bitterness, its pain, its sheer questionableness are the conditions without which we are neither bound to God nor to ourselves.
And here is on what it means for the church to be the church for the sake of the world:
The Church is the place wherein the scandal of the Cross is forever actual. Were that not so, the Church would have no “social function” whatsoever. What the Church proclaims is a paradox, wherein resides man’s essential healing—the self-concealment of God, wherein is his final revelation…
Christian action begins here and now in our present espousal of Christ’s hiddenness, our willing endurance of his nothingness. The index of its reality is a compassion, whose first manifestation is a knowledge of the depth of our impotence, our incapacity to respond to more than one dimension of the situation in which we are involved.
That last reminds me of the line from Olivier Clément’s Transfiguring Time, which I quoted in recent post: “the church exists in the world as an opening, an exorcism: it is a mortal wound for this idolatrous and deceitful world, but for the created world, it is the offer of Transfiguration.”
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As always, I’m continuing to read St Maximus. Here are a couple of astounding passages I’ve been returning to:
“Christ in his love unites created reality with uncreated reality—How wonderful is God's loving-kindness towards us!—and he shows that through grace the two are become one. The whole world enters wholly into the whole of God and by becoming all that God is, except in identity of nature, it receives in place of itself the whole God.” (Amb. 41)
“Let God be the guide of the things that are perceived and spoken, for he is the only mind of those who perceive and of that which is perceived, and he is the only word of those who speak and of that which is spoken. He is the life of the living and of the things that have been endowed with life. On account of the very things that are and that are becoming, he is the one who is and the one who ‘becomes all things to all.’ But, on account of himself, he neither in any way whatsoever belongs to nor comes to belong to the things that are or that are becoming, whose essence he constitutes. He is by nature in the same class as absolutely nothing of the things that are, and for this reason, he allows us to say rather that he is not, because it is more properly said of him that he transcends being. For it is necessary, if we are to know truly the difference between God and creatures, we must know that the negation of the things that are is the affirmation of the one who transcends being, and the affirmation of the things that are is the negation of the one who transcends ‘being.’ And both designations can be reverently contemplated about him, yet neither is possible in a proper sense…” (On the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy)
Side note: strange as these claims may seem to us at first, the truth is Maximus is simply taking seriously the claims of Scripture—see Eph 1:10 and Col. 3.11, especially. No one has helped me more to see that than Jordan Wood, and (in case you missed it) he’s teaching a class for SAI next month. I hope you’ll be able to join us.
Lauren Raley put me on to this passage from the conclusion of Catherine LaCugna’s God for Us, which resonates with much of what Maximus says and may prove helpful for those struggling to follow Maximus’ trains of thought:
Living trinitarian faith means living God’s life: living from and for God, from and for others. Living trinitarian faith means living as Jesus Christ lived, in persona Christi: preaching the gospel; relying totally on God; offering healing and reconciliation; rejecting laws, customs, conventions that place persons beneath rules; resisting temptation; praying constantly; eating with modern-day lepers and other outcasts; embracing the enemy and the sinner; dying for the sake of the gospel if it is God’s will.
Living trinitarian faith means living according to the power and presence of the Holy Spirit: training the eyes of the heart on God’s face and name proclaimed before us in the economy; responding to God in faith, hope and love; eventually becoming unrestrictedly united with God.
Living trinitarian faith means living together in harmony and communion with every other creature in the common household of God, “doing all things to the praise and glory of God.”
Living trinitarian faith means adhering to the gospel of liberation from sin and fractured relationship: liberation from everything that misleads us into false worship, from everything that promotes unnatural, non-relational personhood, from everything that displaces us to an exclusive household, from everything that deceives us into believing self-aggrandizing archisms.
Amen.
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Finally, here’s Hirshfield’s translation of a Mechthild of Magedburg poem, which says so perfectly what the work of theology must be:
Of all that God has shown me I can speak just the smallest word, Not more than a honey bee Takes on his foot From an overspilling jar.
Bless you. And when you remember, pray for me.
Bless you, CEW Green