Astounded onlookers chalk it up to drunkenness, forgetting that alcohol tends to make one less intelligible, not more. Besides, if drunkenness produced multi-lingual fluency, a good many college graduates today would be eligible for a job at the U.N. Likewise, Peter dismisses the charge and says “It’s a God thing,” exactly what the prophet Joel meant when he said, “In those days I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh: old people, young people, folk from every place and every walk of life!”
Image is in the public domain. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.
My wife played me a recording this week from an NPR program called This American Life. The entire episode was about the way kids think and the funny (sometimes profound) things they say. It was originally broadcast in 2001:
It all began at Christmas two years ago, when my daughter was four-years-old. And it was the first time that she’d ever asked about what did this holiday mean? And so I explained to her that this was celebrating the birth of Jesus. And she wanted to know more about that. We went out and bought a kids’ bible and had these readings at night. She loved him. Wanted to know everything about Jesus.
So we read a lot about his birth and his teaching. And she would ask constantly what that phrase was. And I would explain to her that it was, “Do onto others as you would have them do unto you.” And we would talk about those old words and what that all meant.
And then one day we were driving past a big church and out front was an enormous crucifix.
She said, who’s that?
And I guess I’d never really told that part of the story. So I had to sort of, yeah, oh, that’s Jesus. I forgot to tell you the ending. Well, you know, he ran afoul of the Roman government. This message that he had was so radical and unnerving to the prevailing authorities of the time that they had to kill him. They came to the conclusion that he would have to die. That message was too troublesome.
It was about a month later, after that Christmas, we’d gone through the whole story of what Christmas meant. And it was mid-January, and her preschool celebrates the same holidays as the local schools. So Martin Luther King Day was off. I knocked off work that day and I decided we’d play and I’d take her out to lunch.
We were sitting in there, and right on the table where we happened to plop down, was the art section of the local newspaper. And there, big as life, was a huge drawing by a ten-year-old kid from the local schools of Martin Luther King.
She said, who’s that?
I said, well, as it happens that’s Martin Luther King. And he’s why you’re not in school today. So we’re celebrating his birthday, this is the day we celebrate his life.
She said, so who was he?
I said, he was a preacher.
And she looks up at me and goes, for Jesus?
And I said, yeah, actually he was. But there was another thing that he was really famous for. Which is that he had a message.
And you’re trying to say this to a four-year-old. This is the first time they ever hear anything. So you’re just very careful about how you phrase everything.
So I said, well, yeah, he was a preacher and he had a message.
She said, what was his message?
I said, well, he said that you should treat everybody the same no matter what they look like.
She thought about that for a minute. And she said, well that’s what Jesus said.
And I said, yeah, I guess it is. You know, I never thought of it that way, but yeah. And it is sort of like “Do onto others as you would have them do unto you.”
And she thought for a minute and looked up at me and said, did they kill him, too?
The NPR story ends there, but the answer to the little girl’s question is, of course, Yes. They did kill Dr. King too, and Oscar Romero, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the prophet Isaiah, and the apostle Paul. It seems that the treatment inflicted upon Jesus has also been visited on those who stand up for what is true and right in any age. The apostle Paul himself, before he was beheaded by the Roman state, famously said, “In my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions.” Paul seems to have picked up on the inherent connection that exists between what happened in Christ on the cross and what happens in those whose lives are similarly extinguished by unjust powers. In the mind of God, these events are not separate: They are one.
Jesus himself articulated a similar sense in Matthew 25 when he said to his followers, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family,you did it to me.” The suffering of the hungry, naked, sick, and imprisoned people of this world is one and the same with the suffering of Christ.
We Christians don’t always understand this truth. At least, we don’t live as if we understood it. We separate these events in our minds. We separate the social from the spiritual. We say things like, “The church shouldn’t get involved in politics.” While I agree with this statement when it comes to religious institutions endorsing candidates or receiving state funding, I disagree with the idea that our most deeply held beliefs and values should not shape the way we organize our life together. Politics, on the most basic level, has to do with relationships, and relationships are what Jesus is most interested in. When someone once asked Jesus about the most important part of the Bible, he said it all comes down to relationships: your relationship with God and your relationship with your neighbors.
The quality of our relationships is the measure of the quality of our religion. In fact, we read in this morning’s scripture readings how religion should even take a back seat to relationships. In our first reading, from the book of Amos, the prophet tells the people that Yahweh their God is disgusted with their religious rituals and fed up with their pious posturing. He says that God isn’t even listening to the sound of your hymns anymore. Why not? Because what God really wants is for “justice [to] roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.” In other words, God listens for the harmony and not the melody. God wants harmony between people, not just musicalnotes. That’s what the words justice and righteousness mean in this passage. God wanted nothing to do with their religion because their relationships were all out of whack. There is an inherent connection between the way people behave toward each other and the way they behave toward God. Injustice toward a neighbor is a sin against God. The spiritual is political. The quality of one’s religion is measured by the quality of one’s relationships.
In our New Testament reading, we see Jesus cleansing the Jerusalem temple. As he drove out the money changers, he shouted, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.”
He was quoting a passage from the book of Isaiah. In that section, the prophet was setting forth a vision of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem as an international, multi-cultural center of faith and learning. People from all over the world, not just Jews, would one day be welcome in the house of God. The place designated for this activity was the Outer Court, also called the Court of the Gentiles. It was the only part of the temple where non-Jews were allowed to participate in worship. It just so happens that this was the very place where the money changers and animal dealers had set up their shops. They had robbed the Gentiles of their rightful place in God’s house. And for what? To make more money. By placing profit over people, they undermined the legitimacy of their spirituality. They made the house of God into “a den of robbers”, according to Jesus. Like Amos, Jesus wanted to see “justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.”
Again, the quality of our religion is measured by the quality of our relationships. What we do for our neighbors, we do for God. There is a connection between the suffering of people and the suffering of Christ.
This morning, we are continuing with the fifth sermon in a five-week series on the Great Ends of the Church. We’re asking the question, “Why does our church exist?” We’ve already given four answers to that question. We said the Great Ends of the Church are the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind, the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God, the maintenance of divine worship, and the preservation of the truth. This week, we’re adding a fifth Great End: the promotion of social righteousness.
This one tends to get us into trouble sometimes, because many (including some within the church itself) say “the church shouldn’t get involved in politics.” They cringe when preachers bring up controversial social issues from the pulpit, preferring instead that preachers would just “stick to the gospel.”
But here’s the thing: a good preacher can’t preach the gospel without getting into relevant social issues. Any minister who just wants to save individual souls for heaven isn’t preaching the gospel of Jesus. Jesus said the quality of our religion is measured by the quality of our relationships. Jesus said, “just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family,you did it to me.” Jesus drove the money changers out of the Gentiles’ place in the temple and told his followers to leave their offerings at the altar and make peace with their neighbors before coming to worship. Jesus said that God preferred the compassion of the Good Samaritan over the ritual purity of the priest and the Levite.
No Christian who actually reads the Bible can preach the gospel of Jesus without engaging in the promotion of social righteousness.
Now, as I said before, this doesn’t mean that churches should be endorsing candidates, telling people how to vote, or accepting money and power from the state. What it does mean is that we should all have a clear enough understanding and a firm enough commitment toward our beliefs and values that we are willing to speak up and act up when the culture around us promotes practices and policies that contradict said values. Do we believe at all people are made in the image of God? Then we should have something to say about equal opportunity for all races, classes, and genders in housing, education, and employment. Do we agree that Jesus had a special place in his heart for poor and outcast people? Then we should not just make room for them in our hearts, homes, and churches; but we should also re-locate and re-orient ourselves to be where they are: in the slums, bars, and jails of Oneida County. Do we believe that God loves everyone and never gives up on anyone? Then neither should we.
These Christian values, if we live them, will inevitably put us at odds with American values. We will have to go against the grain and the flow of the larger culture in order to hold it to a higher standard. It will be uncomfortable. It will make us unpopular. It might even be dangerous. But let us remember what our Savior taught us: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”
People throughout history, from Martin Luther King to the apostle Paul, have followed Jesus on the path of the cross. Their suffering and his suffering are one in the eyes of God. They didn’t just preach the gospel, they were the gospel. And they share in the resurrection life of Christ, who overcomes the bonds of death and proclaims a new reality in our midst, a new community that is overthrowing and replacing the old domination systems of this world: the kingdom of heaven-on-earth. When the church challenges the unjust practices and policies of the powers-that-be, we show ourselves to be citizens of that kingdom with the saints in light. The church’s promotion of social righteousness is not separate from the proclamation of the gospel or in addition to it, it is an essential part of it. Our actions in relationship with our neighbors comprise the text of the silent sermon we preach every day to the people around us.
I’ve posted about T.M. Luhrmann’s work before. I find her fascinating.
This is re-posted from the NY Times:
We often imagine prayer as a practice that affects the content of what we think about — our moral aspirations, or our contrition. It’s probably more accurate to understand prayer as a skill that changes how we use our minds.
I’ve been invited by my friend Jodi Haier, a Methodist pastor, to contribute a column to a soon-to-be published group study book on Forgiveness. I have permission to publish my contribution here as a foretaste of the upcoming book. I’ll let you know when the whole study comes out. Thanks!
I’ve been asked to write this meditation on the subject of Forgiving God.
I have until the end of the month to finish it, but I want to get it done today, not because I’m efficient like that, but because today is April 16, 2013, the day after the bombing of the Boston Marathon.
The main religious question that arises in times like this is: How could a loving, all-powerful God allow something like this to happen? On days like today, it seems that God owes us an explanation (if not an outright apology) for standing by, silently, while some person(s) blew up the Boston Marathon.
As bizarre as it may sound, I’m going to argue that what we need to do in this moment is forgive God. What I mean by this is that we need to adjust some of our ideas about who God is and how God works if we’re going to make sense of situations like the bombing of the Boston Marathon.
Now, it just so happens that I am both a pastor and a philosophy professor, so I’ll construct my argument from both of those perspectives.
Philosophically speaking, we’re dealing with the Problem of Evil, which says, “Any two of the following statements can be true at the same time, but not all three: (1) God is all-powerful. (2) God is good. (3) Evil exists.” While many wise believers have tried to solve this problem over the years, none have fully succeeded. Personally, I choose to remove the first statement: “God is all-powerful.”
I believe God ceased to be all-powerful when free will was created. God could have made us like robots that always do what they are told, but God chose instead to make conscious beings that can freely choose to love. It is a logical necessity that, if one can freely choose good, then the capacity for choosing evil must also exist. God gave us freedom because God wanted love in this world, and there is no love without freedom.
Hence, God’s power is limited. God is not able to create a free world where the bombing of the Boston Marathon cannot happen. We have to create that world. It’s up to us. We are co-creators with God.
Honestly, I’m not sure that we’ll ever evolve to the point where we have a perfect society. Something will probably always be wrong. We cannot control what happens to us, but we can control how we respond. Will we use our God-given freedom to bring more love or more darkness into the world? Will our unjust suffering embitter or ennoble us? Will we stand together or fall apart?
I think we can (and should) forgive God for what happened yesterday by letting go of our idea of an all-powerful deity who controls everything that happens. That God doesn’t exist. What we have instead is a loving God who gives us freedom and invites us to be partners in the ongoing creation of the world.
I don’t know about you, but I sometimes get a bit discouraged when I read the stories and poems of the Bible. It seems that people back then had a much more immediate sense of God’s presence than we do today. On almost every page, there are tales of visions, voices, angels, and miracles. Meanwhile, even the most spiritually-inclined of us today have to rely on powers of reason, conscience, intuition, and imagination when forming our ideas about who God is and how God relates to us. It’s easy for us to feel left out when we read the Bible because most of us haven’t had the kind of direct and intense mystical experiences described in its pages. After all, who here has ever walked on water or seen the ocean part in front of them? My guess is that not many of us have. If only there was someone in the Bible whose experience of God looked more like ours! Well, as it turns out, there is just such a person: Esther.
This morning’s first reading comes to us from the book that bears her name. As a matter of fact, this week is the only week in our church’s three-year lectionary cycle that makes use of the book of Esther, which means that I’ll have to give you a lot of back story in a short amount of time.
The story of Esther takes place during a rather dark period of Jewish history. In 587 BCE, the kingdom of Judah was conquered by the Babylonian Empire and its elite and aristocratic inhabitants were taken off into slavery, where they lived for the next several generations. During this time, they struggled to preserve whatever tattered pieces of their culture and religion that they could. A little while later, the Babylonians themselves were conquered by the Persians.
It is during the Persian occupation that the story of Esther is set. It’s a story of struggle and survival in the midst of powerlessness. Esther represents the weakest and most vulnerable members of society. She was a Jew in a Persian culture, she was a woman, and she was an orphan. In the ancient world, you really couldn’t get much lower on the social food chain than that.
Through a series of unlikely circumstances, Esther found herself being recruited into the personal harem of the Persian king. This position would provide her with a modicum of security and comfort, but it came at the price of being an object of desire to be used by someone else.
As the story unfolds, Esther eventually becomes the king’s wife around the same time that a plot is being hatched to commit genocide against the Jewish people. Due to her position as queen, Esther is in a unique position to save her people. However, doing so would involve a great deal of personal risk to her. In Persian culture, it was a capital offense to approach a king without being invited. This particular king, Ahasuerus, had already demonstrated his willingness to deal harshly with any kind of insubordination, even from his wife.
Esther has a hard choice to make: she can keep silent and allow her people to die in order to save her own life, or she can risk her life in order to save the lives of her people. It was her cousin and caretaker, a man named Mordecai, who gave her this advice: “Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.”
After hearing these words, Esther decides to take the risk. Approaching the king unannounced, Esther pleads for her life and that of her fellow Jews. The king has compassion on her and punishes Haman, the mastermind behind the genocide plot, but is too late to stop the plan from being carried out. At the last minute, he makes provision for the Jews to defend themselves against their attackers. The day is saved.
All in all, the book of Esther makes for a great story. It’s full of intrigue on the one hand and irony on the other. There are some outright hilarious moments as Haman, the villain, repeatedly sets himself up for failure and humiliation. This is a story of underdogs winning out over powerful forces of hatred and evil. Just like it happens in the movies, trust and faithfulness are enough to beat the odds.
There’s only one thing missing from the biblical story of Esther. Its conspicuous absence sets this story apart from all others in the Bible. Can you guess what it is? It’s God.
God is never mentioned in the book of Esther. Not even once. This is so unusual for the Bible, where visions, voices, angels, and miracles abound. All we see here are human beings, caught in a difficult situation, and trying to make the best of it.
I like that. It gives me hope. It reminds me of my own spiritual life, where I often have to ask hard questions and figure things out for myself. It would be most convenient if I could get a visit from an angel every time I had a question or a problem, but that just doesn’t seem to be how God works in my life. The God I believe in is one who encounters people on the journey of life and gives them the gifts of reason, conscience, intuition, and imagination. These are the God-given tools with which we all must chart our own course in life, trusting that the path we take will lead us home to our true selves and the Mystery of Being, which we call God. There are no easy answers or quick fixes in this life. There is only the journey and the hard choices we must make along the way.
For me, the book of Esther is a brilliant illustration of this principle in action. God does not show up in any immediate way. God’s presence is implied. Mordecai expresses the divine trait of wisdom. Esther embodies faith and courage. In the end, the implication is that God has been present and active all along, even though the heavens have been silent and apparently empty.
In the book of Esther, God is the presence in the absence and the voice in the silence. So it is, I think, in our lives. Faith, for most of us, grows gradually as we learn to trust in that absent presence and silent voice. We find God in ourselves and in the people around us. We feel a tug in our hearts that leads us in the direction of faith, hope, and love. Those who follow the leading of that tug discover for themselves where that mysterious road goes.
Just like Esther and Mordecai, we can’t tell where the road will take us or whether our efforts will be successful. All we have in our possession are bits and pieces of some larger puzzle that may or may not be solved at some point in the future. The best we can do is lay our individual puzzle pieces down onto the table and try to see where they fit into the larger picture of the whole as it gradually comes together.
If you’re here this morning and your experience of faith has largely been an experience of doubt, silence, and absence, I want to encourage you with Esther’s story. You’re in good company. Your experience of absence does not necessarily amount to an absence of experience. God is present and active in your life, whether you realize it or not.
As you struggle along in life, trying to walk by your own inner lamp of reason, conscience, intuition, and imagination, remember that you are not alone. Others, like Esther and Mordecai, have gone this way before. More importantly, there is one who walks with you, beside and within, who first gave light to your inner lamp and has promised to keep it burning through all eternity.
Church is probably going to feel like an Indiana Jones movie this morning because I’m taking you on a hunt for lost treasure! We’re going to explore some dangerous and exciting new territory. There’s bound to be risks aplenty. The treasure we’re looking for doesn’t belong on a dusty old shelf in some museum; we’re going to put it to good use in our lives, where it can yield a return on our investment.
(OK, that opening was a bit gimmicky, but give me a break, I’ve got to start the sermon somewhere!)
What I’m interested in doing today is exploring one of the lost treasures of the Bible itself. It sounds weird to hear someone talk about “lost treasures in the Bible”, right? I mean, isn’t the whole thing right there for us to open and read anytime we like? Of course it is! However, there are certain parts of the Bible that have been passed by or ignored over the years. This usually happens because these passages just don’t fit very well with the big ideas of the people in charge, so they get minimized and pushed aside while other passages take center stage. Once this has happened for several generations or even a few centuries in a row, most people forget those passages are even there. But that’s just the thing about the Bible: if you actually read it, it has a way of challenging the status quo and opening you up to new ideas that the powers-that-be might even call “heresy”.
This is exactly what happened with our Protestant ancestors, Martin Luther and John Calvin. Once they actually got their hands on the Bible itself, it led them to challenge a thousand years of church tradition and authority. Both of them were eventually excommunicated for preaching this crazy idea that regular people, not just priests and monks, should be able to read the Bible for themselves, in their own native language. It’s just like Desmond Tutu said in God Has A Dream, the book our congregation read together last summer:
Oppressive and unjust governments should stop people from praying to God, should stop them from reading and meditating on the Bible, for these activities will constrain them to work for the establishment of God’s kingdom of justice, of peace, of laughter, of joy, of caring, of sharing, of reconciliation, of compassion.
This morning, as we open the pages of this dangerously subversive and revolutionary manifesto that we call “the Bible”, we’re going to be searching for a particularly fascinating “lost treasure” that has been hidden in plain sight for thousands of years. This treasure that I’m talking about is actually a biblical character, like Jesus and Moses. Her name is Wisdom.
To the ears of us North Americans, talking about Wisdom as a person sounds weird. We’re used to thinking of Wisdom as a virtue or a concept, like intelligence or compassion. Wisdom (so we think) is not a person, but a character quality possessed by those of our elders who have lived long and lived well. We all aspire to be holders of Wisdom in our old age.
But that’s not how the Bible portrays Wisdom. The Bible sees Wisdom as a person, not a concept. In this morning’s Old Testament reading, taken from the book of Proverbs, Wisdom is portrayed as a bold and brave woman:
Wisdom cries out in the street;
in the squares she raises her voice.
At the busiest corner she cries out;
at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:
‘How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?
How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing
and fools hate knowledge?
Give heed to my reproof;
I will pour out my thoughts to you;
I will make my words known to you.
There is so much to love about the scene that is being set here. First of all, as I’ve already pointed out, Wisdom is portrayed as a person, a woman. In Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament, the word for Wisdom is Hochma. In Greek, the language of the New Testament, the word for Wisdom is Sophia. That’s where we get words like philosophy from. Philosophy literally means “the Love of Wisdom”. Sophia also happens to be a very familiar name for women in our culture. Sarah and I actually considered naming our daughter Sophia, but then we found out that it was the single most popular name for baby girls in 2008, so we decided to name her something more unique to her. So, for the remainder of this sermon, in order to emphasize the personal and feminine nature of Wisdom, as she is portrayed in the Bible, I will be referring to her by that Greek name: Sophia.
What kind of woman is Sophia? We learn right away from this passage in Proverbs that she is both unconventional and courageous. Proverbs says that she “cries out in the streets” and “raises her voice” at “the busiest corner”. Imagine, if you will, the gender-segregated world of ancient Palestine. In that culture, a woman’s traditional sphere of influence was limited to the home. Proper women, so they said at the time, didn’t make their presence known in public, which was the domain of men. If a woman needed something to get done outside of the home, she had to get it done through a man, like her husband, brother, or father. There were only two kinds of women who would raise their voices on a busy street corner: prostitutes and desperate women who had suffered such an injustice that they had no other choice but to take matters into their own hands. Either way, whenever a woman raised her voice in public, people were apt to think the worst.
So, I think it’s extremely significant that when we first meet Sophia, here in the book of Proverbs, she is crying out in the streets. The fact that she is doing so in that culture meant that something had gone very, very wrong indeed: either something was wrong with her or something had gone wrong with the world. Her willingness to speak up makes her the kind of person who is able to think outside the box and color outside the lines of what is socially acceptable. She is this strong, creative, and dynamic presence who raises her voice in order to change things for the better. In that way, the figure Sophia reminds me of pioneering women like Eleanor Roosevelt or the famous primatologist Jane Goodall. Both of these women, in the fields of politics and science, respectively, made a lasting difference by trespassing over the borders of what was expected of them from society. If we were to make a movie about Sophia, I think I would cast someone like Whoopi Goldberg or Kathy Bates in the lead role.
What can we learn about Sophia from looking elsewhere in the Bible?
In Proverbs 8, we meet her again. Just like before, she is crying out in the street in defiance of public opinion. She says:
To you, O people, I call,
and my cry is to all that live.
O simple ones, learn prudence;
acquire intelligence, you who lack it…
…I have insight, I have strength.
By me kings reign,
and rulers decree what is just;
by me rulers rule,
and nobles, all who govern rightly.
I love those who love me,
and those who seek me diligently find me.
At this point in the poem, things start to get really interesting. Up to now, we might still be able to dismiss Sophia as an impersonal concept, symbolically represented as a woman, but listen to what she says later in chapter 8:
Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth…
When [God] established the heavens, I was there,
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master worker;
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.
This is most interesting. Sophia, according to the ancient Hebrew sage who wrote this poem, holds a prominent place in cosmic scheme of things. Somehow, God works through Sophia in creating and shaping the world. The natural order we observe in the universe, according to this poem, is the direct result of God’s creative energy working with and through Sophia. Earlier, she says, “By me kings reign, and rulers decree what is just”. This means that the ideals of goodness and justice, far from being arbitrary cultural norms, are actually woven into the very fabric of the universe by Sophia herself. In this sense, she can be compared to that which Chinese philosophers have referred to as the Tao, the fundamental organizing principle of the cosmos.
We can learn even more about the development of the idea of Sophia by looking at the books of the Apocrypha. While these books, written by Hellenistic Jews in the centuries after the last Jewish prophet and the birth of Christ, were not accepted as sacred Scripture by the Protestant reformers, they are nonetheless helpful for demonstrating the developing thought patterns of the Jewish people in the years leading up to Jesus’ lifetime. This passage, a meditation on Sophia, comes from chapter 7 of a book called The Wisdom of Solomon:
because of her pureness she pervades and penetrates all things.
For she is a breath of the power of God,
and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty;
therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her.
For she is a reflection of eternal light,
a spotless mirror of the working of God,
and an image of his goodness.
Although she is but one, she can do all things,
and while remaining in herself, she renews all things;
in every generation she passes into holy souls
and makes them friends of God, and prophets;
for God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with wisdom.
She is more beautiful than the sun,
and excels every constellation of the stars.
Compared with the light she is found to be superior,
for it is succeeded by the night,
but against wisdom evil does not prevail.
What I find so fascinating about this passage is that the figure of Sophia is becoming more and more closely associated with God’s own self. As we move into the New Testament, the apostle Paul refers to Christ as “the Wisdom of God” in his first letter to the Corinthians. Decades later, someone writing in Paul’s name expanded on this association of Christ with Sophia in the epistle to the Colossians. Listen for the similarity between this passage about Christ and the one we read earlier from Proverbs 8:
[Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him.
It seems that the early Christians saw Christ as the earthly embodiment of Sophia herself. More than anyone else in history, Jesus lived a life in harmony with this fundamental organizing principle of the universe.
How can it be then, that such an important figure as Sophia has become one of the “lost treasures” of the Bible? The answer, I think, comes from the various kinds of cultural momentum and inertia that can be found in people of every place and time. Christianity itself has grown up in a patriarchal society. The sad fact is that women’s voices have not counted as much as men’s voices. When it comes to the metaphors we use to describe God, Christians have embraced images of masculinity and power (e.g. Almighty Father, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, etc.) to the exclusion of more feminine images (e.g. Sophia raising her voice in the marketplace). Nevertheless, our sacred Scriptures remind us that men and women are both equally made “in the image of God”. The Bible also gives us several feminine metaphors for God apart from Sophia the Wisdom Woman. Deuteronomy 32 describes God as an eagle teaching her young to fly. Isaiah 49 describes God as a mother who could never forget her baby. Women served as metaphors for God in more than one of Jesus’ parables. One of my favorite images comes from the Hebrew root of the term that gets translated as “tender mercies”, a character quality that is often applied to God. In Hebrew, the word for “tender mercies” is rachamim, which comes from the word rechem, which literally means “womb”. When the Bible tells us that we are the recipients of God’s “tender mercy”, it means to say that we are being nurtured and loved as we grow within the very womb of God. I like to tie this right back in to the image of Sophia as a metaphor for God. When I think of God, I have little use for the image of an angry, powerful man with a long white beard who sits on a throne above the clouds, hurling thunderbolts of judgment down to the earth. That kind of Deity sounds more like Zeus than Jesus. When I think of God, I prefer to think of Sophia: that brave and beautiful woman who raises her voice for justice in the city streets and carries the earth like a baby on her hip. That’s the God to whom I have given my heart.
This week, as you go out into the streets where you live, work, and play, I pray that your ears would be open to Sophia’s voice, calling out to you. Whether you are walking along an autumn trail, sitting in a meeting, milking a cow, or ringing up a cash register, may you become aware in those moments of that same sacred presence that shaped and renews the cosmos. Like Jesus, may you feel her creative energy pulsing through your veins and granting you the insight you need in order to live a life in total harmony with the universe itself.
There is a lovely phrase which St. Paul uses in his letter to the new Christian converts in Galatia. And that phrase is “in the fullness of time.” Paul speaks about how when Jesus was born it was at just the right time, all the pieces had fallen into place, the antecedents were just right, and it all happened at exactly the right moment. A little earlier would have been too soon and a little later would have been too late. When it happened it could not have been at any other moment.
Last year, many of us had a good laugh at the hype created by a fringe religious group who claimed to have exclusive knowledge that the end of the world was coming on May 21, 2011. As you may (or may not) recall, the day itself came and went without event. This was by no means the first time someone tried to cash in on apocalyptic hype. At the turn of the Millennium, there was “much ado about nothing” regarding the Y2K computer bug. In the 19th century, a man named William Miller made three unsuccessful attempts to predict the end of the world before his followers lost faith in him. Even before that, at the turn of the previous millennium, Pope Sylvester II trembled in prayer in his church, convinced that the world would come to an end that very night. Later this year, so we’re told, the Mayan calendar is supposed to run out, leading some people to speculate that this ancient civilization knew something we don’t about the apocalypse.
Predicting the what, where, and when of the end of the world has never failed to be a sensationalistic, money-making pastime for would-be prophets and their paranoid followers. We Christians have proved to be especially vulnerable to these scam artists, mainly because of the presence of the book of Revelation at the end of the New Testament. Many claim that this document, when read and interpreted properly, provides a detailed road map for the end of the world. It’s bizarre and cryptic imagery are said to contain secret messages about the Apocalypse that are meant to be decoded by those with the proper biblical study tools. The downside of this approach is that every single prediction supposedly “decoded” from the book of Revelation has turned out to be wrong. God’s plan, it seems, is not so readily available for human review and approval, but that hasn’t stopped people from trying to figure it out anyway.
Many of us might find it easy to laugh at them for their misguided pursuit. However, I’d like to take a moment to sympathize with them. My theory is that folks who tend to obsess over this kind of thing are looking for something. I think they’re looking for a sense of meaning and purpose in life. They want to believe that God has a plan for the world and that we’re not all just wandering aimlessly through history. I can relate to that.
The next step that most of these folks take is to apply this concept of God’s plan to their personal lives. They might say, “Not only does the universe have a destiny, but so do I. I’m an important part of God’s plan. Therefore, my life has meaning.” Like I said before, I can respect that need. I feel it too. I think we all do. But we have to watch out and make sure that we don’t carry this idea too far.
Our ancestors in the Calvinist tradition were famous for believing that God predestines the fate of every single human being. They believed that some people were destined for eternal bliss in heaven while others were doomed to endless suffering in hell. What makes the difference, they said, is “unconditional election” by God. God chose who would be “saved” or “damned” from the beginning of time, and there is nothing that anyone can do or say to change their fate. What’s more is that there was no way to know with any absolute certainty about which category you were in. This theological belief, called “double predestination”, caused people a lot of anxiety.
I’ve also seen people take the idea of God’s plan to unhealthy extremes in rather mundane matters. When I was in high school, I worked in a bookstore that had a section where we sold religiously themed posters. One day, I was walking through the stacks when I came across a woman who was kneeling on the floor, weeping. She had two posters laid out on the floor in front of her. The problem, it turned out, was that she couldn’t figure out which poster God wanted her to buy. Just like those folks who are obsessed with predicting the end of the world and the early Calvinist belief in double predestination, this person in the bookstore had taken the idea of God’s plan too far.
When I think about the idea of a divine plan for my life or history, I try not to get too hung up on the details of what, when, and where certain things are supposed to happen. If we occupy our time with those kinds of questions, I think we’re more likely to end up in an unhealthy state of mind. Rather, when I think about God’s plan, I prefer to ask questions of who, how, and why.
God is far less interested in what you’re doing and more interested in who you’re becoming, how you’re living, and why you do what you do. These are questions of the heart. Answering these questions goes a long way in helping us forge a sense of meaning and significance in our lives. For example, let’s take a young person in school who is trying to decide on a career path. I don’t think God tends to care very much whether someone decides to become a lawyer, a doctor, or a minister. Those are questions of what, where, and when. Of greater concern to God is whether that person wants to become a lawyer in order to just make money or to serve the greater cause of justice. In God’s eyes, a waitress in a diner with a heart for hospitality is more holy, more in step with God’s plan, than a minister who just likes to hear the sound of his own voice. Who we are is much more important than what we do.
That’s why I tend to avoid the phrase “God’s plan” when it comes to the events of history. I much prefer to think of “God’s vision” or “God’s dream” as Desmond Tutu calls it. God’s dream is a dynamic thing. It’s always changing and in motion. God is the ultimate creator of this dream, but has invited each one of us to become co-creators with God and each other. Archbishop Tutu says it like this:
It has often been said, “What we are is God’s gift to us. What we become is our gift to God.” What we become is not about status, it is about love. Do we love like God, as God so deeply desires? Do we become like God, as God so deeply desires us to be?
As for the substance of the plan itself, the shape it takes is up to us, and God works with and around what we bring to the table. Again, in the words of Archbishop Tutu:
There is a wonderful Portuguese saying that God writes straight with crooked lines. God works through history to realize God’s dream. God makes a proposal to each of us and hopes our response will move His dream forward. But if we don’t, God does not abandon the goal, He does not abandon the dream. God adjusts God’s methods to accommodate the detour, but we are going to come back onto the main road and eventually arrive at the destination.
I love that phrase: “God writes straight with crooked lines.” To me, it describes so well my experience of life in this world where things don’t always go according to plan. Accidents happen. Things don’t always go your way. Life goes on. It doesn’t mean that God isn’t present or working in this world and in our lives. It means that, if we’re going to look for God, we have to look deeper than the level of surface appearances and random events.
When someone gets sick, or an accident happens, or a terrible tragedy overtakes us, people are prone to ask, “Why is God doing this?” or “Why did God allow this to happen?” I have to be honest with you, I don’t think God had anything to do with it. The God of love that I believe in is not in the business of causing cancer and car accidents. I think these things just happen. The God I believe in is the one who meets us in the middle of these disasters and leads us to respond in a certain way.
One of my favorite examples that I use to illustrate this point is the terrorist attacks of September 11. Some people said that God allowed those airplanes to crash because God was judging the United States for one reason or another. I don’t think that’s true. I don’t see God in that at all. I see God in those volunteers who climbed the smoldering piles of rubble with buckets in their hands to get the trapped survivors out. I see God in the police and fire fighters who risked or gave their lives to save others. That’s where God is. That’s God’s plan, God’s dream, in action.
I don’t know if there will one day be an apocalyptic end to the world. I don’t know if there will be a once & for all victory of goodness over evil “in the fullness of time”. I don’t know if we, or our children, or our grandchildren will ever live in a perfect world.
I don’t know much, but this is what I believe:
When I look out at the stars in the heavens, I see a harmony that human selfishness cannot touch. We might destroy ourselves and each other someday. We might even take our whole planet into extinction with us. But the beauty of nebulae, quasars, and galaxies will still be there. The impulse toward order and equilibrium will never be gone from our universe. That same impulse exists in each one of us. We call it life, we call it justice, and we call it compassion. I call it God. As long as there is a universe to exist, God will never stop working within it to shape darkness, death, and chaos into light, life, and love. As long as we are alive in this world, God will never stop inviting us to join God in this continuing mission. I close this sermon and end this series by going back to the words of Desmond Tutu himself:
All over this magnificent world God calls us to extend His kingdom of shalom—peace and wholeness—of justice, of goodness, of compassion, of caring, of sharing, of laughter, of joy, and of reconciliation. God is transfiguring the world right this very moment through us because God believes in us and because God loves us. What can separate us from the love of God? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And as we share God’s love with our brothers and sisters, God’s other children, there is no tyrant who can resist us, no oppression that cannot be ended, no hunger that cannot be fed, no wound that cannot be healed, no hatred that cannot be turned to love, no dream that cannot be fulfilled.
Rätikon mountain range in Austria. Image by Böhringer Friedrich
I must confess that I have been hitherto unfamiliar with the poetry of William Wordsworth, but my mind was blown this morning as I came across this passage of his, quoted by Karen Armstrong in The Case for God. It quite simply set my heart on fire. I would point to poetry like this if someone asked me to give my definition of the term “God”:
…I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.
Morpheus, a character from ‘The Matrix’ who introduces people to “the real world” by inviting them take a red pill. “If you take the red pill,” he says, “you stay in Wonderland and I show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
Dear Child of God, I am sorry to say that suffering is not optional. It seems to be part and parcel of the human condition, but suffering can either embitter or ennoble. Our suffering can become a spirituality of transformation when we understand that we have a role in God’s transfiguration of the world. And if we are to be true partners with God, we must learn to see with the eyes of God—that is, to see with the eyes of the heart and not just the eyes of the head. The eyes of the heart are not concerned with appearances but essences, as we cultivate these eyes we are able to learn from our suffering and to see the world with more loving, forgiving, humble, generous eyes.
I have to confess that I really get a kick out of those movies and TV shows whose plots are built around the premise that the everyday “normal” world we all inhabit is a hollow fantasy and the “real” world is way more intense and exciting than most people can imagine. I went to college in the late 90s and the movie that most exemplifies this idea for people my age is The Matrix, starring Keanu Reeves. In this movie, the “normal” world turns out to be a computer simulation used by evil robots who are trying to control the minds of the human race. The main character, a regular guy with a boring job in the beginning, turns out to be a hero with super-powers who is destined to save humanity from the robots.
Another example is the TV show Weeds. This show takes place in sunny, suburban California, where a soccer mom named Nancy is trying to make ends meet for herself and two kids. But the deep, dark secret is that Nancy is actually selling marijuana. The show follows Nancy as her life drifts farther and farther away from the world of PTA meetings and white picket fences and into the criminal underworld of gangsters and drug dealers.
What all of these movies and shows have in common is the idea that the “real” world is somehow darker and seedier than the “normal” world. Wesley Snipe says it like this in the movie Blade: “You better wake up. The world you live in is just a sugar-coated topping! There is another world beneath it – the real world. And if you wanna survive it, you better learn to pull the trigger!”
Sounds pretty intense, doesn’t it?
I think these stories tend appeal to people because they reflect, in a metaphorical way, the experience of disillusionment that everyone goes through in the process of growing up. When we were young, our parents tried to shelter us from the harsh realities of life. We do the same for our kids and grandkids. Are there any good parents who don’t worry about the amount of gratuitous sex and violence their kids see on TV? I doubt it. We instinctively want to protect our kids from being exposed to those realities too soon, even though we all know our kids will eventually see them anyway, in spite of our best efforts.
So, why do we try to shield them? Why, instead, do we bring them to church and enroll them in Sunday school where they can learn the stories of the Bible and the basic beliefs and values of our faith?
There are many out there who argue that we are simply trying to delay the inevitable. They would say that we are trying to keep our kids locked up in a fantasy world that’s “just a sugar-coated topping” in the words of Wesley Snipe. They would say that we parents are pining for our lost innocence and therefore trying to prevent that loss from happening to our kids. Afraid of reality, they say, we try to keep ourselves and our children imprisoned in a fantasy world where everything is fine and everyone is happy all the time.
Religion, according to these folks, is the ultimate enforcer of the fantasy world. Karl Marx, the philosopher who founded the idea of Communism, called religion “the opiate of the masses.” Faith in God, he said, was part of the fantasy world. The real world, according to Marx, was a struggle to the death between the haves and the have-nots. Religion, he said, was one of the tools that the haves used to keep the have-nots in line. Similarly, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously declared that “God is dead,” considered virtues like compassion and humility to be part of the morality of the weak. According to Nietzsche’s thinking, might makes right. The only real winner is the superman who rises above the masses and imposes his will upon his fellow human beings. Power, according to Nietzsche, is the only real morality. It should come as no surprise then, that Nietzsche’s number one fan in the twentieth century was a man named Adolf Hitler. Nazism was basically just Nietzsche’s philosophy in practice.
Both Marx and Nietzsche (the founders of Communism and Nazism, respectively), as materialist philosophers with a cynical edge, believed they had found the real world beneath the surface of everyday “normal” reality. Each one thought he possessed the secret knowledge that held the key to history. And you know what? They were right… to a point.
They were right in observing that the happy world of easy answers, black & white morality, and “happily ever after” fairy tale endings is ultimately a fantasy constructed by people who want to shield themselves and their kids from the harsh realities of real life. They were right in observing that many people use religion as a means of enforcing belief in the fantasy, threatening hellfire and damnation to those who question or doubt the fantasy’s validity. They were right in guessing that truly mature people are those who can face the darkness of reality and see this complicated world for what it really is. They were right in those things.
But they were also wrong. They were wrong insofar as they believed that they had fully sounded the depths of reality. They were wrong insofar as they presumed that this new level of consciousness they had uncovered was the final one. They were wrong, not because they went too far in their quest for the truth, but because they didn’t go far enough.
As a person of faith, I believe there is another level of reality, of which Marx and Nietzsche were apparently unaware. The existence of this level of reality can be neither proved nor disproved by philosophy. Reason can lead us only to the point of possibility, at which point each of us must then freely choose for ourselves what we will accept as the more probable truth.
The world I see beneath the so-called “real” world of harsh realities is characterized by the presence of justice and compassion. Hindus call this reality “Brahman.” The ancient Greeks called it “Logos.” Jews, Christians, and Muslims throughout history have traditionally identified this reality as personal and called it “Adonai,” “Allah,” or “God.”
God, so we say, is the one “from whom, through whom, and to whom” all things come. It is in God that “we live, move, and have our being.” For us, God is the mysterious “all in all” at the heart of the universe. And what is the character of this ultimate reality? We say that it is love. “God is love,” as it says in the Bible. How do we know this to be true? We don’t, in an absolute sense. We trust it to be true, however, because of what we have experienced in and through the person Jesus of Nazareth.
Looking at the life of Jesus, we experience something that Christians for millennia have chosen to accept as a revelation of God, the ultimate nature of reality. Because of Jesus, we choose to believe that God is love. We see it in the way that he drew our attention to flowers, birds, sunshine, and rain as evidence of God’s providential care. We hear it in the parables he told about the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. We feel it in the way he touched the unclean lepers and welcomed outcast sinners to dine at his family table. Above all, we encounter it in the way that he died: forgiving his enemies and entrusting his spirit to God’s care. Because of this, we say, “This is love. This is ultimate reality. This is what God is like.” Because of this, the cross of Christ has become the central symbol of our faith. And, because of this, we refuse to believe that death can have the final word over such love, so we celebrate Easter, the central holiday of our faith. We tell stories of how, after Jesus’ death, some women came to his grave to pay their respects. Upon their arrival, they found the tomb empty and the stone rolled away. Then an angel suddenly appeared and asked them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here. He is risen.”
Can we prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that these things actually happened? No. But we believe them to be true because the love we see in Jesus leads us to believe that “love is strong as death” and is the creative power that gave birth to the universe. The belief that “God is love” is the ultimate truth that “was from the beginning, that we have heard, that we have seen with our eyes, that we have looked at and touched with our hands” in the person of Jesus. We can’t prove any of this. The truth of it can’t be forced on anyone. It must be freely chosen.
We are free to choose whether we will confine Jesus and his message of love to the annals of history or see him as our living window into the ultimate nature of reality. This is what Desmond Tutu means when he talks to us about “seeing with the eyes of the heart” in this week’s chapter of God Has a Dream.
This new way of seeing, Tutu says, changes things. It changes the way we look at Jesus, the way we look at others, the way we look at ourselves, and the way we look at the world. Archbishop Tutu says:
Many people ask me what I have learned from all of the experiences in my life, and I say unhesitatingly: People are wonderful. It is true. People really are wonderful. This does not mean that people cannot be awful and do real evil. They can. Yet as you begin to see with the eyes of God, you start to realize that people’s anger and hatred and cruelty come from their own pain and suffering. As we begin to see their words and behavior as simply the acting out of their suffering, we can have compassion for them. We no longer feel attacked by them, and we can begin to see the light of God shining in them. And when we begin to look for the light of God in people, an incredible thing happens. We find it more and more in people—all people.
There is another story in the Bible of a person who was able to look past his own disillusionment and “see with the eyes of the heart.” I’m talking about the story of Joseph, from the Old Testament book of Genesis. Joseph, you may remember, was his father’s favorite son. This fact made his brothers green with envy to the point where they faked his death and sold him into slavery. Later on, Joseph was falsely accused of rape by his boss’ wife and ten thrown into prison to rot. Much later, after a few providential run-ins with royal officials, Joseph was freed from prison and appointed to what we might call the Vice Presidency of Egypt. It was at this point in the story, in the midst of a severe famine, that Joseph’s brothers show up again, this time groveling and begging for food, not realizing who they were talking to. This would have been the perfect opportunity for revenge. No one would have blamed him for holding a grudge, but that’s not what happened. In this story, after telling his brothers who he was, Joseph wept with them and forgave them. He said to them, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good”.
Joseph knew all about disillusionment. His fairy tale dreams were shattered at an early age. He was well aware that, beneath the world of his childhood dreams, reality was a lot more complicated. However, unlike Marx, Nietzsche, and the producers of those movies I mentioned, Joseph never stopped searching for that presence of justice and compassion at the heart of the universe. I think it’s pretty clear that he must have found, or at least glimpsed, what he was looking for. Somehow, he was able to look past the darkness and into the light beyond. This way of seeing with the eyes of the heart brought Joseph to the point where he was able to forgive those who had done such unforgivable things to him. He was even able to see the hand of providence at work at work in his circumstances, saying, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good.”
Desmond Tutu tells us the story of another modern-day Joseph who was able to overcome injustice and let it shape him for the better. He writes:
Nelson Mandela spent twenty-seven years in prison, eighteen of them on Robben Island breaking rocks into little rocks, a totally senseless task. The unrelenting brightness of the light reflected off the white stone damaged his eyes so that now when you have your picture taken with him, you will be asked not to use a flash. Many people say, “What a waste! Wouldn’t it have been better if Nelson Mandela had come out earlier? Look at all the things he would have accomplished.”
Those ghastly, suffering-filled twenty-seven years actually were not a waste. It may seem so in a sense, but when Nelson Mandela went to jail he was angry. He was a young man who was understandably very upset at the miscarriage of justice in South Africa. He and his colleagues were being sentenced because they were standing up for what seemed so obvious. They were demanding the rights that in other countries were claimed to be inalienable. At the time, he was very forthright and belligerent, as he should have been, leading the armed wing of the African National Congress, but he mellowed in jail. He began to discover depths of resilience and spiritual attributes that he would not have known he had. And in particular I think he learned to appreciate the foibles and weaknesses of others and to be able to be gentle and compassionate toward others even in their awfulness. So the suffering transformed him because he allowed it to ennoble him. He could never have become the political and moral leader he became had it not been for the suffering he experienced on Robben Island.
All of us are bound to become disillusioned in the process of growing up. That much is inevitable. What is not inevitable is how we will respond to our disillusionment. Will you halt your search for truth with those cynics who say “God is dead” and “might makes right”? Or will you continue to follow the living Christ ever deeper into the heart of reality where you can experience firsthand the love of God giving birth to the universe?
My prayer is that we would all choose to see with the eyes of the heart, that we would all come to know this eternal love for ourselves, and that we would all be forever transformed by that experience.
I was at a pastors’ retreat earlier this week where a spiritual director suggested that I might find Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross to be a particularly helpful read at this point in my journey.
So, I’ve decided to take it up. Just for fun, I’ll also be posting my thoughts on the chapters here on my blog. I hesitate to call it a “commentary” because the book itself is a commentary on a poem by the same author. Mine would be a commentary on a commentary, sort of like the Jewish Talmud, but without all the incessant arguing.
But first, here is the poem that forms the basis for this book. I read it out loud to myself before each chapter, therefore I’ll be posting a copy of it with each blog post in this series.
On a dark night, Kindled in love with yearnings –oh, happy chance!– I went forth without being observed, My house being now at rest.
In darkness and secure, By the secret ladder, disguised –oh, happy chance!– In darkness and in concealment, My house being now at rest.
In the happy night, In secret, when none saw me, Nor I beheld aught, Without light or guide, save that which burned in my heart.
This light guided me More surely than the light of noonday To the place where he (well I knew who!) was awaiting me — A place where none appeared.
Oh, night that guided me, Oh, night more lovely than the dawn, Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover, Lover transformed in the Beloved!
Upon my flowery breast, Kept wholly for himself alone, There he stayed sleeping, and I caressed him, And the fanning of the cedars made a breeze.
The breeze blew from the turret As I parted his locks; With his gentle hand He wounded my neck And caused all my senses to be suspended.
I remained, lost in oblivion; My face I reclined on the Beloved. All ceased and I abandoned myself, Leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies.
Since I only got the idea to blog about this after I’d already read the first two chapters, I’ll be playing a bit of initial catchup in this post.
Mother and child in Bolivia. Image by Peter van der Sluijs
The first chapter talks about the love of God being like the love of a mother for her baby. A newborn soul (i.e. someone taking ownership of her spirituality for the first time) is nourished and cuddled without much being required on her part. Later, as the child grows, the mother weans the child from nursing and teaches her how to walk on her own. This is a difficult-but-natural phase in the growing-up process.
In years past, I would have read this chapter as a legalistic call to arms. I would have said that it was my responsibility to walk on my own and live up to God’s impossible moral standards. However, reading this chapter as a parent changed my outlook significantly. I’m currently at the phase of life with my kids that John of the Cross was using as a metaphor for the spiritual life.
Yes, it’s true that parenting is a challenge for everyone as babies become toddlers. However, the phase doesn’t end all at once. Even on the toughest of days, there is still a lot of affection to be given. My wife and I didn’t just decide one day that it was time for our daughter to grow up. That is happening naturally over time. We expected her to fall down as she learned how to walk. We expected accidents to happen during potty-training. We expected her to mispronounce new words. She wasn’t punished for these things. We just loved her through them and she figured them out on her own (with some help from us).
What’s really amazing is watching her personality emerge as she gets older. Some of it she learns from imitating us (like laughing at fart jokes). Some of it seems to be inborn (like her tendency toward left-handedness). But all of it is part of who she is. And we love her for it.
The same thing is true of us in our development as human beings of the spiritual variety. God’s tenderness toward us does not end as we grow more spiritually mature. God expects us to make mistakes and loves us through them. God is raising us, not to conform to some foreign standard of piety, but to become the best versions of our own unique selves.
If I, as a parent, can find such joy in this process with my own kids, how much more does God do so with each one of us?
Hopping Hadrian's Wall 