Aug 10 | Retreat Diary: Tuesday

HOLY READING

  From Widening the Horizons: I was delighted to see the author quote Sallie McFague! “The only legitimate way of speaking of the incursion of the divine into history, or so it appears to this tradition, is metaphorically. Metaphor is proper to the subject matter because God remains hidden. The belief that Jesus is the word of God – that God is manifest somehow in a human life – does not dissipate metaphor but in fact intensifies its centrality, for what is more indirect – a more complete union of the realistic and the strange – than a human life as the abode of the divine? Jesus as the word is metaphor par excellence; he is the parable of God.”

From metaphor Gerkin moves to narrative as imperative for forming a new theology of pastoral care. In speaking of aspects of narrative, he mentions that humans are able to transcend time through memory and anticipation. Really all creatures can do that to some extent, but with humans it may be different in some way. Animals and other organisms are able to live much more clearly in the moment than we are, and their memories (I think) are not only personal but collective as evolutionary advantages and instincts. In this particular example, can we really say that living in the moment is better or worse? I don’t think we can really prioritize it in the same way we do today.

I think this is coming up in my mind because this text is seeming rather anthropocentric! So do other animals have narrative? Do their bodies carry it? “To be a person is…to live in a story.” Is it really only living in a story that makes us people, or do we have to accept the story, or rather, accept that story is a given for how we live? What about Nature? Is Nature capable of personhood when we impose a story on its life? Or is, say, a tree a person because God has imposed or gifted a story to it? I would say yes. The mountains and trees I can see from where I sit seem to me to be capable of far more significant stories than mine. After all, trees, which can live for centuries, even millennia, contain seeds, and they all have stories; same with mountains and rocks. A mountain or an ocean is really quite incapable of being individual.

Now I’m really drawing on my Celtic roots! God must then be closer to an ocean than to us as human beings…and yet God can still be distinct, and we are made in God’s image. Perhaps, then, the Fall really does have more to do with putting ourselves out of touch with that collectiveness. And of course no human story is “really” individual – we are all collective.

From The Sacred Mirror: The fifth reading is the story of Simeon and Anna, from the Gospel of Luke. Herbie reflects that Anna may be present in the story to provide a counterpoint to Mary. Anna is old and widowed, seeking refuge in the temple. Mary’s body has become a temple. We should also note that as the world gets older, more Simeons and Annas will need to be cultivated.

They are spoken of in this book as prophets, and linked to the ones I read about the day before. I have cautioned some of the other people of faith I’ve met on linking those prophets too closely with Jesus. Prophecy in that time was less about pointing into and predicting the future and more about speaking truth to a situation – being God’s mouthpiece. In a sense, they were really people of the present, not the future. I think of those prophets of which I wrote yesterday as pointing toward a sense of restoration of covenant and justice. Simeon and Anna fit very well into this family.

The sixth reading is about the woman with the haemorrhage who touches Jesus’ cloak. Herbie suggests the woman does not approach from the front so that she doesn’t have to feel disappointment when she is not cured, as she has in her many years of discomfort consulted many other healers and been disappointed over and over. I find it far more inspiring to suggest that she knew, as a ritually unclean woman, she could not hope to touch or be touched by this holy man.

Herbie also mentions that she reaches out hoping for magic to cure rather than a relationship to heal, and that Jesus challenges this by turning around and seeking her for relationship. He contrasts this with the experience people are searching for at those faith healing shows. Surely some attend hoping only for magic, but I don’t think it’s fair to set them up as being entirely opposite from those who seek relationship as well. I do think the standard practice of high priced tickets for those shows is incredibly cruel and manipulative. They deliberately separate those who can receive healing power from those who can’t, and purely on financial levels, which I think makes Jesus cringe. Herbie does rightly note that human beings crave touch and believe on a cellular level in the efficacy of touch for healing. His observation that people are invited “to touch the television for healing” if they are watching at home, despite being directly observed by an 8-year-old me watching Peter Popoff, was probably the saddest thing I’ve ever read. I do not write the word “sad” in a contemptuous way, but in an honest, soul-wailing way. It’s similar to the feeling I get when I think about recent attempts to create robots to take care of elderly people in nursing homes. How long will we allow ourselves to be slaves to the rules of efficiency through capitalism? How long will we deny the need we have for each other, the need we have for touch? No wonder so many kids are cutting themselves, or even killing themselves, when we live in a world that is happy to sell its soul for productivity and the illusion of community and security.

As I become burdened with these thoughts, Herbie, with masterful timing, then writes about the amazing human capacity to hope. Hope drives us – it even drives us to touch the screen. If I can accept that part of the world will seek to profit from hope, I can begin my own work of hope. While others seek profit, I can seek to spread relationship – even, as my motto for CPE stated, “sharing the light of the world.”

-Clarity

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