Easter VII
I've been granted a vision this past year and a bit. Perhaps you have, too.
I used to imagine the world full of little undiscovered places and sensibilities, and if I traveled wide and far enough I would continually be greeted by the wonder of the new. Always someplace new, a new world to discover. The process of discovery keeps you on your toes: everything is a new horizon.
But, when the pandemic closed us all down, it became apparent that there was no place to go to escape, no place I could go to be outside of this reality. The whole world came to seem like one vast prison. Nowhere to go. Might as well stay home. The Mars Rover in the midst of the pandemic simply reminded me that the red planet was not an inhabitable place, regardless of the prowess of interplanetary exploration represented in the expedition.
Where to go to experience the new? How to see the world anew from the same old viewpoint?
The spirituality of continual exploration has a long history in our tradition (and Islam and Judaism and Buddhism and...): to be a pilgrim, to travel about as a mendicant and truly practice being a lily of the field. We could pick up a begging bowl and venture out into our own city, here, and find it transformed, although if everyone was staying inside, our exploration might simply reveal to the unenlightened eye (mine!) only one continual, bleak landscape. Santiago de Compostella in Spain was locked down tight. Ditto all the Marian shrines everywhere. Forget flying to Tibet. All one bleak sameness of tedium and anxiety.
Was that the revelation? No. That feels like the fear rippling just below consciousness most days. Pandemic-caused lack-of-travel simply made it unavoidable: all the things with which one can fill a day, or a life, receded out of reach.
For several weeks, now, and for a few more to come, we read from John's community Gospel, and Jesus is saying in varying ways the same thing: I will not be with you bodily, but the Spirit comes among you in many ways, and will lead you into all truth. Believe this, and seek out this spirit.
The other narrative we've been tracing is through the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, which is a collection of stories of the early followers of Jesus. They have been praying for this Spirit to be among them, for it broadens their horizon and imagination, and gives them power to do what Jesus has told them to do: proclaim that the kingdom of God has come very near to us all, now. We are to change our lives accordingly, and allow this renewed power to work in and through us, for the transformation of all things.
The kingdom of God. An ancient phrase. The kingdom of heaven, to use an AKA. The phrase can conjure images of 'elsewhere'. Our ancestors' cosmology often placed this 'up', and 'heavens' and 'sky' are synonyms in many languages. A post-death destination, playing into all sorts of reward-and-fear-based theologies and cosmologies over the centuries.
Elsewhere. Another world! Unreachable. On a pilgrimage to this Place our whole lives long.
Well, amen. But, here's a pithy observation: 'there is another world, and it is hidden in this one.'
(Trying to trace this wise observation was a Google-rabbit-hole. Most likely phrased by Paul Eluard, French communist/surrealist poet, who himself was citing other people.)
Jesus tells the disciples in John's Gospel that the Spirit will reveal things to them, and that this is all being told them so that this fullness-of-joy may dwell in us - complete and full, not elsewhere, but within us. Hidden in this world.
The Christian tradition tells us that how we imagine God truly matters. Imagine God as a lover who truly desires you, who seeks you out, who reveals secrets to you, whose constant presence reveals this world to contain a multitude of worlds.
It is this opening-of-reality that the Spirit draws out in us. With Power, Jesus says.
And, this opening -- this revealing of another world-not-elsewhere-but-here -- is meant to be for the life of all, the coming-alive of all. Revealing another world hidden within this one makes so many of our collective choices and compromises and struggles and fears seem... short-sighted. Incomplete. Being granted a vision of the world-within-world spurs us to collective action (collective repentance, which is how repentance is generally meant to be experienced), action that acts from that standpoint of greater knowledge and truth -- from that vision.
Small acts reveal this world, just as much as grand shifts or revolutions. No need to travel to Tibet or Santiago. The revealing of this reality is powerful, and comes from the only power that will last.
Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and you will find.
Love, humility, justice, truth: these are the passports and the currencies of this Place. Ask, and they shall be given.
These are also the lenses we must learn to wear in order to see... this world hidden all around us and within us and all created things. Seek, and you will find.
This is the power of resurrection working in us, with the Spirit's grace. Thanks be to God.