Fighting With a Mystic: Good Friday Edition

Every Holy Week I recall one of Meister Eckhart's teachings that pricks me at my core. While I do as much as I can to distance myself from the difficulties of Christ's life and make excuses for the teachings of Jesus that call me to die to myself, Eckhart's teachings calls me back to a Truth that I don't want to know that I know:

"Scripture says,  "No one knows the Father but the Son." Therefore, if you want to know God, you must not only be like the Son, you must be the Son."

Many of us in the West are not comfortable with poetic mystic language. We tend more toward toward didactic (and verbose) prose. 

Enter Martin Luther. 

In much the same spirit of Eckhart, Luther wrote in The Freedom of a Christian (1520):

"As our heavenly Father has in Christ freely come to our aid, we also ought freely to help our neighbor through our body and its works, and each one should become as it were a Christ to the other that we may be Christs to one another and Christ may be the same in all, that is, that we may be truly Christians..."

You may have seen on the internet the acronym TLDR which means: Too long, did't read. C.S. Lewis understood that many people were not going to read Eckhart or Luther so he wrote books that were more accessible and shorter. So to quote Lewis from Mere Christianity (1952): 

"Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.”

As we enter into Good Friday, I confess I am not ready to be a Little Christ.

WWJD is the wrong question

When I was a kid I was given a WWJD bracelet. In case you missed this trend, WWJD stood for "What Would Jesus Do?" It was a way to get people to stop and think about what is the action we ought to do - that is what would Jesus do - in a situation. For me it functioned more as a fashion accessory than a Jesus reminder. 

After I wrote this post, I came across writings from another author. I guess I a not original. 

As I have gotten older it is much harder for me to answer the question WWJD. Frankly I have little idea what Jesus would do in many current situations. Maybe I am the only one, but I have a difficult time imagine what Jesus did much less what he would do. I know how Jesus would respond to the question, "Who is my neighbor?" but only because I have read the story of the Good Samaritan. I am not sure that I would have guessed that if Jesus was asked that question he would have responded by making up a story. 

This leads to the overall problem with WWJD: it leads on to believe that Christianity is primarily a religion of doing things when in fact it is not. Christianity is a religion that is not about doing but about being. And this is where I turn to the desert monastics to help make the point. 

In the introduction of James O. Hannay's book "Wisdom of the Desert", he has this to say about what the desert monastics thought about Christianity's relationship with doing good for others.  

"The hermits were called selfish because they aimed at being good and not being useful. The charge derives its real force from the fact that philanthropy, that is, usefulness to humanity, is our chief conception of what religion is. We appeal to the fact that Christ went about doing good, and we hold that true imitation of Him consists in doing as He did rather than in being as He was. The hermits thought differently. Philanthropy was, in their view, an incidental result, as it were, a by-product of the religious spirit."

WWJD puts philanthropy front and center to the Christian life, but the desert monastics saw philanthropy as a by-product! That is when we try to answer WWJD we are always going to miss the mark. We have no idea what Jesus would do. However, if we stopped trying to guess what Christ would do and spend our energies being as Christ was then we gain a clarity of how to act in the world.

Jesus prayed in the garden to not die. He would not have chosen to die via the cross. Rather, he stepped away from what to do and sought from God how to be. When he was grounded on how to be, what to do was clear. It was not easy, but it was clear.

What bees can teach us: Self care is different from caring about yourself

St. John Chrysostom once said in his 12th homily, “The bee is more honored than other animals, not because she labors, but because she labors for others.” It is a simple idea, one that we were taught while in kindergarten - the value of serving others. 

While the beehive is not a common image used in relation to the Church, it does make it's appearance in the Latter Day Saints community as well as a connection to St Ambrose, St Bartholomew, St Kharlamii, and St. Gobnait (aka Abigail) to name a few. Beekeeping and the monastic life have long been intertwined. 

I trust that you can discover many layers in the metaphor of bees and the Christian life but I wanted to highlight one specific aspect about bees and the Christian life. That is the work of self care. 

Sometimes we are prone to think that the bee is working to pollinate the other flowers that it comes across and this is what the bee is setting out to do. However, this is not what the bee is doing. The bee, as you know, is looking for nectar and it goes from flower to flower doing so. To put it another less poetic way, the bee is taking care of itself in a way that benefits the world around it. This reflective of what self care is within the Christian tradition. 

Christians are called to tend to our own souls but in a particular and specif way: our self care benefits those around us. Too often self care is thought of as something that one does in order to get away from people and the larger world. Ironically, self care cannot end with the self. Self care means we act in ways renew us while also pollinating the world. More inward forms of renewal is not self care, it is just caring about ourselves.