The Living Word

The Living Word

Ever get so caught up in a book that you forget where you are or what time it is? Ever go to a movie and become so wrapped up in it that you forget the red glowing exit signs in front of you? Jesus taught, as many other mystics down through the ages, in the form of story. His stories were parabolic. Stories about him became parabolic. That is, they contain within the telling, deep and unique truth and particular meaning for each and every one who enters into the story at the telling.
Remember when you were a very young child and someone told you or read to you a story? Remember how real it was, and how some stories became your favorites? They touched and resonated with some part of you and you responded in a way that cannot be put into words. It is the same with the sacred encounter that we have frozen and called faith.
What if we allowed ourselves to hear the Word as we heard stories as a young child? What if we encountered the Bible not as analytical adults but as witnesses to events that were happening right in front of us, right now? I don’t mean as a literal truths, but as witnesses to a creative eternal moment. As children we knew dragons didn’t exist, and yet they did. We knew monsters didn’t live under our bed, and yet they did. Children don’t usually argue with each other about whether or not the characters in Narnia or Harry Potter are real. Like the mystics, we were un-impeded in our dialogue with the miraculous, until the adults taught it out of us.
There are several stories in the New Testament of Jesus encountering people who were desperate. There is the one about the lame boy lowered through the roof of a house by friends or family, where Jesus was teaching and healing; the woman with the flow of blood that no one could stop; the Syro-Phoenician woman half crazed with fear and anguish because her daughter had a demon; the woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her own tears and hair, and spread ointment from an alabaster jar on his feet. They interact with Jesus, right in the moment. There is no holding back. There is no analysis. They don’t even pay attention to the social laws of the culture they live in. They are desperate, and desperately in the moment. We’ve all felt that kind of pain, that kind of being lost, and when that happens, rules fly out the window. Jesus responds to that, and the dialogue and encounter between the person and Jesus is part of the healing. He tells several of them that their faith has saved them or to one particular woman who has changed his mind in her appeal, that she has spoken well.

What do these stories say to you about the nature of God? To me they say that it is all about relationship and dialogue, born perhaps out of our human predicament of being alive, in pain, separated from what we used to know or what we never knew, and about crying out to God in that pain, that mis-fitness, that loneliness, and that bleeding that no one can stop.
The mystic knows that the story, the parable, is happening, right now, right here, in this moment, to you and to me. The Jewish philosopher of religion, Abraham Joshua Heschel *wrote:

What is intelligible to our mind is but a thin surface of the profoundly undisclosed, a ripple of inveterate silence that remains immune to curiosity and inquisitiveness like distant foliage in the dusk. The universe is a score of eternal music and we are the cry, we are the voice. …Religion…comes to light…in moments of discerning the indestructibly student within the perishably constant. Faith is a blush in the presence of God.

He goes on:

Wonder is not a state of aesthetic enjoyment. Endless wonder is endless tension, a situation in which we are shocked at the inadequacy of our awe. It is His otherness, ineffable and immediate as the air we breathe and do no see, which enables us to sense His distant nearness.

And this quote by Heschel, which once again reminds me of the healed people in these stories,

We are the creatures of a Creator who creates the world anew at every moment. Even our freedom is sustained in that divine grace. We discover God’s presence through the ineffable that we encounter in all things, and in our response to the ineffable we know ourselves as known by God. We find the meaning of our lives (or the healing-my words)
not in ourselves, therefore, but in our relation to what transcends us.
“To be is to stand for” - RSP

* Quotes from The Affirming Flame, Maurice S. Friedman, 1999, Prometheus Books.