Advent 2020 Session 3 ~ For Further Reflection: “The Restoring Face of God”
1) Are you experiencing God’s restoring face turned toward you? If so, describe how this feels, using heart language.
2) When have you experienced God restoration within you? Describe the experience. Now describe how this feels, using heart language.
3) When have you witnessed God restoring your neighborhood, your community? Ponder the answer that arises. Talk with God about the answer.
4) Spend time reflecting on your answers. What is being revealed? Is there an invitation emerging?
5) Offer this prayer: Restoring God, I bring to you my concerns (offer prayers of concern): My broken relationships need mending— With neighbors across the street and around the world. My body needs healing, and my mind needs restoring. My town (city or country) needs fresh vision and new hope. I long for all people to rebuild the ancient ruins, to create communities of justice and peace. Restoring God, I look to you as my architect, my master rebuilder.
Restoring God, I bring to you my joys (offer prayers of praise): My home can be filled with laughter and love. My community can be repaired and thrive. Wars can cease and peace can reign. Although I have cried many tears—for myself, for my friends, and for those I hear about in the news, you promise to bring me home with shouts of joy. AMEN (Adapted from Leader Magazine, Fall 2008, MennoMedia)
6) Conclude with this blessing: As you go, praise God! Open your life to God’s restoring Spirit and scatter seeds of healing and hope. God will restore you. God’s face will shine on you, and you will be saved. (ibid)
Session 2~For Further Reflection: “The Comforting Face of God”
1) Are you experiencing God’s comforting face toward you? If so, describe how this feels, using heart language.
2) When have you experienced God comforting you? Describe the experience. Now describe how this feels, using heart language.
3) Can you truly trust God with yourself? Ponder the answer that arises. Talk with God about the answer.
4) Spend time reflecting on your answers. What is being revealed?
5) Offer this prayer: Comforting God, I bring to you my concerns (offer prayers of concern): speak tenderly to me; speak to the fading and withered places; speak comfort to broken bodies, minds, and relationships. I long to see valleys lifted up and mountains made low so I might walk on straight paths, confident in your forgiveness, and ready to hear your words of love and peace. Comforting God, I bring to you my joys (offer prayers of praise): I revel in the joy of your embrace. When I see good things spring up from the ground, I say, “Here is my God!” When I hear voices of comfort and wisdom, I say, “Here is my God!” I live in thankfulness, knowing that you walk with me. AMEN (Adapted from Leader Magazine, Fall 2008, MennoMedia)
6) Conclude with this blessing: As you go, know that God holds you securely and tenderly. Live justly and seek the ways of peace. God will restore you. God’s face will shine on you, and you will be saved. (ibid)
1) Are you experiencing God’s face hidden from you? If so, describe how this feels, using heart language.
2) When have you experienced God’s “shining, shimmering face?” Describe the experience. Now describe how this feels, using heart language.
3) Or, would you rather remain hidden from God? If so, describe this desire and how does it impact your life?
4) Spend time reflecting on your answers. What is being revealed?
5) Offer this prayer: Hidden God, I bring to you my concerns (offer prayers of concern): For the darkness of waiting, Of not knowing what is to come, Of staying ready and quiet and attentive, I praise you, O God.
Hidden God, I bring to you my joys (offer prayers of praise): For the darkness of hoping In a world which longs for you, For the wrestling and laboring of all creation For wholeness and justice and freedom, I praise you, O God. AMEN (adapted from Janet Morley, All Desires Known, pp. 58-59)
6) Conclude with this blessing: As you go, know that God is faithful in your darkness. God is as near to you as a loving parent And molds you according to the divine purpose. God will restore you. God’s face will shine on you, and you will be saved. (from Leader Magazine, Fall 2008, MennoMedia)
We are planning to start an online Contemplative Photography/Visio Divina gathering lead by me (Kevin). I envision each gathering as a time of sharing, sitting, gazing, and reflecting. Participants will take turns sharing a photograph and we all will spend time in silence sitting, gazing, receiving the photograph and looking for what the image might be telling us. There will be time for the photographer and all participants to openly reflect on their experience of the picture. We can also spend some time at the end talking technique and tools but that is not our focus. (The shared photographs must be original to the person sharing them.)
These gatherings are open to everyone who can point a camera/phone and take a thoughtful picture. Don’t think you do not have enough skill. This is not an art critique. This is not a place to “show off” our amazing pictures. This is about contemplation, not competition. This is a time to share and encounter photographs that speak to us at a deeper level; pictures that may reveal deeper truths; pictures that may reveal something of the divine.
The gatherings will happen via Zoom the second Thursday of every month at 7 pm (EST) and will go no later than 8:30 pm. You must register to participate (see below). There is a $5-10/session recommended donation to The Hermitage to participate, but all will be welcome regardless. The gatherings will be limited to 8 participants.
This program is no longer available as Kevin has left the Hermitage.
(This essay is the first of two that together present some of the information that was to have been part of a day-long retreat on Holy Saturday, 2020, entitled “God in Deep Time: Showing Mercy to the Thousandth Generation.” This retreat was cancelled due to the Corona virus pandemic and related shelter-in-place order. It has since been recast as an online retreat experience.Both of these essays are available on the Hermitage Community Blog. This essay provides some background on “deep time” and the second essay, “Lament on Holy Saturday 2020” includes a confession and lament for Earth.)
INTRODUCTION
As
I was working on this essay, a children’s song kept going through my head.
My God is so BIG, so strong and so mighty, there’s nothing my God cannot do. My God is so BIG, so strong and so mighty, there’s nothing my God cannot do . The mountains are God’s the valleys are God’s the stars are God’s handiwork, too. God is so BIG, so strong and so mighty, there’s nothing my God cannot do.
God in Deep Time We are going to focus on this “so BIG” God. If we understand the context of our lives in what scientists call “Deep Time,” we will begin to recognize that we no longer accept the Biblical writer’s, cosmology (what we sometimes refer to as “worldview,” though that term is too narrow when we talk about the universe). Rather, we all already have a cosmological consciousness that takes us outside what the Bible presents us. So, we will begin by looking at the conception of the universe that is presented in our Bibles. Then we will look at the cosmological picture of Deep Time. Finally, we will return to a text from Isaiah 40 to see if Deep Time can help us set our understanding of Isaiah’s words in our current context. The text from Isaiah is fruitful for reminding us that God is so much “bigger” than we usually picture God.
THE THREE-TIER UNIVERSE
God in Deep Time
The Bible was written during a time when the earth was perceived as flat, bounded above by the heavens—where God dwells above among the sun, moon and stars—and below by the underworld— the place of the dead. This three-tier universe, limited on each side by the distances that humans had traveled by land, form the boundaries of what was known as “the ends of the earth,” in the mind of the Ancient Near Eastern writer. But, early in the second century after the birth of Christ, Ptolemy proved that Earth and the heavens were spherical and in motion. In the 14th and 15th centuries, Copernicus took up the idea again and proved mathematically, that Earth rotated around the Sun and not the other way around, as was assumed by the daily experience of seeing the “sun rise and set.” Declared heretical by the Church, which had finally been convinced of the “round earth” only after the great sea explorers of the 15th century ran into unexpected continents while trying to sail to China from Portugal, traveling westward. In another hundred years Galileo and Tyco Brahe assisted by Johannes Kepler reasserted Copernicus’ calculations and improved on them by actually observing the movement of the “heavenly bodies” through their newly improved telescopes. Then the Church finally, but reluctantly, capitulated by making space for scientific observation and inquiry but still holding fast to the worldview of the Scripture in its doctrines. This created a rupture between religion and science that has continued hemorrhaging to this day.
Unfortunately
for us, those old ideas of the three tier universe, the centrality of Earth in
the universe, the sun “rising and setting,” persist because of a theology that
depends on these ideas as captured in Scripture. We find it hard to rid
ourselves of the ideas that heaven is “up,” that we are at the center of the
universe, or that what we can see is all there is. We are afraid of the
mystery, of the sheer immensity, of what we cannot understand. And the ancient
scriptures, based on an outdated worldview, echo our fears.
Pastor
Paul R. Smith wrote a book entitled, Is your God big enough? close enough?
you enough? Jesus and the three faces of God, a reimagining of the trinity through the lens
of Jesus’ relationship with a God Jesus called “Father.” While I do not expect
your views of God to change in an instant, I hope to open in you some different
and maybe new ways of imagining God in deep time, or more properly, in
eternity. We will be tackling only one-third of Rev. Smith’s project, “Is your
God big enough?”by going on a tour of what scientists, theologians and artists
show us about the cosmos and deep time, and then coming back to reflect on a
passage from Isaiah.
COSMIC SHIFT
Scientists
tell us that the universe, or the multi-verse, or what I am calling today the
cosmos, began 13.8 billion years ago with a “big bang.” Though they don’t
completely understand how this happened, they can see and describe the detritus
of that explosion in what we call the universe with its galaxies, novas,
super-novas, nebulae, comets, solar systems, black holes, black matter and
speckles of light. Details of the formation of the cosmos are scarce and
difficult for non-scientists to understand. So, we rely on models and metaphors
to help us understand what this theory means for “life on earth.”
God in Deep Time
Ilia Delio, the Franciscan nun, scientist, and theologian upon whom I will rely for most of my scientific information here, gives an illustration of the human being in this context using a picture of a set of encyclopedias – a 30 volume set she calls The Encyclopedia of Life. Imagine, she says, that you have just such a set of books, lined up on a shelf. Each volume of the 30-volume set contains 450 pages. Each page represents 1 million years. The front cover of volume 1 is the Big Bang – the Beginning. Somewhere in the middle of volume 21, Earth has coalesced into a ball of molten minerals and is cooling into its present form of molten core, mantle, crust, and a gaseous envelope of atmosphere around the planet. In volume 22, life, in the form of micro-organisms, begins on Earth. About volume 29 (and remember, the set, so far, has 30 volumes), we enter Earth’s Cambrian Period. This is the period of Earth history when the single land mass surrounded by a single ocean begins breaking up to form our present-day continents and when the first complex animals burst onto the scene in the ocean, in the forms of sea sponges, trilobites, and tube worms. Life continues to complexify through volume 29. Finally, in volume 30 on page 385 of our 450- page book, in the end of the Jurassic period, dinosaurs go extinct. Mammals, the most complex life form so-far, first begin to appear on page 390. Finally, on the last line of page 450 of volume 30 of The Encyclopedia of Life, the final two words are “human beings.”
Yes,
the cosmos has been around for a long time. Humans, the most complex and
self-reflexive of the life forms on Earth are such new-comers that our whole
history takes up only the final two words in a 30 volume set of 450-page-long
books, with each page representing 1 million years. Now, our understanding of
God as eternal, without beginning or end. This means that God was there, at or
in, the Big Bang, in Deep Time. Yes, God is that BIG!
Physicists
are only beginning to understand how this universe is put together. One of the
recent (20th century) findings is that the universe does not exist in a flat
plane. That is, those planetary models of the solar system, that flat spinning
dinner plate with marbles affixed on it, is most likely an anomaly in the
cosmos. With clouds of gas and intersecting wave-like time/space formations,
the universe looks more like Gene Roddenberry’s vision in Star-Trek, with time tunnels and worm
holes connecting vast portions of the universe so that if you find the precise “doorway”
you will move light-years in a single nano-second.
And
what really knocks our socks off is that matter, the stuff of the universe, is
really nothing but energy. Those points of light we see in the night sky, the
emanations from other suns millions of miles from earth, are as “real” as the
chair you are sitting upon. Because the chair is just light and energy held
together in such a way that it can bear a load of other light and energy—You!
You’ve probably heard the famous quote from Carl Sagan that you are made of
star-stuff. This idea has been around for awhile. Take the Crosby, Stills, Nash
& Young’s 1970 hit, “Woodstock,” (written by Joni Mitchell) that keeps
returning to this chorus:
We are stardust, we are golden, We are billion year old carbon, And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.
And,
of course, the idea is older than 1970.
What bothers us and feeds our fears, is that what we’ve counted on as real keeps eluding our grasp. And theology has not been left out of this ephemeral soup. Paul Tillich in the early 20th century, articulated the idea that God is “precisely nothing.” Now, this is a technical definition since the word “nothing” contains the word “thing.” Tillich was simply reminding us what the theologians throughout the ages had already said, that God is not material, is not “made of” stuff. While this is a true assertion about the nature of God, it has always been a dangerous assertion. Just saying, “God is nothing” set John of the Cross at odds with the Spanish Inquisition in the 16th century and shut down the possibility of that truth finding its way into the hearth of our hearts.
We
like to think of God with hands, a lap, a heart, able to carry us and comfort
us with human-like touch. But, this, in fact, reduces God to being conceived in
our image rather than the other way around. Bearing God’s image does not
necessarily mean that God “looks like” us, but rather that we are imbued with
an ungraspable “God-ness.” In that, lies our greatness and the mystery that we
can never, ever, appropriate God, but that, at the same time, God is entangled
in our being (the technical term here is “interpenetration”). We humans are not
great on our own, but only as God-bearers, do we have a measure of
significance. (This is an essential point to grasp when we come to the next
essay dealing with how we care for our Earth home. Our significance is
derivative, not normative: that is, we only exist to mirror God not to be
god-like in our power and use and abuse of Earth.)
At
The Hermitage, every day and for each guest who comes, we affirm by name, that
each one is the “bearer of God’s infinite life.” This simple assertion serves
to remind everyone both that they are significantly known and that they are
significantly dependent. I challenge you to look in the mirror each morning and
call yourself by name followed by the assertion that you are the bearer of God’s
infinite life. It may change the way you go through your day.
HAVE YOU NOT KNOWN?
Now
let’s read the scripture from Isaiah 40:21-31 and see if our new understanding
of deep time can help us read the text for our time. I think Isaiah had and
inkling of just how big God is.
Isaiah 40:21–31 (NRSV)
21Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?
The
prophet begins with a series of questions designed to elicit wonder in the
hearer. “What is going on here? Of what is the prophet speaking?” It is also an
insistence that the hearers remember. This is a natural
knowledge, not a learned knowledge, one that has been passed down from the “foundations
of the earth.”The prophet is asking, “What do you know in your deep-down place
of instinct and intuition, about God?”
22It is [God] who sits above the circle of the earth, that] its inhabitants [appear] like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them like a tent to live in;
In
this verse, we clearly see the three story universe with God way up so high
that people look like grasshoppers. If we read the old “three-story universe
cosmology” into this, we can understand the point that the prophet is making.
This God is as big as we can possibly conceive. So, in contemporary cosmology,
perhaps God is igniting the spark of the Big Bang or God is siting at the
printing press where our 30-volume Encyclopedia of Life is printed and is cranking
out the pages of future volumes beyond our imagining.
23[this God] brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing. 24Scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth, scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth, when [God] blows upon them, and they wither, and the tempest carries them off like stubble.
One
can only hope…
25To whom then will you compare me, or who is my equal? says the Holy One. 26Lift up your eyes on high and see: Who created these [the stars]? [The One] who brings out their host and numbers them, calling them all by name; because [that one] is great in strength, mighty in power, one [of the stars] is missing.
Here
is the prophet entering the cosmic starry realms that can be understood by
someone holding any worldview. The prophet adds the personal dimension showing
God naming the stars and taking a star inventory. This idea is later repeated
in Jesus’ teaching when he says that God numbers the hairs of our heads and
knows when a sparrow falls to the ground (cf. Mt. 10:26-33; Lk. 12:4-7). In the
gospels, the teaching is about not fearing what others can do to you. Here, the
context is similar, for in the next section we read:
27Why do you say, O Jacob, speak, O Israel, “My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God”?
This
is a complaint from the people of Israel, telling the prophet that God cannot
find them nor does God listen to their complaint. The prophet is not impressed
and questions the integrity of their complaint using as proof that the God who
calls each star by name can surely not have lost any of them.
The
prophet then concludes this hymn with a repetition of the beginning:
28Have you not known? Have you not heard? [Our God] is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He
casts God in the role of eternal presence and source of all that is – Creator.
But notice, the flat-earth worldview of “the ends of the earth” reenters here.
We know to reinterpret this phrase to include the whole cosmos. We might say, “Our
God was already present in Deep Time, 13.8 billion years ago at the Big Bang,
and God fashioned even the tiny Earth and its tinier life forms with care.” That
might have the effect on us that this phrase was to have on Isaiah’s hearers.
Then
the prophet changes the direction of his vision. In the first part of this
oracle, the focus is on the cosmic, the powerful rulers, the stars as signs of
minute but distant and all-encompassing care. In this final section, the focus
is on the interior person, inner strength, bodily stamina.
[God] does not faint or grow weary; [God’s] understanding is unsearchable. 9[God] gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless. 30Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; 1but those who wait for [our God] shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.
In
this section, the prophet repeats “faint” and “weary.” First about God and then
about those whom God strengthens. God, who does not faint or grow weary, gives
power to the faint and strengthens the powerless.
The admonition to “wait for God” is an encouragement to resist acting on one’s own power because, after all, even the young eventually succumb. Isaiah is not denigrating natural prowess or youthful energy. Rather, he wants his hearers to notice their dependence on God, because God is who God is. And knowing this is as natural as living on earth where “from its foundations” God has been known, heard, and revered. Then we discover that, to quote Ilia Delio directly, “The background of everything that exists is another existence. God is not something that can be proved or disproved. God does not merely exist nor is God a Being among beings. Rather, God is existence itself which means God can only appear in otherness, in that which exists…. Jesus shows that the infinite, transcendent One is infinitely near, so close that the lines between human and divine are often blurred. We cannot grasp this God of mystery but God grasps us in our infinite depth; for the mystery we name “God” is the mystery of our awakened consciousness to ultimate reality.”
So,
we “wait for the Lord” not because God is too slow or lagging behind, but so
that we can realize the strength of God within us and we are “renewed” to fly
with the eagle of power and dominion, run without weariness, and walk without
weakness because our lives are interwoven with God’s very being. Our waiting,
makes us aware of what is already there and has always been there, in Deep
Time.
The
hymn writer, Isaac Watts, captures a bit of what it is like to participate in
the cosmos as a Child of the God of Deep Time:
Were the whole realm of nature mine, That were an offering far too small, Love so amazing, so divine, Demands my soul, my life, my all.
This meditation is based on the Lenten Retreat given at The Hermitage on March 7, using the scriptures for the third Sunday in Lent for 2020. It will be posted over four days this week, Monday (3/16), Tuesday (3/17), Thursday, (3/19), and Friday (3/20). Each day includes a meditation and suggestions for practice. In this time when the whole world is focused on a virus, my hope is that you will be encouraged to keep thirsting for Christ.
Quench
We come now to the end of the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman. In this section of the story, the woman is gone. She’s in her home place testifying to Jesus’ gift of “living water,” (that is, acknowledging her own deep truth and living from that place into the forgiveness of God). What remains are two scenes, one with the puzzled disciples and one with the townspeople. Read the story in John 4:31-42.
Jesus refuses the food that the disciples have gotten in town. Rather, he insists that he has other food—doing the will of God. I wonder if you have ever experienced the loss of appetite after a particularly enriching experience.
Jesus explains this experience by inviting the disciples to imagine. Imagine, he says, that all of these green fields are golden and dry, ready for harvest. Just so, the sower and the reaper can work together in one field in God’s agronomy. He then points to the lunch they brought, “see,” he says, you brought (reaped) what you did not sow. It is the work of all the people who bring in the harvest that you carry in your hands. Thus, you have entered into the labor, even though you did not do the work.”
This is amazing. Jesus is expanding the labor of one to include the labor of all. He is at the same time contracting seasonal growth, making all seasons compress into the harvest. Have you ever held an acorn in your hand? If so, you have experienced this kind of compression. You have held a tree, possibly a house or furniture, perhaps the warmth of a fire or heat for cooking. In that one small nut, lies not only potential but all that will become real out of that nut. I think that is what Jesus is teaching here. He also describes the timelessness of eternity. When there is no time, that is no “beginning, middle and end” to the story of life, then all things happen simultaneously, out of time. The sowing and the reaping are done together, so that all may “rejoice together.” This is a picture of the eternal kin-dom of God in which all is joy and only joy.
Jesus’ thirst is fully quenched by the true living water he had to offer.
The woman’s thirst was fully quenched by owning her own truth and receiving the gift of life from Jesus’ acceptance.
The townspeople’s thirst was fully quenched by hearing the word for themselves.
The disciples remain puzzled and thirsty. They are thirsty and hungry. They are blessed. They will be filled.
The psalmist tells of this experience in a different voice.
Ps 42:7–11.
7 Deep calls to deep
at the thunder of your cataracts;
all your waves and your billows
have gone over me.
8 By day the Lord commands his steadfast love,
and at night his song is with me,
a prayer to the God of my life.
9 I say to God, my rock,
“Why have you forgotten me?
Why must I walk about mournfully
because the enemy oppresses me?”
10 As with a deadly wound in my body,
my adversaries taunt me,
while they say to me continually,
“Where is your God?”
11 Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
my help and my God.
Remember at the beginning of the Psalm, the writer was asking for a sip of water. Here, he is bowled over by the cataracts, the waves, and the billows that wash over him. It is no wonder that he asks himself, “why are you cast down?” God’s provision is abundance. Rather than a drink, God comes in the fullness of the waterfall and the ocean swell. Notice that the poet’s self-reprimand elicits hope and help from God.
Practice:
Read John 4:31-42. Having one’s thirst quenched is to be satisfied. What satisfies Jesus? Why does that baffle the disciples? Does it baffle you? Jesus turns the tables on his listeners by calling them to participate in a harvest that comes before lunch. Why do you think he does that? What do the disciples learn? How do the Samaritans respond? How do you respond?
Pray with the psalmist. From the beginning of this Psalm, we have stayed with this psalmist’s desire for a “small drink” of God. Here, we witness the overwhelming experience of being completely bowled over by the presence of God. Notice that the psalmist receives the sound of the “waves” and the “thunder of cataracts” as the song of God. Is it hard for you to experience God’s fullness? What would God’s song to you sound like? Write your reflections.
Psalm 42:7-8
7 Deep calls to deep
at the thunder of your cataracts;
all your waves and your billows
have gone over me.
8 By day the Lord commands his steadfast love,
and at night his song is with me,
a prayer to the God of my life.
Read the poem, “Solomon says.” How does this thought from Meister Eckhart help you embrace your union with God?
Solomon says
Solomon says all streams run to the sea and return to their source. These waters are like our souls that run like streams to the One who is drawing them Home.
(Mark S. Burrows & Jon M. Sweeney, Meister Eckharts’ Book of Secrets: Meditations on Letting God and Finding True Freedom)
Breathe a prayer of thanksgiving to God for the natural way God is continually providing “living water” and “drawing” you Home.
This meditation is based on the Lenten Retreat given at The Hermitage on March 7, using the scriptures for the third Sunday in Lent for 2020. It will be posted over four days this week, Monday (3/16), Tuesday (3/17), Thursday, (3/19), and Friday (3/20). Each day includes a meditation and suggestions for practice. In this time when the whole world is focused on a virus, my hope is that you will be encouraged to keep thirsting for Christ.
Drink
How much water do you need to drink in a day? Since we know that water is necessary for life, how much is enough? There are several formulas for calculating this amount. One that is easy to remember is to take your weight in pounds and halve it. Then, drink that amount in ounces of water each day. For example, If someone weighed 150 pounds, they should drink 75 ounces of water each day. One thing is certain, we have to drink. It is our action that makes drinking possible. This may seem fairly obvious, we all drink every day. But I wonder if we realize that spiritual drinking also requires our action. Leonhard Schiemer, an early Anabaptist martyr puts it this way:
“For as the water does not quench my thirst unless I drink it, and as the bread does not drive away my hunger unless I eat it, even so Christ’s suffering does not prevent me from sinning until he suffers in me.”
We can be thirsty, we can be near water, but unless we drink, we cannot be satisfied. Just so, our spiritual drinking is necessary to imbibe the living water. Jesus asks the Samaritan to drink of the living water. Read John 4:16-26.
Jesus asks the woman to own her deepest need. That is, he points to her failure in relationships—in loving. Perhaps, we can imagine a woman who is widowed once or twice. Perhaps we can imagine a woman scorned by a man, but this detail of going through five husbands and then giving up on marriage altogether and just living with the next man is evidence of disordered relationships. So, Jesus, in offering her living water shows her that to drink, she has to own her failure, she has to take off her masks and her self-pity, she must become just who she is “warts and all.” There is no other condition in which we can drink the living water.
The funny thing about drinking the living water is that sometimes it seems as if we are being poured out, or that we are emptying ourselves. The psalmist, too, knows this feeling:
Ps 42:4–6
4 These things I remember,
as I pour out my soul:
how I went with the throng,
and led them in procession to the house of God,
with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving,
a multitude keeping festival.
5 Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
my help 6 and my God.
My soul is cast down within me;
therefore I remember you
from the land of Jordan and of Hermon,
from Mount Mizar.
My soul is cast down, therefore I remember you! What is remembered as the soul is poured out? The memory is of companionship, of joy, of glad shout and songs of thanksgiving of feasting with the throng. So, we learn with the Psalmist that as he is being poured out, he remembers God. The God who is with him in the plains of Jordan, the high mountains of Hermon and the “little hill” (the meaning of the word, “Mizar”). In short, the God who never forsakes, whether in joyous assembly or depressed and alone.
Meister Eckhart, the 14th century mystic, philosopher, friar, priest, and theologian taught about this kind of “emptying to be filled” with these words:
Become Empty
So you want to find God?
Empty yourself of everything—
your worries and your hopes,
your wishes and your fears.
For when you are finally
empty, God will find you,
because God cannot tolerate
emptiness and will come
to fill you with himself.
(from Jon M. Sweeney & Mark S. Burrows, Meister Eckhart’s Book of the Heart: Meditations for the Restless Soul)
The story of the woman at the well does not end here, there are two more movements for her to perform. Read John 4:27-30.
Did you notice what she did? She left her water jar. She came for water, found Jesus, and left her jar. This is probably a very significant line in the story, placed for our understanding. She has discovered the inner spring and no longer needs the well water. Then, she tells her true story to her people, inviting them to come to the man who invited her to own it in the first place.
In another Psalm (51), we hear David saying, “you desire truth in the inward parts.” I think this is what Jesus is demanding of the woman and what it means to drink of the living water. We have to tell the truth—to ourselves and to others and to God. Jesus will meet us with the forgiveness we seek for that which we hide from ourselves and others.
It is Christ in us the hope of glory. No longer I live, but Christ lives in me. This is not unity but union. As Schiemer said it, “Christ’s suffering does not prevent me from sinning until he suffers in me.”
Practice:
Read John 4:16-30. Now that she has abandoned her water jar, what would you say that the woman is “drinking?” Is that a drink you need or want, too? How is this message of universal hope relevant to this time in history? Can you receive the living water that is offered? Write your reflections in your journal.
Read the poem, “Pregnant with God.” What do you think Meister Eckhart means when he uses the phrase, “pregnant with God?” How do the words of the poem speak to your desire for God? You might want to write about your union with God or draw a symbol or picture of what that means to you.
Pregnant with God You are either with or wihtout. I tell you there is no other
(from Jon M. Sweeney & Mark S. Burrows, Meister Eckhart’s Book of the Heart: Meditations for the Restless Soul)
Pray with the prophet (below). Feel your bones being made strong. In your imagination, be a beautiful garden or a never-failing spring.
Isaiah 58:11, alt.
The Lord will guide me continually,
and satisfy my needs in parched places,
and make my bones strong;
and I shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water,
whose waters never fail.
This meditation is based on the Lenten Retreat given at The Hermitage on March 7, using the scriptures for the third Sunday in Lent for 2020. It will be posted over four days this week, Monday (3/16), Tuesday (3/17), Thursday, (3/19), and Friday (3/20). Each day includes a meditation and suggestions for practice. In this time when the whole world is focused on a virus, my hope is that you will be encouraged to keep thirsting for Christ.
Water
Wallace J. Nichols has written that “Water is the most omnipresent substance on Earth and, along with air, the primary ingredient for supporting life as we know it. For starters, ocean plankton provides more than half of the planet’s oxygen. There are approximately 332.5 million cubic miles of water on Earth – 96 percent of it saline. (A cubic mile of water contains more than 1.1 trillion gallons.) Water covers more than 70 percent of Earth’s surface; 95 percent of those waters have yet to be explored. From one million miles away our planet resembles a small blue marble; from one hundred million miles it’s a tiny, pale blue dot. ‘How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean,’ author Arthur C. Clarke once astutely commented,” (Wallace J. Nichols, Blue Mind, 8-9).
We all know how important water is for life. In fact, we remember that after God dispelled the darkness with light, God focused several acts of Creation on water: a separation in the waters and then dividing the water from the land. Ordering the water was a significant act. In the second story of Creation given in Genesis chapters 2-3, after God makes a human and plants a garden, there is an interlude in the text that begins, “A river flows out of Eden.” The story goes on for four verses describing how this river divides and into what lands the successive rivers flow. Then the story of the garden and the human(s) begins again. Water is that important. It is used to identify people groups all through the Old Testament text. There are the people of the sea (Philistines), the peoples beyond the Jordan, the peoples of the great rivers (Tigris and Euphrates), etc.
Not only is water significant for our planetary identity, but each of us is primarily water. Nichols again: “When we’re born, our bodies are approximately 78 percent water. As we age, that number drops to below 60 percent—but the brain continues to be made of 80 percent water. The human body as a whole is almost the same density of water, which allows us to float. …Science writer Loren Eiseley once described human beings as ‘a way that water has of going about, beyond the reach of rivers,’” (Nichols, 10).
Jesus had a significant encounter with a Samaritan woman at a well near Sychar. She came to the well at midday to find that Jesus has stopped there to rest from a long journey. He was alone, the disciples having gone into town for lunch provisions. He asks the woman for a drink. She gets defensive (and political) and argues with him about his desire for water. He replies, If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water,” (John 4:10). Misunderstanding his reference to “living water,” she argues again that he has no bucket to get water to give to her. He then tells her that he is speaking of a spring that will well up within her, a spring of living water that does not dry up. “Sir,” she replies, “give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty.”
What might it be like to have an unending source of water, to never have to trudge from the village to the well? She likes the sound of this offer.
Practice:
Read John 4:5-15. Pay attention to the woman’s words. She is concerned with two things in the end, her thirst and the repetitiveness of her daily round. Jesus, on the other hand, is concerned only with God’s gift of eternal life. Can you recall a time when this crossing of intentions between what you want and what God wants has happened in your life?
Given what you know about water, does Jesus’ offer of a gift of spiritual water have any more significance for you?
Reflect on the following passage from Isaiah 55. With what does the prophet compare water? How is this like Jesus’ promise?
Isaiah 55:10–11.
10 For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven,
and do not return there until they have watered the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
11 so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
“All rivers flow into the sea, and yet the sea is never full,” (Ecclesiastes 1:7). Spend some time in prayer recoclognizing that there is room in you for a never-ending flow of “living water.” Ask to be receptive to this gift.
This meditation is based on the Lenten Retreat given at The Hermitage on March 7, using the scriptures for the third Sunday in Lent for 2020. It will be posted over four days this week, Monday (3/16), Tuesday (3/17), Thursday, (3/19), and Friday (3/20). Each day includes a meditation and suggestions for practice. In this time when the whole world is focused on a virus, my hope is that you will be encouraged to keep thirsting for Christ.
Part 1
When I was a child, my family had a lot on a lake. At first, we camped there in a tent, then we had an old trailer and a home-made camper. Then, my brother’s tree house, tree palace, really, for size, was taken down from the tree and it traveled to the lake lot where it became another room. In the end, we built a house there for my parent’s retirement. It was always the lake that was the draw. The lake and the fire pit. These were the two forces of this place. We talked about going to the lake when we discussed long weekends and vacations.
The lot was on the western shore of a large lake, 5 miles long and 2 miles wide. So, in the morning, when the sun was coming up, the dock received the first sun. With mist rising off the water and gentle waves lapping against the bank, I would sit on the warming dock, wrapped in a towel, waiting for the day to get warm enough to plunge into the water. The bottom of the lake here was sandy with a few toe-stubbing rocks. I could spend hours floating, swimming, rock hunting at the wave’s edge, and rowing our small aluminum boat along the shore. If someone would go with me, we would row a mile to the islands in the middle of the lake and explore them. My favorite times were sleeping all night in the hold of the sailboat we anchored in the shallow water. The gentle action of the waves, the sound of the loons, and the brightness of the stars were beauty enough to contend with the mosquitoes that whined in our ears and bit our faces.
In the early days, we drank water right out of the lake. As time went on, we had a well drilled and fitted with a hand pump. We were never thirsty. There was water, everywhere, to drink.
In fact, I don’t remember being thirsty as a child. There was a small aluminum drinking cup on the bathroom sink and we all drank from it whenever we were thirsty.
When I got older and began hiking, I knew what thirst was. We could no longer drink the water from the streams along the paths. So, we carried water wherever we went. But, sometimes, we underestimated the amount of water we might want on a hike. Or, we thought there would be water available somewhere along the way and the spring or stream, when we found it, was brackish or dry. Then, the only thing to do was to keep walking until more water was found. We couldn’t camp until we found water. Only one time, have I ever camped without having enough water for supper and breakfast in my water bottle.
We don’t realize how precious water is and how necessary, when it is so readily available in plastic bottles and at fountains in public places. In the last five years, we have become more aware of the preciousness and elusiveness of clean water, here in our Water Wonderland of Michigan. The poet, W. H. Auden once said, “Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.” Thirst is the gift given to us so that we are never without the water we require for life. Being thirsty is an apt metaphor for our longing for the Presence of Christ.
Thirst
Exodus 17:1-7
The story from Scripture is about the children of Israel in the wilderness. They have just left Egypt, moving from campsite to campsite as God directed them. God has already provided clean water for them to drink at the springs of Elim and food in the wilderness in the form of manna. Now, God stops them at Rephidim and there is no water. Can you imagine a large group of people gathered in the wilderness being asked to make camp where there is no water? Understandably, they began to panic.
But, Moses does not. But, he reacts to their request as if they are accusing him of being unfaithful to them. Remember, God has already provided both water and food for the people. So, their demand, “Give us water to drink,” can be seen as a further demand that God prove that he is, indeed, divine and as “their god,” cares for them as a god should.
We must remember that this people has only just learned to trust their god. They have had to be convinced to leave Egypt and then only departed when the Pharaoh demanded that they leave so that the plagues will end. They are then chased by Pharaoh’s army, ostensibly so he can bring them back. They miraculously walk through the Red Sea and see that army washed up on the beaches the next morning. Then, the real hardship of their journey sinks in. None of them knows where they are going. They are not practiced nomads as their ancestors Abraham and Sarah were. They are not skilled in wandering. So, here they are at Rephidim with no water.
Practice:
Read Exodus 17:1-7. Imagine you are with the Israelites on their journey. Feel with the people what it must have been like. Then imagine Moses’ frustration. For each of these people, put your feeling into your body. (For example, sigh heavily and audibly or raise your shoulders and clench your jaw. Make your eyes look like you feel.)
Now, re-read v. 6. Where was God? What was God’s way of dealing with both the people and Moses? Imagine how you would have felt as Moses or the people. Let your body feel that way, too.
Spend some time in prayer reflecting on your own demands of God. Are there situations about which you are impatient for God to act? Do you sometimes demand before you look to see that God is already providing?
If you can, set a glass of water in front of you but don’t drink from it. Try to feel what it is like to be thirsty. Our bodies give us wonderful signals telling us that we need to drink. Jesus used this image of thirst in the Beatitudes: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled,” Matt. 5:6. I once lamented to a mentor that my spiritual life felt dry and empty. He responded: “That’s wonderful. Hold onto the hunger and thirst. The promise is that you will be filled.” I was taken aback at his words, but over my lifetime, I have come to regard them as wisdom for the journey. Only when I know my need, will my desire for God be satisfied.
The psalmist feels this way when he writes:
1 As a deer longs for flowing streams,
so my soul longs for you, O God.
2 My soul thirsts for God,
for the living God.
When shall I come and behold
the face of God?
-Ps 42:1–2.
Notice your glass of water. Don’t drink. Just be thirsty. Pray with the poet: “I want more love, / Which is to say, / more God,” (Jon M. Sweeney & Mark S. Burrows, Meister Eckhart’s Book of the Heart: Meditations for the Restless Soul).
In this era of “Me too” we are uncovering the misuses of power embedded in our culture. Mary Magdalene’s historic reputation has been the victim of this kind of abuse of power. We miss the intensity of her personal devotion to Christ and her unflagging faith and deep understanding of what Jesus taught if we get side-tracked by the sensationalism of the tradition surrounding her. Looking at the brief Biblical record about her gives a startlingly different portrait of the Mary who was part of the company of women who supported Jesus and his disciples. She was a woman of great humanity, great courage, great love, and great fidelity.
Come stand with Mary M in recovering her story of devotion and discovering your own devotion to Christ. This retreat is for women and men. We will begin with supper on Friday evening (please arrive by 5pm) and conclude by 4pm on Saturday afternoon.