Kissing the Moment's Joy

William Blake imaged the human tendency to grasp and hold onto joy and happiness in his poem, "Eternity."

The one who binds to self a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But the one who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise.

Blake drew a word-picture of a butterfly lightly skipping through the air. For him the butterfly represented delight, the fleeting here-now-gone-in-a-moment experience of finding deep joy in a moment and wanting to hold onto that joy.

Using the image of the butterfly, my translation of "binding to self a joy" is simply the desire to catch and hold the "joy" as it flies past. If you've ever chased a butterfly -- or watched a cat's futile tries to catch a butterfly -- you know how difficult the task is.

Blake described well the human condition: We want to bottle and save those moments that seem most right, most joy-filled. I'm convinced we want to save them so we can pull them out later, relive them, or even to make them happen again. There is something quite controlling in our response to joy. We want the secret formula so we can recreate the moment at our whim.

[Sidebar: I think that's why we often take so many pictures of significant life-moments or life-experiences. Yes, it's good to have the memories and I take the pictures, too. But the pictures capture a moment that can never be recreated. Wendell Berry's poem, "The Vacation" captures marvelously the traveler in a boat who is so busy taking pictures on his vacation that by the end, he had lots of pictures of his vacation, but he had not actually experienced his vacation. It's a chillingly good poem.

For instance, have you ever taken a trip that was grand and significant for you . . . for whatever reason? And then, some time later, you began to consider taking a trip back to the same place, or with the same people. At some level, we hope for the same significant experience we had before.]

According to Blake's poem, though, when we "bind to ourselves the joy," when we catch and hold onto the delight, we squeeze it and possibly destroy it. What's true of butterflies also may be true of delight.

In "Eternity," Blake counseled instead that we "kiss the joy" as it flies past. We kiss it, acknowledge it, bow before it, recognize that as it flies past we are on holy ground. But we do not grasp it, squeeze the life out of it, and bottle it for later.

The joy is not ours to control. It comes as gift.

Further, holding the joy occupies out hands, closes us to what might be next. Grasping what has just happened means that we may miss the next thing that happens.

Kissing the joy, on the other hand, frees us to receive the next moment, which holds its own promise, which is full of its own delight.

Granted, this is a difficult discipline that runs counter to our instincts . . . perhaps counter to our tendency to "hoard" experiences. But it moves us into so many parts of life in a healthy, open way.

We receive and let go . . . receive and let go . . . receive and let go. We can never get to the end of the pattern.

God is waiting always for our empty hands . . . because God always has more to give us.

Imaging the God Who Is Like Me

These words, the voice of God in Psalm 50, caught my eye:

These things you have done and I kept still,
and you thought that I am like you. (Ps. 50:21)

Because I spend quite a bit of time in the Hebrew Psalms, I notice the tendency of pray-ers to identify with God. It happens often in the Psalms. And it happens often in me and others.

My enemies must be God's enemies.

The things that anger me must anger God.

When I am slighted or treated unfairly, God has been slighted.

I seem always to take myself and my outlook as the point of reference around which God orbits.

This seems to be a fundamental human predisposition, to reduce God to my emotions, my limitations, and my potentialities. Though created in God's image, we live as if God were shaped to our image. There is something in the human condition that makes me want to take the limits of my vision for the limits of the world, or the limits of reality.

In short, this thinking reflects the human tendency to see myself at the center, while everything and everyone else -- including God -- floats at the periphery.

"You thought that I am like you," God said. Rather than live into the largeness of God, we shrink God to our size.

Really, it's a ludicrous notion . . . the God of the cosmos, reduced to fit into my pocket.

The spiritual life, as I have come to understand it, is basically a continual invitation into the largeness of God. The expansiveness of God stretches across all that is real and true, and encompasses every aspect of life without exception. Certainly, a small God feels safer, more manageable and controlled. But even when God became one of us -- in Jesus -- he gave up safety and manageability for a radical life of love and generosity.

Jesus lived large . . . expansive. He pressed the borders and explored the great landscape of God.

As Jesus entered into this largeness and proclaimed that expansiveness to others, he called it the kingdom of God.

As for me, I find it much easier to bend God to my liking than to engage the difficult work of entering into God's expansiveness. It's easier to live small, not as demanding. I basically don't have to change a thing.

Giving Away

The Gospel passage given for prayer and reflection today is John 6:52 - 57.

This is Jesus, giving himself away as food and drink, spiritual sustenance for others. This "giving away" is consistent with the life of God in him. It is the nature of love to give itself away.

This, too, is the life to which we are invited.

John 3:16 is a cornerstone passage for many Christians. For some it is the first verse of scripture they ever memorized. You may be able to quote it easily:

"For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

I've most often heard this verse quoted with reference to the death of Jesus, that God gave Jesus to die as a substitute for us ("substitutionary atonement" is the 2-bit word for the doctrine that arose in the Western Church). John 3:16 has been used so frequently for the death of Jesus that we might have difficulty pulling it out of that understanding and setting it into another context.

Rather than reading "death" into this statement, hear it simply as an expression of the nature of God. Hear these Jesus-words as a statement, a proclamation of the generosity and love of God. This is God's nature, Jesus seemed to say, to be loving and to express that love in generosity. God is a Self-spender, so to speak, generously giving Self away.

And Jesus participated in that God-spending. As God gave away God's Self to the world, so Jesus gave himself away.

So my question may be: "What self do I have to give away?"

My first thought is that the self I most often give away is my false self, my ego-self, my illusory self that is constructed of all the images and appearances that I want to project to the world. I give away my self which originates in the musts and oughts and shoulds that govern my life.

If this is the only self I have to give away -- or at least the only self I know about -- then I am giving something to the world that is toxic, unhealthy and illusion.

The gift of Jesus, the great gift he shared with all people, was that he freely gave away not what was false and illusory, but his own fullness, truth and authenticity. He gave away what it meant to be God. He was fully himself, fully human, fully who God created him to be, yet he did not cling to that and milk it for all it was worth. (Read Paul's words in Phil 2:1 - 11 for a commentary on the self-giving of Jesus.)

Typically this isn't my way of doing life. If I find something good or if I come into something that enhances my well-being, I want to hold onto it and keep it close. I want to hoard it for myself.

There is something about the human person becoming whole and complete, though, that demands to be given away, to be shared with others in generosity. It is not the generosity that has to be prompted or provoked or persuaded. It is the generosity that flows from our most authentic selves. It is loving and giving for the sake of generosity and mercy.

Because there is something within us -- I'll call it soul -- which intuits that the more we spend and give away, the more we will be replenished. The giving away of true self means that we always have more true self to give away.

To live this way simply witnesses to the life of Christ within us.

Living Large in the Land

"Dwell in the land and feed on its riches."
(Psalm 37:3b)

Over the years I've found the image of landscape and terrain to be helpful in framing the spiritual life and prayer. I think of how we each enter this vast god-landscape in different ways, and how we tend to congregate in a particular part of the terrain.

We "camp out" there, so to speak, or build villages in particular parts of the land, along with others who want to make that part of the land their home, also. We can get very comfortable and settled in an acre or two of a vast land that stretches far beyond the limits of our imagination or journeys.

For some persons, there comes a point at which they feel drawn out of the safety of the camp and into the largeness of the land, exploring different ways of prayer and opening themselves to experiences of God's Spirit that deepen their knowing of the land. While we can do this exploration in the company of others, mostly it is a solitary journey, for no one else can do the work of exploration for you.

There are guides, however, who have walked just a little ahead and have seen a bit more of the terrain than we have. These guides are valuable partners on the journey deeper into the interior of the landscape, for they are able to encourage us and to help us beware of the pitfalls to which travelers often succumb. Some of these guides are wise elders who lived long ago, and some of them are contemporaries, offering their wisdom face-to-face, so to speak.

This weekend I've wrestled around with images from Psalm 37, trying to hear the psalm in fresh ways. The psalm is about trust and delight and the vast "land" of God.

"Dwell in the land and feed on its riches," (Ps. 37:3b) I read. I played around with that phrase, holding up to the light and turning it slightly this way and that way in order to catch the variety of its facets. I found myself writing these words to express poetically what this verse strikes within me:

Live large in the terrain God has laid out for you;
explore its vastness,
live in it fully,
take your nourishment from its abundance.
If you live large in the land,
the land will sustain you.

I was somewhat taken aback that I wrote those last two lines. For as much as I've thought of life with God as a vast landscape, I don't remember thinking that by living large in the land, the land would sustain me.

Yet, I was drawn to those words. There is something about this land that provides sustenance and nourishment to those who walk it, to those who explore it. In fact, the provisions we bring with us and stuff into our backpacks only weigh us down on this journey. This journey invites us to "live off the land," to travel light, to find in the journey itself all we need to sustain us.

The words I wrote came, as best I can tell, from deep within me, from that soulful place where I am most intimately connected to God.

Do I believe these words? Certainly, I have some hesitation . . . but most importantly, there is a part of me that believes them completely. And that's the part of me that I hope grows to guide my steps.

Overheard:Transformation

I heard this last week . . . it seems to be true, at least for me.

Everybody wants to be transformed, but nobody wants to change.

A Daily Lent

Just a note . . . through the season of Lent, which began March 9 with Ash Wednesday, I'll write a brief daily reflection on the Scripture for the day at A Daily Lent (www.dailylent.blogspot.com). The meditations are intended to help you begin to consider the daily readings in a way that might draw you more deeply into prayer and reflection.

I may not show up at Only a Sojourner much over the next few weeks. The daily writing is a good discipline for me, but it stretches me creatively. So I'll camp out at www.dailylent.blogspot.com through Lent, Holy Week and Easter. I may pop back to Only a Sojourner periodically, but no promises . . .

See you soon.

Lazarus Walking

I want to tie a couple of cords together. Stick with me for a moment. It's going to take me a minute or two to get there.

First, over the past 15 years or so I have discovered within me a deep love for poetry and art. If you've read much of this blog over the last couple of years, you know that. Names like Rilke, Stafford and Oliver show up quite a bit.

I remember about 20 years ago reading some poems written by a noted poet and thinking to myself – with more than a little embarrassment, I’ll add – “I just don’t get it!” But slowly over a long period of time I kept reading poetry and began to be intentional about noticing works of art. Looking back, the interest in poetry and art was not coincidental. It coincided with an expanding immersion into prayer and a more soulful exploration of my own life with God, with others and with the created world.

The interest has not been a fleeting fancy. I still read poetry as a part of my daily discipline. I’ve found reading poetry to be a contemplative act. To read a poem I must slow down. Read, repeat, read, repeat. I digest a line, a phrase. I ponder an image. Like artists, poets don’t tell you everything. They leave great spaces unfilled. In those spaces, the reader is invited to insert his or her life. The same, I believe, is true of great art. The spaces – or absences – are intentional invitations, extended by the artist to the one viewing the work of art.

Some poetry and art has been especially meaningful to me because there are poets and artists with whom I feel a unique kinship. For instance, I first came into poetry through the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the English Jesuit priest. His stunning poetry became all the more meaningful to me as I studied his life and felt as if I shared in his personal struggles.

I’ve also sensed a kinship with Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke was a German-speaking poet who wrote as the 19th century turned into the 20th, as Hopkins had. Like Hopkins, his personal life was often scattered. A difficult childhood and meandering adulthood notwithstanding, Rilke wrote with a ferocity that immediately appealed to me. His intensity has drawn me magnetically over the years. I feel as if I’ve known him as a brother for a long, long time. (Perhaps you've noticed my fondness for him!)

The artist with whom I’ve felt most connected has been Vincent van Gogh. Even before I knew much about his mental and psychological state, I picked up the tension of his life from his paintings. I’ve read many of his letters. I’m drawn to his faith and to his struggle for faith. I’ve traveled long distances to see his paintings.

Hopkins . . . Rilke . . . van Gogh . . . I feel like I know them, and they know me. In fact, I’ve often found myself – or lost myself – within their poems and paintings.

That’s some background into my love of poetry and art, and into some folks who stir my soul. File that for a moment.

Second, I pulled out a poem recently that I had filed away a few years ago, written by contemporary poet David Whyte, and entitled, “The Lightest Touch.” The short poem is about how good poetry gets inside you, stirs you, awakens you to something you didn’t know could possibly be alive in your interior. This is the last stanza of the poem:

In the silence that follows
a great line
you can feel Lazarus
deep inside
even the laziest, most deathly afraid
part of you,
lift up his hands and walk toward the light.

A great line of poetry . . . a beautiful chord in a piece of music . . . the shape or color of an object in a painting . . . there are so many ways that our breath can be taken away, that something lifeless and limp within us can be stirred to spirit again, as the voice of Jesus awakened his dead friend Lazarus to life out of his stony tomb (John 11:43 – 44). We may not know just what the stirring is, but we do know that for just a brief moment, we are fully alive, fully engaged, fully opened up to what is most real in the world. I have those moments and you have those moments. We all have experienced what David Whyte lined out poetically.

The spiritual path is not about capturing and holding onto those moments, but about recognizing them more and more, being open to them and receiving them, then releasing them so we can receive the next “great line”.

So those are the cords. Here is the tying together:

Two weekends ago I went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston to see the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist exhibition on loan from the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. . . . My visit was a Christmas gift from my son and daughter-in-law. The exhibition features 50 paintings by the artists who represent the shift toward impressionism in the late 19th century: Monet . . . Renoir . . . Cassatt . . . Manet . . . Degas . . . Cezanne . . . and of course, van Gogh.

I could have stayed for a long, long time, but the rooms were pack with folks who wanted time with these artists and works as I did. So I slowly worked my way through each room of the exhibition, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers, in awe of what I found on each wall. The name of each artist was painted in their unique signature-style on the walls above that artist’s work. Thus, as I entered each room I was able to see whose work was displayed there.

I used those signatures as markers to locate the works by van Gogh. First room, no van Gogh. Second room, third room, fourth room, still no van Gogh. By the fifth and final room I anticipated that I would finally find the paintings I had most looked forward to seeing.

As I went through that last door, my eyes scanned the walls around the room, beginning to my left. I noticed a couple of Vincent’s paintings on that left wall as I panned the room, but it was what I saw when I turned to the right that I remember most. On the floor-to-ceiling pedestal on the right side of the room, standing apart from the wall displays, I saw the cursive “Vincent” about 9 to 10 feet off the ground. Directly beneath it was the unmistakeable self-portrait of van Gogh, painted in his characteristic bold, broad strokes at the end of a period of illness which left him pale and weak.

I simply stood at the door for a moment – at a distance – and noticed my eyes moistening.

I froze, motionless for about ten seconds or so, and everything inside me shut down to silence.

And I felt Lazarus deep inside the laziest, most deathly afraid part of me lift up his hands and walk toward the light. For just a moment, I was alive again.