The Daily Disciplines
Everything we do is practice for the next time. When we cease to practice, we lose our fluency, and memory becomes imperfect. Some things are practiced by default- when did you last consciously practice eating? Other things require conscious effort. My handwriting is slow, laborious and has lost its fluency. I type without thinking.
When we took our young children back out to the desert where we had lived, they were profoundly uncomfortable with the open spaces. We noticed our son was happier and less fractious whenever we went walking in the enclosed space of mountain gorges. We become used to, and are affected by our environment. Years before, leaving the desert, my wife and I were depressed, dislocated and disoriented by urban life. A day out walking in the hills begins to resurrect memories and instincts which have been lost to our consciousness.
As urban westerners we live in a profoundly artificial environment. It is possible, even easy, to avoid the outside world for days at a time! Enter the garage by an inside door from the house, drive out using the automatic door opener, drive to the underground car park, and take the internal lift up to work. Leave before it is properly light, and return home after dark. We live in a world which we Australians especially, think we control. In truth, we are irradiated with uncontrolled advertising and other stimulation, rarely alone enough to be in silence, and uncomfortable if we are. We live in a noisy, crowded and driven world, which is the anathema of all that our spiritual ancestors learned is necessary for health. We have stepped out of reality into an artificial place.
The spiritual disciplines are designed to bring us back into the real world from our artificial place. They create time, silence and space for us to re-engage with the depths of life. They patrol the corridors of the mind, as someone has said, re-minding us of what is really important. Religion without practice becomes merely an idea, caught in the currents of the ideas round about, without the anchor of reality.
Samaritan Story
Week of Sunday July 11
Gospel: Luke 10: 25-37
Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 26He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?”27He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” 28And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” 29But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” 30Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead.31Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. 32So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. 34He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. 35The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ 36Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” 37He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”
Jesus says nothing about faith and creeds, or who you believe in. And the lawyer gives what he already knows is the answer. To inherit eternal life “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.” Jesus sits firmly in the tradition and wisdom of his people when he agrees and says, “Do this and you will live.”
Do this, and you will not need Jesus for salvation, for you will be Jesus. I want to carefully make this provocation- read the next paragraphs, please- because what we read here in the Law is the essence of our humanity and our relating to the divine. It is also in Mark. It says there, “When Jesus saw that he (the scribe) answered wisely, he said to him, ‘You are not far from the kingdom of God.’” In Matthew he says “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
The centrality of our humanity is not some saving act by Jesus. It is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind, and to love our neighour as ourself. This is profoundly different from keeping the precepts of a religion called Christianity. It is a being, not a doing.
I say the “centrality of our humanity,” which could sound like I am excluding people who are not Christians from being human. This is not my intention. I am using Christian language to describe what is on offer in life for all of us. Some people are attuned to life in a certain way. They seem to care about, or be intrigued by, its mystery and wonder, and pay it attention. I think most of us do this, sometimes. But some seek to enter into the mystery. They let it be a centre point and focus of their life, whether or not they use religious language and rituals to describe it. Other folk seem to operate far from the centre, beguiled by, or profoundly dissatisfied with, what is on offer by the modern idols of consumerism, for example.
Christians have been exclusive, and ignorant, to think they are the only ones who have an awareness of the mystery that we call God. We have been wrong to tell people they must approach it, and can only approach it using our metaphors. The problem with our exclusive approach is that we have lost the profundity of our own metaphors. We have often reduced them to boundaries that define membership,instead of letting them be the doorways to life. At its worst this phenomenon has reduced life now to a time of waiting, and being good, so that we can enter the real life later, after death.
Loader says, correctly, “‘Eternal life’ includes everlasting life, but its focus is quality rather than quantity. It is sharing in God’s life.” (My emphasis) The lawyer's question and its answer, when we consider them carefully, are about how we are to live life now. They are about a new consciousness and dimension of life, or of being, not some future getting to heaven.
Loader goes on to say “Where … our theology has an image of God whose being is loving and whose life is the creative and redeeming out pouring of such love, then loving one’s neighbour is not a secondary obligation ‘which the king requires’, but an invitation to participate in the life and being of God.” (My emphasis)
The problem with the priest and the levite, I think, is that they saw compassion (mercy) and neighbourliness as one of a list of competing obligations in their service of God; a list that was always over full and inevitably requires triage. They were people who were serious in their service of God, but like me, had church to prepare, places to be, meetings to attend, parishioners to placate. They had to make a choice. In the context of a God who reigns over us, even loving one's neighbour as one's self, may sometimes need to take its turn. It is, after all, one of a long list of commands we have to juggle.
But what if we read the Samaritan's story in the context of the hospitality of God, in the context of 'an invitation to participate in the life and being of God,' straight after mission of the seventy who were shown hospitality, and who gave hospitality by bringing peace upon the house where they stayed? Then the context changes. Everything changes. Kingdom comes from be-ing kingdom. That is, participating in the life and being of God happens by be-ing a part, not from keeping a list of rules. It is a mind set which is moved by the person and situation of our neighbour, rather than seeing them as an obligation, (or an opportunity) we must deal with to gain the kingdom.
If we are of this mindset, we are being Jesus. Jesus will have done his work in us. Again, I am being provocative. I am trying to indicate the profund difference between the two mindsets with which we may approach life.
This was probably not news to the lawyer. Once we get away from the cultic rules of a religion, (or the Uniting Church constitution and regulations), and find love the lord your god with all your heart... as the centrality of our religion, we are on the path to a new insight. Loving with our whole heart inevitably involves relationship. We will be moved beyond fulfilling obligations. Salvation will not be something we are concerned with seeking, because we will be there.
The news for the lawyer is the same news we need to hear today. Perhaps he already it knew it at some level of his being. After all, we know, and he already knew, that neighbour meant the people of Israel and the aliens living in their midst. (Lev. 19:33, Deut. 6, for example) The story of the Samaritan universalises this faith. It is another change, indeed conversion, of mindset and consciousness. The first conversion is that which goes deep into participating relationship with the divine instead of standing in awe at a distance and keeping rules. This second conversion leads me out into a participating relationship with all people, away from the rule that I only relate to those who are close to me. To discover God is to discover that all people are my neighbour.
We still tend to think of this in terms of obligation. The lawyer's question was about obligation. Who is my neighbour? To whom am I obligated? As Petty puts it, The lawyer asks, "Just how far are we supposed to go with this 'neighbor business'?"
Being in relationship with God means there is no obligation; obligation is not part of the lexicon. We live not in the framework of obligation, which is the framework of Law. We live in the framework of mercy and compassion.
Petty says this of the Samaritan's actions.
Splagxnizomai is a strong word. It means "to feel compassion, to yearn in the bowels." This is, quite literally, gut-level compassion. Luke uses the word three times in his gospel--once here, once to describe the father of the prodigal son (15:20), and once to describe Jesus' own emotional state (7:13). The Samaritan is in some fine company.
It also suggests the Samaritan was not operating out of obligation.
We are talking about what drives and moves us. Where is our centre? Years ago three of us came upon a road accident. The young bloke was bleeding profusely; dying as far as we could see. He was in absolute panic, and the two of us remaining were hard put to hold him down as we tried to stem the flow of blood, while our companion went for help.
After it all ended there were grim questions about infection. To what had we been exposed in all that blood? Compassion tears off its shirt, and rips it to pieces in its hurry to save. It is uncalculated, costly, and dangerous. Obligation considers costs and risks.
If Jesus had answered the lawyer by saying everyone is your neighbour, even the most compassionate person would be crushed under the world's pain and injustice. Jesus focuses neighbourhood in upon those “near to us,” which is the literal meaning of the Greek. Near to us means regardless of me being Samaritan and you being Jewish. It is not so much the everybody that matters, that's implicit, but the near to me. Neighbour trumps enemy. In a smaller, not very mobile world, this means simply the person we find on the road, or in our village. In our larger world, the horizon is broader.
But perhaps it is in the very local that the most profound compassion may be needed. Last weekend's Australian, reprinted a Christopher Hitchens article from Slate. In The Narcissism of the Small Difference Hitchens (quoting Freud) noted that “In ethno-national conflicts, it really is the little things that tick people off.” Some of the most severe and intransigent conflicts seem to be between people who to the outsider, have little difference over which to battle. They are the wars between neighbours. Hitchens notes, of course, that “there are latent nationalist and confessional differences to act as a force multiplier once the nasty business gets started.” We are also well aware how local conflicts are hugely complicated and worsened by the interests of empire and oil. But even in Iraq, where there is an external invading force, much of the violence and death is done neighbour to neighbour. The Iraqi death toll is far greater than the US death toll, and much of it not at the hands of the US and its allies.
Only the naive or racist would think this is because Iraqis are inferior. It is too often the same. The narcissism of small difference is on show among us all, in road rage, talk back and Facebook posts. Perhaps what will stop my country becoming an Iraq at some time of crisis, is not the machinations of national politics, and not wise international alliances. It will be the refusal of my neighbours and I to indulge in the narcissism of the small difference. It will be the determination, the will, and the compassion to be neighbour to the one who is near to me.
There is one more thing I want to say. Practically my compassion is small. I am constantly taking on things that I regret. I do not walk by on the other side, but then find I have more than I can handle. Or more than I want to continue with. And then I do walk by; I already have too much neighbourliness on my plate to handle any more. Guilt hovers to the extent that I wonder if I have any right to write or preach upon such a text as the story of the Samaritan. But I am heartened that at least I can see. Far rather this discomfort than the blindness that allows rules to rule out some people from humanity.
Andrew Prior
Direct Biblical quotations in this page are taken from The New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Greetings Maureen. Andrew
Previous page: Hospitable Mission
Next page: Mary:Martha