GodSnack

As I continue to read my way through the poetry of Rumi, I pranged against an interesting spin on one of the more challenging things about a mystic approach to faith.

The poem is entitled "Chickpea to Cook," and its focus is a reluctant chickpea, which doesn't want to be part of the stew a cook is preparing. The chickpea has no desire to be eaten, to lose its sense of self and identity. It doesn't particularly want to be cooked, either.

The cook, on the other hand, thinks the chickpea is being selfish. "I'm giving you flavor," he says, "so you can mix with spices and rice and be part of the lovely vitality of a human being."

What Rumi is articulating is a desire that weaves through all of the mystic traditions within each of the world's great faiths. It's the yearning to lose oneself completely in God, to be utterly subsumed into the glory of the divine. As it's expressed in this wee bit of theological whimsy, Rumi articulates our purpose in being as giving God "...something good to eat."

This, I think, is the problem most human beings have with mysticism. There is nothing, nothing, nothing that we cherish in the world more than our own sense of self. We don't want to cease to be as we are. We cling to the unique assemblage of memories that form us, enfleshed in our uniquely patterned organic neural network. It is our existence. It is us. We don't want to let ourselves go.

When we conceptualize heaven, this is why we want it to be a place where we remain eternally as we are. Maybe a bit younger or a bit older, maybe a bit thinner, maybe with a full head of hair, but still us. This has never really appealed to me, or made any sense theologically. Here in creation, our "self" is a complex intermixture of genetic predisposition, experience, and memory. But moving into a direct and unmediated experience of God would seem to be something of a gamechanger for us as persons.

We know that individual experiences or events in our lives can have radically transforming impacts on our sense of self. After that first kiss, you are not the same person. After the first death of a dear, dear friend, you are not the same person. Why would we expect not to be utterly changed by God's presence, which is several orders of magnitude more intense?

If God is, as we faith-folk tend to say, both infinitely good and infinitely loving, why wouldn't we want to lose ourselves in God?

Gettin' Personal, Continued...

Picking up my previous thread about what it means to have a "personal relationship with Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior..."

What we hear in John's Gospel is Christ proclaiming something very different from the personal relationship we have with other people. It's easy for us to pray to Jesus, and tell our innermost thoughts to God in those times when we need an ear to hear us. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, although my compulsive Calvinist tendencies invariably remind me that I'm not praying to tell God anything God doesn't already know.

The challenge in this is that a God to whom we chat can easily become our own pet god, as we mumble our needs to Him like Queequeg whispering softly to his little wooden Yojo while the Pequod tosses in the gale-driven night.

What Christ is calling us to is a much deeper relationship than that--an immersion in him that transforms our inner person. It is a mystical relation, but not in the ethereal self-absorbed hi-I'm-Madonna-let's-talk-about-Kabbalah kind of way. Instead, it's a relationship that involves us being changed in the here and now. God and God's Kingdom cease to be *other* than us and separated from us. We participate in them, and through them, we participate in each other.

That, I think, is a better way to understand being "born again." It moves us into the sort of practical mysticism that Paul declares in Philippians:

Philippians 2:1-13 If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-- even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence, but much more now in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

Gettin' Personal

The foundational assumption of the evangelical movement is that we need to have--everyone say it together--a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as Our Lord and Savior. We need to be aware of Jesus not as an idea, or a historical figure, or a teacher of doctrine, but as a real presence. He's always there for us. He's our friend. He walks with us, he talks with us, he tells us we are his own. All that good stuff.

But then I read through John, and all those intimate and powerful teachings about who Jesus was and what it really means to be his disciple, and I git to scritchin' my head a little bit. Because the relationship Jesus describes in that Gospel seems to be of a radically different character than the relationships we have with other homo sapiens. Jesus says:

John 14:20 On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.
John 15:4-5 Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.
John 17:21-23 As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

That's not a "personal relationship," at least not as we generally understand it. The bond that Jesus expresses seems to go far deeper than that. What Christ is describing is transpersonal, a relationship that breaks down the normal existential boundaries between we human beings. I think there's a real difference between relating to him as we relate to another person and abiding in him, so immersed in his presence that it becomes hard to tell where he begins and we leave off.

So which is it? A little bit of both, methinks.