Full of Grace and Truth

“Full of grace and truth” has stayed with me this Christmas 2020 season to dispel the gloom of unreformed Scrooges, unredeemed Grinches, and an unrelenting pandemic.

The Gospel writer John used “full of grace and truth” to describe God’s coming into this world through the beloved child and prophet Jesus. John gets credit as a theologian for his elevated prologue beginning “In the beginning was the Word…” but, in truth, we are all theologians, speculating in our own “Tiny Tim” ways about the nature of the universe, of humanity, and the nature of God.

In early Christianity, “theologia” was communion with God, so maybe it’s better to consider John a mystic, a contemplative whose vision revealed a thin place—Jesus—where God’s grace and truth could touch, heal, transform our confusions and delusions and self-elevating pride.

Blending grace and truth, to my very human perspective, is as challenging as mixing divinity and humanity. When I think of those among us full of grace, they seem able to be gracious because they hold their tongues when it comes to truth: “No, you don’t look fat.” “No, your profits are well-deserved.” “Yes, you are super.”

When I think of those among us full of truth, they come across as challenging, even judgmental, spoilers, disagreeable. Yes, they are prophets and whistleblowers and much needed in our self-deceptive, aggrandizing, fame- and wealth-driven world, but dinner with them? Heavens, please, no!

But one of the characteristics that makes divinity “divine” seems to me to be its ability to integrate both grace and truth. “Yes, you belong,” grace says. “Yes, you belong,” truth says. In the view of process theologian Daniel Day Williams, belonging is as vital (as in life-giving) as believing. Grace tells us we belong. Truth tells us we belong.

The belonging Jesus proclaimed confirms our place in creation and our citizenship in God’s common spiritual wealth, neither of which is to be taken lightly. That’s grace with a dose of truth.

Happy New Year!

Chris

 

Relevant New York Times columns by Peter Weimer:

The Forgotten Radicalism of Jesus Christ

The Uncommon Power of Grace

How Can I Possibly Believe that Faith is Better than Doubt?

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Copyright © 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

"A Flower Does Not Talk"

One of our orchids.

The whole world today, both East and West, seems to be going through a period of convulsion, a time of travail, as it seeks to give birth to a new culture. There cannot be one simple cause for the tensions in so many parts of the world, but one of the major factors may be that while remarkable progress has been made in the use of new scientific knowledge, we human beings have not developed sufficiently spiritually and ethically to meet the new conditions.

It is most urgently required, therefore, that we must work to create a new human culture by striving for a truer understanding of humanity and a higher level of spirituality. 

This seems to echo the observations of Teilhard de Chardin, writing just after World War II, and speaks to our own time nearly two decades into the 21^st century. But it comes from a book written in 1970 by Zenkei Shibayama, a Zen master and then abbot of Nazenji Monastery in Kyoto, Japan. The book is titled, A Flower Does Not Talk: Zen Essays, and was translated into English by one of the author’s disciples, Miss Sumoko Kudo.

I took this from my bookshelves very early morning of the Saturday I write this, a little more than a week before leading a contemplative retreat, which I should continue preparing for, but I prefer to write this post, to be published a week after the retreat. The title possibly appealed to me because I am a little anxious about my impending leadership. In her helpful book, Be Still: Designing and Leading Contemplative Retreats, Jane E. Vennard writes that the best way to lead contemplation is to be a contemplative. A flower that does not talk seems a good role model.

As I read Shibayama’s preface and Daisetz T. Suzuki’s introduction, I wondered how I had never read this book that has sat alongside my books of Eastern wisdom for at least three decades. I was moved to find that the introduction was the famous D. T. Suzuki’s last writing, having completed it the day before he took sick, dying the day after that at the age of 95.

Only when I sat down to write this post did I see “Culbertson” handwritten on the title page and realize that this was either a loan or a gift from my friend, Linda Culbertson, executive of the Presbytery of the Pacific.

Suzuki evokes a smile with his very first sentence, “Zen claims to be ‘a specific transmission outside the scripture and to be altogether independent of verbalism,’ but it is Zen Masters who are most talkative and most addicted to writings of all sorts.” As a would-be contemplative who obviously loves words, I find this comforting.

He then writes how Zen Masters enjoy bringing their readers “to bewilderment with their apparently irrational and often irrelevant utterances.” I underlined “bewilderment” because yesterday I used a fanciful version of the word preparing a guided meditation for the retreat, writing, “We will flee from the familiar to the wild-ness and bewilder-ness of the wilderness.” Suzuki asserts that their purpose is to lift students to “the higher way of observing things.”

“Zen tells us to change or reverse our usual way of understanding,” he writes. “Zen always aspires to make us directly see into Reality itself, that is, be Reality itself, so that we can say along with Meister Eckhart that ‘Christ is born every minute in my soul,’ or that ‘God’s Isness is my Isness.’”

Yet the author, Abbot Zenkei Shibayama, cautions in his preface, “We should not too easily conclude that there is just one Truth, and that East and West are after all the same.”

Hallelujah!

The book’s title is that of the author’s poem:

A Flower Does Not Talk

Silently a flower blooms,

In silence it falls away;

Yet here now, at this moment, at this place,

            the whole of the flower, the whole of the world is blooming.

This is the talk of the flower, the truth of the blossom;

The glory of eternal life is fully shining here.

I think I’ve found my personal reading for the retreat.

I will be speaking during the 11 a.m. worship this coming Sunday, May 13, 2018 at Ormewood Church in Atlanta.

Related Post: A Flower’s Tears

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Remember the Gift

Resting in God, temple in India, 1983.

My sleep was interrupted very early the morning I write this as I struggled with a request to co-lead a several-day contemplative retreat, doubting my qualifications. Suddenly my mind began structuring the course, bringing order to chaos. I continued organizing in a dream as I drifted off to sleep again. Waking, I felt more confident.  

I have yet to share it with my co-leader, so there will be changes to come, but I thought it would also be a helpful way to write posts that might speak to those of you who follow the spiritual season of Lent and Holy Week as well as those of you who don’t! So eager was I about this that here I am, up at 5:19 a.m., writing.

For the next six Wednesdays I plan to reflect on themes that could be used in such a retreat, in an order that roughly parallels the evolution of contemplation in the Christian tradition. Today I write of memory.

I have been told that studies indicate personal memory is unreliable. But I could not do my work or “do” my faith were it not for such a faulty instrument! My present self may easily be reshaping my personal narrative to suit myself. Lillian Hellman, believed to have reshaped her own personal narrative in her memoirs, famously wrote that the longest sentence in the world begins with, “I remember…”

One of the things I remember but have never been able to document is a line from W. H. Auden: 

Remember the gift,

The one from the manger,

It means only this:

You can dance with a stranger.

When I used to send Christmas cards, I created a card with that verse one year. It is in “remembering the gift” that contemplation begins. The first followers of Jesus told stories about him, recounted and amplified his teachings and parables, and remembered, re-enacted, and sometimes re-shaped his deeds and life events. Lent is simply remembering his 40-day sojourn in the wilderness after his baptism.

If personal memory is faulty, collective memory can be fanciful, and as it passes through time, evolves into myth. Myth, for me, offers a deeper spiritual truth. Jesus came to represent to those who followed him and those who followed them what the world needs.

Teilhard de Chardin (yes, I’m still reading him) writes, “However personal and incommunicable it may be at its root and origin, Reflection can only be developed in communion with others. It is essentially a social phenomenon.” I would add, a social phenomenon over time, a communion of saints over the ages. In another context, he writes, “Coherence and fecundity, the two criteria of truth.”*

This is what separates mythological truth from “alternative facts.” There is both coherence and fecundity in mythology: it makes sense to our inner selves and is fruitful in its outcome. The sacrificial love that Jesus taught and practiced and lived bears fruit in our transformation and in the transformation of the world.

Zen Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield tells the story of a woman attending the trial of her son’s murderer. Overwhelmed with grief, at one point, she cries out, “I’m going to kill you!” After he was imprisoned, to his surprise, she came to visit him. “Is there anything you need?” she asked casually, and she began providing little things here and there whenever she came to visit.

When he approached release, she asked, “Do you have a place to go?” He said, “No, ma’am, I don’t.” So she offered him her son’s room. She also found him work with a relative. After living together for a while, she asked him if he remembered when she shouted, “I’m going to kill you!” “Yes ma’am,” he said, “I could never forget that.” The mother replied, “You see, I did ‘kill’ you. You are no longer the man who killed my son.”

Sacrificial love transforms. That’s why early followers of Jesus gathered to relive his sacrifice in the Eucharist in which all attending, not just the spiritual leader, spoke the Words of Institution that rendered bread and wine into body and blood.  The Eucharist was preceded and prepared for by the Service of the Word, the reading of scripture and a contemporary interpretation. Liturgy too is a way of remembering, spoken or sung or choreographed. And early on, art and architecture served the Christian memory, especially in a largely illiterate world.

In Jesus and the Eucharist, Jesuit Tad Guzie wrote that the meal was “above all, a natural way for Jesus to express the meaning of his impending death, a death which he knew lay at the heart of Yahweh’s promise of life and a kingdom for his people.”**

This, to me, is not a sacrifice to an angry God, but a sacrifice to show us a greater love.

*The Future of Man, 133, 182.

**Jesus and the Eucharist, 57.

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Copyright © 2017 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.