In conceiving the sacred, we echo the mistake of Adam, we attempt
“to be like God.” Our process
attempts to be creative like God’s is full of reasoning, places undue
importance on our own active volition, our work. If our reading of the prologue is our
starting point, without denigrating whatever proper role reason and creativity
might have, our conceptions of the sacred might have more traction were they
negative like the Logos.
John’s gospel opens with an account of Jesus cleansing the temple. The Intro to Seung Sahn’s teachings
“Dropping Ashes on the Buddha” asks Zen disciples what they would do if a
student, smoking a cigarette and full of bluster, walked into the Zen Center
and flicked ashes on the statue of Buddha.
Seung Sahn says “However you try to teach him, he will hit you. If you try to teach by hitting him
back, he will hit you even harder. (He is very strong.)” Seung Sahn’s ashes are like Jesus’
flipped tables. The whip of
cords, the reality of Jesus’ public mantrum challenges our potentially
sick ways of acknowledging the sacred. Like
Jesus, the asshole of Seung Sahn’s portrayal is actually the teacher: those
with cranky definitions of the sacred are the students.
John’s Christology is “high,” focusing more on divinity than
humanity: For him Jesus is the Teacher of Teachers, willingly laying down his
life. Ultimately Jesus’
authority is founded on Realization, Transformation and Self Emptying. In John 3, Jesus’ late-night
breakdown for the Pharissee Nicodemus gives us a window into what this would
all look like when the rubber hits the road.
When someone has a realization, they can never be deprived of that
truth… in the context of this reading, ”being born from above,” means being
empowered by the transcendent. “No
one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of Water and the Spirit” Not just sex, but the entire human
experience “gives birth to” people. Parents
are generative, and anything that’s generative is a parent. The Spirit is the Reality of
Transformation. Water is the
self-emptying power of “Acceptance.”
Without self-emptying, transcendent authority becomes prideful and
undoes its own transformational work. I’ve
fallen into this trap; being “full of self” is actually what causes anxiety. Anxiety then causes us to use reality
as a self-comfort mechanism, and there you have a complete synopsis of mortal
sin in the economy of the sacred. It's a lesson I'd prefer to be unable to teach from experience.
Truth, I think, is witnessed, not constructed. Listen to Jesus’ apt Metaphor for
realization: “The wind blows
where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it
comes from or where it goes.” As
with all things given, we can’t claim to be Santa’s little helper in the
causality department. Asking us
if realization is substantive is like asking a chicagoan’s inverted umbrella
what the weather’s like.
As a testament to this post’s first paragraph, Jesus alludes to
people’s difficulty with reality “We speak of what we know and testify to what
we have seen, yet you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you about earthly
things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you about
heavenly things?” A
transformation is something seen, it is reality accepted. We, in our sickness, tend to theorize
about reality as a way to avoid encountering it. It’s only by acceptance of the
realities of earth that we’ll be ready when God wills to impart Heaven’s
unifying knowledge. In short, if
we want wisdom to usher us into the next life, we must go out of our minds in
accepting this one.
The process of self-emptying does not lead to self-made-meaning
(existentialism) but to non-meaning. While
it falls short of a standalone Koan, much of what Jesus says to Nicodemus
reflects koanic work. “No one
has ascended into heaven” says Jesus “except the one who descended from heaven,
the Son of Man,”
If the Catholic Tradition of Divine Fatherhood is to be
believed—and in the context of this reading, belief repays us lavishly—Jesus,
who refers to himself as the “Son of Man” is actually the Son of No man. If parents are generative, then
anything generative is a parent. Jesus’
lack of a present, earthly father is precisely what does the work of
“Fathering.” The Lord is
actually raised by absence. Jesus
is “born” of the processes of self-emptying and transformation. All Humanity shares in that
generative process to some degree, because, all over creation, the negative
principle that is the Logos ultimately does positive work. In reality, I was and am parented by
many things that aren’t my parents. Jesus
is the “Son of Man” in the generic sense of being “brought about by the same
transformation and self-emptying” that all humanity, if it would be awake, goes
through.
We are children of many things.
But short of a transformative and self-emptying process, we
misunderstand the things of heaven. When
we undertake self-emptying and transformative work, we descend from the Heaven
of our own misunderstanding. Earth
is heaven when it is nothing else but earth.
And Heaven is whatever God wills it to be.
It’s not imitation of Jesus, but intimacy with him that John
ultimately emphasizes. It’s not
being like Jesus, but being with him that gets the evangelist’s nod. The process of transformation is
lonely. Any real change does not portray the inner work that brought it about. It is real change precisely because it comes naturally, and the absence of effort is something understood only by those those who have been similarly shifted.
We don’t really get, from the scriptures, a sense of whether
Nicodemus smelled what Jesus was ultimately stepping in. We know Nicodemus was confused, that
he had difficulty stepping out of his normal, reason bound mindset. In that way, he perhaps shared
something both with Jesus and with us. On
the face of it, the company is worth the confusion. As it turns out, if providence wills
it, we’ll poke through our self-induced haze as well, where those who’ve gone
before us are waiting.
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