The Full View
“The Full View”
Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost YEAR C, November 17, 2019
Isaiah 65:17-25 Luke 21:5-19
Andrew Kennaly, Sandpoint, Idaho
Today we read prophetic visions from Isaiah, and come to the end of the Season of Pentecost posing alongside the disciples as they ask Jesus, “Now what, Lord? What’s coming now? What do we do?” These passages have lessons that can be summarized in a piece of wall art. Jim sent me photo of a wall hanging that has a drawing of a dandelion gone to seed, that puffy head letting a few miniature parachutes go in the wind, and as they blow the words say, “Accept what is…Let Go of what was…Have Faith in what shall be.” (read twice). Accept, let go, have faith. Words of Wisdom.
Another quote I’ve been pondering the last couple of week is a saying attributed to the Nimipu, or Nez Perce tribe of American Indians. This is a tribal people whose ancestral range includes hundreds of miles of what is now Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon, mostly in the large country of rivers like the Salmon and Clearwater, the Snake, and the Grande Ronde. The saying I’ve been pondering is this: “The longest journey is from the head to the heart.”
With that on my mind, I wrote a reflective write I’d like to share, called “The Longest Journey.”
The longest journey is from the head to the heart.
(Nimipu, or Real People, or Nez Perce)
Shoes gradually wear down with each step, especially if conditions involve tough terrain, heavy weather, or miry messes. Sometimes they get attacked on the inside from sweaty feet, bacteria, or fungus. Shoes are not designed to last forever, and specialty pairs, such as long distance running shoes, break down internally even though the exterior looks nearly new. Sometimes boots or higher quality shoes can receive new soles, going through two or three sets, but even these shoes will someday wear too thin and need replaced by new leather, stronger stitching, and fresh points of fabric or insoles. Sometimes our feet change. Bunions form, hammer toes intensify, callouses build, and sizes and widths that once worked well and felt good now have pinch points, tight spots, or need adjusting. Unless people go bare footed, shoes will need replaced.
A similar dynamic involves eyes and the need for glasses or contacts. Some people don’t realize they even have a need, assuming their vision is normal, just the way it is. Stories of amazement are shared as details are discovered, like seeing individual leaves on a tree, rather than a big, green blur. Vision does not remain static all through life, and eyes change with age as small, intricate muscles relax or nerves degenerate. For most people, adjusting optics through contact lenses or glasses brings the world into focus, up close, far away, and in between. Some people even have one eye tuned to see distance, and the other up close, allowing the brain to learn the adjustment. Others use bifocals or trifocals or progressive lenses, even adapting automatically to various light levels.
Eyes are susceptible to disease or shock, and sometimes surgery is needed. Some are fairly quick and routine, with short recovery times. Others are very complicated and take weeks or months to complete. It doesn’t take much for eyes to be a painful source of irritation. But when all is well enough, eyes are often overlooked in how much they help people every day. Eyes are a tremendous blessing.
If we need new shoes, we go to a shoe store or footwear department. There are often many choices of styles, depending on the intended use, such as golfing, walking, trail running, even swimming. If we need our eyes checked, there are places to go so we can get a prescription, custom numbers for each eye. Displays abound showing frames, lenses, and styles. Of course, all this assumes we have resources, like shops, trained staff, money or insurance to cover expense, transportation, and the time or ability to tend to the process. If one does not have the luxury of meeting these needs, for footwear or eye care, they will suffer, and their condition will continue to complicate their life.
Eyes and feet are part of our physical bodies. If something is askew, attempts are made to address the condition in physical ways. A new pair of shoes, an orthotic insert, a pair of glasses, or cataract surgery. Entire industries have developed on a global scale to help in ways that previous generations never dreamed possible. They lived with sore feet and blurred vision.
Members of our species now have enhanced ability to do things once thought of as impossible, simply by having options for feet and eyes. This is a forward movement, and people will not volunteer to go back by turning in their shoes or giving up their glasses.
Enlightenment has similar dynamics, in the sense of being able to change everything, on a planetary scale, involving species adaptations into forms not even considered by most. The majority of humanity seems content with religious industries developed to address questions of meaning. Industries that start with the assumption that we are not worthy, and a sacrifice must be made. But there are some noticing the need for the next thing, and an emerging form of participation in spiritual complexities and simplicity is starting.
But if only spiritual growth and maturing were as easy as trying on new shoes or getting fitted for glasses, with comfortable travel and vision of utmost clarity. If someone is struggling in faith, where do they turn for help? Changing churches is common enough. Dabbling in other faith traditions seems refreshing in some ways, as people lust for new perspectives or techniques or practices.
But what if religion itself is a false distinction, like a beautiful quilt, intricately designed, covering up a being waiting to emerge at dawn? Rising would allow the sunshine to warm the skin directly. But instead, another quilt is pulled up, covers thrown over our head as we prefer to stay in the warm bed, in the dark of a known comfort. There are many benefits to this, and a bed-of-perfect-temperature is a wonderful place to be – rested, relaxed, drifting on the edge of sleep and awake, especially if there’s no alarm set to go off.
But if your stay under thick covers too long you overheat, or run out of fresh air, or need to pass the body’s waste products. Something wakes us up every day, and even before we get out of bed, we start thinking, but with conscious thought come decisions. But decisions come at a price, for choices imply judgment, a weighing of pros and cons, a measuring based on a frame of reference. Most of the time, and for the vast majority of humans, that reference point is self-referential. Sometimes this is defined through clan or tribe, even nation, but at its core is ego-identity, a clinging to some form of distinction which often involves notions of separation and superiority. The subject-object game begins, even before our head lifts from the pillow. Objectifying reality is one consequence of dualistic thinking, of continually judging from an ego-centric perspective.
Thus the spiritual dilemma. If most churches are based on dualistic understandings of reality, and images of God often involve judgment, even condemnation, or formulas of appeasement must be considered to merit worthiness, where do people turn to break out of this oppressive operating system? Not only from churches, or larger religious expressions, but the overhaul of thinking itself?
Egos have limits, self-imposed boundaries, defending what’s familiar and rejecting all that does not fit. Thought itself, and particular thoughts particularly, tends to reinforce limitations, calling for patterns of compliance in efforts to control, hoping for certain outcomes, such as safety and security. Basic thoughts can lead to specific results, but higher thinking is needed to deal with complexities and subtleties or exceptions. But even higher thought is thought, based on a frame of reference, bathed in context, with all the limitations that go with it. Even a long view, for example, succumbs to the curvature of the earth, as one resides on a sphere, marooned in the specific.
The human spirit is yearning, permeating through deep awareness to expand beyond awareness itself. Much of what we experience today will be only rumor, shockingly viewed as tragedy by a more evolved humanity. Like war, poverty, and hunger. The driving forces creating these, such as desire, attachment, fear, greed, fall away as thinking transcends itself and the monopoly of the mind collapses.
Like honey stored for winter, the heart not only provides what’s needed, but luxuriously, in ways the mind cannot. Like a cluster of bees gradually moving into the honey chamber as winter rages outside, spending weeks in the warmth of sweet sustenance while outside there’s a dearth of nectar as trees and flowers brace winter storms, the heart patiently embraces the mind. As a new operating system, a new organ, through a heart-mind spiritual receptor, reality takes on a new hue. The judging mind slows down, distinctions erode, dignity returns as perceptions shift objects back into subjects as relationship is experienced. Christ is in everything. All things are one.
When you throw off the blankets and rise to awareness of a new day, you don’t want to crawl back in bed. When you discover quilts make good wall hangings too, there’s no need to bury your face, but you can enjoy the variety on display. But what do you do, where do you go, how do you function when even the walls seem forced, a necessary protection but a barrier all the same? I suppose you install more windows! Add doors, and leave them unlocked. Allow reality to be as it is.
Humanity, homo sapiens, is in the womb. Its fetal form continues to develop. Even Christianity, as devout and intense as leaders and followers can be, is still in infancy, partly innocent and partly selfish for survival. The God-industry perpetuates to maintain certainty, but this is like keeping the lid on the jar of a soapy water mix, with the stick-wand inside. God-breathed bubbles are forming as the lid gets nudged loose. There is no fear in floating, and even as surface tension pops, the drops get embraced by the ground. Nothing is lost. Everything belongs.
Emerging as a species is a planetary process, cosmic in proportion, and involves multi-dimensional participation. As hearts grow more attuned, attentive, and receptive, goodness and love give shape to new forms as all things come into being in a Christ-soaked world. But what do we do in the meantime, as people whose shoes don’t fit right and eyes see dimly? How do we function with visions of greater things when so many prefer limited views and seek to pull you back under covers of ego-limitations? How can words express when vocabulary itself restricts and divides by its very nature?
They called Jesus “Teacher” and asked him for signs. The Human One knows the words of Isaiah, “For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.” (Isaiah 65:17). Jesus invites us into Wisdom’s flow as God’s creative power transforms suffering. This does not remove suffering and we are contextual beings living between horizons. “By your endurance you will gain your souls,” the Human One tells, teaching of wholeness and fullness, and promise.
We are participants in evolution. Individuals, families, clans, tribes, societies, empires, nations, cultures, realms and dominions. One age leans into another as eons come and go. How we do small things is how we do all things. Endurance implies effort, and time, and distance, typically in the face of resistance, betrayal, even hatred. One step after another is the only way to take a long journey, but God’s promises are sure, and the vision is all-encompassing. As Paul Reese-Nystrom said,
“It is only at the very edge of the cliff, at the most dangerous part, does one get the entire view.”
Blessings on the journey, the longest journey, from the head to the heart.
Amen.