The Scorpion in the Palm
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Fourth Sunday After Pentecost by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.
Last week, I was talking a little bit about seeing God in the midst of ordinary life and how that asks of us a degree of presence to what William Carlos Williams calls “what’s close to the nose.” The great American modernist poet and obstetrician who practiced in Rutherford, N.J. and scribbled his poems on the back of prescription pads between visits used to say that “poetry is the speech of Polish Grandmothers.” He got sick and tired of how poetry restricted itself to conventional beauty—pastoral landscapes, themes of idyllic childhood, “thoughts thought but ne’er so well expressed.” Instead, he took the materials for his poetry from what presented itself directly to the senses: Polish grandmothers sitting on their porches as he made his house calls included. The “American idiom”--the language of the ordinary people--and ordinary people going about their daily tasks populate his unvarnished verse. Williams didn’t arrive at this conception of poetry out of some desire to be merely innovative. Novelty for novelty’s sake is never at the heart of great art. Williams’ poetry comes from a different place. From a sacramental worldview that sees God in everything and everything in God--life lived from the recognition of everything as pure gift. Here’s Williams’ “Between Walls”:
the back wings
of the
hospital where
nothing
will grow lie
cinders
in which shine
the broken
pieces of a green
bottle
This kind of simple presence—an effortless willingness to be-with what’s there and honor it, to allow whatever presents itself to be bathed in the light of loving awareness and shine forth—is the gateway to eternal life. Paul, in his Second Letter to the Corinthians, reminds us something rather startling—“See, now, is the acceptable time; see now is the day of salvation!” Eternal life, healing, wholeness, freedom from having our happiness dictated by constantly changing circumstances, is not reserved for the afterlife. Practicing the Presence, being present to the presence that is always already present to us, allows us to see that there is no place, no encounter, no experience, no person, not touched by grace. When we put on the Wakeful One (as Ephrem the 4th century Turkish deacon calls Christ) we begin to see with wonder and awe the beauty that surrounds us. Not only in snow-capped mountains or vast empty deserts, or in a beautiful flower or a baby’s smile, but also in broken glass in cinders between walls.
That’s a hint as to how we might navigate this life when it offers up its inevitable storms. Our readings that bookend Paul’s extraordinary proclamation both present us with calamitous circumstances. In Job’s case, of course, just about everything that can go wrong has gone wrong. In the case of the disciples, they find themselves in the boat with Jesus when things quickly turn perilous. Many folks believe that having faith, believing in God, somehow insulates us against the vicissitudes of life. If I’m good, good things will come to me. And if bad things happen, that must be the result of something I did. It’s a kind of transactional model of faith that is exactly what the Book of Job is out to explode, to whirl away in the windy mystery of God. Job’s interrogators try to suss out where he could possibly have gone wrong. It’s a search for the cause of the calamity so as to explain it away, but also so as to say “Phew! I didn’t do that, so I don’t have to worry. Job brought it on himself. He deserves it.” So and so has liver disease. Well, did they drink too much? So and so has lung cancer. Well, did they smoke? We jump immediately to seeking the cause in an effort to insulate ourselves against the chances and changes of this life. If we just avoid that then what befell those other people won’t happen to us. Notice, that the other person’s suffering is completely subsumed by our fear for ourselves. Compassion—suffering with—is blocked by figuring out how in one way or other how that person deserved it and since we’re not like that person it won’t happen to us. Death is something safely parceled away that happens to other people.
If we think that faith will somehow insulate us from calamity, we are sorely mistaken. Worse, we can think that if the 800-pound gorilla shows up on our door, it is somehow the result of our lack of faith. There is that parable of the Stoic philosopher who, when informed of the death of his son in battle, replied, “I have always known that my son was mortal.” Is that something to aspire to? I should hope not. It’s not the way I want to live my life. Cold passivity in the face of loss is not what faith calls us to. Jesus wept over his friend Lazarus. Grief, fear, mourning, the sharp pang of loss are not unchristian. And expressing them to others and to God—simple emotional honesty—is a big part of what it means to mature in the faith and the life of prayer. Railing at God, accusing him of falling asleep at his post, is an essential aspect of the relationship: “Can’t you see that we are perishing while you sleep on your comfy cushion in the stern?” We come just as we are and lay it all out on the table, warts and all, and listen for what God makes of the apparent mess. When the gifts of bread and wine are brought to the altar, do we see that it is we ourselves who place our lives on the altar, a living sacrifice just as we are, without prettying up the picture? “Here I am,” as Samuel says, as Isaiah says, as we, too, say.
Faith does not prevent the storms of life, but it does provide us with a way of approaching, relating to, those storms. Where is the peace and stillness in the midst of the waves that threaten to swamp our boat? How do we access it? In whom is our refuge? Our normal mode of seeing—from what Paul called last week “the human point of view”—is to see peace in opposition to conflict, calm seas in opposition to rough seas. Life goes well when everything accords with how we think it’s supposed to be, when life conforms to our requirements of how things “should” be, and life goes badly when those demands that things go a certain way bump up against the way life actually is. So life is this alternating current of getting what we want and not getting what we want—calm seas and wavy days. But faith teaches us something different. Faith teaches that our demand for things to be a certain way is a good recipe for always being miserable. Did you notice that the disciples in our Gospel take Jesus, “just as he was”? Not how they’d like him to be, but just as he was. Interesting that the peace and the stillness of the sea at the end of the narrative is the fruit of this initial letting-be, this acceptance and allowing, this yielding to the other in the person of Jesus just as he is, this welcoming of the stranger into the boat.
When, not if, the inevitable storms of life whip up and we find our little boat threatened, we usually try to fix the problem, run away from it, or just numb out either by going to sleep or anaesthetizing ourselves against the experience with drugs, alcohol, or indulging in distractions. “Just as he was,” is an invitation to explore a different way of relating, and to discover and live from a “place” that is not simply blown about, tossed to and fro by every wind. We can take our openness to the presence that we yield to in daily life—the Polish Grandmothers calling to one another from their porches, broken bottle glass in cinders between walls—and approach difficult situations, stormy weather, with that same disposition of curious, inquiring acceptance and letting-be. We can—and this is one of the most counter-intuitive aspects of the spiritual life—move towards to the difficulty, welcome it, in the faith that God is in the waves as much as God is in the calmness of the seas. The wave and the sea aren’t two separate things. Come closer friend.
I included in your bulletin this week another painting by the English painter Stephen Spencer. I found out this week that Christ in the Wilderness is actually a whole series of paintings. In this one, we see Jesus holding a scorpion in his hand, looking lovingly at a creature that could hurt, harm, or kill him. It’s a wonderful pointer on how we might relate to the waves, the scorpions, the broken bottle-glass and cinders that inevitably arise in our lives. Sure, we’ll spend time trying to figure it out, find a cause, rage away, or assign blame. But eventually we’ll come to that point where all there is is the whirlwind. No explanation is possible, and we just have to open to the experience as it is. We can try to suppress our anger, our fear, our grief, but eventually it is something that needs to be lovingly embraced, welcomed, loved: held with the same love with which God holds us. What if, instead of seeing those things we think are wrong with us as obstacles, and problems to fix, we let them simply be held in love? What if instead of chasing the scorpions of our life around with a shoe trying to squash them flat, we held them in love and smiled at them?
The upside down and backwards world of the Gospel is that by letting ourselves be, just as we are—call it surrender, call it radical acceptance, call it going to the places that scare you, call it being loving into loving—the changes that we pursued under various self-improvement projects spontaneously occur? Instead of “getting rid of our anger,” we see it, love it, hold it in our palm, just as it is. The wave is revealed as the ocean. Each apparent obstacle the gateway to heaven, even here, even now: “in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger” as Paul says. Each wave we encounter in life, each apparent moment of broken bottle glass in cinders, a doorway to presence. The scorpion in the palm suspiciously like a communion wafer.