A Homily for the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

A sermon preached by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on July 7, 2024, the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost.

Our little portion of Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians presents us with the problem of perfectionism–one of the great bugaboos and occupational hazards of the spiritual life. Paul, of course, is a recovering perfectionist who, as Saul, sought to gain, win, and earn grace through his own efforts, through the successful performance of the law. This did not go well for either Saul/Paul or the Christians whose paths he crossed. Checking coats and passing out stones at the martyrdom of Stephen, Saul/Paul “still breathing threats of violence and murder,” sets off in search of more Christians to round up and cart off to Rome for execution. The great and tragic irony of Saul/Paul’s perfect performance (and of all perfectionism) is that it results in persecuting Christ in the name of God–”Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” We kill God and God’s people in trying to win God, in trying to make of God a possession subject to our manipulation and control. Bad idea.

Saul/Paul’s Damascus Road experience is the great undoing of perfection sought as successful performance rather than gift received as sheer unmerited and undeserved grace. Grace that arrives, that showers down, that meets us and greets us from completely outside of all our usual frameworks good/bad, success/failure, praise/blame. Knocked off his horse, blinded, and fed by a perfect stranger for three days, Saul/Paul is converted from strong, powerful, self-directed, willful, self-reliance to something we recognize less readily–the strength of God revealed in weakness, affliction, and not-knowing. When, that is, we are at wit’s end (always).

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking about how for “people of the way,” pilgrims that we are, the big shift in the life of discipleship comes when we stop seeing people, places, circumstances, relationships in our life as obstacles preventing us from swimming like fish in the ocean God, and start relating to difficulty, hardship, and affliction as our very path to God. Rather than trying to surmount hardship and thorniness by our own efforts through heroic assertion of willpower, there is a softening, an opening, yielding in love to the circumstances of this very life right here, right now, just like this, as the place where God meets us in Christ through the Holy Spirit. Our daily life–with its ups and downs, successes and failures, hosannas and heartbreaks–is our monastery. The very means by which God draws us to Godself and the place where salvation is manifest as love poured out for others.

This is hard to accept. Finding God in the pots and pans sounds delightful, but given how humans do about everything else in life, it’s actually much easier to buy into faith as a giant self-improvement project where we renounce our ordinary lives, win God, and then walk around a couple of inches off the ground with rainbows beaming out of every orifice (usually with a collar on). We imagine some kind of idealized spiritual state that we will enter and never leave. We imagine that once we get rid of the difficulty in our life–a fraught relationship, illness, our anger, our addictions, whatever–then, then we’ll know God. Then, then, God will love us. We live our life as if peace, fulfillment (quite different from getting what you want), and uncaused joy were something over the next hill, and around the next bend and live our lives under the twin banners of “Are we there yet?” “Am I doing this right?”--always a day late and a dollar short.

One of my great heroes in life–Philip Whalen–was a perfect embodiment of the simple truth that “Just this is it. Nothing is missing.” Bookish, rotund, blind as a bat, cultured to a fault, neurotic, and permanently patching life together without a steady job, Whalen was a poet’s poet and comrade of fellow Beat travellers Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure and Joanne Kyger. Anecdotes are innumerable, but a favorite of mine is how Whalen–by then a monk–was visiting New York to give a reading at the legendary St. Mark’s Poetry Project. About to go in to read his poems he happened across a statue of Peter Stuyvesant. He stopped, drew himself up, put his hands together and made a profound bow. “What are you bowing to that old rascal for?” someone asked (referencing Stuyvesant’s rabid anti-semitism, colonialist exploitation of indigenous peoples, and a virulent anti-catholic bias). Somewhat surprised by the person’s surprise, Whalen peered at him through his coke bottle glasses and said, “I bow to everything.” 

This, I think, is really the essence of the religious life–a life where everything without exception is bowed to, reverenced, awed at as tender unfolding mystery in life and in death. It’s a great little practice to engage for a day, a week, indeed your entire life. But start with a morning. Bowing to birdsong cascading out of the pre-dawn darkness. Bowing to the leaky dishwasher. The headache. The diagnosis that sets the mind spinning. The spouse. The child. The loved one. The enemy. The stranger. The shiny faucet miraculously gushing at the lightest touch pouring cool water into a chipped mug. “I bow to everything.”

And when we bow, it’s not passive resignation of the kind Canadians and the English are so well practiced at. Bowing is not mere stoicism, or stiff upper lip projection of inviolability. Nor is it submission. Rather, bowing is about intimacy and porosity–the faithful recognition that God’s grace is always sufficient and works strongly through our weakness. That God is present, active, and working in hidden ways that surpass our understanding in all places and all times. That our problems don’t need to disappear (or be violently split off or disassociated from) for Presence to companion us, feed us, hold and heal us in our weakness, provision us with the imperishable bread of Christ-with-us, Emmanuel through thick and thin even to the end of ages.

There has been lots of prurient speculation about Paul’s thorn. Scholars want to know what it was that Paul wanted removed from his side. But that entirely misses the point! It’s the desire for a kind of idealized perfection where our problems disappear that is being interrogated here (and very gently detonated). Seen with a softened heart in light of the sufficiency of grace, we learn and practice simply being ourselves–faulted, foibled, slightly crazed–and loved unconditionally just as we are before we’ve moved a muscle, prettied up the picture, or got our ducks in a row. Strangely, it is in first bowing to our life as it is, in acceptance and surrender, that the transformation we sought through our perfectionistic self-improvement project is wrought, in God’s own time, in us by grace. Transformation (if we must use that word) comes about by first leaving everything alone in love.

See, the great danger in the spiritual life is that we pit one part of ourselves (the so-called holy part) against another part of ourselves (the unholy part that causes mischief in our life) in a zero-sum game. We mistakenly try to hate ourselves into loving ourselves and end up brittle, soured, nasty, curved in on ourselves. And when we try to excise or eradicate parts of ourselves through spiritually-condoned violence directed at ourselves, we inevitably do the same thing (entirely unconsciously) to others–trying to get them to conform to some ideal of perfection. Placing ourselves in the great judgment of Christ we are judge, jury, and executioner of all those who don’t measure up to our idea of thornless, performative, perfectionist piety. We think we know wheat from tares and in our rush to fix ourselves and others, destroy the whole crop. Rather like McNamara’s famous quote during the VietNam war–“In order to save the village we had to destroy it.”

Radical welcome, indiscriminate hospitality to ourselves and others– “I bow to everything,”--is the way out of that death-dealing trap. Just this past week–after struggling with room-spinning vertigo and nausea for seven days—I went to the doctor. Ear infection. Simple fix. Feel better already. And yet the sense of profound inconvenience, restless impatience at the way things were, hopelessness, despair, frustration at myself and my fragile little skin bag was unmistakable! There was not a single bow! And then there was the anger directed at myself for not bowing! What a mess. But that entire mess, too, can be bowed to–the fragility of life, our inconstant bowing to life as it is, our frazzled freak outs–can that all too be seen lovingly and without judgment, welcomed, bowed to, and embraced? How simple love is! How lavish this grace!

When Jesus sends the disciples off without anything to rely upon (no bread, bag, money in the belt)  it is training in open-handed receptivity. It’s training and practice in not knowing so much, not being so strong-willed and strong-minded. It is training in bowing to each stranger, each house they enter, utterly receptive to the spirit’s work in the hidden midst of our  humble ordinary life just as it is. Letting-go of our uninterrogated stories, our frantic efforts to be perfect, we discover instead the perfection of imperfection, the “crack in everything that lets the light through” as Leonard Cohen sings. We discover Christ come to our hometown, where before we only “saw” the brother of Joses, the carpenter’s son. 

This letting-go and letting-be (so offensive to the spiritual ego that wants to storm heaven) slowly opens us onto presence in this very imperfectly perfect moment as the place and the circumstance where we are sourced in and resourced by the power of God’s love for all of God’s creatures. Not third heavens with all this business of being in the body or out of the body–this life, here and now, as the means of grace by which we become a little more like the one we follow after down the way of love: the one seated already, loving us unconditionally, on the throne of the heart calling us home. The great Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in his poem “Pied Beauty,” points the way to God through the graced imperfections of daily life, work, and relationship.

Glory be to God for dappled things – 

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; 

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; 

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; 

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; 

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. 

All things counter, original, spare, strange; 

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) 

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; 

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 

                             Praise him.

Teach us, Lord, to love all that is counter, spare, strange, fickle and freckled in ourselves and others. Teach us to see the weakness of imperfection not as an obstacle to life in God, but  where grace is most powerfully at work. Teach us, Lord, to bow to all,  to reverence, to awe. Hang the third heaven. You father-forth not in timeless, static, thornless perfection, but as pots and pans God, as, “fresh-firecoal chestnut-fall and finches’ wings.” Yes, yes, “Glory be to God for dappled things!” Appreciate this life. Amen.