To Be or Not To Be
"Take care!
Be on your guard against all kinds of greed;
for one's life
does not consist in the abundance of possessions." [i]
For six years, I have been watching the Harford County
Register of Wills probate a will that involves a dispute among surviving children
of an estate. It is excruciatingly slow and tedious work. Jesus is asked to
settle a similar dispute among siblings and says, in effect,
“I am not a probate judge. What I do is announce the Good
News and tell stories. The good news is that God forgives you and loves you. Equally
good news is that life is more important than who gets the cup and who gets the
saucer. It’s not that greed is right or wrong – greed and the accumulation and
consumption of more and more stuff is just not healthy. Not for you. Not for
your neighbor. Not for the common good.
“Here’s is a story about a man, his abundant crops and his
barns – but note well, it is really a story about his self, his soul, and his
life. He has a bumper crop and nowhere to put it. I’ll tear down my barns and
build bigger barns, he says to himself. He fills them with all his crops and
all his goods. Then he says, ‘Self, look what we have done! We have enough
stuff for years to come! Let’s eat, drink and be merry!’ He has a party! With
himself. He has no friends, no neighbors. He gives no thanks to God for his
good fortune.
“From off-stage comes the voice of God. ‘Self? You are no Self.
You have no Soul. You are a fool! Look at you. All this abundance of stuff and
no friends, no neighbors, no one to share it all with. Keeping it all for your
supposed ‘self,’ while tonight your life will end. Who will enjoy your barns
and barns full of stuff now? All is vanity and a chasing after wind!’” [ii]
We are to think of that moment in Genesis 2 when YHWH takes
a handful of dust, some of the morning dew, and forms the first creature before
anything else. It’s a handful of mud really until YHWH breathes into it. That
is the moment it lives. Life begins with that first breath. Each time the first
creature breathes in it is the creation of life all-over again. As it breathes
out, it participates in creation, giving life to so much of the greening and teeming
of life on Earth. It is a dance, the circle of life. A giving back of what has
been given. A sharing of abundance with all the rest of life. It is to be this
way with all that we are and all that we have. We receive, we give back.
Barn-man has forgotten all of this. [iii]
Barn-man forgets to breathe out – to share. When you don’t
breathe out you die. And you contribute to the dying of the world. The common
good suffers. Your neighbor suffers. You suffer.
“So it is with those who store up treasures for
themselves but are not rich toward God.” [iv]
For ages some have devoted whole lives to finding out what
it means to be “rich toward God.” They create all kinds of acts of devotion,
all kinds of rituals, all kinds of dos and don’ts. Forgetting that we are all
already “rich toward God.” We are all already created in the image of God. A
God who breathes in and breathes out. A life giving, life sustaining God who
loves all of creation right down to the tiniest gluon quark! A God who loves
each and every one of us.
Evelyn Underhill, a woman who has chronicled so much of the
mysteries of life itself suggests that we tend to spend much, if not all, of
our lives conjugating just three verbs: To Want, to Have, and to Do. “Craving,
clutching and fussing, on the material, social, emotional, intellectual – even
on the religious - plane, we are kept in perpetual unrest: forgetting that none
of these verbs have any ultimate significance except so far as they are
transcended by and included in, the fundamental verb, to Be: and that Being,
not wanting, having and doing, is the essence of a spiritual life.” [v]
So it is, one day a week at Noonday Prayer we pray:
It is when we are
still that we know
It is when we listen
that we hear
It is when we
remember that we see your light, O God.
From your stillness
we come
With your sound all
life quivers with Being
From you the light of
this moment shines
Grant us to remember
you at the heart of each moment
Grant us to remember [vi]
Remember to breathe
in AND to breathe out is life.
To Be, or not To Be – that is the question. [vii]
Amen.
[i]
Luke 12:13-21
[ii]
Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14
[iii]
Swanson, Richard, Provoking the Gospel of Luke (The Pilgrim Press, Cleveland,
OH: 2006) p.174.
[iv]
Ibid Luke 12: 13-21
[v]
Underhill, Evelyn, The Spiritual Life (Harper & Row, NY: 1936) p.20.
[vi]
Newell, John Philip, Praying with the Earth (Wm. R. Eerdmans, Cambridge, UK:2011)
p.44.
[vii]
Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, Act 3, scene 1
Good morning Chief!! I am very happy and honored to be here: i have been finding my sea legs as a Christian mystic for many years, and now I am ready to begin sharing the ideas that arrive with you sometimes!!
ReplyDeleteMy current study is about covetousness as a uniquely crucial concept within the entire Bible and most religious and spiritual traditions of the world! Covetousness is essentially a psychological form of vertigo (and so it could be said "Covetousness is vertiginousness" or "Covetousness is like motion sickness"). and around us, especially for younger people, are the many misguided spoken and unspoken implications that covetousness is the cornerstone of being human. Of course, non-covetousness is very much like the true cornerstone of really being ourselves; to learn how not to covet, is indeed a stone that is the least coveted of all!!
I feel that Colossians 1: 15-29 and 3: 1-17 are two of many indescribably beautiful and forever helpful readings which (slightly indirectly) describe how Christ is the Ever~Present Teacher who is especially Good at showing us how to refuse covetousness!!
The translation i have in my old Bible from my grandparents uses the word covetousness in Colossians 3: 5 , and some other translations call it greed. To me, the word covetousness highlights that the roots of its activity are psychological, and thus something which our spiritual discernment and overall awareness can outweigh!! I am personally very curious about the idea that the Commandments are like a Rosetta Stone for helping humanity to understand themselves psychologically, with new clarity, that is still being completed: to one day become, even more than before, a simple and direct map of human psychology that can be of wondrous providence!!