Saturday, May 6, 2023

Awakened Heart Easter 5A

Awakened Hearts    Easter 5A

While listening to the Gorecki Third Symphony, a somber and yet transcendent piece of music, sitting at a gate in Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, it was hot. It was summer, and the air conditioning was not working. People around me were hot, grumpy about our plane being late, constantly harassing the airline representative for information she did not have. People walking by looked angry while lugging their luggage in the humid corridor. Suddenly, the music transported me. People looked relaxed, smiling, at one with themselves and each other. Those walking by were once again engaged in upbeat even gay conversation. No one was complaining. It was peaceable. Sparkling! Transcendent! The symphony came to an end. The rough voice of blues legend, Howling Wolf intoned, “I asked my baby for water, but she gave me gasoline…” I looked up, and everyone was as before – grumpy, angry, hot and unhappy.

 

How long had the vision lasted? I’ll never know. But it has persisted. It remains one ongoing vision of what we call the Christ. Which is not Jesus’s last name. It is his essence. It is what storyteller John calls the logos, which gets translated, “Word.” But which even at the time of Jesus logos, a word borrowed from Greek philosophy, suggests Richard Rohr, meant something more like the “Blueprint” or Primordial Pattern for reality. [i] In the beginning we are told all things were created through the logos, and that the logos is the light and the life of the kosmos, the world, and everything therein.[ii]

 

What I saw at Hartsfield-Jackson International was the light that shines within us all; within all life. This logos, this life, this light is what other New Testament writers call christos, Christ. I’ve come to believe this logos, this christos is what Buddhists call bodhichitta, a Sanskrit word meaning a “noble or awakened heart.” [iii]  “It is said to be present in all beings…in difficult times, it is only bodhichitta that heals.” When all seems lost; when we feel ready to give up; this, writes Pema Chodron, is the time when “healing can be found in the tenderness of pain itself…in the midst of loneliness, fear, feeling misunderstood and rejected is the heartbeat of all things, the genuine heart of sadness…the genuine heart of bodhichitta cannot be lost. It is here in all that lives, never marred, completely whole.” [iv]

 

The 14th chapter of John comes out of a growing sadness and fear among the disciples. It is their last supper with Jesus. He says he is leaving. He says that where he is going, they cannot follow right now. Peter objects, and pledges he will follow Jesus, the logos, even unto death. Kindly, Jesus tells him he does not know what he is talking about. And out of this John has him say, “Let not your hearts be troubled.” [v] Why not? Here, translation fails us. The text continues, “Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?” Richard Swanson notes, in the Greek there is no question mark, and offers an alternative translation, “If there were not many places to stay in my father’s home, I would have said to you: I am traveling to prepare a place for you.” [vi]The difference is monumental. Jesus does not need to prepare a place. The father’s house already is wide enough, broad enough. large enough, so commodious as to host all of us, all living beings, all traditions, all of creation itself! Jesus does not need to prepare a place for us, or anyone else. In the cosmology of the fourth gospel, the logos, the christos, has already made room, as we heard last week, for sheep from other flocks – all other flocks. [vii]

 

Let not our hearts be troubled. The very logos, the christos, that created all that is, has placed the bodhichitta heart in us all. We need only go to this place within, where the word that has become flesh chooses to dwell, to live, to remain among us always, to heal our fear, our perceived loneliness, our sadness at his seeming departure – which, is no departure at all.

 

Besides, Jesus says, you know the way. This is what this dialogue is about: The “way,” universally understood among Jesus and his fellow Jews, is the ‘way of Torah,’ the way of YHWH, the way of the covenant life that promises life, light and abundance for everyone and all creation. Philip says, “But we don’t know the way!”  Oh, Philip, Jesus says. You have been with me all this time; I have been with you all this time. I am the way, the truth and the life. I have been with you before time itself; before creation itself; when you were a mere dot of DNA in the father’s logos, the father’s blueprint for the entire cosmos! Then here it comes – the source of much misunderstanding and trouble: “No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

 

Like Philip, we forget. Jesus, the logos, the christos, and the Father are not “Christians.” The father’s house, which is the entire 14 billion light years of the universe, the kosmos, is not the church. There is enough room for all people and all traditions. It is big enough for us all. Be we Chrisitan, Buddhist, Muslim, Taoist, Jew, Atheist – simply, who and whomever we are. This house is wide enough and broad enough for us all. It all comes from the logos, the Christ.

 

The Church has been fixated long enough on thinking we are the only folks in the house. It is time, Jesus then says, to get past that. To see the light and the life in all people. Just as some mysterious portal opened for a brief period of time at Hartsfield-Jackson International that hot and humid day in Atlanta. Curious, isn’t it. I was in an international airport. People from all over the world come through there. People travel from there to everywhere in the world. “If there were not many places to stay in my father’s home, I would have said to you: I am traveling to prepare a place for you.” For just a moment, I could see the logos, the christos, the light and the life within all of us troubled, and angry, and hot people sitting at a gate – forgetting that Jesus once said, “I am the gate to the fold.” We are not the gate keepers. He is. The Christ is.

 

This world, the kosmos, the father’s house has room enough to accommodate us all. Believe this, says Jesus, and then do the things that I do. And once you see, once you touch, the logos, the bodhichitta heart that is within you and among you all, you will do even greater things than I do!

 

That’s what this is all about: Walking in the Way. Let us remember. We have always been on the way with the christos, with the logos. We all are endowed with bodhichitta, with tender hearts that heal, that shine with the true light, with true life, with noble and awakened life. The light of Christ and bodhichitta shines through all darkness. We are to let it shine through all we say and all that we do. Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine!



[i] Rohr, Richard, The Universal Christ, (Convergent, NY:2019) p.22

[ii] John 1:1-5

[iii] Chodron, Pema, The Pocket Pema Chodran, (Shambala, Boston & London: 2008) p.1

[iv] Ibid, Chodron, pp. 1-2

[v] John 14:1-14

[vi] Swanson, Richard, Provoking the Gospel of John, (Pilgrim Press, Cleveland: 2010)p. 314

[vii] John 10:1-10


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