Challenging Illusions

Challenging Illusions - Sermon for 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Preached at St Peters on Willis Street – Sunday 12 February 2012
Rev’d Sande Ramage – sande@spiritedcrone.com -

To read more of Sande's work and her blog on life and meaning, check out her website or email her sande@spiritedcrone.com.

Challenging Illusions

Doctors who use heroic measures to keep people alive are like theologians who persist in dallying with an after life. With the best of intentions, both are playing fast and loose with illusions, helping us avoid a crucial encounter with death that brings sense to our living.

Help me, fix me, and make it better is the central, repetitive theme of Mark’s gospel. The saga dashes along with one demanding petitioner after another wanting action from Jesus before he exits exhausted, to be crucified and buried. A cryptic gospel rescued rather too conveniently by the resurrection postscript.

Even although there were no blood tests, CT scans, MRIs or surgery in 1st century Palestine, people seemed remarkably like we are today, demanding instant answers and a quick fix from the hotshot healer of the moment.

During an animated discussion about healing the other day one of my colleagues started drawing a circle on a piece of paper. Then she folded the paper in the centre so that it looked as though the circle was broken. ‘I think healing’s like this’, she said, unfolding the paper. ‘It’s when the circle is complete.’ ‘So’, I said, trying to get my head around what she meant, ‘that means that all the illness and dis-ease, and even death, is still in the circle’. ‘Yes’, she said, ‘I suppose it is.’

Being able to see things differently is a great approach when we start reading Mark’s story of Jesus. Think Nigella Lawson here. While she might write a wonderful recipe for us, she’s always going to throw bits and pieces together in a quite unique way that means a meal is never going to look the same way twice. The point of a story, like Nigella’s cooking, is to take us places we’d never dreamt possible.

When I was a school chaplain, my teenage students never dreamt they’d be interested in the bible but once into reading the whole of Mark on the trot they became entranced with the stories. ‘Does Mark think we’re thick or something’, said one bright spark, ‘how come he has to keep repeating the same kind of stories over and over?

Even understanding that the repetitive nature of the stories might have something to do with writing out of an oral culture, my student’s quip has stuck with me for years and so this week I set myself the task of reading Mark straight through again to see what demanded attention.

Yes, it is repetitive. So, if I don’t think the writer is trying to convince me that Jesus is a supernatural wonder worker; perhaps I need to look at the crowd to get another perspective. That was sobering. They come across like incompetent, dependent creatures always crying out for help and seemingly unable to help themselves.

Strangely enough, our own story reads that way too. Doctors are in short supply. GP surgeries and emergency departments struggle to keep up with an endless flood of patients. Interestingly enough, most people aren’t sick enough to be admitted to hospital but, as one doctor said, a test will prove reassuring that you’re not going to die, just yet.

My friend Jay lived every day with an unremitting sense of melancholy that had gone on most of his life. Suicide was always very close to Jay. As he put it, one of a range of rational options.

Some of Jay’s friends couldn’t understand his discontent. Although they recognised the struggles of his life, they saw him as someone who could put his mind to anything and frequently did. They believed his troubles were the result of a chemical imbalance and for a long time Jay believed this too. However, after many years of this approach, he knew it hadn’t changed his deep sense of dis-ease about life. From his point of view, none of that did anything for his soul, so he stopped crying out to doctors to heal him.

Combined with that, a series of unexpected life events took Jay into an intense dark night of the soul. Part way through all light disappeared. His friends were frightened and wanted him to get medical help but Jay responded by going deeper and deeper into contemplation of his death. He read about it, explored varying views, and gave himself permission to end his life.

Then slowly, a strange thing happened. It wasn’t that the darkness disappeared, or lifted, or went away. It was that the light and the darkness came together and co-existed. Like the circle my colleague drew.

According to Jay, what made the difference was that he honestly faced his mortality. He came to understand that if he was to live soulfully, all of his living had to be informed by the inevitability of his death stripped of illusions. These days he says that the painful exploration of the deep has enriched his living, his choices and his perspective.

Although most people don’t want to think about it, or intentionally do what Jay did, dying is what we’re all destined for. It’s right there in Mark’s story. After three years of frantic activity, Jesus is finished, gone. So, if this ancient book of wisdom is not trivialising the human condition by promising the impossible then I have to tangle with this death scene.

Despite our best efforts at trying to unlock these stories with academic tools, we’re always going to be defeated because these are difficult, slippery stories about the mysteries of life. Writers take us down obscure pathways and creep up to the main event careful not to shine too bright a light on the shy truths that we’re not that keen on knowing. Stories like these flow out of the unconscious of the author and from the greater unconscious of the world. They have a life of their own.

Thomas Moore, former monk, theologian, psychotherapist and best selling author tells an ancient gnostic story in his book, Care of the Soul in Medicine. In this story Jesus goes by the name of Lithargoel. It’s a word that breaks down into the Greek words Lithos (stone) and argos (silver) and the Hebrew el (angel). Jesus is presented as the shining spirit stone. Around his waist he wears a packet of medicine. He is a healer and promises to give people pearls. But he means himself. He is the pearl, he is the medicine.

With our noses pressed to the page it’s hard to see past the wonder worker riding to the rescue even although that’s not consistent with the story of the incarnation that emerges from the Bethlehem stable. That story is about a fragile human baby that is utterly dependent on others for his existence. He can’t grow up to be a wonder worker, any more than any doctor in our time is one.

In the story today and in all the stories in Mark, the central feature is that, on the whole, Jesus shows up. Although sometimes angry, tired and frustrated with people who can’t see their own potential and who don’t believe in themselves, he persists in showing up. He is vulnerable, loving, compassionate, openhearted and accepting with a mysterious connection to that which is beyond. He appears as more than human; an arresting presence that draws us in and enables a whole new perspective to unfold. What that presence allows people to become is miraculous.

I am poignantly aware of this miracle as I sit beside people struggling with disease or dying. Yes, scientific interventions are wonderful but a significant difference is made by presence; the presence of vulnerable human companions who are prepared, when all illusions are gone, to walk the path to the cross with nothing to offer but themselves.

This divine presence is what is so outrageous, so unpalatable and quite beyond belief but to get to it you have to wade through the illusions of wonder workers, saviours and eternal life. To stop trying to pretend about or extend life, whether it’s through medicine or theology and instead, live within what is.

At that moment of discovery, expect a great silence for this is where the great wound of humanity lies open and weeping. But do not clutch at it and try to stitch it up. As Anthony de Mello says, ‘Prayer, love, spirituality and religion are about ridding yourself of illusions. When religion brings that about, that’s wonderful, wonderful! When it deviates from that, it is an illness, a plague to be avoided. Once illusions have been abandoned, the heart is unobstructed, and love takes hold. That’s when happiness occurs. That’s when change takes place. And only then will you know who God is..’

May we all know and be the Divine presence within.

A pdf of the above sermon is available here.