R.I.P DR. BOTTOM

A university friend died suddenly. Simon had sent me off in the direction of writing and performing, because I sang my poems to his guitar playing. I thanked him as I scattered soil on his casket. His face smiles from his Facebook page, but he has left behind a wife with three young daughters.

His was a humanist funeral, which the celebrant said was for those with no strong religious belief. The celebrant also said a person’s death was the last event of a person’s life, which it seems to me is a belief a lot stronger than many religious ones.

I intuitively regard true life as eternal.

Meeting two friends in Whitby last week, we walked some of the Cleveland way along the cliff tops next to the North Sea. Before going our separate ways, we prayed that as we left one anothers’ physical sight, we would not leave one another’s spiritual sight, and they seemed to stay with me while I travelled through train stations hundreds of miles away. How much more is this the case with those who have gone beyond nature.

Our proverb: “Out of sight out of mind”, does not take into account the mind of God, a spiritual sight.

In John’s gospel, after Jesus leaves his disciples physically, the writer stresses his spiritual presence: “If you loved me,” Jesus says: “you would rejoice that I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I … the Holy Spirit will remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you: I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”

The pain of a disciples loss is raw, but Jesus adds this qualification: “I do NOT give to you as the world gives.”

The world gives pain and trouble. Even today the world defines peace as merely a temporary cessation of open hostility, with tension and trouble still expressed or repressed. But true peace flows out from how we define who we are. Creations of God have an eternal nature, which is God.

Pain is real and we miss those we love, but true Love involves letting people be where they are. We will be there soon enough. Some say “Who is Jesus?” is the most important question in the world, but I disagree. “Who am I?” is the really dangerous question.

When the fourteenth century Christian Priest and mystic Meister Eckhart preached that “God and I are One”, he was brought before Pope John XXII and forced to recant. When the tenth century Islamic mystic Al Hallaj used language that claimed an identity with God, he was crucified.

Heresy got Jesus nailed to a cross. Claiming to be God today might not get you that, but it could possibly get you sectioned under the mental health act.

Mystics, however, are not psychotic, because when they say; “I am God”, they are not talking about their individual person, but their truest self.

Roman Catholic Thomas Merton put it clearly like this: “If I penetrate to the depths of my own existence and my own present reality, the indefinable am that is myself in its deepest roots, then through this deep centre I pass into the infinite I am, which is the very name of the Almighty.”

I am is one of the Hebrew names of God, the fullest background consciousness, the true light, the spiritual reality which makes hearts still, unafraid and untroubled.

But it cannot be grasped or defended, which is precisely why Jesus says it is a peace which the world cannot give. We identify with the presence beyond all our death.

St Augustine said: “People travel to wonder at the height of the mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering … [but] God is closer to you than you are to yourself."

Jesus’ physical presence left his disciples, but it wasn't the whole picture, just as it isn't the whole picture when our loved ones leave us physically. One day we will be changed too. “I am going away, and I am coming to you … I have told you this before it occurs,” says Jesus, “so that when it does, you may believe.”

There is a funeral prayer by the Quaker William Penn: “We give them back to thee, dear Lord, who gavest them to us. Yet thou didst not lose them in giving, so we have not lost them by their return. What thou gavest thou takest not away, O Lover of souls; for what is thine is ours also, if we are thine.”

So death is not the last event, it is merely the opposite of birth.
We miss them in time, but Life is outside time, it is eternal.

SILLY SIGNS

There’s a sign in a Paris hotel lobby: “Please leave your values at the front desk.”

And another in the restaurant: “Customers who find our waiting staff rude should see the manager.”

Mistranslations make what is genuine sound silly.

There’s a sign in a Greek hotel: “Visitors are expected to complain at the office between the hours of 9 and 11 daily.”

In a Japanese hotel: “You are invited to take advantage of the chambermaid.”

In an Egyptian hotel: “If you require room service, please open the door and shout room service.”

And outside a dry-cleaners in the USA: “Drop your pants here and you will receive prompt attention.”

Mistranslations make a genuine sign sound silly.

Signs are unusual, even miraculous, and in Hebrew the word miracle means both a sign and a wonder.

God is described in Deuteronomy 26:8 as having brought the Israelites out of Egypt: "with an outstretched arm and with signs and wonders".

But the Jewish Talmud recognizes these signs and wonders as ordinary when it says: “it is as wonderful to watch the support of a family for someone in trouble as it is to see the parting of the Red Sea.”

The fact that life exists at all is a sign and a wonder. The miracle of self-consciousness is that other animals have to be born and live and die, but as far as we know, none of them also have to be aware of it like us. And what is this awareness?

If we are empty of our own spirit, we can be filled with God's. And Jesus was sign and wonder, going around Galilee curing demoniacs, epileptics and paralytics, giving a teaching we now call the Beatitudes, which means Blessednesses – as in ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’.

These Blessednesses: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart,’ etc, were written in Greek, but Greek was not Jesus’ native tongue. So even though some people imagine him waking up one morning and getting out of bed to announce he was fully human and fully divine in one hypostatic union, he walked Galiliee before the Talmud, before Rabbinical Judaism, and before the Christian creeds.

So he would have dreamt in Aramaic, and thought and spoken in Aramaic, which can help us get behind the text a little.

In the New Testament, the Blessings open with the word ‘Makarios’, a Greek translation of the Hebrew word ‘Ashrei’, which in our modern English means: ‘firmly and deeply happy’, firm, as a house is firm.

So what we get is something like: ‘Firmly and deeply joyful are the peacemakers.’ Jesus is holding up a mirror to the world, he is reflecting reality to show us where happiness already is.

‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,’ is the only text to include the phrase: ‘poor in spirit’. Almost. Because it also appears in the Dead Sea scrolls, which helps give us the Aramaic idiom Jesus dreamt in. And once you leave this context, the idiom is difficult to translate. Maybe it’s a bit like the hotel signs again, or like trying to translate: ‘Bob’s your uncle’ or ‘That’s the bees knees’ into another language.

Because an Aramaic phrase which is something like: ‘Ashrei Nedav Sedic’ gets translated through Greek into English to become ‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness.’

But biblical scholars like the one I met on a hot insect filled day above a cool calm sea of Galillee say re-applying the idiom of the Dead Sea scrolls would make it more like: ‘Deeply and firmly happy are those in whom the urgent desire for justice and salvation is so strong that they literally cannot sleep at night.’

They are pursued by that desire, until justice and salvation is spread across the earth, and the Kingdom of Heaven is brought down to earth.

This, of course, is less like a future state and more like holding up that mirror to the world which shows us where happiness already is, having nothing and being empty of everything but the potential of the Kingdom.

It’s so easy to turn the Kingdom of God into something it was never intended to be. I remember being at a service at theological college which was based on these Blessings, and one young man got up to do the prayers. He loudly invoked: “King Jesus” who he announced would destroy followers of other faiths.

But I just can’t imagine Jesus beginning the Lord’s prayer with “Our Jesus”, and announcing he had come to start a religion named after himself, or “live by the sword die by the sword” as early campaign propaganda on the way to later world domination.

The ten commandments for healthy living may begin ‘Thou Shalt Not’, but the Beatitudes are not even suggestions. They reflect on a reality which can still be ours today, empty and open to receive, nothing to claim or cling to and at odds with this world, but also a salt and light to it, like a sign which brings glory to God.

We Christians can be far too clear about what we are trusting. Really to have faith, really to trust in God requires not knowing, because when we know, we no longer need to reach out in trust, to receive the signs and the wonders.