Today’s Gospel holds a tension that many of us know all too well. Jesus and the disciples are rushing about, so busy, so inundated, that the Gospel tells us “there was no time to eat.” Maybe you know something of that pressure, in your life today, or in your life of yesteryear. Thankfully here in Albuquerque, we live in the land of mañana. It is hard to imagine a pace frenzied enough to keep us from taking a break for green chile, (or red, if that’s your thing). But even so, the report of the apostles of busyness rings true.
I want to posit that for Jesus, today’s story is about more than lunch. Jesus takes his disciples into the boat. They head toward a deserted place. Within the Gospels there is this tension, between action and contemplation, between work for healing and space for prayer. The tension is especially present in today’s text, but it is there throughout Jesus’ story. Even in Holy Week, Jesus spends time in the garden before his arrest.
The Role of Contemplation
We tend to treat spirituality like a hobby, a side project. Church is often seen as one more club to which we belong. Like soccer, or stitching, or an art society, our culture treats faith like a membership organization, an interesting facet to our personality, a quirk. But faith does not reliably stay on the sideline. In the big moments, in the hospital corridors, when we face loss or change, we turn to faith. We turn to the system of belief and the relationship of prayer. We turn toward the community who support us. In the big moments, we turn to God, and practicing faith between the big moments can help us know how and where to turn.
We Christians often call this turn to God by a funny name. We call it “contemplation.” Think on that word a moment. Contemplation asks us to slow down, to build capacity for subtlety and nuance, to listen. At church we advertise opportunities to practice contemplation. We have groups that gather, which all might make it again sound like a club, for certain people with certain interests. But contemplation, for Christians is more than a hobby. It is the hunger we have for the deserted place. Contemplation is the inner drive we have, the desire for spaciousness, for room to breathe, reflect, and simply to be with God. Contemplation is, really, a form of attentive longing.
The former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said it this way:
“contemplation is very far from being just one kind of thing that Christians do: it is the key to prayer, liturgy, art and ethics, the key to the essence of a renewed humanity that is capable of seeing the world and other subjects in the world with freedom… To put it boldly, contemplation is the only ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and our advertising culture and our chaotic and unexamined emotions encourage us to inhabit. To learn contemplative practice is to learn what we need so as to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly. It is a deeply revolutionary matter.
Contemplation, in a society obsessed with image and competition and busyness, in a society that is so frantic doing and buying, contemplation is a revolutionary matter.
How do you escape the busy? How do you find the space? It isn’t easy. Even Jesus today longs for the space more than he is actually able to find it. But the longing itself matters. Attending to the inner call for slowness and space matters. Taking even a moment to breathe, matters.
St. Paul answers the question: “Why Jesus?”
I don’t know about you, but the pace of the news over the past few weeks has felt even more harried than usual. The state of the campaigns for president left me exhausted every time I tuned in.
This week especially, I found St. Paul’s words so necessary. Speaking to a group of ethnic and religious outsiders, St. Paul talks about citizenship. He uses the language of circumcision, which was the language naming insiders and outsiders among his own people, in his own day.
But don’t let that language distract you. Paul is wrestling with questions we might recognize, questions which may matter again in the 21st century in ways they haven’t in the two millennia since St. Paul’s time. Paul is writing to the Ephesians to answer questions like: “Why does Jesus matter? Why would anyone choose to be Christian?” Why would I belong to a church, when doing so makes me seem strange, at best? Why, in this pluralistic world, with so many religious options, would I choose Jesus, especially when doing so is unpopular? As Flannery O’Conner once wrote, “you shall know the truth, and the truth will make you odd.” But, in this busy complex world of ours, what does Jesus offer?
Paul’s answer to the Ephesians, “in Christ God announced peace.” God announced a peace so profound that those who were called strangers are no longer strangers. Those who are called aliens, another translation is “those who are called immigrants” are no longer. In Christ we are all fellow citizens.
In a week where immigrants have been demonized on the national stage, in a week where leaders of both parties are competing to look tough on border policy, in a week where rhetoric has been used to dehumanize, to blame, and to divide, Paul tells us that our faith is one which is not about division. Ours faith proclaims a peace humans can’t often even imagine. Ours is a faith that breaks open our binaries: immigrant/citizen, woman/man, Ephesians/Roman. Some scholars say that these words of Paul, all are one in Christ Jesus, were a form of an early creed. I wish we still had that creed in our prayer books. Immigration status does not matter to God. Christ’s peace is for all. All. For Paul all our divisions are less compelling than the unity, the peace of Christ. We are one body, in Christ, with humans of every tribe, and language, and people, and nation. We are all citizens of God’s reign. God’s peace is a peace which passes all understanding.
How do we seek that peace in our harried word? How do we remember our deeper citizenship? How do we remember the ties that unite us are deeper than the language which divides?
Faith, amidst the rhetoric of our world, is more than a hobby. Finding stillness and grounding is about more than what we do with 20 minutes on a Thursday morning or an hour and change on a Sunday. Our faith is how we stay sane in a world with insane priorities. Our faith is about seeking the peace that St. Paul talks about. Our faith is about learning to long for a deeper wholeness when all our world offers is more painful division.
Acknowledging our Longing
The irony of today’s Gospel is that the longing for peace, the longing for stillness, doesn’t seem to pay off. Jesus and the disciples plan to find an empty place, away from the crowds, and the crowds stay ahead of them. But, notice, something still shifts in the text.
Even acknowledging the need they have for stillness, the need the disciples have to get away to reflect and pray seems to have an effect. There are times when our busyness isn’t about us, it’s not about puffing up our image of importance. There are times when we are busy because we are attending to the needs of our neighbors. That word may be where the subtle shift happens. Before they take a break. Before they get on the boat, all these people coming seem to the disciples to be strangers, to be other. And while they do not have the retreat they embark on, even acknowledging the need to pause allows perspective to shift. Just acknowledging their need for contemplative space has an effect. Because as soon as they land on that shore, Jesus and his disciples are healing the sick. And Mark tells us, Jesus has compassion. The disciples are no longer bothered by strangers. For Christians, there are no strangers.
Spirituality is more than a hobby. Faith is more than a sport that we play at certain fixed hours. Yes, practice helps. Seeking stillness, spending time in contemplative prayer matters. Finding that 20 minutes a day, when we can, helps. Coming to church matters. Coming to this radical table where all are welcome, where we break bread with those with whom we disagree, where we share a common cup with folks we wouldn’t encounter anywhere else, it matters. Practicing our connection to God matters. But spirituality is about more than practice. This is not all just a rehearsal.
At its heart, spirituality is about learning to attend to the deep longing within us. We long for a peace that the world cannot give. We long to know the height and depth and breadth of our connection with God and one another. There is, within each of us, a hunger. And Contemplation is attentive longing.
Our world does its best to distract us, to tell us the hunger can be satisfied with one more purchase, with one more vote in favor of a certain policy. But the hunger persists.
Within each of us there is a hunger, for the deep and abiding peace of God, which cannot be purchased, cannot be elected. No company or political party can give us this peace. The peace we long for can never fully be realized in our lives, and yet the peace of God is always there. If we simply acknowledge the longing, we are already on our way. Contemplation is a revolution because it sets us free, free to respond to our days not with frenzy, but with compassion.
Mike Angell 