Monday, July 8, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Joe times three
Thus saith the Lord, “I will allure her. I will lead her into the desert and speak to her heart.”
Professor Cone posited three stages of life, which we enter and eventually exit, although God sets much of this in motion without us having the slightest idea. However, we can consider these stages and the value of each, and compare it to other stage theories, and pray to be led in and out of each at the time God chooses.
Start with Joe. Dr. Cone showed a picture of Joe #1 on his screen.
Joe #1 is born and gradually develops ambition, first to be a firefighter, later to be a Greek scholar, eventually to graduate. After graduation he expects that a good job will make him happy. He expects that a wife and children will make him happy. He expects that an annual vacation and regular visits to the golf pro will make him happy. Lots of money? Hardly, not if he’s a Greek scholar. But enough … money, enough … success, enough … marital and familial bliss … hmmm.
Joe #1 is still not happy. He is looking for the exit to his unhappy life. He watches late night TV comedy and hankers to be like Steven Colbert. Steven Colbert seems happy, even if the world betrays his expectations over and over. So Joe turns over a leaf, applies for an exit visa to become Joe #2. He vows to give up his innocence and stop acting like Pollyanna, stop expecting the world to provide what he needs to be happy. He becomes skeptical of preachers, and worship, and prayer, although he swam in those religious pools all his life. He flounders now, can barely keep moving in the water. He never learned how to simply float, to be still, satisfied with the surface, letting God deal with the deep. Now as he tries to dive he can’t really hold his breath, not for long, and he comes up gasping. Angry. God, you are one bad dude.
And those he expected to move his mountains on earth, you are bad dudes too. I want nothing more to do with any of you. I have become a cynic and joined the Association. Its slogan is simple: “Life sucks! And then you die.”
Joe #2 suffers from EYES WIDE SHUT.
In his own stages of development, Richard Rohr suggests that to move on, to get a second exit visa, there needs to be a hurricane or tsunami or some great almost-death: Normally a major defeat, shock, or humiliation must be suffered and passed through to go beyond this stage.
This should not be a surprise to anyone who has read the bible much. In the Bible stories people die all the time, without recourse to any sense of justice or redemption here on the fallen earth. Death takes dominion and laughs all the way to the bank. Those who wrote and sang the psalms mourned this, and claimed God’s promises to protect and redeem them.
You walk with me beside still waters. You restore my soul. In the valley of death I shall fear no evil, for you are with me and prepare a table for me in the presence of my enemies.
No matter. Death comes for the archbishop. My friend Nancy fell and waited twelve hours trapped in her tub for a neighbor to come home and hear her cries. Her fainter and fainter cries. Does that count as crisis?
Course it does. God is good all the time, and all the time God is good. Believe it. Live it. Oh my, that’s hard. But we can do it.
Annie Dillard in For the Time Being shares the observation of a wise and formerly well-known rabbi:
Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav said that God studies Torah three hours a day. The Talmud notes that God prays, and puts on phylacteries. What does God pray? “May it be my will that my mercy overcome my anger.”
Jesus breaks into our faint hope for mercy with an impossible command.
Love your enemies.
The “spirituality of self-improvement” takes a penultimate death blow. All alone in the world, in the tub, in my life, I’m supposed to love my enemies?
No way.
Lord, have mercy!
So Joe gathers his experiences and gives himself up. This changes things. He determines to  stop choosing to be just a cynical son of late night sarcasm. He turns over several new leaves. He listens to WBGL, and falls asleep to Max McLean reading the psalms.
Still this might take awhile, because Joe is constantly taught by other “self-improvers” that he should reject suffering, he’s allergic, he doesn’t deserve to suffer. He’ll be tempted to remember how great and entitled he is. His shopping list prayers which thrive on self-pity horn in on his confessional conversation with the one he wants to call Abba.
My daughter has just died. Come and lay your hand on her. A woman bleeding for twelve years came up and touched the tassel on his cloak.
Joe is immune to none of this. Again the rubber skids off the road, another “major defeat, shock or humiliation” flies into his face. This time he cannot cannot Cannot! clean it off.
Ah! God has granted Joe a second exist visa. Oops, I mean exit visa. Exit to existence … all the time God is good.
Now Professor Cone shows a picture of Joe #3 on his screen. This guy seems to be smiling, not in any hurry. He has more than enough. His life isn’t teetering on success or health or understanding, he just sits there in the morning sun.
How did he come to be found?
He is settling in slowly into settling only for God, for YAHWEH, not the god of his own making. He knows and names his idols and can confess them to another person, and to God when he prays. His conversations with Yahweh are rich and mutual, although it takes awhile for that to happen, even now.
This happened to Joe, it can happen to me. It can happen to Professor Cone. And it can happen to you.
Thus saith the Lord, “I will espouse you to me forever. I will make you my spouse in right and in justice, in love and in mercy. I will marry you and be faithful to you as long as we both shall live. And you shall know the Lord.”
 (Hosea 2, Psalm 145, 2 Timothy 1, Matthew 9)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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