18 March 2012
The Fourth Sunday in Lent
1).
I want to cast a scene for you.
Picture a mother nursing a baby boy in a rocking chair. It’s evening, a lamp dimly lights the room, the boy is dressed in a one-piece sleeper, the mother in a simple nightgown. You hear the creak of the rocker, the gentle suckle, and a whispered soprano:
For God so loved the world, he gave his only Son, to die on Calvary’s tree from sin to set me free. Some day he’s coming back, what glory that will be! Wonderful his love for me, for me, wonderful his love for me.
Every night it’s the same scene: the baby is held close, feels the warm, sweet milk fill his belly, hears the creaking of the chair and this song. And the boy drifts off to sleep with the words, “wonderful his love for me,” still kissing his ears.
There is a kind of knowing taking place here by this baby boy before language has any meaning for him. This is the knowledge of belovedness, what developmental experts call attachment. You can screw up a lot as a parent, but as long as you succeed in planting this knowing deep within your child, 99% of your God-given work is done.
And for this baby, as language is acquired and begins to carry more and more meaning within his experience of the world, the words of John 3:16 are imbued with the power of his attachment to his mother and to the Divine Reality she embodies to him.
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
2).
But the boy was weaned, and soon the cognitive use of language employed by his intellect became the main way he attached meaning to his life. Slowly a great distance grew between the boy’s conscious experience of the world and the first knowing he ever had. That distance enabled the boy to function in the world, to develop a personality and an identity of his own. This is appropriate and normal. It’s what developmental experts call individuation. And slowly, a veil was drawn over the knowledge of his belovedness. He replaced that knowing with a story about himself and the world in which he needed to earn his belovedness. This particular boy replaced his first knowing with the story that he is loved to the extent that he is approved of, and he built his life according to that false story. He began to develop habits of thought and attention and emotion that reinforced that story in every area of his life. Before he knew it, he was out of college, married, and had kids of his own and the story seemed to be holding up pretty well. There was the occasional anomaly, but there were no serious signs that the fiction was slipping.
But there came a point at which the false story did slip. And when it slipped, the whole shebang came crashing down around him, and the boy was trapped—separated from his first knowledge by a lifetime of mistaken beliefs engrained by habits of thought and attention, of distorted feelings learned through habits of emotion and reaction. He could not reach the knowing of his belovedness for anything more than a fleeting moment at a time. He can’t go back to the rocking chair and listen to the song with infant ears. He is grown. He is banished from the garden.
3)
It is at this point that the boy, the man, comes to the true work of the spiritual life. It is the work of remembering and reclaiming one’s attachment to the Divine, one’s visceral knowledge of belovedness, not by reverting back to infancy and innocence, but by transcending the ego’s false story as a fully grown adult. This work is done with an ancient set of tools that employ language in the service, not of the ego, of the intellect, which is enslaved by the fiction, but of the soul, our true Self, which includes our unconscious and never forgets what it knows.
These tools are myth and symbol. Myth and symbol provide us access to the riches of our inner experience, and they aid the spiritual adult in the transforming work of remembrance and reclamation of her core identity as the beloved child.
4)
Nowhere are these tools seen more clearly in action than in Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus in John, chapter 3. Here we see Nicodemus trapped in our boy’s predicament. His false story isn’t working for him in the way it once did—respected, pious Pharisee on the ruling council of his people—so he comes to Jesus by night seeking answers. And what does Jesus do? He feeds him myth and symbol to lead him into the experience of inner transformation.
* Birth of water and of Spirit
* Being born again from above
* The serpent of bronze lifted up in the wilderness to heal those bitten by snakes
* The Son of Man likewise lifted for all to look upon and be cured
* Light coming into the world, and the struggle against the human love of darkness
Myth and symbol calling for Nicodemus to leave the comfort of his intellect and join Jesus on a transforming journey inward to remember and to reclaim what is veiled from his conscious mind. But Nicodemus, this earnest inquisitor is left perplexed. “How can these things be?” he asks. I hear him saying in this exasperated question, “You are asking too much from me.”
5)
What is Jesus asking of him, of our boy turned man, of all of us? I believe he is asking us to follow him on that inward journey through myth and symbol to the depths of our soul, to our true Self, the beloved child. He is asking us to employ these tools in the difficult spiritual work of reconsidering our stories, of remembering and reclaiming the knowing that is ours from our earliest days.
It is a long and tedious process as we, habit by habit, thought by thought, emotion by emotion subject our fictions, our personal darkness, to the exposure of God’s light, as we turn our eyes upon the Son of Man with hope for healing, and as we accept our birth of Spirit, our lives made new from above.
This is a hard path. It’s no wonder Nicodemus balked at the prospect of following Jesus down to the depths. It feels like we die when our stories die. But this is the death of a fiction that frees us to live our true life in the embrace of our Divine Parent where our soul is at rest in the knowledge of our belovedness. This is life that never ends.
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
