“Had I but wings like a dove,
I would fly away and be at rest.
Far away I would flee;
I would lodge in the wilderness.”
This is the temptation, to flee from all that overwhelms. To seek rest ‘away’ from everything. Alas, though, we bring everything with us when we try to flee. As much as we try we can’t run away from each other and we can’t run away from ourselves. That’s why the wilderness is never a far away place. It’s always the place where God always is, waiting for us to take notice.
The world can seem terrifying in the immensity of its brokenness, and we like to point our fingers at what or Who we consider to be the causes – the wrong political party, the wrong president, the wrong candidate, the untrue religion, the wrong side of the tracks, a bad upbringing, the wrong skin color, the wrong sexual orientation, the wrong gender, the wrong goal, and on and on and on. James is trying to clarify for us this wrong-headedness, or perhaps WRONG-heartedness in his epistle (Jas 4:1-10):
Beloved:
Where do the wars and where do the conflicts among you come from?
Is it not from your passions that make war within your members?
You covet but do not possess.
You kill and envy but you cannot obtain;
you fight and wage war.
You do not possess because you do not ask.
You ask but do not receive, because you ask wrongly,
to spend it on your passions.
Adulterers!
This is quite a Mardi Gras send off into Lent, but there you have it. We like to blame the unsettledness or many times outright loathing and hatred for the situations and circumstances in this world on externalities that we can categorize, describe, and evaluate. This person thinks this way and behaves in such and such a manner. The subtext here is that ‘I don’t think or act that way, my way of thinking is correct, and therefore that person is wrong and to be avoided, or excluded, or even killed.” James minces no words when he poses this: “is it not from your passions that make war within your members?”’ Here the word passion is not about having an exuberant spirit for life, but has more to do with the suffering that we bring upon ourselves and each other when we cling to habits or mental fixations from which we think and act.
There is a sense that we have it all ‘wrong.’ And the result of this is a ‘war within our members’ – both metaphorically and quite literally! The injustices that we inflict upon each other are the ongoing casualties of this war. Here is James’ exhortation with regards to this war WITHIN ourselves.
So submit yourselves to God.
Resist the Devil, and he will flee from you.
Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.
Cleanse your hands, you sinners,
and purify your hearts, you of two minds.
Begin to lament, to mourn, to weep.
Let your laughter be turned into mourning
and your joy into dejection.
Humble yourselves before the Lord
and he will exalt you.
This doesn’t sound like too much fun, at least from the standpoint of what our society and culture promote through striving consumerism and the ideology of more is better, with more running almost exclusively along the capital gains line. Is James telling us that having things is bad? I don’t believe so. He may however be spelling out how there is a wrong-heartedness going on in our strivings and programs for happiness. The line that strikes me most here is “…and purify your hearts, you of two minds.”
What would it mean to ‘submit’ to God, to draw so near to God so that God draws near to you. Here is the wilderness close at hand. God is already here – otherwise we would be gone totally without a trace! It seems to be a question about seeing and actively manifesting that God IS near now! And whatever blocks we put up to realize this constant presence of God in our midst serve as blindnesses and feel like wilderness in the worst sense. The wars we create within ourselves and with each other contribute to the desolation that we feel because of the eternal incapability of anything BUT authentic relationship with God in each other to give us the rest we desire – the abundant lodging in the wilderness. The wilderness does not have to frighten us. As we will hear heading into Lent, it becomes the most sacred transformative space that we could possibly even imagine.
How do we ask the right questions, as James puts it? In Mark’s Gospel, we have Jesus, just after having shared with his followers where the path will lead for him (and ultimately them also), being confronted with his disciples arguing over which of them is greater?
They came to Capernaum and, once inside the house,
he began to ask them,
“What were you arguing about on the way?”
But they remained silent.
For they had been discussing among themselves on the way
who was the greatest.
Then he sat down, called the Twelve, and said to them,
“If anyone wishes to be first,
he shall be the last of all and the servant of all.” (Mk 9:30-3)
Perhaps in one sense, the disciples have the subject of the question correct, in that they are placing the question on a WHO, but they then succumb to the whole game of comparison listed above where one is better than another and thus someone gets pushed down and someone gets elevated. This is what James in his letter above is calling “you of two minds.” How is this purified, or made whole – One? Jesus tries to quash this two-mindedness with again something that does not make the ego jump for joy – the first shall be last! We have to get to ONE, meaning we have to converge in such a way that the dignity of each is reflected in all! NOTHING is lost! This is Work! This is the Work of Christ in us!
Taking a child, he placed it in their midst,
and putting his arms around it, he said to them,
“Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me;
and whoever receives me,
receives not me but the One who sent me.”
The ‘nothingness’ of the child in Jesus’ society is a radical overturning of striven-for seats of honor. The playing field is levelled; the wilderness spreads itself out. Will there be a truce in this war? To be nothing, to receive nothingness is not a formula for self-annihilation, but instead, the only real recipe for abundance. When the two-ness of our minds and hearts – the dualistic posturing where all value is determined by a dominating hierarchy of values – can become one, then placement is vastly done away with because wild spaciousness is born wherein the beauty of diversity enhanced by each holy interaction of everyone and everything can come to fullness.
From a Christian perspective, this is not a pie in the sky, but rather a cross in the ground. Can we allow our questions about value flow through the personhood that we have in God in and through each other? How can we bring those life and death questions to the forefront and trust that the intersections of our lives, which are by the way inescapably inevitable, break through the ground, painfully at times, so that something radically new will sprout?
The German mystic, Jacob Boehme captures this birth and death, young and old nondual paschal experience in a beautiful quote:
“…for it is the young tree borne out of the old root which will illuminate what the old tree has been in its wonders”[i]
“We have a wilderness God who does not abandon us but does call us into wider and wilder realms that we have yet to imagine. And these wondrous possibilities can only become real to the extent we begin to live and die in them – really embody them – yes like a Child. If you’re thinking of giving something up for lent – Give up Everything and Give up Nothing…just sit with that.
[i] Jacob Boehme, THE WAY TO CHRIST (Paulist Press: 1978)