Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging (10 page)

Impressions form images that become fixed ideas that give birth to prejudices. Anthony De Mello said, “If you are prejudiced, you will see that person from the eye of that prejudice. In other words, you will cease to see this person as a person.”
[12]
The pharisee within spends most of his time reacting to labels, his own and others’.

The story is told of a man who went to the priest and said, “Father, I want you to say a Mass for my dog.”

The priest was indignant. “What do you mean, say a Mass for your dog?”

“It’s my pet dog,” said the man. “I loved that dog, and I’d like you to offer a Mass for him.”

“We don’t offer Masses for dogs here,” the priest said. “You might try the denomination down the street. Ask them if they have a service for you.”

As the man was leaving, he said to the priest, “I really loved that dog. I was planning to offer a million-dollar stipend for the Mass.”

And the priest said, “Wait a minute. You never told me your dog was Catholic.”

…

At this time the disciples came to Jesus and said, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” So he called a little child to
him and set the child in front of them. Then he said, “I tell you solemnly, unless you change and become like little children you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. And so, the one who makes himself as little as this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”
(MATTHEW 18:1-4)

In the competitive game of one-upmanship, the disciples are driven by the need to be important and significant. They want to be somebody. According to John Shea, “Every time this ambition surfaces, Jesus places a child in their midst or talks about a child.”
[13]

The sharpness of Jesus’ answer in Matthew 18 has not always been appreciated. Jesus says there is no “first” in the kingdom. If you want to be first, become everybody’s lackey; return to your childhood and then you will be fit for the first place. Jesus leaves little room for ambition; and He leaves no more room for the exercise of power. “Lackeys and children are not bearers of power.”
[14]

The power games the pharisee plays, gross or subtle, are directed toward dominating people and situations, thereby increasing prestige, influence, and reputation. The myriad forms of manipulation, control, and passive aggression originate in the power center. Life is a series of shrewd moves and counter moves. The pharisee within has developed a fine radar system attuned to the vibrations of any person or situation that even remotely threatens his position of authority.

What a friend of mine calls “the king-baby syndrome”
 
—the emotional programming that seeks to compensate for the power deficiency we experienced as infants and youngsters
 
—may lead to a preoccupation with status symbols, whether material possessions or cultivating people with economic or political clout. It may motivate a person to accumulate money as a source of power or to acquire knowledge as a means of achieving recognition as an “interesting” individual. The pharisee knows that knowledge can be power in the religious realm. The expert must be consulted before any definitive judgment can be made. This
game of one-upmanship prevents the exchange of ideas and introduces a spirit of rivalry and competition that is antithetical to the un-self-consciousness of the child. Anthony De Mello explained, “The first quality that strikes one when one looks into the eyes of a child is its innocence: its lovely inability to lie or wear a mask or pretend to be anything other than what it is.”
[15]

The power ploys of the pharisee are predictable. However, the will to power is subtle. It may go undetected and therefore unchallenged. The omnivorous pharisee who succeeds in seizing power, collecting disciples, acquiring knowledge, achieving status and prestige, and controlling his world is estranged from the inner child. He grows fearful when an underling swipes his baton, cynical when feedback is negative, paranoid when threatened, worried when anxious, fitful when challenged, and distraught when defeated. The impostor caught up in the power game lives a hollow life with considerable evidence of success on the outside, while he is desolate, unloving, and anxiety ridden on the inside. King-baby seeks to master God rather than be mastered by Him.
[16]

The true self is able to preserve childlike innocence through unflagging awareness of the core identity and by steadfast refusal to be intimidated and contaminated by peers “whose lives are spent not in living but in courting applause and admiration; not in blissfully being themselves but in neurotically comparing and competing, striving for those empty things called success and fame even if they can be attained only at the expense of defeating, humiliating, destroying their neighbors.”
[17]

…

Counselor John Bradshaw, among others, has offered keen insight into the importance of getting in touch with the inner child. In this age of immense sophistication, vast achievement, and jaded sensibilities, the rediscovery of childhood is a wonderful concept and, as William
McNamara pointed out, can only be enjoyed “by unspoiled children, uncanonized saints, undistinguished sages and unemployed clowns.”
[18]

Unless we reclaim our child, we will have no inner sense of self, and gradually the impostor becomes who we really think we are. Both psychologists and spiritual writers emphasize the importance of getting to know the inner child as best we can and embracing him or her as a lovable and precious part of ourselves. The positive qualities of the child
 
—openness, trusting dependence, playfulness, simplicity, sensitivity to feelings
 
—restrain us from closing ourselves off to new ideas, unprofitable commitments, the surprises of the Spirit, and risky opportunities for growth. The un-self-consciousness of the child keeps us from morbid introspection, endless self-analysis, and the fatal narcissism of spiritual perfectionism.

Yet we cannot stop with returning home to our inner child. As Jeff Imbach has noted, “First of all, if the inner child is all that is found inside, it still leaves one isolated and alone. There is no final intimacy within if all that we are reclaiming is ourselves.”
[19]
When we seek the inner child on our spiritual journey, we discover not only innocence but what Jean Gill called “the child in shadow.”
[20]
The inner shadow child is undisciplined and dangerous, narcissistic and self-willed, mischievous and capable of hurting a puppy or another child. We label these unattractive traits “childish” and either deny them or block them out of our consciousness.

When I got in touch with the shadow side of my childhood, much of it was riddled with fear. I was afraid of my parents, the church, the dark, and myself. In her novel
Saint Maybe
, Anne Tyler spoke for the surrogate father Ian Bedloe: “It seemed that only Ian knew how these children felt: how scary they found every waking minute. Why, being a child at all was scary! Wasn’t that what grownups’ nightmares so often reflected
 
—the nightmare of running but getting nowhere, the nightmare of the test you hadn’t studied for or the play you hadn’t rehearsed? Powerlessness, outsiderness. Murmurs over your head about something everyone knows but you.”
[21]

Our inner child is not an end in itself but a doorway into the depths of our union with our indwelling God, a sinking down into the fullness of the Abba experience, into the vivid awareness that my inner child is Abba’s child, held fast by Him, both in light and in shadow. Consider Frederick Buechner’s words:

•
6 •

Present Risenness

STANDING ON A LONDON STREET CORNER,
G. K. Chesterton was approached by a newspaper reporter. “Sir, I understand that you recently became a Christian. May I ask you one question?”

“Certainly,” replied Chesterton.

“If the risen Christ suddenly appeared at this very moment and stood behind you, what would you do?”

Chesterton looked the reporter squarely in the eye and said, “He is.”

Is this a mere figure of speech, wishful thinking, a piece of pious rhetoric? No, this truth is the most real fact about our life; it is our life. The Jesus who walked the roads of Judea and Galilee is the One who stands behind us. The Christ of history is the Christ of faith.

Biblical theology’s preoccupation with the Resurrection is not simply apologetic
 
—that is, it is no longer viewed as the proof
par excellence
of the truth of Christianity. Faith means receiving the gospel message as
dynamis
, reshaping us in the image and likeness of God. The gospel reshapes the hearer through the power of Jesus’ victory over death. The gospel proclaims a hidden power in the world
 
—the living presence of the risen Christ. It liberates men and women from the slavery that obscures in them the image and likeness of God.

What gives the teaching of Jesus its power? What distinguishes it
from the Koran, the teachings of Buddha, the wisdom of Confucius?
The risen Christ does.
For example, if Jesus did not rise, we can safely praise the Sermon on the Mount as a magnificent ethic. If He did, such praise doesn’t matter. The sermon becomes a portrait of our ultimate destiny. The transforming force of the Word resides in the risen Lord who stands by it and thereby gives it final and present meaning.

I will say it again: The dynamic power of the gospel flows from the Resurrection. The New Testament writers repeated this: “All I want is to know Christ and the power of his resurrection” (Philippians 3:10).

When through faith we fully accept that Jesus is who He claims to be, we experience the risen Christ.

God raised Jesus. This is the apostolic witness, the heart of the apostolic preaching. Scripture presents only two alternatives: Either you believe in the Resurrection and you believe in Jesus of Nazareth, or you don’t believe in the Resurrection and you don’t believe in Jesus of Nazareth.

…

For me, the most radical demand of Christian faith lies in summoning the courage to say yes to the present risenness of Jesus Christ. I have been a Christian for more than fifty years, and I have seen the first fervor wear off in the long, undramatic routine of life. I have lived long enough to appreciate that Christianity is lived more in the valley than on the mountaintop, that faith is never doubt-free, and that although God has revealed Himself in creation and in history, the surest way to know Him is, in the words of Thomas Aquinas, as
tamquam ignotum
, as utterly unknowable. No thought can contain Him; no word can express Him. He is beyond anything we can intellectualize or imagine.

My yes to the fullness of divinity embodied in the present risenness of Jesus is scary because it is so personal. In desolation and abandonment, in the death of my father, in loneliness and fear, in the awareness
of the resident pharisee, and in the antics of the impostor,
yes
is a bold word not to be taken lightly or spoken frivolously.

This yes is an act of faith
 
—a decisive, wholehearted response of my whole being to the risen Jesus present beside me, before me, around me, and within me; a cry of confidence that my faith in Jesus provides security not only in the face of death but also in the face of a worse threat posed by my own malice; a word that must be said not just once but repeated over and over again in the ever-changing landscape of life.

An awareness of the resurrected Christ banishes meaninglessness
 
—the dreaded sense that all our life experiences are disconnected and useless. It helps us to see our lives as all of one piece and reveals a design never perceived before.

Do we see these hints of the present risenness of Jesus?

…

The resurrection of Jesus must be experienced as more than a past historical event. Otherwise, “it is robbed of its impact on the present.”
[1]
In his book
True Resurrection
, Anglican theologian H. A. Williams wrote, “That is why for most of the time resurrection means little to us. It is remote and isolated. And that is why for the majority of people it means nothing. . . . People do well to be skeptical of beliefs not anchored in present experience.”
[2]

On the other hand, if the central saving act of Christian faith is relegated to the future with the fervent hope that Christ’s resurrection is the pledge of our own and that one day we shall reign with Him in glory, then the risen One is pushed safely out of the present. Limiting the Resurrection either to the past or to the future makes the present risenness of Jesus largely irrelevant, safeguards us from interference with the ordinary rounds and daily routine of our lives, and preempts communion
now
with Jesus as a living person.

In other words, the Resurrection needs to be experienced as present risenness. If we take seriously the word of the risen Christ
 
—“Know
that I am with you always; yes, to the end of time” (Matthew 28:20)
 
— we should expect that He will be actively present in our lives. If our faith is alive and luminous, we will be alert to moments, events, and occasions when the power of resurrection is brought to bear on our lives. Self-absorbed and inattentive, we fail to notice the subtle ways in which Jesus is snagging our attention.

William Barry wrote, “We must school ourselves to pay attention to our experience in order to discern the touch of God, or what the sociologist Peter Berger calls the ‘
rumor of angels,
’ from all the other influences”
[3]
(emphasis added). Let me offer a concrete example.

Late one Saturday night, I returned home from a speaking engagement. The message on my answering machine was brief and pointed: “Frances Brennan is dying and wants to see you.”

The next day I flew to Chicago, took a taxi to San Pierre, Indiana, and arrived at the Little Company of Mary nursing home around nine p.m. I went up to the fourth floor and asked the night nurse if Mrs. Brennan was still in her old room. “Yes,” she replied, “room 422, straight down the hall.”

This ninety-one-year-old woman, who had been a second mother to me the last forty years, and whose surname I adopted when I legally changed my first name in 1960, was lying in bed with a nun sitting beside her and praying softly. “She’s been waiting for you,” the sister said.

I leaned over the bed, kissed her on the forehead, and said, “I love you, Ma.” She extended her right hand and pointed to her lips. After a few seconds of uncertainty I sensed what she wanted. With the little energy she had left in her frail sixty-two-pound body, she pursed her lips and we kissed three times. Then she smiled. She died a few hours later.

With a heavy heart I drove to Chicago with friends to make the burial arrangements. I decided to stay at a motel on Cicero Avenue because of its proximity to Lamb’s Funeral Home. After checking in at the desk, I took the elevator to the fourth floor, walked down the hall, glanced at the key, and inserted it in the door. Room 422.

Stunned, I dropped my bag on the floor and sank into a soft chair.
There were 161 rooms in the motel. Sheer coincidence? Then, like a bell sounding deep in my soul, these words rose inside me: “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” Outside, a cloud passed and the sunlight burst through the window. “You’re alive, Ma!” My face split into a wide grin. “Congratulations, you’re home!”

Perhaps, as John Shea suggests, the boundary between this life and the next is more permeable than many think. “There are signs. People find them in the ordinary and in the extraordinary. They are open to argument and refutation, but their impact on the ones who receive them can only be welcomed. They confirm our deepest yet frailest hope: our love for one another that says, ‘Thus, thou shalt not die’ is not groundless.”
[4]

My internal skeptic whispers, “Brennan, your cheese is sliding off your cracker.” My resurrection faith hears a rumor of angels, and my eyes see a sunlit communiqué from the risen One, whom Saint Augustine said is more intimate with me than I am with myself.

Frederick Buechner wrote about two experiences that may be whispers from the wings, or they may not be whispers from anywhere. He leaves the reader to decide.

And then another one was just a dream I had of a friend that recently died, a very undreamlike dream where he was simply standing in the room and I said: “How nice to see you, I’ve missed you,” and he said: “Yes, I know that,” and I said: “Are you really there?” and he said: “You bet I’m really here,” and I said: “Can you prove it?” and he said: “Of course I can prove it,” and he threw me a little bit of blue string which I caught. It was so real that I woke up. I recounted the dream at breakfast the next morning with my wife and the widow of the man in the dream, and my wife said, “My God, I saw that on the rug this morning,” and I knew it wasn’t there last night, and I ran up and sure enough, there was a little squibble of blue thread. Well again, either that’s nothing
 
—coincidence
 
—or else it’s just a little glimpse of the fact that maybe when we talk about the resurrection of the body, there’s something to it!
[5]

In reading the Celtic chronicles years ago, I was struck by the clear vision of faith in the church of Ireland in medieval times. When a young Irish monk saw his cat catch a salmon swimming in shallow water, he cried, “The power of the Lord is in the paw of the cat.” The Chronicles tell of the wandering sailor monks of the Atlantic seeing the angels of God and hearing their songs as they rose and fell over the western islands. To the scientific person they were only gulls and gannets, puffins, cormorants, and kittiwakes. “But the monks lived in a world in which everything was a word of God to them, in which the love of God was manifest in accidental signs, nocturnal communiqués, and the ordinary stuff of our pedestrian lives.”
[6]
If the Father of Jesus monitors every sparrow that drops from the sky and every hair that falls from our heads, perhaps it is not beneath His risen Son to dabble in room keys, monogrammed tie clips, and squibbles of thread.

…

Faith in the present risenness of Jesus carries with it life-changing implications for the gritty routine of daily life.

For the sake of clarity and cohesion, we must first consider the meaning of Pentecost. Pentecost is not a feast honoring the Holy Spirit. It is a feast of Christ. It has to do with the Jew, Jesus of Nazareth.
[7]
Pentecost is the feast of Easter shared with the church, the feast of the resurrection power and glory of Jesus Christ communicated to others.

John stated that while Jesus was still on earth “there was no Spirit as yet because Jesus had not yet been glorified” (7:39). Elsewhere in his gospel we read, “It is for your own good that I am going because unless I go, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I do go, I will send him to you” (16:7). Thus, Paul wrote, “The last Adam has become a life-giving spirit” (1 Corinthians 15:45).

The fourth gospel does not set the scene of the gift of the Spirit on the fiftieth day after Easter, but on Easter Day itself: The Spirit is the Easter gift of Jesus the Christ.
[8]
“In the evening of that same day, the first day of the week. . . . Jesus came and stood among them. He said to them, ‘Peace be with you’ . . . After saying this he breathed on them and said: ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. For those whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven; for those whose sins you retain, they are retained’” (John 20:19,22-23).

In the oldest texts of 2 Corinthians 3:17, the risen Jesus is Himself called
pneuma
, Spirit: “Now this Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”

Remember that Paul’s faith in the Resurrection was based not only on the apostolic witness but also on his own experience of the present risenness of Jesus (Acts 9). Christianity is not simply a message but an experience of faith that becomes a message, explicitly offering hope, freedom from bondage, and a new realm of possibility. As Roger Garaudy, the famous communist philosopher, once remarked about the Nazarene, “I do not know much about this man, but I do know that his whole life conveys this one message: ‘anyone can at any moment start a new future.’”
[9]

The present risenness of Jesus as “life-giving Spirit” means that I can
cope with anything. I am not on my own. “I pray that you may realize . . . how vast are the resources of his Spirit available to us.” (See Ephesians 1:18-19.) Relying not on my own limited reserves but on the limitless power of the risen Christ, I can stare down not only the impostor and the pharisee, but even the prospect of my impending death. “[Christ] must be king until [God] has put all his enemies under his feet and the last of the enemies to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:25-26).