Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging (12 page)

Jesus’ compassion moved Him to tell people the story of God’s love. In an idle moment I try to envision what my life would be like if no one had told me the salvation story and no one had taken the time to introduce me to Jesus. If I were not already dead from alcoholism, the impostor would be running wild. As
The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous
tells us, self-will runs riot.

I came across a touching story by Herman Wouk narrated in his novel
Inside, Outside
. His hero was recalling when he had become
B’nai Brith
, a son of the covenant, through his bar mitzva at age thirteen. He then relates:

If Pop hadn’t made the effort I’d have missed the whole point. Anybody can stage a big bar mitzva, given a bundle of money and a boy willing to put up with the drills for the sake of the wingding. The backbone of our religion
 
—who knows, perhaps of all religions in this distracted age
 
—is a stubborn handful in a nearly vacant house of worship, carrying it on for just one more working day; out of habit, loyalty, inertia, superstition, sentiment, or possibly true faith; who can be sure which? My father taught me that somber truth. It has stayed with me, so that I still haul myself to synagogues on weekdays, especially when it rains or snows and the minyan looks chancy.
[16]

The Sinai myth, the key to interpreting Hebrew history and to understanding Jewish identity, is kept alive and passed on by a minyan (quorum) of stubborn old men in an almost deserted synagogue. However muddled their motives and however frustrated they may become by the apathy and indifference of the crowd, they keep telling the story in season and out.

Our impulse to tell the salvation story arises from listening to the heartbeat of the risen Jesus within us. Telling the story does not require that we become ordained ministers or flamboyant street corner preachers, nor does it demand that we try to convert people by concussion with one sledgehammer blow of the Bible after another. It simply means we share with others what our lives used to be like, what happened when we met Jesus, and what our lives are like now.

The impostor recoils at the prospect of telling the story because he fears rejection. He is tense and anxious because he must rely on himself; his power is limited by his paltry resources. He dreads failure.

The true self is not cowed into timidity. Buoyed up and carried on by a power greater than one’s own, the true self finds basic security in the awareness of the present risenness of Jesus Christ. Jesus, rather than self, is always the indispensable core of ministry. “Cut off from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). The moment we acknowledge that we are powerless, we enter into the liberating sphere of the risen One, and we are freed from anxiety over the outcome. We tell the story simply because it is the right thing to do. As the Cambridge classicist F. M. Cornford once said, “The only reason for doing the right thing is that it is the right thing to do; all other reasons are reasons for doing something else.”
[17]

The late Hollywood film director Frank Capra is best remembered for his 1946 movie
It’s a Wonderful Life
. The film is a “‘fantasy about a man who falls into suicidal despair because he thinks he has accomplished nothing of value.’ He ‘is rescued by a guardian angel who shows him, in a gloriously realized dream sequence, how miserable the lives of
his town, his friends, his family would have been had he never existed to touch them with his goodness.’”
[18]

Perhaps when the final curtain falls, you will have told the story to only one person. God promises that one cup of living water drawn from the Fountain and passed on to another will not go unrewarded.

…

Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Sustaining ourselves in the awareness of the present risenness of Jesus is a costly decision that requires more courage than intelligence. I notice a tendency in myself to sink into unawareness, to enjoy some things alone, to exclude Christ, to hug certain experiences and relationships to myself. Exacerbated by what someone has called “the agnosticism of inattention”
 
—the lack of personal discipline over media bombardment, shallow reading, sterile conversation, perfunctory prayer, and subjugation of the senses
 
—the awareness of the risen Christ grows dim. Just as the failure to be attentive undermines love, confidence, and communion in a human relationship, so inattention to my true self hidden with Christ in God obscures awareness of the divine relationship. As the old proverb goes, “Thorns and thistles choke the unused path.” A once verdant heart becomes a devastated vineyard.

When I shut Jesus out of my consciousness by looking the other way, my heart is touched by the icy finger of agnosticism. My agnosticism does not consist in the denial of a personal God; it is unbelief growing like lichen from my inattention to the sacred presence. The way I spend my time and money and the way I interact with others routinely testifies to the degree of my awareness or unawareness.

In
The Road Less Traveled
, M. Scott Peck wrote, “Without discipline we can solve nothing. With only some discipline we can solve only some problems. With total discipline we can solve all problems.”
[19]

With the passing of the years, I am growing more convinced that the discipline of awareness of the present risenness of Jesus is intimately linked to the recovery of passion.

•
7 •

The Recovery of Passion

THE WORD
PASSION
MEANS
basically “‘to be affected,’ and passion is the essential energy of the soul.”
[1]
It seldom strikes us that the capacity to be affected by anything is a source of energy. Yet we find a luminous illustration of this truth in the gospel of Matthew (13:44).

It appears to be just another long day of manual labor in the weary rhythm of time. But suddenly the ox stops and tugs mischievously. The peasant drives his plowshare deeper into the earth than he usually does. He turns over furrow after furrow until he hears the sound of a harsh metallic noise. The ox stops pawing. The man pushes the primitive plow aside.

With his bare hands he furiously digs up the earth. The dirt flies everywhere. At last the peasant spies a handle and lifts a large earthen pot out of the ground. Trembling, he yanks the handle off the pot. He is stunned. He lets out a scream
 
—“Yaaaahh!”
 
—that makes the ox blink.

The heavy pot is filled to the rim with coins and jewels, silver, and gold. He rifles through the treasure, letting the precious coins, the rare earrings, and the sparkling diamonds slip through his fingers. Furtively, the peasant looks around to see if anyone has been watching him. Satisfied that he is alone, he heaps the dirt over the earthen pot, plows a shallow furrow over the surface, lays a large stone at the spot as a marker, and resumes plowing the field.

He is deeply affected by his splendid find. A single thought absorbs him; in fact, it so controls him that he can no longer work undistracted by day or sleep undisturbed by night. The field must become his property!

As a day laborer, it is impossible for him to take possession of the buried treasure. Where can he get the money to buy the field? Caution and discretion fly out the window. He sells everything he owns. He gets a fair price for his hut and the few sheep he has acquired. He turns to relatives, friends, and acquaintances and borrows significant sums. The owner of the field is delighted with the fancy price offered by the purchaser and sells to the peasant without a second thought.

The new owner’s wife is apoplectic. His sons are inconsolable. His friends reproach him. His neighbors wag their heads: “He stayed out too long in the sun.” Still, they are baffled by his prodigious energy.

The peasant remains unruffled, even joyful, in the face of widespread opposition. He knows he has stumbled on an extraordinarily profitable transaction and rejoices at the thought of the payoff. The treasure
 
—which apparently had been buried in the field for security before the last war, which the owner did not survive
 
—returns a hundredfold on the price he had paid. He pays off all his debts and builds the equivalent of a mansion in Malibu. The lowly peasant is now a man whose fortune is made, envied by his enemies, congratulated by his friends, and secure for the rest of his life.

This parable focuses on joyous discovery of the kingdom. Biblical scholar Joachim Jeremias commented,

Let’s transpose the parable of the treasure into a modern key. On July 10, 1993, Leslie Robins, a thirty-year-old high school teacher from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, won $111,000,000 (yep, one hundred and eleven million dollars), the largest lottery jackpot in U.S. history at the time. Immediately he flew from Wisconsin to Lakeland, Florida, to regroup with his fiancée, Colleen DeVries. In a newspaper interview, Robins said, “The first two days we were probably more scared and intimidated than elated. Overall, things are beginning to die down enough where we feel comfortable.”
[3]

Would it be presumptuous to say that Leslie and Colleen have been “affected” by their good fortune and that the winning of the Powerball prize awakened passion in their souls? The identical passion of the peasant in the parable?

Robins had 180 days after the drawing to claim the prize. However, let’s suppose that these two Wisconsin natives are rabid sports fans. They get so engrossed in the Milwaukee Brewers’ chase for the American League pennant and the Green Bay Packers’ run for the Super Bowl that they forget to claim the prize. The 180 days expire, and they lose the $3.5 million (after taxes) annually for the next twenty years.

What would our verdict be on the young couple? Foolish?

My response would be the same, though tempered with understanding and compassion. I have done that very thing. Their blind servitude was sports; mine, alcohol. I can relate to their foolishness. They forfeited a fortune for the Brewers and Packers; I forfeited the treasure
for bourbon and vodka. During those days of sour wine and withered roses when I was stashing whiskey bottles in the bathroom cabinet, the glove compartment, and the geranium pot, I hid from God in the midst of tears and under hollow laughter. All the while I knew the whereabouts of the treasure.

It is one thing to discover the treasure and quite another to claim it as one’s own through ruthless determination and tenacious effort.

The paltriness of our lives is largely due to our fascination with the trinkets and trophies of the unreal world that is passing away. Sex, drugs, booze . . . the pursuit of money, pleasure, and power . . . even a little religion
 
—all suppress the awareness of present risenness. Religious dabbling, worldly prestige, or temporary unconsciousness cannot conceal the terrifying absence of meaning in the church and in society, nor can fanaticism, cynicism, or indifference.

Whatever the addiction
 
—be it a smothering relationship, a dysfunctional dependence, or mere laziness
 
—our capacity to be affected by Christ is numbed. Sloth is our refusal to go on the inward journey, a paralysis that results from choosing to protect ourselves from passion.
[4]
When we are not profoundly affected by the treasure in our grasp, apathy and mediocrity are inevitable. If passion is not to degenerate into nostalgia or sentimentality, it must renew itself at its source.

The treasure is Jesus Christ. He is the kingdom within. As the signature song of the St. Louis Jesuits goes,

     
We hold a treasure

     
not made of gold

     
in earthen vessels

     
wealth untold.

     
One treasure only

     
The Lord, the Christ

     
in earthen vessels.

…

The story is told of a very pious Jewish couple. They had married with great love, and the love never died. Their greatest hope was to have a child so their love could walk the earth with joy.

Yet there were difficulties. And since they were very pious, they prayed and prayed and prayed. Along with considerable other efforts, lo and behold, the wife conceived. When she conceived, she laughed louder than Sarah laughed when she conceived Isaac. And the child leapt in her womb more joyously than John leapt in the womb of Elizabeth when Mary visited her. And nine months later a delightful little boy came rumbling into the world.

They named him Mordecai. He was rambunctious, zestful, gulping down the days and dreaming through the nights. The sun and the moon were his toys. He grew in age and wisdom and grace, until it was time to go to the synagogue and learn the Word of God.

The night before his studies were to begin, his parents sat Mordecai down and told him how important the Word of God was. They stressed that without the Word of God, Mordecai would be an autumn leaf in the winter’s wind. He listened, wide eyed.

Yet the next day he never arrived at the synagogue. Instead he found himself in the woods, swimming in the lake and climbing the trees.

When he came home that night, the news had spread throughout the small village. Everyone knew of his shame. His parents were beside themselves. They did not know what to do.

So they called in the behavior modificationists to modify Mordecai’s behavior, until there was no behavior of Mordecai that was not modified. Nevertheless, the next day he found himself in the woods, swimming in the lake and climbing the trees.

So they called in the psychoanalysts, who unblocked Mordecai’s blockages, so there were no more blocks for Mordecai to be blocked by.
Nevertheless, he found himself the next day, swimming in the lake and climbing the trees.

His parents grieved for their beloved son. There seemed to be no hope.

At this same time the Great Rabbi visited the village. And the parents said, “Ah! Perhaps the Rabbi.” So they took Mordecai to the Rabbi and told him their tale of woe. The Rabbi bellowed, “Leave the boy with me, and I will have a talking with him.”

It was bad enough that Mordecai would not go to the synagogue. But to leave their beloved son alone with this lion of a man was terrifying. However, they had come this far, and so they left him.

Now Mordecai stood in the hallway, and the Great Rabbi stood in his parlor. He beckoned, “Boy, come here.” Trembling, Mordecai came forward.

And then the Great Rabbi picked him up and held him silently against his heart.

His parents came to get Mordecai, and they took him home. The next day, he went to the synagogue to learn the Word of God. And when he was done, he went to the woods. And the Word of God became one with the words of the woods, which became one with the words of Mordecai. And he swam in the lake. And the Word of God became one with the words of the lake, which became one with the words of Mordecai. And he climbed the trees. And the Word of God became one with the words of the trees, which became one with the words of Mordecai.

And Mordecai himself grew up to become a great man. People who were seized with panic came to him and found peace. People who were without anybody came to him and found communion. People with no exits came to him and found a way out. And when they came to him he said, “I first learned the Word of God when the Great Rabbi held me silently against his heart.”
[5]

The heart is traditionally understood as the locus of emotions from which strong feelings such as love and hatred arise. However, this narrow description of the heart as the seat of the affections limits it to one
dimension of the total self. Obviously this is not all we have in mind when we pray, “God, create a clean heart in me,” or what God meant when He spoke through the mouth of Jeremiah, “Deep within them I will plant my Law, writing it on their hearts” (Jeremiah 31:33), or what Jesus meant when He said, “Happy the pure in heart” (Matthew 5:8).

The heart is the symbol we employ to capture the deepest essence of personhood. It symbolizes what lies at the core of our being; it defines irreducibly who we really are. We can know and be known only through revealing the revelation of what is in our heart.

When Mordecai listened to the heartbeat of the Great Rabbi, he heard more than the systole and diastole of a palpitating human organ. He penetrated the Rabbi’s consciousness, entered into his subjectivity, and came to know the Rabbi in a way that embraced intellect and emotion
 
—and transcended them. Heart spoke to heart. Consider Blaise Pascal’s provocative statement: “The heart has her reasons about which the mind knows nothing.”

…

Once, on a five-day silent retreat, I spent the entire time in John’s gospel. Whenever a sentence caused my heart to stir, I wrote it out longhand in a journal. The first of many entries was also the last: “The disciple Jesus loved was reclining next to Jesus . . . leaning back on Jesus’ breast” (John 13:23,25). We must not hurry past this scene in search of deeper revelation, or we will miss a magnificent insight. John lays his head on the heart of God, on the breast of the Man whom the Council of Nicea defined as “being coequal and consubstantial to the Father . . . God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God.” This passage should not be reduced to a historical memory. It can become a personal encounter, radically affecting our understanding of who God is and what our relationship with Jesus is meant to be. God allows a young Jew, reclining in the rags of his twenty-odd years, to listen to His heartbeat!

Have we ever seen the human Jesus at closer range?

Clearly, John was not intimidated by Jesus. He was not afraid of his Lord and Master. The Jesus John knew was not a hooded mystic abstracted by heavenly visions or a spectral face on a holy card with long hair and a flowing robe. John was deeply affected by this sacred Man.

Fearing that I would miss the divinity of Jesus, I distanced myself from His humanity, like an ancient worshiper shielding his eyes from the Holy of Holies. My uneasiness betrays a strange hesitancy of belief, an uncertain apprehension of a remote Deity rather than intimate confidence in a personal Savior.

As John leans back on the breast of Jesus and listens to the heartbeat of the Great Rabbi, he comes to know Him in a way that surpasses mere cognitive knowledge.

What a world of difference lies between
knowing about
someone and
knowing Him!
We may know all about someone
 
—name, place of birth, family of origin, educational background, habits, appearance
 
—but all those vital statistics tell us nothing about the person who lives and loves and walks with God.