Barry Casey Page 2

23 Jun

MIND THE GAP

In

By Barry Casey … In the London Underground, there are signs cautioning us to “Mind the Gap,” calling us to attention when getting on and off the Tube. It’s a sign that should be posted in a lot of other places in our lives.

There is the gap between our public aspirations to equality and the stark realities of systemic racism, the deconstruction of voting access for millions of people, and the constant inequity between the top one percent in this country and almost everyone else.

There’s the gap between what corporations claim are their highest values of equality, service, and diversity, and the reality of discrimination, indifferent service, and a whiter shade of pale in corporate boardrooms.

There’s the gap between our personal best intentions and what we actually display to the world. And there’s the gap between what we, the church, claim as the kingdom and what we substitute in its place.

Show us the Father, the disciples challenged Jesus. And he replied, “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father.” The disciples, like us, saw only that which fit the scope of their vision. The Father was too sovereign, too remote, too terrifying to be anything less than thunder in the mountains or a mighty wind rolling back the waves of the Red Sea.

Jesus brought the Father across that gap between the human and divine, slipping the invisible footprints of the eternal God into his own along the roads of Galilee. He called his Father by an endearing name. But old habits are hard to break: we can be sure not many prayed to God as “Abba,” or “Daddy.” There was an unbridgeable gap there, fixed and immovable in their eyes—and ours.

How often do we think of Jesus as divine? Most of the time. How often do we see him as fully human? Far less. There is a gap. Yet, as human, he suffered all the temptations we do and more. To whom much is given, much is required.

If we really saw Jesus as human, we would not be surprised when his anger flares up, when he weeps over Jerusalem or when he pounces on the hypocrisy of the religious leaders. These are not weaknesses; they are evidence of an impassioned soul completely immersed in this world, yet constantly breathing the air of transcendence.

Within the spectrum of the visible, Jesus’ divinity ripples, fades, reappears and vanishes. “I and the Father are one,” Jesus claimed, infuriating the keepers of the sanctuary and bewildering the disciples. “Divinity flashed through humanity,” said Ellen White, in a metaphor as visceral as it is inadequate.

We keep trying to summarize Jesus in a thirty-second elevator pitch. It can’t be done. We want something we can carry with us, an amulet for the fingers when we are tempted or grieving. We have the images we’ve gathered from the Gospels: Jesus making his way across the waves to the terrified disciples, rubbing his thumbs across a blind man’s eyes, and enveloped in a brilliant cloud as the voice of God reverberates across the dry hills. These are part of our inner art galleries, companions to the work of artists who have stretched his likeness across their canvasses.

The senses need touch, though. Body yearns for body. We would take the Emmaus Road in the late afternoon, our hearts broken, if we thought there was the slightest chance, we could relive that moment with the mysterious stranger who innocently asked what happened in Jerusalem that weekend.

We are not within the same chronological trajectory as Jesus. There is a gap. He burns across the skies at light speed. When we read his story in the Gospel of Mark, the prose itself is breathless. The narrative runs to keep up with him. He emerges from the wilderness, the habitation of demons, and immediately turns his hometown synagogue upside down. Full of the Spirit, he announces the breaking in of the kingdom. “The time is ripe,” he says, “and God’s kingdom has come close. Change your purpose and trust in the good news.”

A man tortured by possession is in the synagogue screaming in pain. Jesus reaches deep and drags the demon out, leaving the man shaken, but grateful, the onlookers stunned by the authority of Jesus’ word. Across the gap between the stiff sanctity of the sacred service and the raw clawing out of the demon from its midst, the word of Jesus sizzles through the air: “Put on a muzzle and come out of him!”

We come up against a mystery: Jesus and his mission are one and the same. To have some inkling of Jesus as a living, breathing person is to take tentative steps across the gap between this world and the kingdom. He shows us the way to God, not through a formula for successful salvation, but by being the person in whom God was most fully seen. At the risk of cliche, the way God acts in the world is through Jesus as the Way.

We get this not through a painstakingly logical progression of thought, but by a leap of trust across the gap. In Jesus we see God as God wants to be seen and known.

Even so, there is still a gap between Jesus and us—a gap that cradles history and human nature. Over the course of a lifetime, we are drawn to Jesus in a multitude of ways. We may see him in art, sense him in music and poetry, revel in the gospel stories, interpret his words for our situation.

There is always the situation and the story. A gap stretches between the two.

The situation is this moment in history, the events, and structures we find ourselves within. Language, myth, and symbol are how our story creates us in this situation. Our situation and Jesus’ situation differ, not in nature but in degree.

The whole of human life consumed and transformed him in ways that we will likely not experience this side of death. We get glimpses of it, we hear the music occasionally, but the heavens will not part for us as they did for him. The gap remains. Therein lies our glory and our salvation. He has done what we cannot do that we might live through his life.

–Barry Casey taught religion, philosophy, and communication for 37 years in Maryland and Washington, D.C. He is now retired and writing in Burtonsville, Maryland. More of his writing can be found on his blog, Dante’s Woods. His first collection of essays, “Wandering, Not Lost,” was recently published by Wipf and Stock. Email him at: [email protected]

29 Mar

SPARE CHANGE – A MEDITATION IN FRAGMENTS

In

By Barry Casey

1. We take change in three ways: we refuse it, we resign ourselves to it, or we leap at it. Attitude plays a role here. Your mileage may vary.

2. Most change happens without warning. We brace for impact. We anticipate some changes; we plan for them. And many changes happen while we’re worrying about the first two.

3. Sometimes, in order to see the changes, we have to go away and then return.

4. Maybe the change we long for is to return to what is familiar. We look for stasis as soon as possible after change.

5. We are stretched between stability and novelty.

6. Nicodemus is a literalist. He plays it safe. Jesus speaks in metaphors. He risks it all.

7. The prodigal son cannot bear the same old routine every day, so he tears it up and leaves. But, on his way back, all he can think about is his mother’s soup and the way his father throws his head back when he laughs.

8. Jesus’ baptism sets ablaze his experience of God’s showering love. It is a pinnacle moment, one that anyone would long to dwell within forever. But the Spirit drives him, throws him, propels him, into the wilderness. It is a shattering change. The desert is the habitation of demons and Satan is waiting. Every vulnerability in Jesus is savagely probed and battered. All that remains, all he can cling to, is that voice in his head saying, “You are my son, my beloved, and I am well pleased with you.” Satan pushes, Jesus pulls.

9. God changes and remembers everything.

10. We change and forget the changes. If our memories fade, do the changes blur and smear? If we can’t remember a change does that mean, we have not really changed?

11. Are our changes merely adjustments to keep us in place, like treading water to stay afloat or walking backwards on a moving sidewalk?

12. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. (Psalm 51:10) The spirit lay rusting from disuse. It needed a clean heart to work.

13. Heart is stained and broken. Spirit is rusting. Weeds have grown up between them. “I miss you, Heart,” says Spirit. “I am nothing without you.”

14. The prophetic writings are entirely about change. The people have lost their way. They have trusted other gods, gone down a dark path. When this happens the land itself becomes infertile.

15. Change is constant in the Scriptures. Someone is always moving away, reversing course, changing names, repenting. The history of the people of God is the history of constant change.

16. We don’t get used to change, even though it’s happening constantly. Every change rings a bell somewhere that says, “It’s all slipping away. Nothing stays the same. You can’t stop it.”

17. The only change that makes a real difference is knowing that everything put together falls apart.

18. Random notes on change:
personal changes
personnel changes
changes in relationships
changes in my body
change in how I think about the Bible
change in how I imagine Christ
change in how I view God as Father or Mother
change to the church vs change by the church
change over time or cataclysmic change
gradual change—do we notice?
is it really change if we don’t notice it?

19. Heraclitus: You cannot step in the same river twice. God: Behold, I make all things new. Heraclitus: This is what I’m saying.

20.Cease to do evil and learn to do right, pursue justice and champion the oppressed; give the orphan his rights, plead the widow’s cause (Isa. 1:17).

21. Possibly overheard outside a Metro station. “Hey buddy, you got any spare change?” “Sorry, I haven’t got any cash. I have a Starbucks gift card, though.” “Thanks anyway.”

22.Rilke famously murmured in one of his poems, “You must change your life.” I came across this line in a novel where an American mercenary is about to push a nun out of an airplane over the sea off the coast of Nicaragua. She says this to him with a half-smile on her lips. In the novel, the mercenary hears this every night in his dreams.

23. Then one of the seraphim flew to me carrying in his hand a glowing coal which he had taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. He touched my mouth with it and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your iniquity is removed, and your sin is wiped away” (Isa. 6:7).

24.The draw, the excitement of change, is in the anticipation. The imagination blossoms, connections snap together, attention distills the sensory flood to a charged and concentrated fusion. We are, paradoxically, open to everything.

25. A voice says, “Cry,” and another asks, “What shall I cry?” “That all mankind is grass, they last no longer than a flower of the field . . . the grass withers, the flowers fade, but the word of our God endures for evermore” (Isa. 40: 6,8).

26.Listen! I will unfold a mystery: we shall not all die, but we shall all be changed in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye . . . (1 Cor. 15:51 NEB).

27. Tents
Let us say,
the church is not
a fortress. That would be
God says Luther.
No, the church
would be a tent
folded in the night,
carried toward the dawn
in another country,
having done
what we could in this place
filling the stomachs
of the famished, making a wall
against the destroyer of souls,
opening the eyes of the dead,
surprising the living once again.

28.Repentance, in the New Testament, is metanoia. It means “to turn around,” go in the opposite direction. “Change” means doing a 180, retracing one’s steps. But I like what Moses did when he saw the burning bush: he turned off the path he was on and cut a new trail toward the fire.

29.“Change will come,” we are advised. “The wheels turn slowly.” As if it was a machine without a human operator. As if there were no moral currents involved. As if we are looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope. As if Change was an old man with a walker and a heart condition.

30.I say I want the Church to change, to be inclusive, to recognize its diversity. These are phrases: what I really want is to belong without changing.

31. Buber says, “All real living is meeting.” All encounters change us. Therefore, we are continually changing. The Church could be the place where we are not afraid of that.

32. “Be the change you want to make in the world.”

33. With relation to divinity, the Greeks sought perfection, the Hebrews sought dialogue. Only one of these can be achieved. Only one can be improved by change.

34.Change is conflict with “the way things are.” After conflict comes something new. And the new becomes “the way things are.” Rising and falling; is there an end to this?

35. “She had a change of heart,” we say. How casually we speak of such an operation!

36.In math, change is a constant. The same could be said about God.

37. I had a friend who used to say, “Nothing . . . has changed.” Which was true—if you were Nothing.

38. William James did some of the first research in America into attention as a learning component. In order to hold attention, he said, the teacher must change the angle to the subject every few minutes, for without change we cannot learn. The absolutely old cannot hold our attention and the absolutely new cannot either. But the old in the new commands a lively attention. The friction between the old and the new makes the fire.

39.What does it take to make us change? I have been driven by fear to change. I would rather run toward it.

40.“For we are not now as fully whole in Christ as we will be one day.” —Julian of Norwich

41. To change oneself is the result of ambition. To allow oneself to be changed throws open the door of desire that longing is standing behind.

–Barry Casey taught religion, philosophy, and communication for 37 years in Maryland and Washington, D.C. He is now retired and writing in Burtonsville, Maryland. More of the author’s writing can be found on his blog, Dante’s Woods. His first collection of essays, Wandering, Not Lost, was recently published by Wipf and Stock. Email him at: [email protected]

05 Jan

WAS JESUS A SOCIALIST?

In

By Barry Casey — “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” So said Inigo Montoya in one of my favorite movies, The Princess Bride. The word under scrutiny in this article is “socialism,” and it was used in the last U.S. presidential election to demonize, terrify, and coerce people.

Many of those who feared the outbreak of socialism, should the Democrats prevail, came from lives upended by communism, the centralization of power in the state, power to control the economic means of production and every aspect of social interaction. Power to repress religion, censor artistic expression, rewrite history, and co-opt athleticism for the glory of the state. Marx’s dream of the state withering away under communism turned into the nightmare of the state becoming all-powerful. No wonder they were afraid. I have been reading books about socialism, the better to understand and decide whether Jesus was a socialist. Once you enter the forest of such books you learn that you walk always in the hours before sunrise, never in the light of day. The sky, when you can see it through the trees, is an indeterminate shade of gray: it could be cloudy, or it could just lack light. But daylight does not come. The promise cannot be fulfilled.

It’s not that there is a lack of definitions, it’s that there are too many of them. There are so many precisely because there are so many variations of socialism that one definition cannot characterize all of them. The one that seems to me the closest to the ideal is Michael Newman’s. “In my view,” he comments, “the most fundamental characteristic of socialism is its commitment to the creation of an egalitarian society.”

That is a commitment that I share and that I believe most Christians could share. It is a hope that is rooted in the Gospels and in Jesus Himself. And Jesus held it because it was an ancient calling to righteousness that Yahweh, through the prophets, had held up to God’s people.

But we do not get far into discussion of socialism—or any social and political movement, for that matter—without running up against the nature of humanity. What kind of creatures are we?

Christians say we are made in the image of God and that image has almost been effaced in all of us. It’s still there, traces of it, sometimes more in the ideal than in the actual, but it is our highest and best hope for an egalitarian society. A society of people who regard each other the way God regards each person.

Christians thus believe that humanity has incredible potential, but that it is bent away from that potential by sin— by willful disobedience, by ignorance of the truth, by an inability to hit the mark because of our finitude.

Those are three options in this game of life and the one we choose to view ourselves and others by makes a lot of difference in how we go about doing anything in this world. For many Christians, what is most striking about their view of human nature is how low a value they put upon actual, present, living, human beings as opposed to the abstract principle of Life. They echo Linus in the Peanuts cartoon, “I love mankind . . . it’s people I can’t stand.”

Generic socialism, based on a materialistic philosophy of life, looks to the empirical as its foundation and believes that our failings are through ignorance. Knowing rightly makes acting rightly possible, hence the emphasis on education and even re-education.

Ignorance as a cause of injustice is also reinforced by the appalling conditions of poverty and oppression imposed by a system that exploits the many and benefits the few. That is something many Christians can agree with.

Yet, there are plenty of Christians who make the argument that Jesus endorsed capitalism, not socialism. They point to Jesus’ refusal to make a man’s brother split his inheritance with him, and they hold up the parable of the talents as Jesus’ stamp of approval for capitalistic investment. The parable of the Good Samaritan, they claim, calls us to aid those who are hurt, not to fund the welfare state through our taxes.

Likewise, the story Jesus tells of the landowner who hires workers at the end of day and pays them the same as those who worked all day, is a testament to supply and demand, the right of private property, and voluntary contracts, not socialism. They assert that Jesus’ command to help others is rooted in free-market capitalism, the only thing that has generated wealth. Individual responsibility, not coercion by the state, is what Jesus wants.

That would be ideal if all of us, acting in our God-given freedom and from our moral responsibility, were to care for each other. But as we’ve seen in this pandemic, millions of us cannot be relied upon to care for others through the simple act of wearing a mask and social distancing.

Here is the weakness in trying to build a society on the notion that Jesus was—or was not—a socialist: both positions misunderstand moral responsibility. Those for free-market capitalism believe they have few, if any, responsibilities to their larger community, while those for socialism don’t trust individuals to contribute to the welfare of the community.

If our individual measure of success is the ability to make and keep as much money as we can, then capitalism is the best means to that end. If our measure of an equitable society for all is our goal, then some form of democratic socialism is our best bet. The problem is that we want both: unfettered opportunity for individual wealth and no poverty in our society.

The most revolutionary statement of human rights is the Sermon on the Mount. To read its three chapters, Matthew 5, 6, and 7, without sanding down its sharp imperatives is to be twisted like a pretzel. We long for such a world, yet we admit, in frustration and even anger, that it is nigh impossible, given our desire for autonomy and comfort. The closest that some have come to it are the Bruderhof, religious communities that hold no private possessions but share everything in common.

But what makes the Sermon on the Mount so revolutionary, so dauntingly comprehensive, is that Jesus includes actions and intentions. Turning the other cheek springs from gentleness and courage; not giving in to lust begins with respect for another; not making a show of your religion arises from faith and humility. In every measure we could apply, Jesus asks more of us than can be achieved, either through personal will or state requirements.

We cannot legislate morality, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore those whom Jesus especially cared for, much less exploit them. If we could do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly as Christians in our society, those actions alone would redress a multitude of sins. If we can speak clearly and courageously to the systemic injustice that locks in exploitation and misery for millions, the text, “I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me,” becomes our means to that end.

Was Jesus a socialist? No, he was so much more, more than any ideology could contain or aspire to. Light of Light, Day Ascending, Word from the Beginning, Alpha and Omega.

–Barry Casey taught religion, philosophy, and communication for 37 years in Maryland and Washington, D.C. He is now retired and writing in Burtonsville, Maryland. Read more of his work on his blog, “Dante’s Woods.” Casey’s first collection of essays, “Wandering, Not Lost,” was recently published by Wipf and Stock. Email him at: [email protected]

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