BILLTESKA

I once heard the late Russian émigré theologian, Fr. John Meyendorff, explain the difference between the way Eastern and Western Christianity tend to look at the Fall. For the West, it’s forensic: Adam sinned by disobedience and got what he deserved, the death sentence for himself and all of his descendants. Death is the result of sin. The Orthodox East, by contrast tends to think in more mystical and cosmic terms: by eating the forbidden fruit, humanity acquired the knowledge of good and evil. That is, we entered into an intimate relationship with good and evil; we began to have a conscience; we began to have an uncomfortable feeling that it isn’t ok to walk around naked, and we began to be ashamed of some of the things we do. We also became aware that one day we would die.

Our reflection on our own mortality produced every kind of defense mechanism our clever human imagination could contrive to take our mind off our newborn anxiety. These distractions are what we call sin: lust for power and for pleasure and for possession ~ even for knowledge ~ for anything, fury when we are frustrated at getting them, and cold hatred of those who seem to be better at getting them than ourselves. Fr. Meyendorff offered an analogy: We are like two prisoners in a cell with food enough to sustain only one, so they fight to the death. One murders the other in order to survive. Captivity to death produces sin. Sin is the result of death.

Today’s passage from Wisdom is a pretty horrifying description of this captivity. The wicked, who are convinced that this life is all there is, decide that they might as well whoop it up and “gather rosebuds before they wither” (a metaphor that was later made famous by a 17th Century English poet). But the desperate dark side of this merry-making is made clear in the older passage. The wicked cannot get enough of anything to quell their anxiety. And they look with murderous rage on one who is not anxious, not devoured by their addiction, and they plot all kinds of cruelty against him. This insanity is the original meaning of the term passion in its spiritual sense. It means suffering, and it is precisely the kind of insatiable craving that Buddha taught was the source of all suffering. Animals are not capable of this kind of wickedness, because animals, being ignorant of it, are not captives of death, as we are. Animals may be subject to emotion, but not to passion.

Somebody once asked me, in a jocund way, “So what’s the good news?” I thought fast and replied, “Well, your sins are forgiven and you’re going to live forever.” (He wasn’t expecting that, but then he DID ask for it.) “Boy, that really IS good news!” he said. And if a person can accept it, can trust it ~ if one can change one’s mind about being the captive of death: if one can, in scriptural language, repent and believe the gospel, then anxiety evaporates and sin is put to flight. There is no more reason for dispute or conflict, or covetousness and envy, or lust for anything, or violence and murder and war. Because there is no more anxiety, no more craving, no more passion, all these absorptions begin to seem infantile and a little silly for grown-ups to bother with.

I think this is what James means when he says that friendship with the world is enmity with God.

Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you?

[once again: among you, perhaps]

You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And
you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and
conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive,
because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.
Adulterers! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with
God?

The world here is, of course, not creation but the reality of human life as apprehended by human consciousness in thrall to death. And the unanswered prayers are not our petitions in our necessities, but unworthy appeals for help in denying death by acquisition, on the order of Janis Joplin’s memorable song: “O Lord, won’tcha buy me a Mercedez-Benz?”

The disciples arguing among themselves on the way to Capernaum are still in that death-bound consciousness. Greater and lesser prestige still means quite a bit to those ambitious young men. Harmless enough, even kind of cute. But they have just taken the first step in the direction of hell: by their quarrelling, they are summoning death to make a covenant with him. Jesus’ answer to their folly is poetic. They are acting like children, so he picks up a child and advises them to become even more like one. I think He was teasing them. Childhood was considered an unfortunate condition. Adults did not adopt a sentimental and indulgent attitude toward children, and rabbis did not dote on them in public. No one would voluntarily TRY to assume the status of a child. I’ll bet part of what our Lord was trying to convey was a chiding comparison between the contumacious disciples and the wretched child. “You guys are just like him. You have reduced yourselves to his status by your infantile competition and disputing.” By this little performance-art parable He was saying “You know what? With all your anxiety about status, you are placing yourselves on the level of this urchin. By seeking the first places, you have secured for yourselves the last! But, hey, go for it! Down at his level of innocence, there is also no anxiety, only boundless hope in the invincibility of life and the triumph of love.”

If one really adopts that consciousness, that trust in the benign rule of the universe, with which every child is born, trust in what Jesus called the Reign of God, then one is no longer anxious about earthly things, matters of status and possession and all the currency of the covenant with death, because one loves things heavenly. And that doesn’t mean otherworldly things: not only the everlasting life to come, but the eternal life that begins even now as we are placed among things that are passing away, at the moment we accept that our sins are forgiven and we are going to live forever, once we accept the Good News that we are free from death’s prison, and that our life is infinite. We no longer have to worry about the constant flux of nature because we see that it is possible to hold fast to those things that shall endure, namely love and peace and joy, the heavenly things.

The only thing that can keep us from enjoying this life even now, as we are placed among things that are passing away is what the Christian tradition calls the passions and what Buddhism calls desire: the desperate grasping for those very things that are passing away. But the willingness to grow up and let them go is the entrance into real and unconquerable life.

For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.

# posted by billteska : 3:42 PM