A Reflection for Pentecost III (proper 6) All Saints’ Church, Southern
Shores, NC June 14, 2015 Thomas
E. Wilson, Rector
“Being
Amphibious”
Last week on the Internet there was an article in the East Oregonian newspaper about an Oakland A’s Pitcher who could pitch with either arm and who was brought into the 6th inning of their major league baseball game against the Boston Red Sox. The paper’s headline referred to him as “Amphibious”. I harrumphed and, like many others, made a joke that the author of that headline was confused. It is always fun to make fun of someone else’s mistakes – bear in mind that this comes from a man who has two Master’s Degrees and most of a Doctorate and still needs Judy to go over my reflections for grammar mistakes and confusing word choices… But we tend to attack those things in others which we want deny within ourselves. The paper apologized in an editorial on Tuesday, calling it a “Big Frogging Mistake”, but I would say that, technically, the paper used the right word because the word “Amphibious” comes from the Greek meaning “having a dual nature”. While the scientific term means being at home in water and on land – like a frog - we forget that we all have at least dual natures for we all have many different natures. The first is our strength which we have developed and the other is our less-developed or neglected side. They are both sides of the one being. God’s divine energy flows through all things, and spirit and matter are one. As Teilhard de Chardin notes, “Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen.” I would say we are all meant to be more than a tad “amphibious”.
Today we are continuing the cycle of stories about
the rise and fall of the kingdoms of Israel in the Hebrew Testament lessons for
the season after Pentecost. We can look at it from a historical point of view
and spend a lot of time doing a study of the geo-political forces which formed
the Jewish people, and history buffs like me can go to town. But I want to go deeper and suggest that the
stories are not only meant as literal history but as mythic stories based on
the meaning behind the history itself. Myths are not made up by a storyteller
to prove a particular point, which can be an allegory, fable, or parable, but are
sort of jazz riff improvisations on a theme on traditional stories passed on by
a culture.
I have told you before that myths are public dreams
and dreams are private myths. I look at myths in the same way I look at dreams
in that the identity of the people, places, and events may change but the core
of the story is meant to help me to understand the world in which I live. Myths
are part of the collective unconscious which speaks to us to bring healing in
our lives. I consider dreams and myths as part of the way God communicates with
us.
Last week I suggested that one of the themes in
these mythic stories of the rise and fall of the ancient Hebrew Kingdoms is how
we create community. Last week was about the dynamic tension between developing
one’s own personal authority and the need to work together with others for the
common good. The failure to develop personal authority sets us up for tyranny,
and the failure to work together generates what William Butler Yeats, at the
end of the First World War, described in the first stanza of his poem, The Second Coming”:
Turning
and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
In this story Samuel hears God tell him that the
picking of Saul was not a good choice. Early on in the chapters before this story
for today, the writer describes Saul as a son of a wealthy family and “a
handsome young man. There was not a man among the people of Israel more
handsome than he; he stood head and shoulders above everyone else.” (9:1-3). He
is straight from Central Casting, and if you were only looking with your eyes,
he would look perfect for the role. He does well for a couple of years as he
listened to Samuel and to God and developed an inner spiritual life from which
developed a proverb “Is Saul also among the prophets?” (10: 11-13)
However, that promising beginning does not last and his spiritual discipline starts to fade as he develops glory in his military campaigns. Saul is so filled with pride at his success in battle against the Philistines and Amalekites that he stops listening to what God is telling him through Samuel. So filled with his own ego, he sees no reason to listen to God and becomes a stranger to his own spiritual journey because he thinks that he has already arrived at the journey’s end. While Saul would do the outward show of religion, he neglects and refuses to look into his own heart and soul and the heart and soul of his people. Without a spiritual guide to remind him that there is a power greater than himself, Saul descends into delusions of grandeur, paranoia, and madness. To use the term in the baseball headline, Saul becomes one-dimensional and is no longer “amphibious”, no longer spiritual AND material, no longer part of a community working together, but a tyrant bending the community to do his bidding. His divorce from his spiritual self is destructive to his life and to his community.
Now Samuel goes to find a replacement for the
unraveling king. Going to Bethlehem, he looks over the sons of Jesse. He is
told not to look just at the outside of a person but to look deeper into the
reality of the heart, looking for the one who allows the spirit self to grow.
He is reminded by his inner conversations with God that he needs to see with
both the senses of the eye AND with the heart of the spirit.
One of the deeper themes of this story is that communities and their leaders need to nourish that “amphibious” vision of life to be able to walk on the firm land of the senses and swim in the deep water of the spirit or, to borrow a phrase from the paper, it is a “big frogging deal”. That we believe in an incarnation of God’s spirit becoming flesh so that we might be aware that God’s spirit is the center of our being. Each person we meet, each animal, each grain of sand on the beach is filled with the Divine Spirit, for “Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen.”
We here on the Outer Banks are so fortunate in that
it really takes a massive amount of denial to ignore the spiritual dimension of
the world we live in. Don’t get me wrong - it can and is done every day, but it
would seem to be so hard to look at this ocean and not be in awe and realize
that there is something more to this world than what we can or seek to control.
With this awesome and also awful power all around us – the power to give and
take away life - we really have to be dense and self-obsessed not to realize
the context of mutual dependency that we need in order to work together. Don’t
get me wrong - it can and is done every day, but what a waste of fullness of
life when it is so simple to be “amphibious”. It is a big frogging deal.
Last week when the grandkids were here, we came back
from the beach and I introduced them to one of the tree frogs living in our
outdoor shower where we wash off the sand we collect on our beach excursions. I
wrote a poem about the gift of the frog which informed my reflection.
Being
Amphibious
The
water is running over my body
to
wash afternoon beach walk sand
off,
or the early morning eye sand out
or
the sweat of the morning workout.
“Blaaart”,
not “Ribbit”, sound the tree
frogs
who hang out by the shampoos or
soaps
on the second ledge or behind the
old
mirror hanging in my outdoor shower.
He/she
only stares and I want him/her to
say
much more but s/he only looks, as if
to
tell me that s/he and I are both spirit and
matter,
amphibians, living in dual natures.
S/he
living both in water and land and
I
swimming in the water of the spirit
with
feet planted in the hardy ground
of
reason, never one or other fully apart.
“Blaaart”,
s/he interjects from behind the
mirror,
probably a frog-ish mating call, but
I,
in wonder, translate it as a way of saying
to my soul, “life really is a big frogging deal.”
I
should have blaarted him/her back, for in
the
Divine eyes we are all creatures made in
and
for love in awe of that which is inside and
outside
of our narrow boxes of holy experience.
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