Thursday, March 8, 2018

Snake Eyes Poem and Reflection for 11 March 2018



A Reflection for IV Lent                          All Saints’, Southern Shores, NC March 11, 2018                                        Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
Numbers 21:4-9 Ephesians 2:1-10         John 3:14-21                Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22

Snake Eyes

Today we have a couple stories with snake imagery, and as I keep telling you, the Bible is not interested in facts but in a deeper truth and uses symbols to tell stories. Let’s take a look at snakes - and I can see that many of you don’t want to really have a look at snakes. Is it because they are reptiles and have cold blood? Is it because they are possible disrupters to business as usual? Is it because they have scales rather than skin? It is because they are a symbol of change with the shedding of their skins and we rather like not having change? Is it because they swallow things whole and we are afraid of being of being reabsorbed into something greater than ourselves? Is it because they are close to the ground and we walk upright, away from the ground of our being? Is it because they have a bad image in the Bible tempting us to sin? Or is it just irrational? Think of the terms we use: “real snake in the grass, slimy, cold-blooded, slither, forked tongue.”

When my daughter was a teenager, she had a snake which I could never warm up to, but I would have to feed Sammy the Snake when she went off to a Christian mission trip down in Panama or an Episcopal Youth Convention in Wyoming. I think I probably told you the story about when we were trying to sell the house and Sammy got out and found his way upstairs to the bathroom light fixture to get warm. Luckily when she went off to college, Sammy found a new home.

   Snakes were part of the healing of people who would come to the Temples of the God of Healing, Asclepius, where they would sleep and face their dreams while non-venomous snakes slithered on the floor. Snakes also had a reputation as tempters to brokenness as in the story of the Garden of Eden where the snake tempts Eve to be like God and know good and evil. Lamia was a Greek legend about a snake-like monster who tempted men to forget themselves.

   Keats wrote a Poem, Lamia, about a man who was magically enchanted by a beautiful snake who took the form of a woman. He wrote it in his love letters to Fanny Brawne whom he would praise for her beauty, but he lived in fear of losing his freedom as a poet. He would die before they were married. She is in his sonnet “Bright Star would I were as steadfast as thou art”.  The last two lines of the sonnet are:
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

In symbolic language the snake is often a symbol of the wisdom of the unconscious because it is a creature who lives underground away from sight. In the story from Numbers for today, the Hebrew children are grumbling, blaming Moses for taking them off the easy road into the wilderness. They make Moses the scapegoat for all their frustration, saying that if it wasn’t for him, they would have a good life. They had been in Egypt in captivity, and while they said they wanted to be free, freedom had a lot of problems. They wanted freedom without responsibilities, sort of like a teenager who wants to blame their parents for all of their problems. Listen to one of their comments: “For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.”

So which is it? Is there no food or is it that they are tired of the gift of the manna which gets them through one day at a time in the wilderness and they want to have more than they need? They are getting tired of depending on God and want to be in charge as their own little Gods.

The unconscious thought that keeps coming up time and time again for them is that they want to take short cuts to the Promised Land or avoid it all together:  “Why do we have to trust this God of Moses? Can’t we just build a golden calf to worship? Can’t we just go back to Egypt and maybe work out a better arrangement with our slave owners?” 

The pattern is like the symbol of a snake biting its own tail, in a constant circle, trapped over and over again to repeat the same behavior. They are denying that this is happening because they will not stop complaining long enough to pay attention to their unconscious. But the snake of the unconscious desire to return to the safety of a destructive past is not content to just keep them from growing in their faith, but in this story, snakes will bite them outwardly as well. They complain that the outward and physical snakes are their problem rather than going deeper to find the real snake.
Moses hears a solution from God to make a symbol of the snake and lift it up so that the people face the deeper snake and come to grips with the problem that is not out there, but in here, inside each one of them. Only when we honestly face ourselves are we able to make the changes necessary for real change. The fact that the journey of the Exodus is to take forty years is a reminder that facing the snakes inside is a lifelong commitment to bring unconscious compulsive behavior to light so we can deal with it.

John’s Gospel passage for today has Jesus revisit the symbol of the snake in the wilderness when he says, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
Eternal life is not that you will (future tense) live forever, but that we are (present tense) living in the Eternal, participating in God knowing us intimately and seeing us as God’s children, and sharing that vision as God’s beloved. To be God’s beloved brings us Freedom and it carries responsibilities to grow fully into the image of God’s love.
Jesus is saying he came so that we would have to face who we are. He would be lifted up as a scapegoat on the cross so that we might see the repetitive, cold- blooded, compulsive pattern of our lives when we try to be our own little Gods. He is lifted up so that we might see ourselves trapped in a circle of violence which we love, which we say with our lips that we do not want, but which we keep making sure that continues because it take too much energy and commitment to change. But when we see who we are, both sides of who we are, then this is the beginning of learning how to receive forgiveness and how to give it to others and to ourselves in the light of God’s love. No longer will we unconsciously project all of the things that we don’t want to face - our shadows - onto another person, but we will be able to face our unconscious, our shadows, our snakes, our cold-blooded grounding and follow the Risen Christ into a full life.
The writer of the Ephesians lesson has traditionally been seen as Paul or one of his disciples writing in Paul’s name. You remember the story of Paul who was going to Damascus because he had projected all of his problems on the Christians. And while on the road he is thrown off his high horse and is forced to come face to face with his own blindness in truly seeing God and himself. When he was healed, scripture says, that it was like scales that fell from his eyes so he could see anew. No longer would have to see life through the scales of snake eyes, but with the eyes of the Risen Christ. The passage for today underscores the message:
“All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else. But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.”

Snake Eyes
S-ay; don’t like that s-nake in the grass
the way he pass-es judgment so eas-ily
grabbing more than his s-hare greedily,
having fantas-ies s-educing every lass.
Why is he with me every breath taken,
always in my thoughts, at me his-sing
dares, taunting my danger of miss-ing
and every move I make seem mistaken?
I come to see that man is a true mirror
of all those things I wish not to claim,
but repudiate, absolve myself’s blame
and move to be seen as to Saint nearer.
But I am who I am as is the snake man
together we're both loved in God’s plan.

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