Bill Darlison's weblog

Pick up your Bed and Walk!’

Mark 2:1-12

A few days after he’d gone back to Capernaum, word of his whereabouts got around, and so many people gathered that there was no room, not even by the door, and he was speaking the word to them. And four men arrived carrying a paralytic. And not being able to get near him because of the crowd, they took off the roof of the house where he was, and when they’d made an opening they let down the stretcher on which the paralysed man was lying. When Jesus saw their faith he said to the paralysed man, ‘Child, your sins are forgiven.’ But there were some legal experts sitting there who were asking themselves, ‘Why is he speaking such blasphemy? Only God can forgive sins!’ But Jesus was immediately aware of their thoughts, and he said to them, ‘What’s your problem? What is easier to say to the paralysed man: “Your sins are forgiven”, or “Get up, pick up your stretcher, and walk”? But in order to prove to you that the son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins,’ he said to the paralysed man, ‘I say to you, get up, pick up your stretcher and go home!’ And up he got immediately, and picking up his stretcher went out in front of everyone, so that they were all amazed and praising God saying, ‘We’ve never seen anything like this!’

Story

One day Nasrudin was feeling very thirsty. He’d been walking for a long time in the blazing sun and there was no water to be had anywhere. ‘What I need is some luscious fruit. A big melon or a couple of oranges would be perfect,’ he said to himself. As he turned the corner he saw a fruit and vegetable stall. His prayers had been answered!

‘How much are your oranges?’ he asked the stallholder, looking at the mountain of juicy oranges.

‘Fifty cents each,’ replied the man. ‘Three for one euro.’

Nasrudin looked at the few coppers in his hand. Not enough for even one orange. And his thirst was burning! ‘How much are your melons?’ he inquired, optimistically.

‘Seventy-five cents each, and cheap at the price.’

Disappointed but not defeated, Nasrudin looked at the rest of the stall, and some shiny little red pods caught his attention. They looked wonderfully refreshing. ‘How much are those?’ he asked excitedly.

‘Three cents each,’ replied the man.

‘I’ll take ten!’

Nasrudin handed over the thirty cents – all the money he had – and then he sat down in a nice shaded place and began to munch the red pods. He devoured the first one with no trouble, but mid way through the second his eyes began to water and his mouth began to burn. ‘These are the hottest fruits I’ve ever tasted,’ he thought. But he still carried on eating.

Just then, a passer by saw Nasrudin’s distress. ‘What on earth is the matter?’ asked the concerned woman.

‘I’m eating some fruit,’ replied Nasrudin, ‘but I’ve never tasted any like this before! They’re hot!’

The woman looked closely at what Nasrudin was holding in his hand. ‘No wonder they’re hot!’ she laughed, ‘those are chillies! They’re not for eating, they’re for cooking. You put them in curries!’

But Nasrudin carried on eating. Tears were streaming down his bright red face, and his throat was burning unmercifully. ‘You must stop eating them at once!’ ordered the woman, ‘or you’ll make yourself very ill! I’m telling you they’re not fruit!’

‘Oh I know they’re not fruit,’ said Nasrudin, ‘but I’ve paid for them so I’m going to finish them. I’m not one to waste my money!’

**********************************************************

Last Wednesday was the first day of spring. It wasn’t such a pleasant day in England; it was windy and cold, with the odd flurry of snow and sleet, but despite the inclement weather the evidence of new growth was everywhere, as it has been for a few weeks: the daffodils are blooming, the trees budding, the days lengthening. This is the season of new life, celebrated throughout human history with great rejoicing; the long sleep of winter is over, the sap is rising; it’s when ‘a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of love’ (and ‘an old man’s stomach turns!’) It is an optimistic time, when, according to Chaucer, ‘folk long to go on pilgrimages’; it’s when we start to make our plans, change our jobs, sell our houses. Forget January 1^st, with its dreary darkness and its forced bonhomie; this is the real ‘new year’ and has been acknowledged as such in the northern hemisphere since human beings appeared on earth. The ancients believed that the creation of the world took place at this time of the year (as well they might), and the Jewish people said that the Exodus occurred in springtime; the waking of the earth from its winter sleep providing a powerful metaphor for casting off the shackles of slavery in Egypt and moving on to freedom in the promised land.

The sun has entered the zodiac sign of Aries, the sign of the Ram or Lamb, and it is this sign that is reflected in the first three chapters of Mark’s Gospel. (Remember, it is my contention that the whole Gospel of Mark is structured on the zodiac cycle, and that the individual sections of Mark are designed to teach us spiritual lessons based upon the symbolism of each sign.) Aries is the sign of the springtime, the sign of new beginnings, vigour, activity, and impetuosity. People who are born under Aries are often confrontational, somewhat aggressive, fiery, individualistic – like the ram itself, attacking head first, butting all those who would oppose it out of the way. One of the most characteristically Aries people of the modern world is Ian Paisley (born on April 6^th 1926). He is fiercely individualistic, apparently incapable of negotiation or compromise, an initiator par excellence, who is prepared to take on all comers. In his later years he has even started to look like a ram! Life for Ian Paisley is a battle. This is how he expressed his disapproval of the pope’s visit to the European Parliament in Strasbourg in 1988:

This is the battle of the Ages which we are engaged in. This is no Sunday school picnic; this is a battle for truth against the lie, the battle of Heaven against hell, the battle of Christ against the Antichrist!’

Richard Dawkins – born on 26^th March – is another Aries. He is Darwin’s champion, fearlessly challenging religion, even resurrecting the old idea of ‘warfare’ between religion and science. Never one to mince his words, Dawkins believes that astrologers are charlatans and should be put in jail, although he would no doubt be horrified to learn that his own attitudes actually demonstrate the truth of the ideas he is attacking! His equally disputatious colleague, Daniel Dennett, who is beating the rationalist, anti religious drum in America, was born just a year and two days after Dawkins, on 28^th March 1942. (Christopher Hitchens, whose book God is Not Great has become a bestseller, was born on April 13^th 1949.)

Of the great spiritual figures born under Aries, none is more typical or more appealing than the wonderful Teresa of Avila, who was born on 28^th March 1515. She’s one of my very favourite saints. There’s nothing wishy-washy about Teresa. Her earliest desire was to become a martyr, and when she was a little girl she ran away from home just so that she could be captured and executed by the Moors! Fortunately, her uncle saw her trying to escape and brought her back. She’d only gone down the road. Her love for God was passionate, described by her in unambiguously erotic terms, and the famous Bernini statue of Teresa shows her lost in almost orgasmic rapture. Although she was a nun, and although at times she was said to levitate when lost in ecstasy at mass, she was certainly no recluse: she founded and ran a religious order, travelling by cart in Spain’s scorching heat to the various convents under her jurisdiction, suggesting improvements, disciplining backsliders, dealing with finances, all the while writing the most startling religious prose. She deliberately avoided marriage, which she considered a kind of slavery, making her into one of the great feminist figures of the past, and one of a number of Aries women who have fought the battle for female rights down the ages (the other sign with more than its fair share of feminists is Aquarius). Our own Maud Robinson who has written a great deal about adopting female imagery for God is an Aries! They are a force to be reckoned with!

Among the most Arien figures in the Bible is John the Baptist, the very first character we are introduced to in the Gospel of Mark. Mark doesn’t tell us very much about him, except to say that he was dressed in no-nonsense Aries style – a garment made from camel’s hair – and his diet didn’t have too many frills either; he existed on locusts and wild honey! In the Gospels of Matthew and Luke he lambastes the religious people of his day, calling them ‘a brood of vipers’ and threatening them with all manner of calamities if they don’t mend their ways. His plain speaking eventually brings about his downfall. His fearless but rather foolhardy rebuke of King Herod for marrying his sister-in-law, Herodias, gets him beheaded – a most Arien death, since Aries was said to govern the head and was even called ‘The Lord of the Head’ by the Egyptians.

The figure of Jesus that we meet in these early chapters of Mark is equally confrontational. He goes into battle against his religious opponents with breathtaking fervour and more than a dash of rashness. He takes on the Pharisees and the Scribes, and even tackles good old Satan himself, casting the devil out of various disturbed people, and claiming that the kingdom of Satan has been brought to an end. Maya Angelou, a great contemporary Arien figure (born 4^th April 1928), says, ‘I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels; life’s a bitch; you’ve got to go out and kick ass,’ which is exactly what Jesus is shown to be doing. ‘Gentle Jesus meek and mild’? Forget it! That’s just religious sentimentality. This is Jesus kicking ass, and his ass kicking provokes the religious authorities so much that even sworn enemies, the patriotic Pharisees and the collaborative Herodians, are prepared to join forces to plot his death.

So, what are the spiritual lessons of Aries? There are a number of them, but, unfortunately, (or maybe fortunately!) we can’t deal with them all. Today I want to look briefly at two.

The first is found in those passages where Jesus calls his first disciples. They read very strangely as history. Jesus simply says ‘Follow me!’ to James and John, and later to Levi, the tax collector, and, without further ado, they all leave everything behind and impetuously follow him. No lengthy conversations, you notice; no police checks on his background; no, ‘Give us a little time to think about it Jesus’. None of this; just, up and off. (Incidentally, James and John leave their father Zebedee in the boat ‘along with the hired men’. ‘The Hired Man’ was the name of the constellation Aries in ancient Babylon, a fact I discovered long after I’d developed my theory of Mark, but which made the hairs stand up on the back of my head when I discovered it!)

These passages teach us that procrastination has no part to play in the spiritual life. If we dither around telling ourselves that we will begin our journey of self-transformation – which is what ‘living a spiritual life’ means – when circumstances are favourable, when we’ve found a congenial path, when we have more time, when the kids are grown, when we retire, then we might as well forget it. The Hindu sage, Sri Ramakrishna, tells the following story which illustrates this very point:

A wife once spoke to her husband, saying, ‘My dear, I am very anxious about my brother. For the last few days he has been thinking of renouncing the world and of becoming a Sannyasin, and has begun preparations for it. He has been trying gradually to curb his desires and reduce his wants.’ The husband replied, ‘You need not be anxious about your brother. He will never become a Sannyasin. No one has ever renounced the world by making long  preparations.’ The wife asked, ‘How then does one become a Sannyasin?’ The husband answered, ‘Do you wish to see how one renounces the world? Let me show you.’ Saying this, instantly he tore his flowing dress into pieces, tied one piece round his loins, told his wife that she and all women were henceforth his  mother, and left the house never to return.

That’s the way to do it! As St. Paul says, ‘Now is the acceptable time; now is the day of salvation!’ That’s lesson one: stop wasting time; stop kidding yourself that once you’ve sorted out the historical problems of Christianity to your own satisfaction, and come to satisfactory conclusions about the existence of God and the nature of Jesus, you’ll start the process. Because you won’t. The path beckons. Get on it.

Lesson two deals with another important aspect of the same procrastinating syndrome, and is brought out in the story of the paralysed man which we heard as our second reading this morning. You remember what happens: Jesus is teaching in somebody’s house, but the place is crowded; even the doorway is packed with people. Four men carrying a paralysed man on a stretcher find that their way to Jesus is barred, so they go up on the roof, make a hole in the thatching, and lower the man down to Jesus. (Remember: Aries represents the head – or the roof!) Jesus is amazed by the faith of all concerned, and he tells the man that his sins are forgiven, but this so incenses the Pharisees (‘How dare he presume to forgive sins!’ they say), that Jesus changes his tactics. ‘Okay,’ he says, ‘I won’t say “Your sins are forgiven”, I’ll say “Pick up your stretcher and walk!”’ which the man proceeds to do.

When we stop bothering ourselves about the theological implications of the expression ‘Your sins are forgiven’, we can make some sense of this lovely story. It simply means, stop letting the past paralyse you. The man on the stretcher is you and I. We are all paralysed by the past, or, in the words of Aries writer Ram Dass (born April 6^th 1931), ‘we are too busy holding on to our unworthiness’. We like the past, sins and all, because we are safe there. We know where we are with our habits and traditions. We may be, in fact we probably are, like Nasrudin in our children’s story, chewing ferociously on hot peppers, simply because that’s what we’ve always done. ‘Habit is a great deadener’ says Arien Samuel Beckett in Waiting for Godot. But now is the time to stop, to let the past go, to break with the comforting habits of thought and action we’ve allowed to cripple us for so long.

Pick up that stretcher and walk!

And do it today.

These are two important lessons of Aries.

25^th March 2007

Aries 2: ‘Who is my Mother?’

There are a number of incidents recorded in the Gospels in which, we are told, Jesus seems to act ‘out of character’. The most famous one, of course, is of Jesus casting out the money changers in the temple, a scene which does not fit our image of him as a passive man of peace. John’s Gospel tells us that he took a whip to them, and even though this might have been more of a symbolic gesture than a frenzied attack, his actions don’t correspond terribly well with his words in the Sermon on the Mount about loving our enemies and turning the other cheek. Another example is the way he treats the gentile woman who begs him to cure her disturbed daughter. ‘It’s not right to give the children’s food to the dogs,’ he says, meaning that he was only prepared to heal the people of his own nation – ‘the dogs’ were all non-Jews. He eventually does heal the girl, but only after her mother has won him over with a smart rejoinder.

However, to say that on these and similar occasions Jesus was acting ‘out of character’ is really rather misleading. Our character comes out in what we do and what we say, and if Jesus said and did these things then they were part of his character. What we really mean is that Jesus seems to be acting in ways which don’t quite square with the image of him that we carry around in our heads, but this image has been built up more from pious sermons, sentimental films, and apocryphal stories than from an actual close reading of the Gospel texts. According to the Gospels, Jesus was not always ‘Mr. Nice Guy’; sometimes he could be extremely unpleasant. I have never found the Jesus of John’s Gospel to be an appealing person at all. There are places where he seems to be arrogant, patronising, and self righteous. On one occasion, in chapter 7, he even seems to be deceitful. ‘You should go to Jerusalem to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles,’ say his brothers. ‘No, I’m not going to go,’ replies Jesus dismissively; but then he goes! And when he later tells his apostles that they are his friends if they do what he tells them (John 15:14), I find myself losing patience with him as a genuinely sympathetic and humane person.

But then, the Gospels were never intended to present a sentimental picture of the perfect man, in touch with his feminine side, a kind of prototype of St. Francis of Assisi, or Mahatma Gandhi. The Gospels are not character studies. Whatever conventional Christians say, the Gospels do not give us a rounded portrait of a person to emulate. In his words and actions, Jesus is demonstrating and expounding important spiritual principles, and these sometimes demand what, to us, appear as inconsistency.

Nowhere is this more in evidence than in a little passage which occurs at the end of chapter 3 of Mark’s Gospel, the end of what I have called the Aries section of the Gospel. You may not be familiar with it, because it is one of those incidents which preachers tend to ignore, so I’ll read it in its entirety.

And his mother and brothers came and were standing outside. They sent someone in to summon him. And a crowd was sitting around him and they said to him, ‘Your mother and your brothers and your sisters are outside; they are looking for you.’ Jesus responded by saying, ‘Who is my mother and my brothers?’ And looking at those sitting in a circle round him, he said, ‘Look. Here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of God is my brother, my sister, and my mother.’

This is shocking isn’t it? And it is particularly shocking to Catholic sensibilities, which have elevated Jesus’ mother Mary to the status of goddess, and which have presented to us a picture of Jesus as a dutiful, obedient son within the ‘holy family’; and it is also shocking to Catholics because it tells us unequivocally that Jesus had brothers and sisters, demolishing at a stroke the Catholic doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary, at least in so far as it is meant to be understood biologically.

But the embarrassment is not only to the Catholics. This passage calls into question Christendom’s general portrait of Jesus as a man who upholds ‘family values’, so beloved by the American Christian right, although how one could ever assume that an unmarried, childless man whose mother was a virgin and whose father was a ghost could represent a typical human family has always puzzled me.

The tension between Jesus and his immediate family is illustrated a little earlier in Mark’s Gospel, where we learn that his family members thought that he was out of his mind (3:21), and the other Gospels say nothing to contradict it. From the early chapters of Luke’s Gospel we learn of a twelve year old Jesus listening to the wise men in the temple rather than returning home with his parents, and in Matthew chapter 10, Jesus says, with almost unbelievable directness:

Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter–in-law against her mother-in-law; a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household. Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me’ (10:34-38).

This is very unsettling stuff, which is probably why we don’t hear it read aloud too often, but it is not a rant against monogamy or the nuclear family; it is not even a plea for more tolerance of alternative lifestyles. These passages are intended to alert us to an extremely important spiritual principle: that discovering and establishing one’s identity, one’s true individuality, within a communal context, and particularly within the family context, is extraordinarily difficult, but it is so important that nothing, not even those things demanded by our closest intimacies, can ever take precedence over it.

These incidents teach us that anyone intent on following the spiritual path has to break away from some pretty restricting and oppressive social conditioning, and the most effective agency of this conditioning is the family. We learn our earliest and most enduring lessons about life and relationships at our mother’s knee; we inherit the family religion, or lack of it; we imbibe the family’s values before we are weaned; we build a social identity by processing the thousands of messages which accumulate daily from the overt and subtle words and actions of our parents and our siblings. The family itself has its own dynamics, from the obvious age relationships among brothers and sisters – which usually requires the oldest child to be competent, the middle one to be troublesome, and the youngest to be spoiled – to the designated roles which are apportioned early and which seem impossible to shake off.

The Australian psychologist Dorothy Rowe says that when we get beneath the cosy facade that most families tend to present to the world we find some pretty disturbing dynamics, particularly in regard to the allocation of roles. ‘You have been given a role in the family which is yours for life,’ she says. ‘You cannot escape it.’ She is the intelligent one, he is the sensitive one, she is the daydreamer, he is ambitious. Rowe says that the greatest compliment her mother could give to anyone was, ‘He is always the same.’

But these disturbing words of Jesus tell us unequivocally that we must not allow the prejudices of our family to determine the course of our spiritual life. Like Sue Monk Kidd in our second reading today, we have to pull away from the Collective They, to ‘stand before the bare mystery of our own being.’ ‘I came to understand,’ she writes, ‘that there is an Authentic ‘I’ within, an ‘I Am,’ or divine spark within the soul’, and that this ‘true identity’ transcends the outer roles which have been bequeathed to us by our family and our culture. To discover this true identity, the mark of God upon us, something as distinctive and unique as our fingerprints, is the raison d’etre of our existence, and the only guarantee of personal fulfilment and of collective harmony. Ignoring this, mistaking uniqueness for madness, in ourselves or in others, is what Jesus calls ‘the unforgivable sin’. It’s unforgivable because in committing it we have missed the whole point of our existence. In the works of the Sufi sage Rumi, we find it expressed thus:

The master said there is one thing in this world which must never be forgotten. If you were to forget everything else, but were not to forget this, there would be no cause to worry; while if you remembered, performed and attended to everything else, but forgot this one thing, you would in fact have done nothing whatsoever. It is as if a king had sent you to a country to carry out one special, specific task. You go to the country and you perform a hundred other tasks, but if you have not performed the task you were sent for, it is as if you have performed nothing at all. So man has come into the world for a particular task, and this is his purpose. If he doesn’t perform it, he will have done nothing. (Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, page 127)

Each of us is responsible for bringing to birth that authentic self which lies buried beneath those layers of prejudice which stifle its emergence with their insistence on conformity, homogenisation, prosperity, celebrity, and a hundred and one other culturally sanctioned distractions. This is why the passage from Mark’s Gospel in which Jesus is shown dissociating himself from his immediate family occurs where it does, in the Aries section of the Gospel, which would have been read and discussed at this time of the year, when the very trees and flowers around us are emerging from winter’s collective homogeneity and beginning to express their individuality and uniqueness. ‘Doing the will of God’ does not mean behaving yourself, going to church on Sunday, living a respectable life; it means discovering and expressing the unique and precious part that only you can play in the great drama of existence. ‘Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?’ asks Jesus. He goes on, ‘Those who do the will of God are my mother, my sisters and my brothers,’ by which he did not mean that his biological family were disreputable people – they were probably anything but – but that true nurture can only be provided by those who have themselves broken away from the Collective They, and who are concerned to help you find your authentic, creative, unique self.

The Jews tell of a certain Rabbi Susya who used to say, ‘When I die, God will not ask me why I wasn’t Abraham, or why I wasn’t Moses; he will ask me why I wasn’t Susya.’ The same is true of you and me. The success or otherwise of my life will not be determined by how rich I become, or how famous I become, or how influential I become, or how popular I become. It will not even be assessed by how well I have kept the rules, or how closely I have emulated the life of some great spiritual figure. God will not ask me why I haven’t been another Jesus, or another Francis of Assisi. He will ask me why I allowed my inherited cultural and religious prejudices, and my desire for conformity and respectability, to prevent me from becoming Bill Darlison.

15th April, 2007