You can have all this world, give me…

I’m grateful for a kind of peak experience this morning.

One way the blues manifest themselves is irritability. I woke up at 3:30 a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep, By 6 I was frazzled.

Sandy had spent Labor Day experimenting in the kitchen. One failure, one success (pork loin roasted with onions, whole cranberry sauce and pineapple). In the process she dirtied every dish, pot, and pan on the planet.

Our deal is that I clean up. So this morning the chaos in the kitchen hit me in the face BC—before coffee.

At which point mysticism ceased to be theoretical. Hadn’t I just read: “You can wash dishes to have clean dishes, or you can wash dishes to wash dishes.”

Mindfulness—Yuck!

As I prepped breakfast: deviled eggs, I had a devil of a time peeling them. You know when the membrane doesn’t peel off, and you get chunks of egg white? You don’t peel your egg, you crater it.

A thoroughly disgusting thirty minutes!

All through it, unbidden, this chorus was playing in my thoughts:

Give me Jesus,
Give me Jesus.
You can have all this world,
Just give me Jesus.

 You can hear Vince Gill perform it here.

I’m so grateful to be reading Sölle’s book on mysticism now. It takes me back to my days as a resident in pastoral care, when I felt like I was being “cut up, cooked and eaten.”

That’s how the shamans describe “disrobing the ego.” For me it was a deconstruction of my self and my core beliefs.

I lost everything.

Everything except Jesus.

The man from Nazareth, the one who cried out from the cross “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachani?” and the One raised from the dead on Easter morning.

Him I could not lose.

Or rather he wouldn’t lose me.

That’s why, in another time of stripping ego, things, life—this prayer came unbidden to my heart today:

Give me Jesus,
Give me Jesus.
You can have all this world,
Just give me Jesus.