End of a long day, a stream of consciousness reflection.

Day began at 1 a.m. with Sandy unlocking the front door and coming in. She came home from the hospital in a taxi. At these times I wish I could still drive.

We slept, a little later than normal. She had a doctor’s appointment.

Peritonitis had occurred, not that unusual for starting PD.

She’s been on the end stage renal diet (what a bad name) for seven weeks, and is finding the cardboard-styrofoam-library paste menu hard to choke down.

Sandy’s taken in stride so many challenges, it rattles me to watch her struggle.

I concocted a simple sauce made of margarine, sugar free red raspberry jam, sugar free cranberry juice, and water. Reduced that by about half. We poured it over roast pork and barley Mary Fran brought earlier in the week.

A highlight of the day came when Sandy enjoyed the sauce.

Flavor! Flavor! the name of the game.

Some patients actually starve because they just can’t take the  restricted diet.

I’m resolved to find some tasty alternatives on the net and in various cookbooks, as well as trying my hand at some things.

Tonight we had phone calls that assured us that we do not stand alone.

But I admit I feel kind of blue.

Letting go of feelings

This morning I felt high reading Sölle’s book The Silent Cry. She defines mysticism as “direct experience with God,” the chief value of my childhood faith, and looks to some on the left wing of the reformation, the Anabaptists, as models.

Their spiritual writings in the Paulist Classics of Western Spirituality (for me, not including Menno Simons) literally light my fire.

Sölle writes:

• “[I]n praising the source of all good, the ego that is possessed by goals and that craves dominance vanishes. It has stepped out of itself. It has scuttled itself.”
• “That we may live without Eigenschaft [what is one's own: characteristic features, idiosyncracies, and singularity, as well as love of self and egoism]…is an expression of the most profound freedom we can attain. We become free when, no longer wed (ledig) to fears and constraints, we are in God’s presence “without a why or a wherefore.”

I re-member (am joined again to) exalted feelings as I think about this.

In Philippians 3, using accountant language of profit and loss, Paul writes about leaving behind all things, bad and good, for the sake of Christ: “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (v. 8).

He goes on to say that he longs to share in Christ’s sufferings that he may also share in Christ’s resurrection (vv. 10-11).

A year or so ago, I discovered this:

 For [God] has graciously granted you the privilege not only of believing in Christ, but of suffering for him as well.

Phil 1:29 (NRSV)

My gut response was being pissed off. No thanks! I thought.

I read some prayer of someone asking God to make it really hard, agonizing, for them. They could take it!

Not me! I thought. I know suffering from the inside. I’ll use my Get out of jail FREE card any time I can.

What I am learning, I hope, is to become less enslaved to such feelings.

Some days are diamonds,
some days are stone.
Some days the cold wind
won’t leave you alone.

That’s how it is. So what?

In  good times, in bad times, feeling fine, feeling lousy, feeling nuthin’—may I praise thee, God. May I praise thee!

• Jesus and love (not a feeling): his response to a demon-possessed man, to the beloved disciple; his bold risk “nailed his life long to the cross of the world…to love man” (pp. p. 66-67).
• The craving for redemption grows until “assuaged by one who teaches men to escape the wheel of rebirth, or by one who saves the souls enslaved by the powers into the freedom of the children of God” (p. 104)
• In the company of Socrates and Goethe is Jesus’ I-saying, the I of the unconditional relation in which a man calls his You “Father.” (p. 116)
• The gospel of John is the Gospel of pure relationship. “The father and son being consubstantial-we may say, God and man being consubstantial, are actually and forever Two, the two partners of the primal relationship.” (pp. 132-133)

Bare Essentials

Kyrios Christos!

If I strip Christianity bare, what’s left is the cry of the martyrs: Jesus is Lord. Close at hand is the history and experience to which the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament writings bear witness. But at the irreducible core is my experience of the Risen Christ:

You ask me how I know he lives-
He lives within my heart.

My spirituality for the past 20 years has centered on loss:

• loss of the mainstream Southern Baptist identity in which I was reared
• loss of the local church in a crucible of racism and parochialism
• a pastoral counseling residency which I would describe as a shamanic initiatory rite of being “cut up, cooked, and eaten”: loss of self, an internity of which my teaching colleagues were unaware

Anabaptists

Not surprising, then, in the years since to find myself drawn to the Anabaptists of 16^th century Europe, slaughtered by the tens of thousands for their simple insistence on adult baptism, symbolizing soul competency and liberty.

My church history course labeled these forebears as the radical reformation, and moved immediately to the English Baptists of the 17^th century.

But I’ve been drawn to these men and women who carried lists of scriptures in their boots and bore witness to the living flame of God’s love in their lives and deaths.

The Jesus whom they worshipped as Son of Man, Son of God, Savior, and the exemplary human Jesus of I and Thou are light years apart.

Spirit, which Buber conceived of as existing in between I and You, person and person, human being and God, is light years removed from the Holy Spirit of the New Testament.

How do I reconcile these two very different viewpoints?

Where does Jesus fit in

No need to. Buber wrote as a Jew, and as a Jew viewed Jesus in purely human terms, although his conception of Jesus is quite lofty. Jesus is one of humanity’s great religious founders of culture like the Buddha, one of history’s great philosophers like Socrates and Goethe.

Jesus also boldly risked loving humanity itself, and is an exemplar of the I-You relationship with God as of Father and son. There is not a hint of the Trinity. Spirit is not person, but the in between of an actual I-You relation.

The Jesus of the New Testament is not merely human, however exemplary he might be; he is God made flesh. You can’t work him into Buber’s ideas in some nifty fashion. But, as God-become-human he enters the human condition and relates to human beings as one among us.

However you fit the Logos and the man from Nazareth and the Risen Christ with Buber’s eternal You, Jesus is able to sympathize with our weaknesses from inside our skin.

That changes everything.