Words Half Heard: ashes

Showing posts with label ashes. Show all posts

Sunday, March 6, 2016

After the Ashes: Newness

Five years ago on New Year’s Eve, a house not far from us caught fire. No one was home and no one was hurt, but the fire started in the basement, the firehouse was lightly staffed, and by the time

enough firefighters arrived to get the blaze under control the house was just a smoldering shell and needed to be torn down.

The new house built on the lot looks almost exactly like the old: same split-entry design, same windows, same narrow cement porch. The weird mansard roof is gone (roof tiles sloping down sharply from a flatter roof of the same material), and the siding is newer, but in many ways it looks the same.

I walk by the house often and find myself wondering: if you were going to build a new house, wouldn’t you want to make it really new? Start with a new, more functional design, rather than settle for new siding?

I suppose the interior may be totally redesigned, but from what I can see, it’s new, but not really.

That word “new” is a tricky one. There are two words in Greek that are sometimes translated “new”. “Neos” has the same root as new: “With neos the temporal aspect is dominant, marking out the present moment as compared with a former.”

That new house on Biddle is “neos”: fresh, recent, in the same way that the new growth in my yard is neos: fresh, green, but showing up where the same plants grew last year.

The other word translated “new’ is kainos: qualitatively different from what came before; unprecedented; unheard of; new not just in time, but in substance.

“Newness” is a recurrent theme throughout the Bible: promises of a new heaven and earth, a new creation, new covenant, new testament, new people.

That newness is almost always kainos: unprecedented, unheard of, new not just in time, but substance.

I’ve been reading 1 and 2 Kings. Israel had lots of new kings, from the first new king, Saul, to the last, Jehoiachin, living in exile on an allowance from his Babylonian captors. From first to last, they were new in time, but never new in substance. The very idea of “king” was borrowed from surrounding nations. God, through Samuel, described it as a derivative idea that would come to no good.

In 1 Samuel 8, the priestly leader Samuel described the reality the people were demanding:

This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. (2 Samuel 8:11-18)

Those words echoed through the centuries that followed as kingly power was misused, labor and goods demanded by the increasingly profligate leaders while the people themselves slipped closer and closer to the status of slaves.

Sometimes we think “new” will bring relief from the old, but if new is simply “neos”, new in time, new face, new surface, but not “kainos”, new in quality, substance and structure, little really changes.

We are living in a time when the cry for “new” is very loud. Our old structures seem more and more to benefit the few at the expense of the many: party politics, consumptive capitalism, fossil-fuel-dependent progress, ethnic loyalties, nationalist agendas.

Potential leaders promising “new” are met with energy and eagerness, but what’s promised is too often a recycling of failed paradigms: ideas that have led to tragedy before and will lead to tragedy again.

Like the Hebrew nations longing for new kings, we hope a new leader will bring relief.

The real relief looks very different from what’s currently on offer: an unprecedented newness brought by an unexpected leader who said the last will be first and the least shall be greatest, who refused to inhabit the failed paradigm of power and instead offered an outrageous new “kainos” testament of sacrifice, grace, and love.

I am hungry for that genuine newness: a new form of leadership, a new economic model, a new conversation, a new community.

We live in that already/ not-yet kingdom, invited to follow the example of Christ, called to live as new people, with new agendas, in the not-new world of distrust, envy, anger, pride.

It’s a painful, challenging place to live.

I’ve been wondering about John, author of the gospel of John, three short epistles, and the book of Revelation. More than almost any other, he saw the new life Jesus promised, but knew the cruel reality of this present world. He was at the foot of the cross when Jesus was crucified and was no doubt well aware of the martyrdom of so many of his fellow disciples: beaten, stoned, and clubbed to death; killed with sword or spear; beheaded; crucified.

The Siege and Destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans

under the Command of Titus, David Roberts, Britain, 1850

According to many scholars the letters of John were written late in his life, sometime after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. By the time they were written, most of his fellow disciples were dead, along with many others martyred for their faith in Christ. Thousands of his people had been massacred by Roman procurator Gessius Florus. Many thousands more died during the four-year Jewish-Roman War. A five-month siege of Jerusalem ended with starvation, slavery, and complete dispersal of the remaining residents of Jerusalem. Anything of value in the temple was carted off to Rome, then all that remained was smashed and burned.

John had more reason than most to long for revenge, give way to hatred and bitterness, long for renewal of the old ways, the old places.

But his letters speak of astonishing newness, grounded and governed by love:

Dear friends, I am not writing you a new command but an old one, which you have had since the beginning. This old command is the message you have heard. Yet I am writing you a new command; its truth is seen in him and in you, because the darkness is passing and the true light is already shining.
Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates a brother or sister is still in the darkness. Anyone who loves their brother and sister lives in the light, and there is nothing in them to make them stumble. (1 John 2:7-10)

After the ashes of Jerusalem John was able to speak of newness: an unprecedented command that repeated one of the oldest commands, but put it in a new, unheard of, unimaginable context.

Love your neighbor as yourself. The command was passed down by Leviticus, encoded in the ten commandments, an essential part of the Torah.

“Yet I am writing you a new – kainos – command,” John wrote. “It’s truth is seen in him and in you, because the darkness is passing and the true light is already shining.”

That new command took the idea of love, expanded it, enriched it, bathed it in light.

This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. if anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth. (1 John 3:16-18)

It’s hard to imagine talking of love when one’s whole way of life has been burned by the oppressor.

It’s hard to live as children of light when darkness seems to be closing in.

Yet we’re called to a newness that springs up from ashes, called to live as light in a world of darkness, called to welcoming, active, sacrificial love when all around are voices of anger, hate and exclusion.

Called to walk in a newness of life that grows deeper, richer, more surprising with every step. A newness that will never grow old.

"Behold, I am making all things new."

This is the fourth in a Lenten series.

Sunday, February 28, 2016

After the Ashes: Beauty

Last Saturday I had the good fortune to see Max McLean’s one-man show, The Most Reluctant Convert, the story of C. S. Lewis’ conversion to Christianity. In it, McLean recounts a brief moment from Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, a first, fleeing glimpse of beauty:

my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew.

It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton's 'enormous bliss' of Eden (giving the full, ancient meaning to 'enormous') comes somewhere near it. It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what?...Before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse... withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased....

That glimpse of beauty, fragile, fleeting, quickly withdrawn, called to Lewis across decades and became part of an inward quest.

The mention of the childhood garden set me wondering about my own childhood glimpses of beauty and brought me to James Baldwin’s very different, yet somehow similar memory:

When I was very young, and was dealing with my buddies in those wine- and urine-stained hallways, something in me wondered, What will happen to all that beauty? For black people, though I am aware that some of us, black and white, do not know it yet, are very beautiful. And when I sat at Elijah's table and watched the baby, the women, and the men, and we talked about God's – or Allah's – vengeance, I wondered, when that vengeance was achieved, What will happen to all that beauty then?

Poet Gerard Manley Hopkins struggled with this throughout his short life (he was thirty-four when he died). What will happen to all that beauty? A pair of challenging poems, The Leaden Echo and The Golden Echo, address the question head on:

HOW to kéep—is there ány any, is there none such,
nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace,
láce, latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty

My Lenten discipline this year is to focus my heart on things that will last, treasures that will remain after whatever “vengeance,” as Baldwin called it, is achieved, after the fire of human fury, or folly, or environmental destruction.

This week’s word and work is beauty.

Not an easy word to track.

Turning to Hebrew and Greek lexicons, I find over 20 very different words translated sometimes as “beauty” or “beautiful," but carrying literal meanings like pleasant, dignified, adorned, sweet, delightful, precious, boastful, arrogant, glorious, vigorous; “scraped of all impurity”.

I wrote of one word translated “beautiful” several years ago: Towb. It’s used in Genesis One, when God looks at creation and said it’s “good.” That word “good” is an astonishing flattening of a word that could be interpreted beautiful, sweet, pleasing, happy, prosperous, bountiful, agreeable, harmonious.

What is beauty?

Where does beauty come from?

Who decides what, or who, is beautiful?

Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes 3:11, “He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end.”

Lewis believed that beauty as we experience it is a glimpse of something beyond this world we live in, a way of seeing we can only hold for a moment:

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” (The Weight of Glory)

Two quick stories of my own, of seeing beauty just for a moment in a way that calls me on toward something more:

A young woman at the camp where I worked as a kid grated on my nerves. I lived all year for camp: a beautiful, peaceful place in the Catskill Mountains. That summer I found myself stuck, again and again, across the table from a person I considered ugly, whiny, endlessly irritating.

Sitting across from her at staff devotions one evening, I prayed, “God, help me see her as you do.” And saw beauty. Saw past the downturned mouth to a glorious smile. Saw past the constant unhappiness to a longing to be welcomed. Glimpsed a dearly loved daughter of God in as much need of embrace as I was myself. It changed my response to her, changed her response to me.

Another quick story: walking once in a scrubby municipal park in a sandy suburb near Miami, I was joined by a flock of wood stork, scratching along the edges of the parking lot. Wood stork! Walking along beside me as if I was a bird myself.

As we walked along we encountered a deer, just standing on the edge of scrubby little woods, and then, in a tree just above us, a cloud of little kinglets went flitting from branch to branch, sometimes just inches from my head, tiny tinkling birds, some with bright golden crowns, some with red, dozens merrily snapping up invisible bugs as if I wasn’t there at all.

Two different experiences of beauty where beauty wasn’t expected.

Both hints of a country I’ve never yet visited, a place where every person is radiantly loved, a landscape where lion lies down with lamb and humans walk with wood stork, kinglets and deer.

Isaiah prophecied:

The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those who grieve in Zion— to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.

Beauty instead of ashes. Beauty from ashes?

Some plants, like sequoias and lodgepole pine, only grow when the resinous coating of their seeds has been melted by searing forest fires.

Some eucalyptus trees can withstand incredible heat to spring back from their roots a scouring blaze.

Some Australian grass trees only bloom after intense heat.

South African fire lilies can lie dormant for years until flames sweep away the debris covering them; after a fire, they can blossom almost overnight.

What if the real beauty, the lasting beauty, is yet to be revealed?

Hopkin’s poem The Leaden Echo, concluded with the thought that there’s nothing we can do to stop time, to hold beauty:

So be beginning, be beginning to despair.
O there ’s none; no no no there ’s none:
Be beginning to despair, to despair,
Despair, despair, despair, despair.

Yet that poem was immediately followed by another, The Golden Echo:

I do know such a place, Where whatever’s prized and passes of us, everything that ’s fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with, done away with, undone,
Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and dangerously sweet
Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matchèd face,
The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,
Never fleets móre, fastened with the tenderest truth
To its own best being and its loveliness of youth

The language is difficult, but the idea is clear: there is a place where the best of beauty remains:

Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God,
beauty’s self and beauty’s giver.
See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost;
every hair
Is, hair of the head, numbered.

Lewis, like Hopkins, believed our longing to see and experience beauty could lead us to longing for and knowledge of God:

We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words-to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.

At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Someday, God willing, we shall get in. (The Weight of Glory: 42-3).

If glimpses of beauty now are just foretaste and promise of beauty after ashes, what does that require of me now, today?

Lewis believed, in part, that we are called to treat others in the light of future glory:

in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no 'ordinary' people.

I find myself challenged to see the beauty Baldwin feared would be overlooked: the beauty of people who don’t fit the dominant paradigm, the beauty of the old, the weak, the beauty hidden behind sadness, indifference, anger.

And I find myself challenged to look for and work toward the beauty God saw in this world when he made it: beauty tragically damaged, diminished, dimmed, but never fully destroyed.

And maybe the largest challenge of all: I choose to trust that God, more merciful than I can imagine, will restore and renew beauty, will bring beauty from ashes, will reveal that weight of glory we see only in part in each other and this weary world around us.

Will use our longing for beauty to bring us to the full beauty held so faithfully in store.

O then, weary then why

When the thing we freely fórfeit is kept with fonder a care,

Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept

Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder

A care kept. — Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where. —

Yonder. — What high as that! We follow, now we

follow. — Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
Yonder.

This is the third in a Lenten series.