In A Dream

                                                 Josephs Dream -  Gaetano Gandolfi

Matthew 1:18-25

When the unthinkable occurs we may find our selves operating in a daze, a dreamlike state where no thing feels real and everything seems a mirage. How did this happen? What does it mean? What do I do now? How am I going to cope with this and the fallout from this situation? We can lose touch with the world we live in and become bambozzzled by anxiety, frustration and stress.

Joseph is just a man. Mary is just a woman. Two material beings plunged into the unreal world of an unwanted child in a time when for this to occur was an outrage. How do you handle not only the possibility of a child but the tragic consequences which was the normal response to such an event? In Matthews retelling of the story agency is given, not to Mary but to Joseph to steer his little family through the crisis.

Joseph was a good man. Mary was a good woman. According to Matthew they hadn’t lived together, they had followed the rules yet, somehow, there was a child on the way. So what to do?

In spiritual matters angels, sleep and dreams play a significant role in discernment and direction. Mary was informed by an angel about what was to occur and Joseph has an encounter with an angel while asleep and dreaming.

Angels have a history. They are the messengers of God, sometimes even, they are the Godhead itself. The Old Testament are full of such stories. They bring a message, interpret a situation and provide direction for the confused and bewildered followers attempting to live out their faith in a material world.

It is no surprise that these encounters occur when one is asleep. They rarely occur when one’s fully awake and engaged in the busyness of life. When we are distracted by our ego self we can fail to see the messenger standing right in front of us. When we are dealing with a disturbing situation, when someone is confronting us or we have been so unbalanced by an event, it is all we can do to defend ourselves in an attempt to stay upright, let alone see the angel present in the situation.

Being asleep is when we allow our subconscious the opportunity to process the events we are working through and to provide us guidance and direction. Sleep is that time when our brain takes the time to recalibrate itself and to put into order the chaos of our days. We miss things when we are awake and busy. We are so focussed on any number of things at the one time that what can be a key element simply isn’t connected with and miss the obvious. Asleep our brain cleans up and puts things together.

One of the things we need to do with computers is to defrag our system, this simply means defragmenting that part of our computer which stores data. A defrag simply puts things back in the right place so what was possibly lost in another place is restored to where it should be. Sleep is the time our brain defrags its storage system and returns things to its proper place.

No wonder one of the wisest pieces of advice is to sleep on it. It does work miracles. In the morning things look different and what seemed impossible before is now so obvious you can’t believe you were so anxious about it.

Dreaming is one of the tools our brain uses to review the day. Sometimes it is a realistic dream, sometimes it is symbolic and metaphorical and may take a little time to unpack, but this parallel world is seen by the ancient worlds as vital to discernment and wisdom. Again being a sleep and entering into a dreamlike world we are open to the present of others, known and unknown because we are no longer relying on our ego for direction.

My father spoke often of his spirit friend who would visit him at night and sit on the edge of the bed. They seemed to have discussed many things and the visitation was real and valuable to my father. He relied on this visitor for advice and direction. It was no doubt a dream like event but it was real, not imagined, for him.

Joseph’s dream like experience is a way of describing the process he went through to make sense of the impossible situation he found himself in. What he had decided to do and how he decided to do it reflect the importance of the event. He wasn’t making a decision on his own. A supernatural experience require(d) supernatural guidance. Being still and silent, asleep, he was able to hear what was there and what he needed to do.

Here we return to the idea of waiting in stillness we discussed last Sunday. There is no panicked running around trying to solve it. It happens in the stillness of waiting, in this case while he is asleep. When we enter into liturgy and the spiritual life we enter into a place of waiting in stillness. Of letting go of ego and allowing what is to come to come, what is to be to be and what we need to discover to appear. This is not simply a passive stillness or waiting but a waiting to see, to see what is to be and how I am to respond.

Joseph responds very differently to what he would have been expected to respond. He didn’t call off the betrothment, he didn’t abandon Mary, he didn’t go away in shame. He was able to discern that something very special was present and he was to take the uncomfortable journey with Mary. He did so because he acknowledged the inner wisdom present in his inner being. He recognised the fingerprint of God and was prepared to go where logic and local law said not to go. He, the ordinary man and Mary the ordinary woman became extraordinary, making it possible for the intersection of the divine and the human, of the perfect and the imperfect, of the infallible and the fallible.

He and Mary made it possible for God to walk among us in the shape of Jesus of Nazareth and experience the enigma that is being human so that humans can aspire to be like God in their relations with one another.

The challenge for you and I is to find the space to be still and wait for the visitation of wisdom. It can happen anywhere and does, indeed happen in our dreams, while we are asleep. But it can also happen, far less dramatically as we sit in the spaces within our liturgy, in the moments before church and the moments after communion. It simply requires us to be still, to wait and to be open to the possibility. Lets try it now. 

Haggai Sophia - Holy Wisdom

Proverbs 1:20-21

²⁰Wisdom cries out in the street;

in the squares she raises her voice.

 ²¹At the busiest corner she cries out;

at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:

 

 

 

Wisdom is a woman. Her name is Haggia Sophia, “Holy Wisdom” and the Book of Proverbs tells her story this way:

 

Yahweh created me when his purpose first unfolded,

before the oldest of his works.

From everlasting I was firmly set,

from the beginning, before earth came into being,

The deep was not, when I was born,

there were no springs to gush with water.

Before the mountains were settled,

before the hills, I came to birth;

before he made the earth, the countryside

or the first grains of the world’s dust.

When he fixed the heavens firm, I was there,

when he drew a ring on the surface of the deep,

when he thickened the clouds above,

when he fixed fast the springs of the deep,

when he assigned the sea its boundaries

—and the waters will not invade the shore—

when he laid down the foundations of the earth,

I was by his side, a master craftsman,

delighting him day after day,

ever at play in his presence,

at play everywhere in his world,

delighting to be with the sons and daughters of the human race.

 

Where have heard this before? The prologue to John’s Gospel draws a comparison between Jesus who was there at the beginning and Wisdom. John asserts that Jesus is the wisdom of God. In Jesus is the perfect presence of the feminine and the masculine, the coming together of creation and redemption in one earthly being. In a masculine and patriarchal society this seems to us to be nothing more than an oddity. God is and has been for the western mind a masculine figure, a king, warrior, a father. Rarely if ever do we think seriously about God, Jesus, the Spirit in wisdom terms, and even rarer still, in feminine terms.

 

Yet Matthew Fox writes: “Sophia or Wisdom has often been presented as a minor figure in Jewish theology.  However, a serious look at the Hebrew Scriptures reveals that “there is more material on Sophia in the Hebrew Scriptures than there is about almost any other figure.  Only God (under various titles), Job, Moses, and David are treated in more depth.”  There is more written about Sophia than about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Solomon, Isaiah, Sarah, Miriam, Adam, or Noah.  But we do not know her.  Sophia, who stands taller than any of them, is ignored.”

 

In New Testament terms the feminine is reduced to bit parts, Mary Magdalene, Mary and Martha, the unnamed women in the Gospel stories, the women who supported Paul, but again rarely in a primary role. The exception of course is Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptiser and Mary the mother of Jesus. Whoever Mary was she was very unlikely to have been the perfect women we have become to see. As we noted a couple of weeks ago, the nomenclature virgin referred more to how she engaged with her understanding of God and what was happening to her at her centre (le point vierge), the capacity and wisdom to see God at work at a difficult time in her life – pregnant and unwed but betrothed.

 

As civilisations and the jewish experience as an example moved away from a reliance on on the land and sort to distance itself from the fertility Gods, often feminine as the feminine is responsible for birthing all things, society became masculine, an imposed order from above not a birthed order from below. In the New Testament church the role of the feminine was usurped by that of the masculine and remained that way until the middle ages. At this time a renewal began, empowering women to regain visibility and recognition, although their writings and pronouncements were often masculine in form, as they had to be if they were to read.

 

Two of such women were Hildegard of Bingen and Julian of Norwich. For Hildegard of Bingen, Wisdom (Sapientia in Latin) is present in God from all eternity. She is God's bride and the means through which all created things are brought forth. She gives life energy or "greening" power to all things. She mediates between the transcendent divine and creation, sustaining all things, She is manifest in all human sciences, as well as in the revelatory and redeeming knowledge of God. She is incarnate as Christ through Mary's virginal womb, and she continues to speak through the teachers of the church. She is manifest finally in the redeemed people of God as Mother Church.

 

For Julian of Norwich, Wisdom is identified with Christ, the second person of the Trinity. She is the one through whom we are created naturally and recreated spiritually. "Thus Jesus Christ who does good against evil is our very Mother, We have our being of him, where every ground of motherhood begins, with all the sweet keeping of love that endlessly follows. As truly as God is our Father so truly is God our Mother" ("Revelations of Divine Love," chapter 59).

 

This resurgence of wisdom as the feminine principle has been championed by such as Matthew Fox and Thomas Merton and women theologians such as Joan Chittister, Mary Radford Reuther and more. Merton, an unlikely proponent as he was male and part of a male only order, Trappist monks. Yet he wrote a powerful prose poem entitled Haggai Sophia in honour of wisdom. Women played an enormous part in his dreams and were understood by him to be the prophetic wisdom of God. 

 

In his poem he writes the following (I wish I had time to read it all - it is wonderful):

 

'The feminine principle in the world is the inexhaustible source of creative realizations of the Father's glory. She is His manifestation in radiant splendor! But she remains unseen, glimpsed only by a few. Sometimes there are none who know her at all.’

 

He continues: 'Sophia in ourselves is the mercy of God in us. She is the tenderness with which the infinitely mysterious power of pardon turns the darkness of our sins into the light of grace. She is the inexhaustible fountain of kindness, and would almost seem to be, in herself, all mercy. So she does in us a greater work than that of Creation: the work of new being in grace, the work of pardon, the work of transformation from brightness to brightness. She is in us the yielding and tender counterpart of the power, justice and creative dynamism of the Father.’

 

Is there ever been a time when there was a greater need for ‘this tender counterpart of power, justice and creative dynamism’ to be reimagined and lived? The masculine sense of imposed power and right dominate resulting in unjust systems, cruelty and unending war. It is sad that this sense of feminine is often missing, not just in the males who are in power, but by females who take on the masculine traits that lead to momentary success.

 

Wisdom as the feminine principle is not gender specific. Women have no more of it than men for God evenly distributes it to all. It is to be found in all of creation and is experienced by those who, like Mary and Jesus, are in touch with God at their centre, poor and empty of the ego self, present to the poor and the marginalised and uninhibited by culture, tradition and entitlement.

 

Proverbs 1:20-23, which we read today starts: “²⁰Wisdom cries out in the street; in the squares she raises her voice. ²¹At the busiest corner she cries out; at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:” and no-one is listening. It is time we started. Amen

The Foolishness of Wisdom - God At Work in the World.

1 Corinthians 1:18-31, John 2:13-22 

The Bible is full of fools and foolishness. God’s story, old or new is full of fools and foolishness. Even the wisdom we discover there in seems to be at odds with the wisdom and learning we encounter in educational, institutional or everyday life. Paul points straight to the cross, Jesus points straight to the tearing down of the temple through the cross, Moses at 80+, Abraham and Sarah at almost 100 years of age, David as King and the list goes on.

Not only was the wisdom in the Bible at odds with the prevailing sense of the world, it simply marches to a different rhythm to the world we live in. 

Yet, the wisdom and knowledge the world we live in has grown up with is not certain and true.Take, for example, the creation of our universe which has been said by scientists to have begun with a big bang – the big bang theory. There are at least three other theories standing against the big bang theory. The latest from a group of scientists at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, suggests that the universe was simply there all the time and had no need for a big bang theory explain it.

Ideas such as the world isn’t flat, or it isn’t carried on the back of a large tortoise or the sun revolves around earth were all foolishness at one time or another. Over our lifetime we have seen the wisdom of the day overturned time and again, and what would have looked as foolishness, become the new wisdom. Who could have imagined we could instantly connect to someone on the other side of the world with out going through a telephone exchange, having someone dial the number, waiting for the operator on the other side of the world then finally connecting and have to listen through the crackle and noise inherent in the cables under the sea? 

The suggestion that God could be found present in the world in the person of Jesus from Nazareth was foolishness to those for whom God was distant, beyond the clouds and only to be found in the Torah or through interventionist acts from beyond, was foolishness. Even for the majority of Christians God was seen as part of a three tiered cosmos, outside our world, someone who chose who to rescue and not to rescue and was, arbitrary to some degree, in who was in and who was out of his kingdom.

Today we know that God doesn’t live beyond the clouds. We have been there and God, as a person cannot be found. We know, from experience, that God cannot be manipulated into rescuing, saving or healing us. We have come to understand what Jesus and Paul said was true and not foolishness. We are made in the image of God, God is within us and we are within God, and we are on a journey to discover ourselves as we discover who God is to us. Jesus oft said 'Today the kingdom of God has come near' reveals the truth that God is nearer to us than ourselves and our mission is to be still and know that I Am is God.

This was the message of the mystics of all ages and is the core message of John’s Gospel. John was Jewish and his language to describe Jesus and his purpose comes directly from Jewish mysticism. It is the language of unity, being and one-ing. Right at the beginning of his Gospel he lays a hymn of praise and recognition to such an understanding of Jesus. He is not talking about a physical being, a real person or a God who has become a man, but to a being who has always existed and is indelibly apart of the one who simply says I Am. And if we are made one with Christ then we are also made one with the ground of all being, I Am. John uses those two words over and over again to describe Jesus. He is not subtle.

In the temple John directly connects Jesus, I Am, with the temple and all that goes on there. The temple cult sat at the centre of Jewish religious, social and political life. It was the place where the Holy of Holies contained God, and to some sense, where God could be seen as holding them. Jesus, John’s I Am, comes and confronts this worldly wisdom and says this is simply man made. “Here you have created a place where you strive to contain and manipulate God according to the written law and practice. I will destroy the validity of such wisdom and replace it with what may seem like foolishness, a death that says relationships; emerging, growing and defining relationships, with creation and with each other become the places where you encounter God. The possibility of such a relationship is available to all, and especially those that make it real in their lives.

Paul reminds us: ‘For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.’ We could say that God’s love is greater than man’s law. The ongoing story of the two members of the Bali 9 and their struggle with Indonesian law challenges us all. The law is a straightener. It should be designed to bring people back to the centre of themselves and society. The parameters and the judgement of the law should be flexible and able to respond to the steps people make to come do so. To pursue the ends of law simply to make a point is pigheaded brutality and needs to be avoided.

Over and over again, in my engagement with young people in schools, I and those I worked with, faced such a challenge. Yes, this behaviour is inappropriate simply deserves severe censure or expulsion. Yet, what is the outcome we seek? That this child may return to the centre of his or her community and not be expelled from it. Therefore do we follow the letter of the law or do we find ways to allow this person to find redemption? The latter, often seen as foolishness by those for whom punishment is the only reward, was chosen more often and not. And it works.

Saw a message from a young man recently whose history is dotted with great failures. He is now a member of the Army Cadets and was recently promoted to a corporal. It is one of those wow moments. If his misdemeanours had been handled by the letter of the law, this may not have been possible. Relationships and compassion pave the way to redemption.

Sin is not a legal problem, it is a relationship problem; the relationship with self with others and with the I AM, and can only be solved by the foolishness of love, love in the shape of the cross and the taking up of that cross by us in a way that it allow others to journey back to the centre.

May we do this in a way that values individuals and their life experience, be they the young who need direction and correction, or us who are slightly older who need to know that, contrary to the wisdom of the day, are in fact the embodiment of the wisdom experience God has brought our way, if we have processed those experience through the foolishness of the crucified and reimagined Christ.

Silent Retreat Opportunity

Theme: Ancient Wisdom for a Modern World
Date: 29th June - 2nd July

Where: Santa Teresa Retreat Centre, Ormiston, Brisbane

Cost: $375 all inclusive (private room and facilities)

Rule: No technology (mobile phones, ipods, ipads or laptops)

Opportunity for spiritual direction over the 3 days (included).

Program includes daily eucharist, 3 short input sessions and lots of silence.

If interested, email Fr Glenn Loughrey on redshoeswalking@bigpond.com