Soul Force

Saving Paradise

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

April 19, 2009

Rebecca Parker offers this reflection on James Baldwin in her book Blessing the World: What Can Save Us Now:

AT THE END OF HIS EXTRAORDINARY ESSAY, "The Fire Next Time," James Baldwin poses a question. Most of the essay is a keen and painful exposition of the depth of loss and grief people of African descent experience in North American culture. Drawing on his experiences growing up in the ghettos of New York City, Baldwin shows us how self-loathing grows in a culture that tells a black child his presence is not welcome. He reveals how a sense of the sacredness of other human beings is lost, how relationship is severed, how ugliness permeates all aspects of living, and how despair closes down over people's lives.

But at the end of the essay, Baldwin invokes the rhythms of jazz, the resilience of spirit, the freshness of new life embodied in children growing up in the community, and he says, "The question remains: What do we do with all this beauty?" The greatest challenge in our lives is the challenge presented to us by the beauty of life, by what beauty asks of us, and by what we must do to keep faith with the beauty that has nourished our lives.[1]

"What do we do with all this beauty?" What do we do when, in the midst of the most terrible ugliness, the loss of natural and human splendor, something of beauty still shines through?

The paradox of the story of the Garden of Eden is that if Eve hadn't taken a bite of that apple and shared it with Adam, humankind would still be in a state of childhood, innocent but ignorant, perhaps blissfully happy but lacking all of complexity that gives life depth and meaning. And so we are left with all this beauty and also with a sense of incompleteness, of something missing, something more that we need to be really happy, a wish that somehow that original golden time in the garden might be more present in the lives we lead now, in this place, in the midst of all this beauty.

As Baldwin notes, all of this is happening in the context of lives which are made ugly by willfulness, by deprivation, by selfishness, by exploitation. I went exploring the area around our new house yesterday and found a path through one of the town forests around a water tower which the people who had sold us the house had described to us. The pathway started off with the promise of a pristine woodland, leaves and needles gracing the way, trees and birds coming to life all around. And then, jarringly, a bottle discarded along the path. First there was a sense of slight discomfort -- I should really pick that up -- and then rounding another corner some old green plastic lawn chairs, all broken up, surrounded by discarded beer cans and other debris. How could someone leave a mess like this, I found myself asking? The rest of the way was now less satisfying. Rounding a corner, I found that the path ran right past someone's property; there was a sign warning, "Beware the dog." Back into the forest, the path continued uphill to a picnic area which again showed the residue of picnics or parties -- broken glass, cans, bags overflowing with discarded trash. I began thinking, "Who is responsible for cleaning up this mess?" "Who can we get in here to volunteer a little public service time?" and, "I hope we've trained our kids know better than to leave such a place stained with such selfishness!" So much beauty, so much ugliness. So much good, so much careless evil.

Last week we celebrated Easter and spoke especially of the story of Holy Week as Jesus moved from the triumph of Palm Sunday to the tragedy of Good Friday and then to the triumph of Easter even after his death. This week, as we turn to Earth Day, it is perhaps fitting that we consider how the story of Easter relates to our understanding and appreciation of the earth. When we think of this season of Good Friday and Easter in the Christian liturgical calendar, we think especially of the crucifixion and the agony Jesus suffered on the cross. We think of some of the great art in our museums which focus on this pivotal moment in the history of the world. But, as our reading from "Saving Paradise" suggests, this centrality of the crucifixion was not present at the beginning of Christianity. As we heard from Rita Brock & Rebecca Parker earlier,

Images of Jesus's Crucifixion did not appear in churches until the tenth century. And as we realized that the Crucifixion was absent, we began to pay attention to what was present in early Christian art....

Paradise, we realized, was the dominant image of early Christian sanctuaries. And to our surprise and delight, we discovered that early Christian paradise was something other than "heaven" or the afterlife. In the early church, paradise—first and foremost—was this world, permeated and blessed by the Spirit of God. Images of paradise in Rome and Ravenna captured the craggy, scruffy pastoral landscape, the orchards, the clear night skies, and teeming waters of the Mediterranean world, as if they were lit by a power from within. Sparkling mosaics in vivid colors captured the world's luminosity. The images filled the walls of spaces in which liturgies fostered aesthetic, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual experiences of life in the present, in a world created as good and delightful.[2]

"What do we do with all this beauty?"

Our religious traditions have been somewhat ambiguous in teaching about this world and how we shall treat it. You may recall this verse from the end of the first creation story I told the children this morning -- the one where men and women are equally created in the image of God:

^NRSGenesis 1:28 God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."

Now, the words in this verse have been disputed territory in our traditions; all of the translations I've looked at have the word "subdue," but there are some variants for the words translated "have dominion" in this New Revised Standard translation; the New International Version, generally regarded as a more conservative translation, instead uses "Rule over," and the New Jerusalem Bible, a modern Catholic translation, uses "Be masters of." Now, one way of understanding all of these terms -- dominion, rule, mastery over -- is to understand them to mean "have our way with." We see this in some contemporary understandings of private property: I own it, it's mine, I can do whatever I want with it. Presumably the people in the town forest I visited yesterday had extended this notion to shared common space: the land is here for our enjoyment, exploitation; it's ours to use as we choose. An extension of this notion can begin to get a little more short-sighted: Taxes on my property or earnings are theft; I earned it, I own it, it's mine, no one can take it or any part of it away. Sometimes this is even extended to people. It is not so long ago that slavery was abolished, and there are some who believe that they can treat their children as their possessions to do with as they will, or their girlfriends or their wives or their employees. We could quickly go down the road of a political argument with that discussion, but clearly the notion that anyone or even all of us together can completely possess all this beauty can take us down the road to extreme selfishness and isolation. There are other ways of understanding taking responsibility for this earth and for each other. Here's one vision of "ruling over" from the Tao Te Ching in Stephen Mitchell's translation:

When the Master governs, the people

are hardly aware that he exists.

Next best is a leader who is loved.

Next, one who is feared.

The worst is one who is despised.

If you don't trust the people,

you make them untrustworthy.

The Master doesn't talk, he acts.

When his work is done,

the people say, "Amazing:

we did it, all by ourselves!"[3]

So being the master doesn't mean or require lording it over people or over things; real mastery opens shared possibilities. It was this kind of mastery that the earliest Christians believed Jesus had wrested from the powers of evil by his death and resurrection. The early Christians believed that as a result his death the entrance of the long lost garden had once again been flung open, even if only fleetingly and never perfectly. This belief is reflected in the line "Christ has opened paradise" in the hymn "Jesus Christ is Risen Today that we sang last week at Easter. This experience was reflected in the design of the earliest churches; here's how Brock and Parker describe those places of worship:

As soon as congregants entered ancient churches, they stood in a three-tiered sacred cosmos....

In this three-tiered universe, paradise had both a “here” and “not here” quality. Christians taught that paradise had always been here on earth. Sin had once closed its portals, but Jesus Christ had reopened them for the living. While Christians could taste, see, and feel the traces of it in ordinary life, they arrived most fully in paradise in community worship. With its art and buildings, the church created a space that united the living on earth with the heavenly beings and departed saints who surrounded and blessed the living. The risen Christ and clouds of witnesses embraced this life and lifted it to touch the heavens at every Eucharist. In that holy ritual, the community stood within the sacred cosmos, blessed by the fruits of the earth and the power of the saints.[4]

What was not shown was the crucifixion itself. Even representations of the Passion moved directly from the cross being carried up the hill to the appearance of the risen Christ on Easter morning. The crucifixion became central to Christianity only a thousand years after the death of Jesus, when the church and the rulers who allied themselves with the church appropriated the death of Jesus as a way of glorifying death in the causes they wished people to fight for -- the crusades and other conquests. It was at the launching of the first crusade in 1095 by Pope Urban II that "killing for Christ" was given sanctification by the church; as Brock and Parker tell it:

Urban then pronounced the ultimate incentive: “Whoever goes on the journey to free the church of God in Jerusalem . . . can substitute the journey for all penance for sin.” With these words, he reversed nearly a thousand years of Christian teaching about the sin of shedding human blood. War ceased being a sin and became a way to atone for sin. Killing became a mode of penance, a pathway to paradise.[5]

Of course, paradise also changed its nature to become something completely removed from this life and this earth, something achieved only after death, most honorably a glorious warrior's death in battle for the forces of God on earth. This shift in the understanding of the meaning of the death of Jesus was in turn backed up with a theological turn in which the death on the cross was understood to be a necessary sacrifice that God made of God in the form of Jesus for humanity, a sacrifice which bore its full fruit only in heaven, now conceived as a realm separate from this world, separate from this lifetime, separate from all this beauty.

Our Universalist forebears objected to this mechanistic, legalistic notion of a transaction in which God required Jesus to die, in which suffering was necessary for salvation. They called us back to this life, to the reality that we make heaven and hell right where we are and not only in some place remote from our daily living. Clarence Skinner, one of the leading Universalist theologians of the 20th Century, wrote in his book The Social Implications of Universalism that

God is "a robust deity who likes his universe, who hungers for fellowship, who is in and of and for the whole of life." [Skinner] taught that loving the world that God loves meant respecting "the infinite variety of the forms of life," honoring that "human beings exhibit the widest conceivable variety of physical and temperamental differences" which must not be exploited. Loving the world meant working to abolish injustice and to be motivated by joy "in the beauties and riches of the earth." Optimistic, life-affirming religion recognized that "those who have faith in the world are the ones upon whom rests the tremendous responsibility of redeeming the world."[6]

Brock and Parker share this as their vision of what paradise is and can be:

To know paradise in this life is to enter a multidimensional spiritual-material reality, an interstitial space. Paradise is simultaneously this earth, a beautiful, luminous creation, and the realm of the dead, which is connected to the living but is separated by a thin veil through which the dead can pass to accompany, bless, or guide the living. Paradise is human life restored to its divinely infused dignity and capacity, and it is a place of struggle with evil and injustice, requiring the development of wisdom, love, nonviolence, and responsible uses of power. Paradise can be experienced as spiritual illumination of the heart, mind, and senses felt in moments of religious ecstasy, and it can be known in ordinary life lived with reverence and responsibility. Paradise is not a place free from suffering or conflict, but it is a place in which Spirit is present and love is possible.[7]

In this way we can begin to understand that earth can be a paradise if we choose to use our powers to bless the world. Paradise is complex, challenging, never fully achieved, but always a point to move toward, to move into to be refreshed and inspired to use our powers for good in this world.

We must cherish all this beauty. We must choose to bless this world. That is how, to the limited degree that it is possible in any one life, we can return to the garden and, if there should be a paradise of which we can be a part even after we depart this earth, that is also how we may best prepare to live there as well.

Amen.