Hero’s Journey or Exodus? Part 2

The exodus model differs from the journey’s quest in two –for me–compelling ways.

Moses leading the Israelites across the Reed Sea, a fresco in a Jewish synagogue in Dura Europos, 3rd century C.E.

In my last posting, Part 1 of this extended discussion on two models of the spiritual journey, I looked at the popular model of the hero’s journey. I call it popular because Joseph Campbell gave it such appealing presentations. Now, I turn to the second model, the story of the exodus.

Fundamentally the exodus story is the story of liberation, the liberation of a people. Through Moses, God frees the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, freeing them through a series of mighty works he performs on their behalf. 

Fundamentally the exodus story is the story of liberation, the liberation of a people.

The struggle for freedom climaxes in the miraculous passing of the Israelites through the Reed Sea on dry land; the Egyptian army is drowned when it tries to follow. Then something interesting happens. If Israel had taken the normal coastal road along the shore of the Mediterranean Sea, they would have arrived in the land of Canaan in a matter of weeks. But God directs them to pursue their journey through the middle of the Sinai desert. That journey ends up taking 40 years.

Learning to Exercise Responsible Freedom

Why would God direct Israel into such a long, slow, and circuitous route to Canaan? The answer I believe is that this disorganized band of freed slaves is not yet a people, a nation that can hold its own when it arrives in Canaan. What is needed is a time for nation-building. Nation-building, however, is not a quick and instant task. It can take a long time to forge a group of individuals into a unified society. That is the task of those 40 years in the Sinai wilderness.

In particular, Israel must learn how to live with the freedom God has given it, without falling back into the patterns of tyranny from which they emerged in Egypt. For the great illusion of many revolutions is that freedom means license for every person to do exactly what he or she wants to do. 

If you operate with that understanding of freedom, then society becomes a power struggle among all the competing interests and persons. That power struggle comes to an end only when one group or individual gathers all power into their or his hands. When that happens, a new tyranny replaces the old one that the revolution overthrew. We have seen this pattern repeated over and over again in history. 

For the freedom that God has given the Israelite slaves to survive, they must come to recognize that they must exercise a responsible freedom. Responsible freedom means that I enjoy the freedom to be myself, but in a society where everyone else is accorded the same freedom. Responsible freedom, therefore, means we accept limits on our autonomy.

Israel must learn how to live with the freedom God has given it, without falling back into the patterns of tyranny from which they emerged in Egypt.

What is happening in Sinai during those 40 years is that God is establishing a covenant with Israel and giving Israel a code of law that will enable Israel not only to survive as a nation, but also to flourish by a practice of responsible freedom. 

After 40 years of wandering, the Israelites cross the Jordan River to take possession of the land God has promised to them, the land of Canaan. What we find in the rest of the Old Testament story is how seductive will be the temptation for Israel to return to the life of Egypt.

Over and over again, Israel will compromise its monotheism, reintroducing the worship of other gods. It will backtrack from its principles of social justice, repeating the patterns of exploitation and tyranny practiced in Egypt. As a result, Israel will lose its land and freedom, going into exile.

Four Distinctive Features of the Exodus Model

Let me highlight four distinctive features of the Exodus story.

First, the Exodus story is a story about liberation. What Israel is given in the exodus from Egypt is the gift of freedom. Israel does not free itself from slavery. No, God frees them—and thus we are given the original meaning of salvation.

The gift of the Torah or Law is a gift that God gives so Israel can retain its freedom through the practice of responsible freedom. What Israel must learn in the wilderness is how to love God with all their being and love their neighbor as themselves. That is what a saved life looks like–a life of health, harmony, justice, wholeness, and peace.

Second, the exodus is not a story of the liberation of individuals as individuals, but the liberation or salvation of a people. What is primary in the story is the creation of a people, the people of Israel.

Yes, there are heroes in that story, especially Moses. In the story of Moses, there are many places where the life of Moses follows the classic pattern of the hero’s journey. But the exodus story is not primarily the story of the heroic life of Moses. It is the story of the liberation and forming of a people. Salvation has a fundamental social character rather than an individual character.

Three, note how the exodus story ends. Israel does not return to Egypt to resume its life in Egypt as a transformed people. The journey ends in the Promised Land, a new destination and a new home. 

The old home is left behind. It is the land of oppression. Instead God leads them to a new home, a different place from where they began their journey. The Promised Land is a place where Israel can flourish in freedom, if Israel is willing to practice the principles of responsible freedom.

Finally, Israel remembers and celebrates this story of liberation each year through the Passover festival. Passover is the supreme religious festival of Judaism. It remembers the gift of Israel’s liberation. It continues to be seen as the paradigm for how God relates to Israel all through its history and into its future. 

Scholars speculate that in the ancient past, Passover may have had its origins in a spring festival celebrated by the Canaanites. But what is striking is that the Israelites historicize the festival, making it not a celebration of nature’s cycles, but of a historical event, the Israelite’s liberation from slavery. It is a celebration of liberation, of a people being set free for a life of liberty under covenant with God.

The Jewish Concept of Historical Time

This Jewish concept of Passover involves a dramatically different concept of historical time than did those pagan fertility cults that I discussed in my last posting. Historical time is seen as linear, not cyclical. History has a beginning and it has an end. History time moves from one to the other.

In the historical event of the exodus, God frees Israel from Egypt and sets Israel on a journey. When the journey ends, it does not bring Israel back home to Egypt, but to a new destination, the Promised Land. Egypt and the Promised Land are not one and the same. 

Therefore, the divine movement in the world is not seen primarily as moving through the cycles of nature, but through divine interventions into human life, interventions that make a decisive difference. The divine character of God is revealed in God’s interventions in unique historical events, events that are meant to free human beings into a wholesome society. 

Scholars have noted that this Hebrew understanding of time means that Judaism has built into it a momentum for change. Religion is to lead people to a new and better experience of life, a life of liberation. 

The divine character of God is revealed in God’s interventions in unique historical events, events that are meant to free human beings into a wholesome society. 

Time moves forward from an initial starting point toward a fully developed end point in the future. What the future end point will be is not fully clear, but it will not be a return to the initial state of the world at the time of creation. 

The ancient pagan mindset tended to see the Golden Age of mankind as lying in the past, at the time of creation. This was re-emphasized each year in the pagan celebrations of the New Year Festival.

Hebrew thought, on the other hand, sees the Golden Age lying at the end, not at the beginning of history, but at the end of history when the Kingdom of God will be ushered in in all its fullness. History is a linear journey with mankind moving ahead to a Golden Age that has not yet dawned. 

If we remain true to this mindset, then the Hebrew concept of time works not to re-establish the status quo but to give incentive to change, change that leads to a better future ahead. 

Christian Adaptations of the Exodus Model

With its origins in Judaism, Christianity adopts this same Hebrew mindset of linear historical time. With one big difference: Christianity sees the decisive intervention of God into human life as being not the exodus from Egypt, but the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus.

The death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus are seen as the ultimate events of liberation, except in this case, not from the political and economic and social oppression of Egyptian slavery, but from our spiritual slavery to sin, death, and evil. The events of Holy Week, Easter, and Ascension then become another Passover, the Christian Passover. They celebrate our salvation from a kind of spiritual enslavement.

Still, exodus becomes the basic model for the classic Christian understanding of the spiritual journey. Let me mention a few examples.

When monasticism arose in the church in the late 3^rd and 4^th centuries, it arose in the deserts of Egypt and Syria. That is not accidental, for by this time, the desert had come to be associated with the location for spiritual transformation and formation. This was one of the legacies of the exodus story in Jewish and Christian imaginations.

One of the first and great expositions of the Christian understanding of the spiritual journey is a book titled The Life of Moses, by the early church father Gregory of Nyssa. Gregory was a renowned Christian theologian of the 4^th century. He and his brother Basil of Caesarea were great apologists for what became the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. He lived and worked in Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey.

…exodus becomes the basic model for the classic Christian understanding of the spiritual journey.

In his book The Life of Moses, he interprets the story of Moses and the exodus as an allegory. The allegory describes the spiritual journey of the soul as it journeys to God and to God’s realm. In that journey (a mystical journey as Gregory understands it), he sees the soul going through three stages, symbolized by God’s revelation of himself to Moses, first in light, then in cloud, then in darkness.

Gregory is especially notable for his teaching that the Christian soul never fully reaches the end of his journey, even in eternity. Perfection is seen to be a never-ending journey. He writes: This truly is the vision of God: never to be satisfied in the desire to see him.

Another great Christian exposition of the exodus model of the spiritual journey is Dante’s Divine Comedy. This epic poem tells the story of Dante’s own spiritual journey.

He begins in a dark wood of human confusion and despair. He journeys first through the realm of human sin, Hell. Then he begins his ascent to Paradise, passing through the stages of Purgatory as sins are cleansed. He ends his journey in the celestial Paradise where he reaches the end of his journey with a beatific vision of God.

In fact, his poem ends not with Dante returning to a transformed life in this world, but caught up in the ecstasy of divine love at the center of time and space. The end of the journey is a far different and far more glorious place than the dark wood where he began. His exodus is the journey through spiritual purification.

Finally I want to mention a great Protestant classic of the spiritual journey: John Bunyan’s classic, The Pilgrim’s Progress. This book is the classic Protestant adaptation of the exodus model of the spiritual journey. 

It has a hero, the figure of Christian, who travels on his way to the celestial city through a series of tests, temptations, and adventures. The land he leaves behind is a kind of Puritan version of Egypt. When he reaches the celestial city, he crosses through the river of death, never to return home. He comes to his new home, the celestial land of heaven.

Why I Find the Exodus Model So Compelling

We have then two models for the spiritual journey: the hero’s journey and the exodus. We often see writers on spirituality blending aspects of the two models together. Even in the exodus story, as I mentioned, we find Moses as an individual exhibiting some features of the hero’s journey.

I personally resonate with the hero’s journey model because my own spiritual journey mirrors some of its components. I have traveled Campbell’s circle, and returned home again, but as a stronger and spiritually healthier person. But I find the exodus model more compelling for two important reasons. 

First, as I have mentioned several times, the hero’s journey generally has an individualistic cast. The transformed hero may have a beneficial impact on society once he returns home, but the hero’s journey is not primarily about a people’s journey as a people.

Maybe that is one reason why Joseph Campbell’s presentations so resonate with Americans. Our culture is one that values individualism, and a spiritual journey that concentrates on the transformation of an individual appeals to us. Even those classic Christian statements that I cited–the works of Gregory of Nyssa, Dante, and John Bunyan–also adapt the exodus story along an individualistic line. They describe the spiritual journey of individuals.

…we can never escape the fact that the exodus model of the spiritual journey is always a story of a spiritual journey of a people, not just of individuals.

But I think that we can never escape the fact that the exodus model of the spiritual journey is always a story of a spiritual journey of a people, not just of individuals. For this reason, Judaism and Christianity remain corporate in their religious visions. The people of Israel as a people, the Church as the Body of Christ, remain central to both religions.

I think that is important. The hero’s journey can breed a sense of elitism. It is after all a story of a hero. What happens then if we do not feel we are heroes? Is the spiritual journey then something we cannot hope to experience?

What about all of us average Christians who do not have burning bush mystical experiences or Damascus Road transformations? Can we participate in any spiritual journey?

I answer a decisive Yes. We participate in the spiritual journey through our participation in the life, worship, and ministry of our home church. Life in a normal parish church may not always feel all that transformative, what with its petty disputes and meanness. 

But it can be very transformative, as we share in its life, in its the study of the Word, its celebration of the sacraments, and its ministry to those in need. That participation lived out through a lifetime of devotion can bring about transformations just as real as Moses’ or St. Paul’s. The transformation may be slow, quiet, and hidden. Nonetheless, whether transformation is gradual or immediate, it is still transformation.

Here is where I resonate strongly with the exodus model. When I look back on the spiritual journey I’ve traversed in my life, I have to say that I have had no sudden or dramatic revelations or enlightenments or mystical experiences that revolutionized my life and consciousness as did the enlightenment that the Buddha had under the Bodhi tree.

My experience of transformation has been much more an experience of living out in the wilderness for a long time. There in the wilderness I have undergone many transformations, but in slow, quiet, and hidden ways. My formation as a Christian, however, has been deeply shaped and influenced by my participation in a number of local Christian congregations. It has not been an exclusively individual journey.

I believe that for most Christians, that will be the way we experience the spiritual journey. If we take our involvement in a local church seriously and we take the call to Christian discipleship seriously, we will be transformed more often than not in these slow, quiet, and hidden ways. This means I have a high regard for life in a congregation. Life in a local church may have its many problems, but it is still the place where the Spirit works to transform us spiritually.

The Best is Yet Ahead

Second, I find myself most drawn to the exodus model because of its sense of the end point of the journey and its sense of time. Again, as I’ve mentioned several times, the end of the Exodus journey is not the return to Egypt, but the arrival in the Promised Land. 

The exodus story nurtures an openness to change. As a result, life takes on vitality, because we are spiritually always on our tiptoes waiting with incredible anticipation to see what amazing things God is doing and will do.

What I find fascinating in the trajectory of the Biblical story is that the Bible begins with a garden, the garden of Eden, and in the Christian Bible ends with a city, the city of the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven, described in the last two chapters of Revelation.

God is a true conservative, preserving what is good and best in the past, but God is also a true liberal, in the sense of his liberating all creation for a glorious liberty that exceeds description.

Yet in the heart of that city lies the garden. The garden has not been abolished and abandoned, but it has been caught up into something much greater and more glorious, a city where God dwells with his people forever. The garden is preserved and glorified in the city. God is a true conservative, preserving what is good and best in the past, but God is also a true liberal, in the sense of his liberating all creation for a glorious liberty that exceeds description.

What all this says to me is that God is at work not just to save our lives so that we can return to our lives as they are, there to be more happy, effective, and productive.

No, God is at work to bring us and the whole world to something far more glorious than we can ever imagine, a fulfillment that exceeds whatever we can dream. This is a vision of incredible hope. In the exodus story, the best does not lie behind us in the past. It lies ahead.

Final Comment

This posting completes my reflections upon the Book of Exodus, reflections that have occupied my last 34 blog postings. I hope they inspire you to go back and re-read the Book of Exodus and then do so again and again. Let it words sink deep into your souls, for it is, I believe, the paradigm of salvation. This is what the journey to salvation looks like, whether we are an individual or a people. 

The Parable of the Golden Buddha

A discovery in Thailand opens a window on one fruit of a spiritual journey.

The golden Buddha in the Bangkok temple of Wat Traimit

In 1954, a Buddhist monastery in Bangkok, Thailand, was undertaking renovations. A stucco image of the Buddha had long sat in the courtyard under a tin roof. The monks decided to build a shrine to shelter it.

The following year the statue was lifted from its pedestal to be moved to its new location. The statue proved surprisingly heavy. The ropes lifting it broke. The image fell hard on the ground. As it did, some of the stucco coating chipped off.

The color of gold gleamed through the crack. When the workmen removed the rest of the plaster, they discovered a gold image underneath. Parts of the head were in fact pure gold. It weighed five and a half tons.

The image had been moved to Bangkok in 1801 from the ruined city of Ayutthaya. There it had sat for many years in a derelict temple. A Burmese army had destroyed the city in 1767. It is now believed that the temple’s monks had covered the statue with clay in hopes that the invaders would not discover what lay beneath.

They were so successful that not only did the invaders not suspect what lay beneath the plaster, but everyone else forgot also, until the golden Buddha was accidentally rediscovered. Today it is the prized image in its own temple.

This story offers a wonderful parable for one fruit of our spiritual journeys. As we move deeper into the spiritual life through the practice of spiritual disciplines, we can find ourselves discovering more and more of our true self versus the false self that we show as a façade to the world in our everyday life.

A Theme in Modern Spiritual Writing

The contrast between the true self and the false self is a common theme in the writings of many modern writers on the spiritual life. We encounter it often in the writings of Richard Rohr and Thomas Keating, two Catholic writers who have had a profound influence on my own understanding of the spiritual journey.

Rohr attributes the introduction of this theme into the vocabulary of modern spirituality to Thomas Merton, that monk-writer who helped launch the rediscovery of the contemplative prayer tradition in the modern world.

For example, in his book New Seeds of Contemplation, Merton says this:

For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.*

He goes on to say later:

Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny…To put it even better, we are even called to share with God the work of creating the truth of our identity.**

 This work of becoming who I truly am is not, however, work we do by our own initiative. Rather, says Merton, the secret of my full identity is hidden in Him. He alone can make me who I am, or rather who I will be when at last I fully begin to be. ***

A Theme with Pauline Roots

Though Merton, Rohr, and Keating are using the language of modern psychology, they seem to draw their inspiration from a passage in the apostle Paul. In his Letter to the Colossians, Paul says:

So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory. (Colossians 3:1-4)

In this passage Paul speaks of our life that is hidden with Christ in God. It is a life that will be fully revealed and expressed when the Last Day comes and all creation enters into its destined glory, a glory in which each individual created being will shine in its unique identity.

The spiritual journey is the journey in this life when we begin to glimpse and experience aspects of that unique identity, which is our true self. We in partnership with God begin to chip away some of the spiritual clay that hides the golden image below. That is something of the excitement that the spiritual journey can bring us.

The Social Context of Paul’s Thought

This is an inspiring way of thinking for me. It means that we need to think of our spiritual journey as something wonderfully positive, not as something intensely negative. But it is easy to corrupt this way of thinking about the spiritual journey if we think of this discovery of our true self in solely individualistic terms. That is the bias of much of modern American culture and of modern self-help books and lectures.

The apostle Paul never sees our life hidden with Christ in God as a call to live our lives in splendid isolation from all others. We journey towards our unique life always in a social context. That is why the bulk of Paul’s writings are concerned with life in the church as a social body. It is in the challenge to live out the life of love in the rough and tumble interactions of a social network that we begin both to discover and build the unique self that God has created us to be.

Merton picks up this Pauline way of thinking when he writes:

I must look for my identity, somehow, not only in God but in other men. I will never be able to find myself if I isolate myself from the rest of mankind as if I were a different kind of being.****

So I hope that as you pick up and practice the spiritual disciplines, they will empower you to chip away at your false self and discover the golden Buddha that lies underneath. It is the unique self that God created you to be, just as my true self is the unique identity God created me to be. As we let that true self shine forth, we let God’s glory blaze out into the wider world.

Notes:

* Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation. New York: New Directions Books, 1961. Page 31.

** Merton, New Seeds. Page 32.

*** Merton, New Seeds, Page 33.

**** Merton, New Seeds. Page 51.

Spirituality Unmoored

Spiritual experience sickens when detached from the nitty-gritty realities of daily, material life. 

The Transfiguration by Raphael Sanzio, 1520

Some 20 years ago, I served on an advisory board for a Protestant seminary. In our first gathering, the school’s administration sketched for us the broad dimensions of the seminary’s curriculum. The emphasis was heavy on academic theology and field education. That represented their best judgment as to what was proper preparation for the task of ministry.

At the end of the presentation, one in our group asked, “Who is teaching our future clergy to pray?” The question seemed to throw the administrators for a loop. They did not conceive the seminary teaching spiritual practices.

Much has changed since then. The current president of that same seminary writes a weekly blog on spirituality. Many seminaries around the country now offer not only courses in spirituality, but also certification courses in spirituality and spiritual direction.

Likewise many local congregations now give great emphasis to prayer practices as well as other spiritual disciplines. The church my wife and I attend is one. Every educational term there is at least one offering in spirituality, sometimes more than one.

I belong to a professional association for Christian educators. I note the frequency that discussions of spirituality come up in its newsletters and national conferences.

Mainline Protestantism seems to be awash in spirituality. I applaud this because the practice of contemplative prayer has played a very formative role in my own Christian life for the past 25 years. I believe in the spiritual journey. I am glad that many others now see its importance, too.

And Yet

Yes, and yet. I am becoming increasingly concerned about this growing popularity with spirituality. When popularization latches onto any thing profound, it tends to water down the profundity. Quickly the popularized version becomes something innocuous or disappointing.

This, I fear, may be happening with the fad for spirituality. It runs the risk of becoming something cloying, sweetly sentimental, and therefore riskless. We use spiritual practices not to enter more deeply into the nitty-gritty realities of daily life, but to escape them into an unreal never-never land where nothing bothers us.

Gordon Cosby, the late pastor of the Church of the Savior in Washington, D.C., always instructed his parishioners that they must be engaged in two simultaneous journeys in their individual lives and in the congregation’s life. One journey is a journey inward. It is the journey we pursue when we engage in spiritual practices. The other journey is a journey outward, as we engage in ministry and mission to the world outside our inner fellowship.

What has always impressed me about his vision is that he never regarded the two journeys as an either/or. We must engage in both…and simultaneously.

If we do not, our journey inward becomes very self-centered. Our spirituality will sicken. We need to journey outward as a check on that ego-centrism. But likewise, if we engage only in a journey outward, then we quickly burn out. Our inner energy is depleted. We lose either the joy or the momentum to serve. Our spiritual practices keep us in touch with the spiritual springs of our inner energy and inspiration.

I have always felt Cosby was spot on in his analysis. His vision has become my own.

What I fear is that with our current obsession with spirituality, many people and churches today are falling into the very trap that Cosby warns against. We are so focused on spiritual experiences that we are neglecting the simultaneous call to ministry outward.

Mountaintop Experiences and Life in the Valley

Here I find the beauty of Mark’s vision in his gospel. In Mark 9:2-29 Mark tells two stories about Jesus. As is usually the case with Mark, the two stories are not two independent stories that just happen to follow another. They belong together and comment on each other. So we must read them together.

Mark 9:2-8 tells the story of Jesus’ transfiguration on a high mountaintop. It describes what must have been a spectacular spiritual experience for the three witnessing disciples. Jesus glows in a dazzling white light. Moses and Elijah stand beside him in conversation.

Talk about a spiritual experience. Not much can top that. It so impresses Peter that he proposes to build three shrines on the mountain to commemorate the event. In this way he would like to hold on to the experience. This might mean that he, James, and John could return to the site over and over again to bask in the glorious memory.

But the brilliant light fades, as do Moses and Elijah. All that remains is the heavenly voice instructing them to listen to Jesus. Religious experiences never last. What does endure is the gospel word.

Jesus then leads them down the mountain. He tells them to say nothing about the experience until he rises again from the dead. His words make no sense to the disciples.

When they reach the valley (Mark 9:14-29), they encounter a confused scene where a desperate man seeks a healing for his epileptic son. He does not get it from the disciples. Only a fierce argument.

The man pleads for Jesus to step in and Jesus does, healing the boy. Afterwards the disciples ask Jesus why they could not heal the boy. Jesus responds, This kind can come only through prayer (Mark 9:29).

Together these two stories illustrate the point that Gordon Cosby makes. The three disciples are given a powerful spiritual experience on the mountaintop. But they are not meant nor allowed to remain there in its rarefied spiritual atmosphere. Instead Jesus leads them down into the pain, suffering, and frustrations of life in the valley. This is daily life, life in the material world of the body, the place where most of life is lived.

What gives Jesus and his disciples the power and resources for serving those demanding needs in the valley is the practice of prayer. And so Jesus and Mark would have us travel to a quiet place of retreat for prayer and then back into the valley over and over again. This is the  cycle that leads to spiritual maturity.

 

Chasing Emptiness

The prophet Hosea offers two evocative images for the pursuit of vanity.

An Assyrian king engages in a royal lion hunt. 7th century B.C.

One of my joys in reading the Bible happens when a poetic image in the text suddenly arrests my attention. I stop to consider it. Then my imagination kicks in. I begin to make associations that carry me in unexpected directions.

That happened a couple of days ago when I was reading the prophet Hosea. I was just beginning to read Chapter 12 in the New English Bible translation. It begins:

Ephraim is a shepherd whose flock is but wind,
a hunter chasing the east wind all day;
he makes a treaty with Assyria
and carries tribute oil to Egypt.*

One of the great themes of Hosea is his denunciation of the northern kingdom of Israel (Ephraim) for seeking its security by manipulating power politics in the Middle East. On the one hand Israel seeks a treaty with the Assyrian empire. On the other it delivers tribute to Assyria’s rival, the Egyptian empire. The hope is that maybe Israel can remain safe by playing one power off against the other.

Hosea, however, sees the whole diplomatic exercise as a game of illusions. Earlier in chapter 8, he says that Israel is sowing to the wind and is reaping the whirlwind (Hosea 8:7). Its diplomatic games will bring no peace. Instead they will bring disaster. His words proved true when Assyria sweeps down in 722 B.C. and obliterates Israel from the political map.

Shepherds of Emptiness

Hosea returns to this theme in Chapter 12 when he picks up this same image of sowing to the wind. But this time, it comes across in two arresting images (at least in the NEB translation). First he compares Israel’s pursuit to a shepherd who herds a flock of the wind. Its flock consists of nothing but invisible air. I immediately make the association with Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the emperor’s new clothes.

The Israelite king and his court may think themselves astute politicians. Hosea, however, suggests they are nothing but shepherds of illusions and herdsmen of emptiness.

Then the prophet goes on to compare Israel’s diplomacy to a hunter who chases the east wind all day. It was this image that so captured me.

Hunting has traditionally been a favored sport of the aristocracy in many cultures. (See the stone relief above from the ancient Assyrian empire.) It offers the thrill of the chase, whether that be after the lion, the deer, the boar, or the fox. (The favored prey varies from culture to culture.) As the prey races through the forests, over the hill ridges and down into the valleys and then across the plains, the horsemen follow, hoping to wear the animal out and corner it into its death.

That’s the association that Hosea’s image brings to my mind. Except that the prey that Israel pursues is the east wind. It is impossible to ever capture and imprison the wind. As one chases it, it forever eludes capture. In the end it is the hunter who is worn out, not the wind.

Now I find that a powerful image for the pursuit of vanity, however, we define vanity. When we pursue vanity, we are constantly pursuing something that slips out of our grasp in terms of giving us true, deep satisfaction. Just when we think we have achieved our dream, we find it has dissolved into thin air.

In many ways this image of the hunter chasing the east wind strikes home for me as a description of my own personal spiritual journey. For many years, I pursued God, like the hunter chasing the swift gazelle. But God always seemed to slip out of my grasp. All the reward I got for my obsession was exhaustion and frustration.

It is the tried and true experience of deeply spiritual people (as described by some of the great spiritual writers) that we can never cage God and force him to bless us with a vivid sense of his presence. As one of my favorite writers on prayer, Russian Orthodox bishop Anthony Bloom, puts it, God is like a wild tiger.** We cannot domesticate God. He is beyond our control.

The Great Value of Being over Doing

What I had to learn was that if I want—and I believe if anyone wants—to experience a vivid presence of God, then we must stop chasing God obsessively. If we try to grasp the wind, the wind will simply slip through our fingers.

But if we stop the chase and try to sit calmly and expectantly, we may find that God slips into our life and consciousness quietly and unobtrusively. The tiger dwells with us intimately in his own gentle way. He has become the loving house cat. The elusive wind makes its presence known to us by its gentle caress upon our face. We sense God’s presence not in dramatic miracles, but in elusive intuition. But that we know God by intuition does not make that knowledge any less real.

This is why the practice of contemplative prayer has come to play such an important place in my spiritual journey. In contemplative prayer we do not try to do anything with God. We give up speaking and arguing and debating with God. We even give up trying to be pious. Instead we choose to sit with God in silence. We simply be with God.

Being rather than doing becomes the royal gateway into the presence that we have spent so much time and energy chasing. And then comes another surprise. As we settle into just being, the Lord begins to fill us with his Spirit, pouring energy into us that issues eventually into action, but now action that moves in harmony with God’s will. We can begin as spiritual hunters to chase the values that eternally count.

____________
* The translation I was reading was an earlier version of the New English Bible. Verse 12:1 reads a bit differently in more recent editions. The book of Hosea has had a difficult history of textual transmission through the centuries, and so the Hebrew text is not always crystal clear. This accounts for a great diversity of readings in modern translations.

** This way of describing God comes from Anthony Bloom’s little masterpiece, Beginning to Pray. The book is now out of print, but I rank it high among the many books I have read on prayer. If you find a used copy, I suggest you buy it immediately.

Why Mystics Love the Song of Songs

The Erotic Poetry Mirrors the Mystic’s Yearning for God.

I sometimes wonder how the Song of Songs made it into the biblical canon. It is lushly erotic poetry. Bible translators often label the lovers in the poem the bride and the bridegroom, but it is not crystal clear that the lovers are indeed married. The poem may be celebrating pre-marital, not marital love.

The poem, with its slightly risqué flavor, does not seem like something sober rabbis and church fathers would find appropriate in holy Scripture. Yet there it is, with images that are so evocative of sensual pleasure.

One reason why it did get included in the canon is that many of those rabbis and church fathers read the poem as allegory. The real theme of the poem, they contend, is the passionate love between God and Israel, or between Christ and his church, or between God and the awakened soul.

Many modern scholars dismiss this allegorical interpretation as simply eisegesis, an interpretation that reads a meaning into the text that simply is not there. Yet we must deal with the fact that spiritual writers, especially of the mystical sort, have been drawn to this text from almost the time it entered Scripture. Through the centuries, spiritual writers, especially monastics and mystics, have written scores upon scores of commentaries on the Song of Songs. It could vie for the most popular book in the Bible during the Middle Ages.

Why? What is the connection between the text and those who are intense in pursuing the spiritual journey?

The Evocation of Desire

One of the striking things about the Song of Songs is that it says almost nothing explicitly about the sexual act itself. In verse 8:5, the poet writes, “Under the apple tree, I awakened you.”

If this is a reference to the act of sexual union, it is a highly allusive one. It hints, but does not describe. It leaves a lot to the imagination. This contrasts dramatically with all the explicit descriptions of sexual acts that we find in modern novels.

What we find instead in the Song of Songs is repeated description of erotic desire. The lovers are constantly searching for each other, longing to be together. And when they do seem to meet, almost immediately one of them, usually the male lover, mysteriously vanishes away.

Here is one example from chapter 5:

I slept, but my heart was awake.

            Listen! my beloved is knocking.

            “Open to me, my sister, my love,

            my dove, my perfect one…

My beloved thrust his hand into the opening,

            and my inmost being yearned for him.

I arose to open to my beloved,

            and my hands dripped with myrrh,

            my fingers with liquid myrrh,

            upon the handles of the bolt.

I opened to my beloved,

            but my beloved had turned and was gone.

            My soul failed me when he spoke.

            I sought him, but did not find him;

            I called him, but he gave no answer.

What makes the Song such powerful poetry is this ability to evoke the experience of desire, intense desire that lovers can feel for each other.

Spiritual Experience as Desire

This is the feature of the poem that so draws mystics to the Song of Songs, I believe. For in the lovers’ intense erotic desire for each other, mystics see mirrored the similar intense desire they feel for God. They long for God with deep longing. And the best analogy for this deep spiritual longing is the erotic longing the lovers feel in the Song.

The psalmist uses a different analogy to describe this intense spiritual longing. In Psalm 42, we find the psalmist writing:

As a deer longs for flowing streams,

            so my soul longs for you, O God.

My soul thirsts for God,

            for the living God.

When shall I come and behold

            the face of God?

My tears have been my food day and night,

            while people say to me continually,

            “Where is your God?”

In the psalm the longing for God is compared to a basic physical need. In the Song, the longing takes on a more deeply personal character. But both texts highlight the ever-continuing experience of desire, a desire that has yet to be consummated.

This is what attracts the mystic to the Song, as a moth to the shining light bulb. Desire lies at the heart of the mystic’s experience. So much so that the mystic’s experience can often be described as a never-ending search for union with the divine.

In fact, the early church father Gregory of Nyssa believed this spiritual longing will never be completely satisfied, even in the next life. In the fourth century, he wrote, “This truly is the vision of God: never to be satisfied in the desire to see him.” [Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, Paulist Press, 1978, page 116] Whether Nyssa is right or not, he highlights that central place desire has in the spiritual journey of those who have developed a particularly close personal relationship with God.

So it may be eisegesis for the mystic to read the Song allegorically, but does that really matter? For the Song of Songs lays bare the dynamic of the mystic’s experience with God.

 

The Spiritual Life as Unfinished Business

Bible texts: The First Five Books of the Bible  (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy)

In Judaism, the Torah is the inner core of the Bible, the canon within the canon. Christians know the Torah as the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses. It consists of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

These books contain a lot of legal material. But the Torah is much more than a legal code. It is essentially a narrative. It tells the story of Israel’s journey from slavery in Egypt, through 40 years of nomadic life in the Sinai, to its arrival at its destination, the land of Canaan, which is the land God had promised to Abraham and his descendants.

It is, in one sense, a national epic. It provides the foundation story for Israel. It details how Israel came to be and the essentials of its identity.

But there is a peculiar twist to this story. It recounts a journey. But when we come to the last chapters of Deuteronomy, Israel has not yet finished its journey.

Deuteronomy ends with Israel on the east side of the Jordan River. It is poised to cross over and take up residency in the Promised Land. Israel, however, has not yet done so.  Even Moses at the end of Deuteronomy gazes at the land from a distance. He dies outside the land.

One has to read on into the book of Joshua to read how Israel crosses the river and takes up occupation of the land that God had promised. If one reads further on into the historical books, one will finally reach the story of the capture of Jerusalem, the construction of the temple, and the Solomonic empire. Here one reaches what we might consider the apex of Israel’s history. The historical books form part of the Hebrew Bible, but they are not included in the Torah proper.

Now this is odd, if we compare the Torah with another epic of national origins and identity, the Roman story narrated in Virgil’s Aeneid. The Aeneid, too, is a story of a journey. Aeneas travels from fallen Troy to Latium in Italy, where his descendants build Rome.

 The epic ends on a similar unfinished note. Aeneas kills Turnus, but the city is not yet founded. Nonetheless the epic still celebrates the greatness and glory of Rome at its height. In Book Six, Aeneas visits Hades, where he is given a vision of the glorious future of Rome. That future culminates in the greatness of the empire of Augustus Caesar. In that sense the epic ends on a note of triumph.

The Torah, on the other hand, ends with an uncompleted journey. It, too, looks ahead to a conclusion of the journey, but the conclusion is not included in the Torah proper. This means the core text of Judaism is a story of unfinished business.

This raises an important question. Why did the scholars who created the Hebrew canon decide to exclude Joshua from the Torah?

I suspect the answer is that those scholars sensed, even if only in their guts, that the conclusion of Israel’s journey is not the historical possession of Canaan under Joshua and the later Solomonic empire. The fulfillment of the promise still lies in the future.

Whether Israel lives in it own land or lives in other peoples’ lands as a diaspora, its life is fundamentally a life of unfinished business. What governs that life is the narrative of the journey. The Torah’s stories, principles, and laws provide the divine wisdom for a people whose life is always a spiritual journey. That journey will remain uncompleted until that glorious day of the Lord when the kingdom of God comes finally and definitively.

The Christian Application

Now this understanding of the Torah holds great significance for Christians as well. When Christian writers on the spiritual life write about that life, they often resort to the metaphor of a journey. A few examples: Gregory of Nyssa’s allegorical Life of Moses, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. I believe all are drawing upon the paradigm of the Exodus as narrated in the Torah.

The Christian understanding of the journey begins with the crossing of the Christian Red Sea in baptism. It continues as a wandering through the wilderness of the world. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews will draw upon the language of strangers and exiles wandering on the earth (Hebrews 11:13), as will the apostle Peter (1 Peter 2:11). That journey brings both divine blessings and many false turns, both joy and sorrows. It ends with death, which Christians have traditionally celebrated as a crossing of the Jordan.

So for Christians, too, the spiritual life remains a journey of unfinished business. The journey does not reach its final destination until after death when we arrive in God’s perfect Sabbath rest, the heavenly Jerusalem, the kingdom of God. Hope, therefore, remains a fundamental virtue of the Christian life.

Now this has significance for the conduct of Christian evangelism. One popular way of preaching the good news is to set before unbelievers the great blessings they will gain by placing their trust in Christ. Traditionally those include love, joy, peace, healing, and sometimes very concrete material blessings such as prosperity and worldly success. If we base evangelism on these promises, what do we do when inevitably new believers encounter turmoil, serious illnesses and reverses, hostility, and even persecution or worse in their Christian lives?

Such forms of evangelism forget that we are inviting others into a life with Christ that will include both blessing and trials,  both happiness and sorrows, both fulfillment and unfulfillment. What we are inviting people into is a journey, a journey of discipleship. And that journey will not reach its destination in this life. We remain spiritual nomads all of our lives.

But that does not mean the journey is not worth taking. Rather our spiritual lives remain unfinished business until that day when we meet the Lord face to face and he invites us into the joy of our spiritual homeland at last. In the meantime the Torah as well as the rest of the Bible gives us guidance for making the journey with integrity.

Note: I do not want to give the impression that this understanding of the Jewish Torah is an original one with me. I first encountered it in James A. Sanders, Torah and Canon (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972). I recommend it if you wish to explore the thought deeper.