Lisa Bowden
Friends,
After meditating nine hours a day in silence in a New Mexico monastery last week, what came to mind reading the Gospel for the feast of James Hannington (young English Bishop martyred in Africa with his companions in 1885) was: God is closer to us than our own breath. Imagining God within—closer than my inhale and exhale—helps me open to Jesus’ provocation rather than close down at the perception of an affront.
Below the surface of Jesus’ seemingly absurd demand of his disciples (and us), beyond the simpler interpretation of re-prioritizing and serving others, I hear Catholic priest, theologian, and Girardian scholar James Allison suggest we might consider Matthew’s text a negotiation of life lived in the spirit.
So, I try on Jesus’ call as an ongoing conversion toward something more enlivening. A preparation for experiencing shame and danger without fear of domination by them. A letting go of clinging to safety—identities, desires, especially those given by family structures—values of previous generations, or eagerness to protect those younger.
How do we both love our intergenerational siblings (our parents/elders and our children), and potentially experience ourselves in shame-rejecting, frightening, and dangerous structures (the actual conditions faced by the disciples) by walking in Jesus footsteps?
Doesn’t following Jesus require constantly releasing familiar comforts and desires, desires we ourselves may not understand? The more I grasp onto something thinking it’s giving me security, the more at risk I am to winning at life, and actually losing myself. Who can I become if I instead negotiate what’s in between, what life of the spirit offers? Perhaps you know the feeling.
Can I stand still in what brings me to life, in difficulty, pain, and a shame-inspiring world? Can I open my heart and home to bearers of something truthful, just, prophetic? Who can I truly become if I hold God’s love central?
“(Love) always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” (1 Corinthians)
A flight attendant instructs parents traveling with children to put their oxygen mask on before helping their kids. I like thinking of God as oxygen. First breath, then life.
In meditation, when every possible thought tugs—lists, conversations, the mind’s nonstop wild spin of an idea-generating hamster wheel—deep peace doesn’t come from attaching to what fluctuates. Breath demands 100% wholehearted tending. Then deeply abiding calm, luminous joy can come. Tethering to God within, one body.
In community,
—Lisa