The Geography of the Spirit

Thou preparest a table before me
in the presence of mine enemies;
Thou anointest my head with oil.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Our modern sensibilities — especially in democratic, melting-pot, diversity-conscious America — do not like to hear about marginalized enemies or "Moab being treaded down like straw in a dung heap" or people being bound and cast into outer darkness.

I must pause here, in my surprise, that our own lectionary, the Roman Catholic Revised Standard Version, left out the sentence, "And Moab being treaded down like straw in a dung heap." And so, for those present here this morning, you only heard a portion of what the Scriptures actually said. In fact, the alternative reading in our Gospel this morning gets rid of the business of anyone being sent away from the feast. What these cobbled-together verses give you is an invented Bible, not what the Church has always read.

We are inclined to root for the underdog, and we tend to be critical of those who are conspicuously favored. During the latter twentieth-century, religious and clergy became so offended by Biblical disfavor that they began editing the lectionaries and breviaries we use today, bracketing off the parts of Scripture they did not like, or excising them altogether by skipping verses with the use of commas. The problem, of course, is that what has been fenced out, and therefore never read in churches or religious communities, is Holy Scripture.

I hear people dismiss these offending passages as being "Iron Age" or "too primitive" for our more refined way of thinking. But in so doing we reveal that we do not understand even what the Sacred Scriptures are. And it is well to remember that no evolutionary scientist believes that cultures evolve. If this were true we would not continue listening to Mozart or reading Shakespeare who tower above our own cultural productions of music and literary art.

The greatest library and center of scholarship of the ancient world was in Alexandria. Even by the time of Jesus and then into the Apostolic Age, it continued to be a great center of Biblical study and especially its Didascaleion, founded by the Evangelist, St. Mark. We read in the Acts of the Apostles that Apollos dazzled congregations where he preached by unlocking the Scriptures using the methods he learned in Alexandria. For example, he would say that, yes, the people of God left the fleshpots of Egypt, where they did eat to the full (Ex 16:3); then crossed through the depths of the Red Sea, an army of Egyptians no longer tormenting them (Ex 15); spent forty years in the wilderness alone with God (Ex 22); and then entered into the Land of Promise. But we must understand, Apollos would continue, that this is our story, too: for we too have dissipated our lives in sensual preoccupations; we too are cleansed through the waters of baptism with the demons who have haunted us being stripped away through purifying waters; we too go to a wilderness to meditate and draw close to God; and, finally, being prepared to enter in His Holy Presence, we experience unity with God and enter into the Promised Land, which is Paradise.

Using this method, Apollos traveling to Ephesus and Corinth and Athens and many other cities, showed the faithful that the Bible was not only historically, or literally, true, but that it also had a spiritual meaning. This spiritual meaning was called allegory, a word formed from two Greek words meaning "other than the talk of the marketplace." In other words, even during the earliest years of the Christian Church, the Bible was understood to have two meanings simultaneously: ordinary meaning (marketplace language) and allegorical meaning (spiritual depths and mysteries). By the second century, the most influential of the Fathers, Origen, used a method of reading that revealed the Scriptures in four different levels of meaning:

Literal (the level of ordinary historical people and events)
Allegorical (the hidden, spiritual meaning)
Tropological ("the moral of the story")
Eschatological (meaning seen through the lens of the Last Judgment)

But which one is the primary meaning? Origen taught that the first and highest meaning of Scripture is its spiritual meaning. Origen also taught that each of us must follow a three-stage journey like the Hebrews who journeyed from Egypt to the Promised Land: Purgative, Illuminative, and Unitive. We must be purged of our unworthiness, which separates us from God; washing off the mud God's light is able to penetrate us and guide us toward Him; finally, we will be united with Him and with each other, when "all is in All," to borrow St. Paul's memorable phrase. Origen would say, when you come to a passage in Scripture that is difficult or makes no sense, then you must remember that primary meaning of Scripture — its spiritual (or allegorical) meaning.

When we understand these truths, which the Early Church understood very well, then we will stop skipping Bible verses in our lectionary readings and remember Origen's advice: the difficult passages are not to be skipped. In fact, it is their difficulty that tells us a mystery awaits! These passages are the gateway to the greatest depths. They are cues for us to meditate and reflect and ponder. And we learn from this Apollos that these holy stories are about each of us! For if the Scriptures are historically true and they are allegorically true at the same time, then it follows that history itself, and the events around us, have an allegorical meaning, too. Indeed, our individual life stories must also have a deeper, spiritual meaning — that we ought to read our personal histories as if they were sacred literature, with hidden, golden threads tying together great themes .... about our salvation. When we speak of making our pilgrimage to the Kingdom of Heaven, we are really describing an inward journey in which we plumb our own depths and begin venturing down hidden roads through our own personal histories discovering truths we did not suspect.

During my years as a parish priest, when parishioners came to me for spiritual direction, I would ask them first to write an autobiography. Look back at your life: at the highest mountaintops and darkest valleys' your greatest joys, your greatest sins; your greatest challenges; your greatest triumphs. What do you see when you look back at your life? What are the great themes? What are the echoing notes and motifs? When you begin to ponder it systematically, taking notes and making diagrams, I assure you you will begin to a pattern emerge, and you will write that wonderful "term paper" on the "novel" of your earthly journey that will inspire all who read it .... and warm the heart of our Lord.

Yes, the sacraments, and especially baptism, are essential, for without baptism you cannot become a Christian and enter into fellowship with the Lord Who calls to us. But the sacraments were not intended to be an end in themselves. You cannot simply receive them day after day, working up and down a check list. This will not make you heavenly in and of itself. Heaven, you recall, is a state of being, not a place. It is not where you go, but who and what you are.

Our life stories are sacred literature to be read with care, and the Scriptures themselves, which St. Paul calls "the oracles of God" (Rom 3:2), can surprise us with their hidden meanings about us. Read the Psalms, for example, and you will discover that they are really about yourself. When you read mention of the wicked, the deceitful, those who mock God and ignore His statutes, then understand these enemies of God to be you, your own worst self, you own worst moments, and we will all discover they are not a few. And when you read of the virtuous, those who love God's law and delight in His statutes, who celebrate God being a lamp unto their feet, who hide under the shadow of His wing, then please understand these are about you your own best self. The struggle between these two selves, the battle within — a psychomachia (to use the traditional word) — traces your progress through the three-fold path of purgation, illumination, and, finally, unity with God.

We wish that purgation could be a once-and-for-all thing, but it is not. We do not neatly progress from a period of purgation to a period enlightnment and then to Heaven. In fact, we will need to be purged over and over and over again. And thanks be to God for the supernatural healing of the sacrament of Reconciliation, which is really a new baptism. How I wish the rubrics would permit me to reach through that screen and trace cool and holy water upon the brows of penitents when I pronounce absolution!

No it is not that neat. But then we discover that the Psalter itself is not a linear progression from psalm to psalm. One psalm does not lead to the next (though there may be a string that form a sequence here and there). Like our own lives they, are not continuous, not neat. We begin in Psalm One with a childlike love of God, and a natural desire to follow His teachings. You we become, in the world of play, like a tree planted beside water. Yet, all too soon you enter the world and discover all of those who question God's ways, the world where only a fool hesitates to "go for the gusto" or fails to "get ahead" ... by any means available. After a while, you discover that "being practical" is code for ignoring God and His rules.

The Psalms do not follow a steady progression because they are about our own interior lives, in which we move forward, but also lapse backward which is why, I suppose, religious sisters and brothers pray through them every day. They are about the battle within, the struggle within our own hearts, within our souls. In a previous reflection, "The Soul at War with Itself," I posted a painting of an anguished man. When you looked more closely, though, you saw that the man's mind or soul was actually St. George battling the dragon. You see, the Sacred Scriptures are about real estate. Yes, about the Promised Land and Jebusites and the Edomites and the Philistines, but primarily about real estate still more royal, the country of the soul and the spiritual battle that seeks to claim this infinite and holy land.

This morning our passage in Isaiah is about spiritual geography. The prophet depicts a vision of all nations in blessed unity with God: the veil that has separated us from God and from each other has been lifted; God will swallow up even death, suggesting that the unitive vision before us occurs on the highest of high mountaintops, far above Olympus. "For the hand of the Lord will rest on this mountain, and Moab shall be trodden down in his place, as straw is trodden down in a dung-pit." To the modern mind (and in the mind of our lectionary editor), this splendid vision of unity and light has been spoiled by the mentioned of Moab and the dung-pit, a celestial bell is followed by a cracked gong. But it is the difficulty of this passage that marks the gateway into its spiritual meaning. For in it, we hear Jesus' words, "If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love (Jn 15:10)." "I call you my friends," He says, "if you will do My commands."

The geography of ancient Israel was marked by the names of its founding tribes. Judea announces the tribe of Judah. Moab and Ammon signify the descendants of Lot's daughters: the half-brothers Moab and Ammon shared the same incestuous father, Lot. Like Eve, Lot's daughters decided that practical circumstances dictated that God's moral law be set aside. Judging wrongly that the world had been destroyed following the fall of Sodom and Gomorrah, they resolved to continue the human race by planting the seed of their father within themselves, as it were. The formation of these two countries, Moab and Ammon, then, are seen as the mis-creation of God's plan. Their names signify disobedience, rebellion, and perversion.

We find a similar story with Abraham practicing perversion again for practical reasons (as he sees it). Under the direction of his wife, no less, he has intercourse with his wife's maid, Hagar. If Abraham is to be the father of many, Sarah and Abraham reason wrongly, then God's law must be abridged and His moral authority seized for ourselves. Like Eve or Lot's daughters, Abraham and Sarah have made their own plans. And Ishmael, the offspring of Hagar and Abraham, becomes, like Moab and Ammon, a geography that will rage down to our own time.

To be sure, the nations are real and have their historical and literal meanings, but they also represent an inner geography, a war within that spills out into historical wars fought on this hard earth. In the painting posted with this reflection and on Facebook, you may see the face of an anguished man or you may look closer and see the face of Christ suffering or you may look closer still and see the brokenness of all humankind at the center of a battle between good and evil — with demons (flying low over Calvary) and angels ministering to the Crucified. They are all present, all meanings there together at once, and disclosing the rich depths of spiritual anguish and struggle and victory and promise that we find especially in the "hard" passages of the Holy Scriptures.

The greatest psychomachia of human history is depicted upon Calvary. For here one human Soul somehow is able to contain the struggles of all men and all women for all time, the totality of the greatest spiritual battles that have raged within. Somehow one Man is able to bear the brokenness of the world upon Himself and heal it bringing the outer geography into an inner geography where it will find its only reality, in the heart, in the Sacred Heart, of Jesus. Somehow He is able to offer Himself as a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the whole world. The wedding feast, which we also call the Supper of the Lamb, returns us to the Mountain of Isaiah, where the nations are invited into a unitive feast bathed in the light of God. No veil any longer covers us; all things have been revealed. Finally, the spiritual meaning and the literal meaning have merged, and depth becomes surface. All nations are invited, but, sadly, it is in our nature, and the nature of the world, that rebellion and perversion will rage on. Why is there tumult among the nations? And why do the people imagine a vain thing? Why will many choose darkness over light? Or their own purposes over God's? For the wedding garment represents the state of our hearts, our spiritual temperature, the geography of our souls.

And, where all is in All, no one has been denied entrance to the great feast, high above Olympus, where the marriage of Heaven and Earth is announced.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.