The following three blog posts will delve into the story of the resurrection as told in John’s Gospel. Read John 20:1-18 slowly, and then enter into the story as we see John as the patron saint of the contemplative mind, Peter as the patron saint of right action, and Mary Magdalene as the patron saint of the affectionate heart.
John is the patron saint of the mind, contemplating the possibility of a new world.
While the Gospels contain a myriad of stories about Peter and his frantic activity, there is less to be known about John, even from his own telling of the story. He seems to write himself as a careful observer of the ministry of Jesus, taking it all in from a place of quiet wisdom. John’s gospel and the subsequent letters attributed to him or the community he established in Turkey are written from a transcendent place - language of love and belief and knowing, dripping with symbol. We know that John was most likely the youngest of the disciples, the brother of James the Great and son to Zebedee and possibly Salome, who tradition holds was Mary’s sister, which makes John Jesus’ cousin. He was one of the few to die of old age; he is thought to have been laid to rest in Ephesus at the age of 93.
The Celtic tradition of Christianity took to heart the experience of John as their foundational faith language. Patrick’s mission to Ireland, and the resulting network of communities that spread throughout Britain, developed their own unique articulation of Christianity that sanctified many of the existing beliefs present amongst the earlier pagan tribes. When the Roman Empire collapsed in the late 400’s, the British Isles were isolated from the centralized Church, allowing them to further develop their ideas on experiencing God, listening to creation, and cultivating community. By 644 the Roman expression of the faith had reestablished itself through western Europe and sought to integrate Britain back into the Holy Catholic Church, leading to much tension.
In his many wonderful books on the topic, John Philip Newell traces the central tenants of this way of following Jesus as influenced by John, and how they challenged the Roman tradition that tended to favor a rigid hierarchical structure built upon the authority of Peter:
"Part of the Celtic tradition's love of St. John, whom it affectionately refers to as 'John of Love' or 'John the Beloved', was its memory of him as the one who leaned against Jesus at the Last Supper. He is said to have heard the heartbeat of God. Thus St. John became a symbol of listening for the life of God, both within ourselves and within all creation. In listening within we will hear falseness and confusion, selfishness and violence of heart, but deeper still is the Love that utters all things into being.”
The Book of Creation
In the end, Rome won the debate and reintegrated Britain into the Church. However, recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the Celtic tradition, in particular its vision of John as a foundational reality for how we are to contemplate our relationship to God revealed in Jesus.
I am quite taken by the way that John writes himself into the story. Rather than offer his proper name to us, he simply refers to himself in the third person: “the one Jesus loved”. I consider this deep insight into how John understood his own identity, and the humility it brought him. It is his way of speaking to what he personally witnessed in a way that he not only gets out of the way in an ego-driven sense, but opens a way for us to enter into the narrative.
John knew that, beneath the surface of his family name or role in the story, he was primarily loved by Jesus. He achieved the goal of all contemplative prayer - to embrace the reality that his true self is a gift that can only be received, not manufactured or earned. We often think of contemplation as a vertical move upwards towards the heavenly realms, which is true in a sense, but it also entails a delving into the depths of who we are in order to encounter a place untouched by the chaos of our surface world.
I consider it a beautiful revelation that John the Beloved is the first to the tomb. We often think our way into future possibilities in a way that our actions tend to follow suit. It is right that Contemplation is the first human faculty to arrive at the birth place of a new world, to release what was and open up to what might be. Perhaps this is why John reaches the tomb ahead of Peter and yet pauses at the threshold. He slows down to take in the scene, to create an awareness of the magnitude of the moment, before taking any further action.
Our attention is a fascinating thing. New understandings of neuroscience and what we call “the mind” have revealed how we filter the stimuli barraging us every moment of every day, choosing to focus on what matters most to us. When we are in a place of deep insecurity or fear, our attention narrows as survival instincts take over in such a way as we might miss the forest for the trees. Similarly, our desires shape our attention - they act as a narrowing of the spectrum to find what we seek.
What John the Beloved offers us is a chance to slow down and to allow our attention to widen so that we do not miss what is in front of us. This is the true value of contemplative prayer. Contemplation brushes aside the small stories we tell ourselves that frame our expectations based on how we understand life to function to witness a rupture in conventional wisdom. John bends over, a sign of humility, to see the strips of linen lying on the deathbed without a body to accompany them. There is quite literally a gap in the assumptions of the natural world - what might burst forth in its place?
In order to receive a new world, we have to pass through the existential anxiety of the old - the way we have assumed life “works” no longer works. Disillusionment is a necessary step in our spiritual growth, although it can be terrifying to hold the space. This experience of absence rattles us out of our dullness, which in turn beckons us to consider new alternatives. Peter, John, and the others were held in a sort of existential limbo on what we now call Holy Saturday. I can imagine the weight of the wait bearing down on them, challenging them to sit in an uncomfortable in-between. Had Jesus resuscitated before his body was laid in the grave, it could have been excused away in any number of ways. Absence precludes Presence.
Peter brushes past John and also encounters the evidence of absence - Jesus’ body is missing. John eventually enters and as he describes himself so succinctly, “he saw and believed”. What this merely his witness to the birth of possibility in his own mind, or another subtle dig as his partner Simon Peter, who the text does not mentioning as believing? We may never know. What we can embrace is that the emptiness of the tomb, the rupturing of life-as-we-know it, was enough for John to accept the promise of resurrection. Together they both return to where they were staying, awaiting the next stage in their personal resurrections - encounter with the risen Jesus.
The vitality of contemplation as part of our ecosystem of loving God is that it opens us up to encounter with the living Jesus.
The most beautiful invitation from John is to experience ourselves as “the one who Jesus loves”. I believe this is part of the reason he omits his own name from his Gospel, and why the letters attributed to him or the community he founded so often speak of the “we” of God’s love. The love of God is both profoundly collective and, at times, uncomfortably personal. Contemplation is a way of opening up our minds to receive what is truest about us and, in turn, to love God with our mind. We must name and bless the counterfeit forms of thinking that easily ensnare us in our desire to love God, many of which are embedded so deeply in the religious traditions of our day that we cannot seem them as hinderances.
Anti-Intellectualism or Robust Rigidity
Whatever it may have been in the beginning, “fundamentalism” is less a set of beliefs and more a way of holding belief itself. In her fantastic book “Jesus and John Wayne” Kristin du Mez tracks the evolution of the evangelical movement in the United Staes, identifying key beliefs and shifts in thinking that shaped what it is today. This historical analysis of the American religious landscape is important for us to trace back what has been lost, and we we have the opportunity to regain, as we consider the next chapter in the Christian faith in our time.
One particular insight du Mez offers is how the fundamentalist movement, as a reaction to the liberal drift of mainline church denominations in the late 1800’s, took its cue from a relatively new economic discipline called “marketing”. These early progenitors recognized that simplifying messages in order to get them to stick with new audiences was a key way to sell their wares in the marketplace of ideas. We know this impulse in more modern church language as being “seeker-friendly”, avoiding complex or obtuse religious language and practices by making everything more accessible to the common person. While something in that impulse is indeed admirable, what inevitably happened is that fundamentalism bred in its adherents an anti-intellectual streak that was suspicious of anything that could not be grasped in an afternoon. Tragically for those who have been trained in this way of faith have learned to see any sort of intellectual exercise as a source of anxiety and fear. To make matters worse, the heart has been elevated over the mind, in the form of the notorious “twelve-inch gap”. Perhaps you know lots of things about God, but do you love God in your heart? Is thinking actually getting in the way of love? While I sympathize with the sentiment, I think it denigrates the place of thinking and robs so many of one key way we come to know and love God. I remember hearing a fellow pastor claim, “at the end of the day, God just wants your heart”, and the ensuing physical reaction I had to the underlining assumptions that would enable someone to say something so reductive. But many of us have been trained to think in this way about thinking.
Fundamentalist thinking breeds in us a craving for certainty. To have reductively simple statements of belief, as an antidote to that disease called doubt, is to have a solid faith. What I have witnessed in friends of mine who have grown up in such a system is that they either cling to their simple faith as a rejection of complexity, or they discover that the quaint answers they were fed no longer fit the bill and they abandon the faith altogether. I consider this perhaps one of the deepest tragedies of our modern era in the Christian household.
I think, by and large, most children are fundamentalist; which is to say, if fundamentalism did not already exist we would merely invent it. We begin life requiring new concepts to be relatively simple and clear so that we can build confidence in our place in the world, small as it may be. This is why, for example, we don’t encourage children to sit in the horror of the story of Noah and the ark, the possibility that Elohim causes mass genocide because of His great regret in creating humanity, let alone the historical precedents that suggest this passage was a retelling of the far-older Epic of Gilgamesh from the ancient Summerian culture; where the Hebrew writer(s) intended to divert from the original flood myth leads us to understanding its intent. Rather, in Sunday school classes across the world, we entice children to see the goodness of God through marching pairs of animals and a beautiful rainbow, all presented in the flannelgraph medium. Indeed, it would be horrific if your child came home from vacation Bible school at six years old and told you they learned about mass genocide and getting drunk in the post-diluvian world! I do not think this entry point into the scriptural narrative is wrong; what is a tragedy is that we tend to keep people in this simplistic mindset even as they grow.
The cynic in me would consider the shackles of fundamentalist thinking a form of control, and there certainly is something to that. If we rob people of the capacity to engage critically with their own faith, they are more likely to fall in line and go where we lead without any friction. However, I realize that many of the spiritual leaders who perpetuate a cycle of fundamentalism are not conniving shysters looking to control the masses for their personal gain, but fellow captives to simplicity and certainty. Over the course of four generations the expectations of faith, the questions we are told to ask and the values we are meant to embody, have led to a top-down misalignment that is causing the downfall of a large portion of the Church in our country. As I mentioned above, the options become for the young Christian to either lose their capacity for questioning and curiosity over time (another gift of childhood that can be our redemption), or they walk away in seek of better systems and better answers, ignorant to the rich tradition of deep thinkers present in Church history who have wrestled in the deep-end of our faith for two millennia.
The first group of people find it a consistent struggle to hold the doubt at bay in a world that becomes increasingly complex and disparate; the second also have the burden of addressing not only what they have been taught to believe but the way in which they hold belief itself. Because fundamentalism as a form of belief is so subconscious (it is intuitively absorbed more than directly imparted), many young people in the second category carry their fundamentalism over into new tribes without reflection. It is all-too-easy to see now the rise of a sort of fundamentalist progressivism, which for many would seem an oxymoron if we still consider fundamentalism to be the set of beliefs - it should be the sole realm of conservatives.
Several years ago my best friend, in deep study and personal assessment, came to the conclusion he was no longer a Christian. His journey is his own to tell (you can hear more on our podcast Meaning in the Middle), but one especially poignant revelation for him came in the search for a new community in which he could work through the loss of faith. He found online groups of “ex-vangicals” who, on the surface, had made a similar transition as his own. They would share information, blogs and podcasts and books and the like, that were helping them process this huge life event, which he initially found invigorating. Yet after a couple weeks he began to notice a through-line for so many in these spaces that read something like, “can you believe how idiotic these people are, who believe the same things we believed up until five minutes ago?” Many people pivoted from religiously conservative fundamentalism to politically liberal fundamentalism - the set of beliefs had changed, but the way they held those beliefs had not. They were still addicted to certainty, prone to black-and-white thinking, and disparaging of anyone on “the other side” who would challenge their beliefs.
It is important to note that the opposite of fundamentalist thinking is not squidgy convictions and false humility. If anything, this recent cultural pivot is evidence that the post-modern movement, which claims that truth is relative, is failing us. Moving from black-and-white rigidity to anything-goes relativism is not sustainable, nor is it honoring of the pursuit of truth. Neither form of belief is transcendent, which is to say there is no invitation to grow beyond the place we find ourselves in this moment. True humility carries with it a deep conviction that there is something beyond ourselves that we have not yet attained, and we hold the present moment loosely enough to trust as we stay the course what we need to let go of will be revealed to us in time, and what we take up will ground us in way we may not yet comprehend. Which leads to my final critique of fundamentalist thinking.
If the marketing strategies employed by fundamentalism crave a reduction of ideas to become more bite-sized and easily-understood, they also insist that ideas must be easily transferable into useful application immediately. Another phenomena associated with consumerist religion is the conviction that I am entitled to instant gratification - if I believe the right things and behave accordingly, the results will come quickly. I hear this in many churches throughout our nation in how they approach the art of the sermon. Whether the topic is how to have a healthier marriage or how to balance your checkbook, the message subconsciously reinforces the idea that religion is about managing what we already know and what we already have - making our lives a bit less chaotic today than they were yesterday. There must be some helpful nugget I can apply in the workplace or in my relationships tomorrow in order to be worth exploring. While I think helpful advice on any number of topics is valuable and has a place in a believing community, I lament when our sights have been set so low as to filter truth based on what is “useful”, because the very category of usefulness is predetermined based on what I already know, not what might exist beyond my current state. Problematically it exempts most of the scriptural narrative from exploration - most of the Bible is not “useful” to our lives as we currently understand them! This kind of thinking enables a prominent evangelical pastor to double down on his claim that we as Christians should “uncouple” ourselves from the Old Testament, assuming it has no value for modern life.
I recall taking my ministry school students one Sunday to a Greek Orthodox church in Nashville. If you have never been, I highly encourage you to attend a service in your area, sit in the back, and simply observe. At some point, the worship just begins, even as people are coming and going, getting settled in. Half the liturgy is literally in Greek. The homily, what we in the Protestant tradition would call the sermon, is about ten minutes long, and not even the focal point of the whole procession - that honor belongs to the Eucharist. After the service concluded we went out to lunch to debrief. What did they experience? What was familiar, what was strange? And most importantly, were they able to perceive and connect with God there? It is a wonderful exercise to step out of our assumed way of doing things and examine how much our preferences and expectations have been shaped by our cultural reference point for encountering the Divine. What we agreed upon was that the Greek Orthodox tradition is most certainly not “seeker-friendly” - it seems at first obtuse and hard to follow what is happening, both in word and practice. However, what Christians expressions like Orthodoxy reveal at their best is that a life with God by nature is not easily accessible in an afternoon; as with all compelling cultures it requires good guides to help us integrate over time to experience something beyond ourselves. This pivot reorients us from thinking of faith as a one-time status we claim and maintain to a lifelong journey of discovery and revelation.
Making things “practical” only employs the tools and assumptions we currently have without inviting us to transcendence. Before long, we go searching for ideas in scripture and the Church tradition that only make sense to how we live today. We quite literally read our faith through the very narrow lenses we have been given, rendering most of it unintelligible. I am under the conviction that, properly understood, our job is not to interpret scripture, but to allow scripture to interpret us.
The word “religion” comes from the Latin re-ligio - to bind together. It is the same root word that we use for ligament, which is a tissue that holds together bone and muscle in our bodies so we don’t fall apart. I have come to define good religion as beliefs and practices that enable me to grow beyond myself without leaving myself behind. In this definition I am trying to articulate the importance of transcendence in where religion takes us and who we become, and immanence that blesses who we are and where we are in the present moment. We bind together God and Humanity, and the past, present, and future. I recall hearing an elderly Black woman who, when asked, “are you a Christian?” replied, “I am becoming Christian”. This feels to me both more honest and healthier in our endeavor to convert our way of thinking from fundamentalist certainty, practicality, and hostility towards a more contemplative path that blesses the ongoing transformation of our whole being as we encounter the living Christ.
Contemplative Thinking
John is the disciple who rested his head on the breast of Jesus at the last supper, in order that he might listen to the heartbeat of God. This is the aspiration for us as we pivot to true orthodoxy - right thinking.
The work of dismantling my own intellectual pride led me to discover the contemplative tradition and its disciplines of retraining the mind in pursuit of God. Saint Paul tells us in Romans 12:2 “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.” What strikes me about this extraordinary statement, beyond the fact that God does engage with and transform our ways of thinking, is the contrast with “the pattern of this world”, which is shorthand for the guiding principles and philosophies that keep us beholden to life-as-we-assume-it-is, a world where humanity is left to its own devices and little transformation is expected. The renewal of our minds, then, leads us to an encounter with the God Who transcends all our assumptions about life in such a way as life itself is reinterpreted through God’s will for creation.
To contemplate is to establish a sacred space in the mind to be joined with God. The word contemplation derives from con- meaning “with, together”, and the root temple, which means “a space demarcated for sacred consecration”. Is this not what we see in Saint John’s pause at the mouth of the tomb? In his hurry towards the place where life-as-he-knew it had been ruptured by the absence of Christ’s body, it was necessary to slow down and establish in his mind that this was a sacred space, even if that meant he had no category for what it meant in the moment. This is the key to the contemplative life.
Just as the anti-intellectual bent of fundamentalism and the rigid intellectual systems of some brands of Calvinism get in the way of truly knowing God, so does our tendency to incessant thinking. This form of thinking keeps us trapped within our skulls with no way out, whether it is analysis paralysis or the compulsive need to understand before we engage. The thorn in my side as someone who delights in thinking is more the latter - I spend so much time thinking that it feels like I’m doing something. Incessant thinking tends to be a continuation of the scarcity mentality we discussed in the previous section - I must rely on the categories I already have to make sense of life. What if there is nothing more available to me? Do I have what it takes to be smart enough to conquer life, creating a formal scaffolding for comprehending complexity that it can protect me from the fear of inadequacy?
We can interpret the term “orthodoxy” as not only “believing the correct things” but “thinking in the correct way”, so that that thinking brings us into unitive knowledge of God. For me, and for those like me who are classic over-thinkers, Paul’s admonishment to be transformed by the renewal of our minds is a challenge to relearn thinking itself. This begins by deconstructing the reasons behind our thinking, discerning our personal agendas and realigning to our deepest desires. Surface thinking tends to betray our desire for mastery or protection, which surely keeps us from the place where we can rest in God.
It is often in the moments when conventional thinking as a way to protect us from an overwhelming world breaks down that we are able to enter into the space of contemplation, as it seems the only resource left. I recall a moment years ago in which I felt overwhelmed by the chaos swirling, both within me and around me.
To state the obvious, the Covid pandemic was difficult. More than difficult in fact; it felt apocalyptic in the sense that the foundational assumptions we had about how life works were shaken to the core. I found this profoundly true in leading a faith community. As the initial goodwill and solidarity we felt towards our neighbors in the first few weeks of the lockdown faded, however, there gathered a growing sense of anxiety - something was happening that did not fit into our categories. The sense of powerless and frustration that grew as the pandemic stretched on was exacerbated by the murder of George Flood in Minneapolis on May 25th of that year. All of a sudden we were not only isolated from one another physically but we were also witnessing a profound injustice unfold on all our screens simultaneously.
The inability to gather as the body of Christ shook the church to its core as well. For several years I had been attending a noon Holy Eucharist service at the Cathedral Church of Saint Luke in downtown Orlando to keep myself grounded in my Anglican heritage, and to be ministered to in a way that would bless my ability to show up and minister to my own community at City Beautiful Church. While for some the prospect of “doing” church completely online in our pajamas was a welcome respite, for me it was a tragedy. To not be able to gather with my brothers and sisters, to not be able to receive the bread and the cup of holy communion, made it feel like my soul was withering. Still more, the burden of trying to shepherd my own people through the pandemic itself and the reckoning brought about by Mr. Floyd’s death overwhelmed me.
I remember the first time the cathedral was able to host services again, albeit with restrictions and social distancing in place. Instead of gathering in the small alcove to the side of the sanctuary, we were spread out through the whole building. I arrived early and took a seat in the front row. It was incredibly quiet, the atmosphere was tentative.
Sitting in the front of this grand expanse gave me a chance to focus upon the crucifix that hangs above the altar at Saint Luke’s. It is a serene modern rendition of Christ, elongated and fully robed, with his arms outstretched and away from the beams of the cross in a posture that feels more like a welcoming embrace. Around his head a thin halo reminds you of his perfection, his divinity.
There is something about stepping out of “normal life” into a sacred space such as this that enables me to breathe for a moment. I kneeled in that first pew, vanquished by my feelings of powerless to make sense of the world, and I chose to fix my gaze upon Jesus. Even as I sensed the accusatory thoughts rushing in, I brushed them aside and continued to gaze. If I uttered any prayer in that moment, it may not have been much more than, “speak to me. Please.”
I cannot claim to have had too many mystical encounters in my life, yet in that moment I felt that this tranquil Christ was returning my gaze and speaking to the deepest part of me: “mercy”. I heard over and over again, not with my physical ears but with my soul the repetition of that simple word, “mercy, mercy, mercy”. It was unhurried and wispy like breathing. I began to weep, for in that moment all the grief I was holding back in order to show up in the world as a good pastor was welcomed into the Presence. That simple, single word was what I craved deep down in my soul. A mere five or so minutes later the attending priest began the liturgy and I found my feet again, reciting the prayers that had been inscribed on my mind since childhood, prayers that have grounded so many for generations. When the priest came forward in his N95 mask to offer us communion, a wafer already dipped in wine was placed in my open hands with a tong, and I wept again. I had not realized how much the touch of the sacraments to my hands and lips meant to me.
This encounter with the Spirit of Jesus in desperate contemplative prayer and the receiving of the Eucharist did not make sense of the chaos around me. It gave me no plans for helping our church survive the pandemic or apologetic quips to address the crises of faith amongst my people or solutions to de jour racism in the United States. What it did, however, was recenter Jesus in my life for that moment when I needed him. As the pastor Brian Zahnd often reminds us, “Jesus is perfect theology”. There are times when we seek his face less to make sense of the world as we know it, and more to know him when the world does not make sense. To sit with Jesus long enough is to allow him to reveal himself as the only one in whom “all things hold together” (Col. 1:17) - humanity and divinity, life and death, suffering and glory - and the one who “fills the whole universe” (Eph 4:10) so that it might all things might be reconciled to God.
I was recounting this story to someone during a recent spiritual direction session and, fours years on, it still brought tears to my eyes to remember the tunnel vision that came over me as I contemplated the Risen Christ. I sometimes hesitate to speak of these experiences because I’m worried it will give you an expectation that this is what contemplation should always look like. That is perhaps too high a bar; I have only had a few such encounters in my life, although I hope and pray for more. The measure of contemplative prayer is not in the grandiosity of the vision, but in the transformation of our true selves over time.