I cannot think of a more
poignant story than Ishmael’s.
Abraham cast Hagar and her
baby out into the desert
with nothing but a loaf of bread and a skin of water.
When the water ran out,
Hagar laid the child
under a bush and left him there alone
because
she could not bear to watch him die.
But God heard the baby’s
cry,
sent
Hagar back to her son, gave them water,
and made
Ishmael’s descendants a great nation.
I stand in awe of that
moment when baby Ishmael has lost everything
-- father, mother, food, water,
shelter – all gone.
He has nothing –
absolutely nothing – but the grace of God.
Then my mind leaps from
Ishmael to his opposite
– Willy Loman in The Death Of A Salesman.
In Thomas Dumm’s recent book,
Loneliness As A Way Of Life,
he describes Willy Loman as lonely, alienated
-- cut off even from himself.
-- trapped in the ceaseless struggle
to acquire,
to succeed by amassing possessions, to have, have, have –
because
the alternative to having is to be had.
We trust owning things to
insure our well-being and our freedom.
We want to be people “of
independent means.”
But Dumm says that the life
of having is empty.
As Wordsworth put it,
“Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.
Little we see in
nature that is ours.”
It’s like Citizen Kane
dying with the word “Rosebud,”
the name of his boyhood sled, on his lips
He had built an empire
but died longing
for the
simple innocent humanity he had lost.
Psychoanalyst Eric Fromm
wrote in his book, To Have Or To Be.
that
Western culture had gone off track,
promising happiness through material possessions,
but that life of getting, spending, having, and clutching
had failed to make us happy.
It had drawn us away from
authentic experience.
It had cut us off from our
real selves, cut us off like Citizen Kane
and Willy Loman from our humanity,
reduced us to jumping
through economic hoops.
But Fromm says there is
another way.
It is possible to live
deeply and happily
through participation in the whole dance of humanity.
He calls that experience
“being” and says we develop the capacity for being
-- the capacity for life -- through letting go of
possessions
in order to connect with each other.
Fromm’s compelling diagnosis of our psychological malaise
seems to grow out of an older book by French philosopher
Gabriel Marcel, Being
And Having.
But Marcel says the problem
isn’t just material possessions.
It’s how we relate to
everything.
It’s treating the world,
even our own bodies and ideas,
as something we can watch, dominate , possess, manipulate.
That’s what Gabriel Marcel
means by “having.”
We can have our families
as well as having our homes.
The problem, according to
Marcel, is that we stand back
one step
removed from everything,
using it instead of celebrating it.
So the vegan yoga-practicing
purist in patched jeans
can be just as caught up in having his spirituality
as the investor is in having
his mutual fund.
“Having” is about control
and credentials.
The opposite of “having”
is what Fromm and Marcel call “being.”
It’s the real life that
comes from participation, from joining the dance.
It happens when we give
ourselves away.
Being is as vulnerable as
baby Ishmael under the bush.
Authentic life is
vulnerable precisely because
it is
engaged with others, participating rather than controlling,
giving our money, our time, our attention,
and our hearts
to a life that often doesn’t go our way.
It’s surfing. We don’t
control the frothy waves. We ride them.
In between Ishmael,
homeless and alone in the desert
but surviving
by the grace of God,
and Willy Loman, dying in
a car wreck
on the
very day his house was paid off,
there was another
character – Jesus.
Jesus’ disciples had left
everything follow him.
They left their jobs,
their homes, their families, their communities.
After awhile they asked
Jesus,
“Now
what will we get? What’s our reward?”
Jesus told them they
still had more to give.
They’d have to take up
their cross.
Then he said, “Whoever
finds his life will lose it;
but anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it.”
The word we have
translated as life is actually psyche.
It means the very core of
a person, their identity,
what makes them get up in the morning.
It’s in the ballpark of
what Buddhists mean
when they talk about surrendering the ego.
I used to be a Buddhist
talking about surrendering my ego ad nauseum.
I was pretty proud of how
much ego I had surrendered.
Then I ran across God who
wanted me to surrender real stuff
like money, time, emotional energy
-- and I discovered
I still had some attachments break
loose.
Jesus invites us to let
go of what we cling to most tightly,
because those things are our chains.
The more we give away,
the less we have,
but the more fully alive we become.
If we give our money, our
time, our attention, our labor
for Jesus’ sake, it opens up a place in our souls
where we can breathe.
We can lighten up.
We can get light enough
to join the dance, to surf the waves.
Everything we do in the
Church is about getting free
from the
prison of having
so we can plunge into being
-- that spontaneous
flowing state of appreciation and gratitude.
We place our offering of
money, bread, and wine
unconditionally
on God’s altar.
These tokens represent
all we have and all we are.
We give it all to God.
Then our gifts are
blessed, broken, and shared with one another.
Holy Communion is the
ritual of giving up what we have
in order to participate in life.
It is the exchange of
having for being.
In Holy Communion we
recall Abraham leaving his land and people
to follow God; then Moses; then Jesus; and the followers
of Jesus.
Like them, we do not come
to Church to “get something out of it.”
We come to Church to give
ourselves to God
and open our hearts to life.
Meister Eckhart, one of
the greatest spiritual masters of the Middle Ages,
said,
“The person who is full of things is empty of God;
but the person who is empty of
things is full of God.”
He also said,
“No one ever gave so much of himself away
that he did not have more to give.”
So think today on what
you have given away for the love of God.
Remember how that felt.
Then ask what you have
left that you might yet give.
Maybe it’s money, maybe
it’s time, maybe it’s attention.
What might you give that
would set you just a little freer,
that would give you a bit more peace,
that would open your heart a little wider to life and
joy?
Giving ourselves away,
giving away even a little of what we have,
is a risk, a leap.
It is also godly action.
The word for God, theos, comes from a root that means “to
leap.”
God leaps into our lives
when we make a space for him.
John 3:16 recounts that godly
leap of love,
“For God so loved the world that he gave . . . . – he
gave.”
We love the world and we
love God when we give back.
That’s what eucharist means -- a thankful giving back
in love.
It is the love puts a
heart in our life.
