Monday, March 18, 2024

Finding Our Octopus: When Dying Brings Us to Life

 




John 12:20-33

At the beginning of the 2020 documentary, “My Octopus Teacher,” filmmaker Craig Foster tells the story of how he had lost his love for life. He’d sort of lost who he was. Burned out from his work that had taken him all around the world, and deeply depressed, he goes back to his South African home to try to reconnect with what really matters in his life. He couldn’t find it. To try to shake himself out of his mental and emotional stupor, he went out into the cold and unforgiving waters of the Atlantic, where he would free dive, holding his breath for minutes at a time, diving deeper and deeper into the kelp forest, blocking out everything else in his life that he simply couldn’t fix, until one day, he met an octopus. 


Somewhere around the year 2020, I was tasked with bringing a dead congregation back to life. Peters Creek United Presbyterian Church had experienced a deep schism about thirteen years prior, and had been undergoing years of litigation since. Half the congregation left the Presbyterian church and felt like they had a right to the building and all of the congregation’s assets. The remaining congregation had dug their heels in, refusing to let go of any of it without a fight. Needless to say, after years of meetings with lawyers, hundreds of thousands of dollars spent, trials, retrials, and appeals, the congregation had dwindled to about five faithful members, a small group of stubborn Presbyterians who loved their church and held out hope for a timely resurrection in their midst. After all, if Jesus could feed five thousand with five loaves of bread and a couple of fish, what could he do with five dedicated, and did I mention stubborn, Presbyterians who were ready to do anything it took to bring new life to this neighborhood church? I was ready to give it my all, my everything. I was going to try all the experiments and make all the connections and work and work and work until I figured out what worked. I was going to give my best sermons and be my most exuberant self and draw in the crowds with my quirky, yet bubbly, personality. And then, of course, Covid hit.


At first, Craig kept his distance from the octopus, only wanting to observe her from afar so as not to disturb her way of life. Thinking that she was fearful of him, but still curious about this strange marine animal, he left his camera at the bottom of the sea floor, and rose to the surface for some air. Curious, the octopus creeped out of her cave to explore the strange object. The camera records her using the suckers on her tentacles to feel out what this oddity might be. When Craig returned to fetch his camera, he was surprised to find her nearby, watching him, seemingly without fear. Day after day he went searching for the octopus, learning about the intricate details of the animals of the kelp forest, and the signs they left behind. He saw how mollusks leave delicate tracks in the sand, how the pajama sharks gather together to feed, how the fish seem to school where the kelp grows thicker. And then, one day, he saw her. He saw her again, and began to follow her. He left all his cares behind. He forgot about his depression and anxiety, the mistakes he’d made in his marriage and with his son, and simply single-mindedly pursued this strange creature that was so unlike himself. 


Lots of folks told me that I had been hired to do the impossible. They told me that I needed to be kind to myself when I didn’t see growth in the church, that I needed to be patient, and maybe even a little bit resigned to the fate of this already dead church. And what with Covid, it wasn’t like I could go knocking on doors to invite them back to church, I couldn’t throw a big tent revival to bring the neighborhood back together, there just wasn’t much I could do but watch, and pray, and wait. My anxiety was through the roof. How on earth was I going to save this church? Time - and money - was running out. But all I could do was take some online courses, read some books, I started some spiritual direction, I sat alone in my office and watched the deer yank crabapples from the tree in the churchyard. And my world got smaller. I did one thing at a time. After all, what else could I do? I felt completely useless. 


The octopus got used to Craig’s presence. She grew curious, and floated closer and closer to discover more about his strange appendages, the weird mask over his eyes, the odd way he would swim to the surface and then come back down again. He reached his hand out to her and she wrapped her tentacles around him, both of them exploring this strange other. He watched her hunt, watched her play games with the fish, watched her change colors and fit herself into the tiniest cracks to protect herself from predators. Deep under water, he became single minded, and as the waves and his life crashed above him, he let himself go down into this strange otherworld, watching and waiting for this one common octopus to arrive, to teach him something new. 


As soon as this pandemic was over, I’d be able to get back to work. I’d be able to fix this church. I’d gather all the people and preach my little heart out and wrestle this little church from the ashes. As soon as we got through this, I’d really get to work. Until then, I’d started putting out seed for the birds in my front yard. I’d watch the sparrows hop between the feeders, quarreling over the best perches and the tastiest kernels. I saw the piles of discarded sunflower hulls accumulate on the ground. Meanwhile, I preached to five people in a church that once held hundreds, Sunday after Sunday. I learned how to be quiet. How to watch. How to wait.


How was it that Craig found himself by observing and relating to a creature so unlike himself? How was it that he’d reach this intense focus each time he dove under the water, where time stood still, and he became singularly passionate about simply watching this strange cephalopod go about the rhythms of her life? By focusing on this one creature, this one strange thing, this completely Other creature, by giving his whole presence to it, he entered what psychologists call a “flow state,” where he, himself, disappeared, and all that exists is what is right now, a small octopus in a kelp forest just off the South African coast. Had he, somehow, shed his distractions, his self-definitions, his accolades and achievements, his laurels and masks, and simplified himself down to this one thing - just one man watching one octopus, day after day after day.


When people enter this “flow state,” they don’t experience many thoughts about themselves or about their performance. In some ways, they sort of “disappear” into the fullness of what they’re doing. They lose track of time. They forget where they are. They lose their egos and identities. They lose themselves. The hull cracks open. The shell falls away. The seed dies. We are so fully ourselves that all our masks disappear, our scales flake off, and we are just here in the present moment, where we’ve sloughed off ourselves to the extent that we’ve just disappeared, and all we have left is nothing more or less than exactly who we’ve been created to be. Craig Foster calls this connection through otherness “remembering that we are wild.” It doesn’t happen all the time, and when it does, it’s only for the briefest of moments, but it’s this place where we let expectations and distractions and labels and our egos fall away and we realize that we are connected to the great Source itself: God - that unifying intelligence that keeps us alive from one moment to the next. Craig experienced a kind of death to himself, a re-wilding, a singular focus on something so completely other than himself that through it he found himself. 


“Anyone who loves their life will lose it. And anyone who lets go of their life, for my sake, will keep it for eternal life.” 


The church did die. The congregation dismantled. My job was dissolved. I’d failed. The seed fell to the ground and died. And even today we’re still waiting for the fruit to come of all this brokenness and hurt and pain and death of a church. But there are still those sparrows that come to my bird feeder. There’s still the quiet I’d learned to hear. There were five dear presbyters that I’d learned to love. And maybe, most importantly, there was the death of my self that thought that saving the church was all up to me. There was this seed of myself that fell to the ground and died, that seed that thought I had the power to control outcomes and resurrect communities if I just worked hard enough, if I just believed more, if I just gave more of myself to it. 


After 304 days straight of visiting this octopus, Craig Foster watched her slowly dissolve her life in to the thousands of fertilized eggs that would be her only legacy. It took everything she had left to bring these new lives into the world, and of the thousands, only a few would survive. She’d given her life for life, and when she was done, she let go. She floated along with the current until a shark snatched her away. And that was it. Craig swam home. And he began to write the whole heartbreaking, life-giving story. A simple story of an octopus who, simply by living, helped a man lose his life to find it again. 


“Unless a seed falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a single seed, but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” And what is hidden in the fruit? More seeds. More seeds to fall to the ground and die, more seeds to bear much fruit. Dying seeds become fruiting plants that form seeds and fall to the ground and die again. And around and around it goes. 


Craig Foster takes his son out for dives now. He teaches his son what the octopus taught him. One day, just under the surface of the water, they found a tiny octopus, who curiously, wrapped its tentacles around their fingers. A tiny octopus who looked curiously familiar.


There is a flow we all enter, a kind of self-less energy that overwhelms us, and all that is not us — all the expectations and assumptions and shame and regrets — falls away, we’re cracked open like a seed, and that is where we find ourselves again. This is the invitation of Jesus. It’s not an invitation to work more or try harder, it’s not an invitation to hate ourselves, it’s not an invitation to martyrdom or self-immolation, or to make ourselves so small that no one can see us or hear us or know that we’re there. It’s not even primarily and invitation to escape this world for some better reality up in the clouds. It’s an invitation to dive deeper into ourselves, to watch, to wait, and to love so fiercely that we can be nothing outside of what we love. It’s an invitation to enter the flow, that place where we lose ourselves in order to find ourselves. Our truest selves. The selves that are cracked open, broken open, loved open, and opened up to be exactly who God has created us to be. 


Where is your octopus? That one thing that calls to you, that brings you so much to life that you can’t help but forget about your life, you can’t help but forget about your self so you can give your whole self to it that it might live? Remember when you had that? Remember what it felt like? You, being so very you, that you forgot about…you.  It’s time to swim into the deep waters to find it again. It’s time to swim into the deep waters to lose, and to find, yourself again. This is the call of Christ. 


Thanks be to God. 






Monday, March 11, 2024

The Eternal Now

 

John 3:14-21


Ok. Two wild passages for today. Two passages about snakes and lifting up and poison and healing and eternal life. I love these passages. And I don’t understand them at all. First, we have a bunch of folks wandering the wilderness who are complaining about the food they say they don’t have. And when a bunch of poisonous snakes attack and Moses intercedes, in what, I assume is Samuel L. Jackson’s voice, God tells him to make a bronze image of one of these treacherous snakes, raise it high up on a pole, and everyone who is bitten and looks upon the snake is healed. Fast forward seven hundred odd years later, and it’s not a snake on a pole that saves, but Jesus, on a cross, lifted high. Fast forward two thousand years from there, and we’ve turned this passage into a middle school girl’s note passed around in math class. Do you like Jesus? Circle ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and voila, your eternal destination is determined. 


We’ve turned John 3:16 into such a cliche. We see it painted on bedsheets at football games, we slap bumper stickers with this verse onto the trunks of our cars, we use it as a scripture bomb to lob over to someone who doesn’t believe the same way we do so that we can somehow prove that our way is the best and only way. It’s become our get-out-of-jail-free card, our hall pass to get us out of the hell of first period wailing and gnashing of teeth. 

Just agree to this verse, logically assent to the series of propositions that it presents, and voila, instant heaven. That’s it. All of your worries about your regrets and your fears about what happens after we die, are, poof, gone. Simply agree to the veracity of this verse, and that’s it, you’re done; you’re heaven bound. Now you just have to suffer through the inconveniences of this life until you get to the end and then you cross over the rainbow bridge where everything is peace and light and perfection and halos and harps and angel wings. 

See, I think we maybe get it a little bit wrong, or we miss something important, when we cast this very important verse solely into the realm of where we’re going to end up when we die. Does it bring you comfort about what comes after this life? Excellent. Do you hope for a heavenly state where you are reunited with loved ones and pain has ceased and you’re singing the praises of your savior until the end of time? Awesome. Hold on to that. Don’t give that up. God says important things about salvation after our physical deaths.


But. Or, rather, and. 


There is an eternal life that is right here, right now, that we so often miss because we’re so occupied with the regrets of the past, or we’re so obsessed with escaping into the future. We don’t know where to turn. We lose our focus on what’s important, and each time, God gives us something to focus on. For the wandering Israelites, he gave them a bronze snake. A symbol to remind them that it is God who saves. For the first century Christians, it was Jesus, lifted high on a cross. And for us, it’s still Jesus, lifted high on a cross, but not just as a get-out-of-hell-free coupon, or as “fire-insurance,” but to show us that it is God’s work, both in and out of time, that saves. God cares about our eternal future, absolutely, but I also think that God cares about our eternal now. This requires us to play in the philosophical sandbox for a minute. But don’t worry if you feel like you’re getting buried in the sand at first. Let’s just play around with time for a little bit. It’ll be fun. 

Paul Tillich calls this the “eternal now.” 

He says our existence is defined by time. We have a beginning and we will have an end. There was a time before we existed. And there will be a time after. And some day, even time will end. Just as the darkness was separated from the light and the earth was formed and the soil created and time began, so will the soil disappear, and the earth will fall away, and darkness collapse back into the light. There is a beginning. And there is an end. But, he says, the God who enters time is also the God who is also outside of time. Time will end, but there is an “eternity above time,” there is an “eternal as the ultimate point in our past.” And, likewise, there is an eternal as the ultimate point in our future. Or, stated a little more simply, time is just a construct, as we have just illustrated today when we somehow “lost” an hour of sleep last night and suddenly the sun will stay out an hour “longer” tonight. 

There is something even beyond time, outside of time, that isn’t defined by a past or a future, but that just is. We call this reality, “God.” God, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. And just as we believe that God became flesh and entered into the temporal now of human existence, Tillich says that God enters into our own temporal nows, our own “right here”s. A sort of incarnational two-way bridge is formed, where the incarnated, fleshy, earthly, timely world of human existence reveals the ethereal, transcendent, timeless, eternal ultimate love of God. When this happens, the “temporal” now, and the “eternal” now overlap, and we encounter God. He says, “Not everybody, and nobody all the time, is aware of this ‘eternal now’ in the temporal ‘now.’ But sometimes it breaks powerfully into our consciousness and gives us the certainty of the eternal, of a dimension of time which cuts into time and gives us our time.” 


It’s in this eternal now, in this present moment that surpasses all moments, that we experience forgiveness, “belief”- whatever that is - and light in the darkness. It’s in the eternal now that God is present and “lives” and meets us where we are. But it’s not some escape, some other place, where we can leave behind the messiness of our lives. In the eternal now, the facts cannot be changed, what has happened has happened, but the meaning of what has happened can change, and when the meaning surpasses the pain of the past, that is forgiveness. The meaning of the past is changed, and that makes all the difference for our future. But that only happens in the time that we actually have, and the only time that we actually have is right now, in the present. The past is gone. The future’s not here. We just have right now. And it’s so fleeting, that the second that I say “right now” the present is gone, poof, never to be seen or experienced again. But there are those moments that seem to last longer, that seem to be more real, that seem to transcend time, and those moments are “eternal now” moments, those moments are encounters with God, and in those moments, we are saved. In those moments we are not perishing, but we have eternal life. 


Ok. I’m sure I’ve lost you with all this existential philosophizing. I apologize. I get all excited and I just can’t help it, and it’s really cozy and comfortable for me in the world of theory and thought and the hypothetical. But what I’m trying to say is that John 3:16 is so much easier to handle if we just project it into our futures and make it all about an afterlife. John 3:16 is so much easier to handle if we keep it at arms length and simply say that it’s about belief and unbelief, or assenting to the right creed, or marking the “yes” or “no” box on the “Who gets in to heaven list." But, more and more, as I experience the healing force of being in the present, of being in the now, of being centered and mindful of what is right here, right in front of us, I am starting to believe that John 3:16 is more than a litmus test for believers; it is an experience of something more, of something eternal, even as it is a present “here-ness.” God so love the world that God entered into limited bounded realm of time so that everyone who believes may not perish in the right here, in the right now, but have eternal life.


This is all I really want to say to you today. God is with us, right here, in this eternal moment. This is eternal life. That’s the eternal life we can tap in to. Not some distant, far off, nebulous vision of us reaching the pearly gates and checking our names on the John 3:16 list, and forgetting about all the hurt we’ve caused and the pain we’ve suffered, but in the right here, in the right now, God, incarnate, present in this presence, in meaning-making forgiveness that God offers. It’s what we should focus on.


My spiritual director has been trying to get me out of my “head” for months now. Every time I try to experience God or have some kind of an encounter with God, every time I try to pray or meditate or try some contemplation technique, I jump into my logical mind. I end up asking all kinds of questions, I want to know the Greek, and I want to know the Ancient Near East Palestinian context and I have this sudden urge to dig out the commentaries and talk to scholars and head to the library. I want to check the boxes to make sure I don’t miss anything. I want to get it right so that I don’t need the forgiveness in the first place. 

But “no,” she says, "don’t do that. Stick with the image. Take the risk. Use your imagination. Focus on the now. Experience what God is trying to say to you today.” Well, one day we were supposed to connect with Jesus in his childhood. We were supposed to listen and watch and explore Jesus as a young child. And as many of you know, we don’t get a whole lot about Jesus’s childhood in the Gospels. It’s all left up to our imaginations. Ugh. There’s not a lot to ask about when there’s nothing there, and I didn’t have any Greek to look up or context to fill in, there was just this vast expanse of time that nobody really knows anything about. So, instead of giving up, and instead of looking for another reference book, I took Jesus to my own childhood, to my own backyard, and to the overgrown lot next door. To when I was eight or so. And I was also 42. And I showed Jesus the best climbing trees and all the times we started building a treehouse but never finished. I showed him where we buried a time capsule full of Pepsi clear and a box of Runts and Lisa Frank stickers and a picture of Molly Ringwald. I showed him my swing set and the thin row of grass where I tried to plant a garden but the rhubarb was the only thing that survived and only Dad liked rhubarb. 

I told him about the time I fell off the neighbor’s shed and another time when I jabbed my elbow into the window well and needed rows and rows of stitches. We ate mulberries right off the branches. And then night came. And the fireflies started glowing. And we sat together on my front step. And we watched. I was listening hard for God to speak to me. But, we just sat. We just waited together. We weren’t even sure what we were waiting for. And I swear. I promise. For half a second. For a split moment that was beyond moments. For the briefest of time that was truly outside time, in the remembering of a hot summer night in the late 1980s, I swear, in that present moment, in my 42 year old body that is now my 45 year old self, in that eternal now, I looked all around at this incarnated world lifted high, and I could hear the cicadas singing.


Thanks be to God.