Your Life is Your Practice
When we reflect deeply on Jesus’s baptism, we see just how far God is willing to enter into our lives, saturating our lives with the Divine Presence. In this Presence, we see that our entire life is the place of our spiritual transformation and wholeness. If this is the case, then we are called to live consciously and fully awake, following the Spirit’s guidance to hope and peace.
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Transcript
Here’s a poem from the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh to open today:
Oh you who are going in circles,
please stop.
What are you doing it for?“I cannot be without going,
because I don’t know where to go.
That’s why I go in circles.”O you who are going in circles,
please stop.“But if I stop going,
I will stop being.”O my friend who is going in circles,
you are not one with
this crazy business of going in circles.
You may enjoy going,
but not going in circles.“Where can I go?”
Go where you can find your beloved,
Thich Nhat Hanh, Call Me By My True Names: The Collected Poems of Thich Nhat Hanh. (Berkeley, California: Parallax Press, 2022), 219
where you can find yourself.
Today, we mark the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord, which is a peculiar feast day. It is one of the key Epiphany stories, that collection of moments in Jesus’ life that all orbit around the central question of “who is this person Jesus, and how do we understand God becoming manifest through his life?” There are three key stories in this collection that the Christian community has celebrated for two millenia: the Visitation of the Magi, which we heard last Sunday; today’s account of the Baptism of Jesus; and next Sunday’s story of Jesus’s first miracle at the wedding in Cana.
All three of these stories invite us to reflect on the Incarnation, the manifestation, the embodiment, of God’s presence in the person of Jesus, and today’s story is filled with the heavens opening up and the Creator’s voice announcing the truth of Jesus’s being.
Of course, in our lives, we understand baptism to be, as the Prayer Book says in the baptismal rite (page 308), the sacramental embodiment whereby “you have bestowed upon these your servants the forgiveness of sins, and have raised them to the new life of grace.”
So, we may ask, if this is the inward and spiritual grace found in the outward and visible sign in this ritual embodiment, why exactly did Jesus participate in it? Jesus had no sins to reckon with, and he had no need to be raised to a new life of grace when he was the embodiment of its fullness.
The Incarnation shows us that God so entered into our lives in the person of Jesus that Jesus himself shared in the ancient baptismal rite, transforming it through his own life. His participation in this rite demonstrates how far God is willing to go to share in our lives. And, in so doing, by entering into our lives with such fullness, we experience within our own lives the presence of God. The reality of God’s love and being is not just an idea; rather, it is an embodied experience. The Incarnation continues in and through us, and the truth of God’s love flows through our veins.
With this being the deep spiritual truth, then our lives become the locus of spiritual transformation. I’ll say that again: if this is the case, our lives become the locus of spiritual transformation.
Now, we can see where our deep spiritual work lies, with our very lives, and we can identify how our spiritual work might take shape. We are convicted about how all aspects of our lives matter to our spiritual transformation.
The great Annie Dillard wrote in her book The Writing Life: How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.
What the poet Mary Oliver said about the poet Walt Whitman is an excellent description of Jesus’s own intention for our lives:
His message was clear from the first and never changed: that a better, richer life is available to us, and with all his force he advocated it both for the good of each individual soul and for the good of the universe.
Mary Oliver, Upstream. (New York: Penguin Press, 2016), 95.
Howard Thurman, that great 20th century spiritual guide in the Civil Rights Movement, put it this way:
We look at ourselves in this waiting moment–the kinds of people we are.
The questions persist: what are we doing with our lives?–what are the motives that order our days?
What is the end of our doings? Where are we trying to go?
Where do we put the emphasis and where are our values focused?
For what end do we make sacrifices? Where is my treasure and what do I love most in life?
What do I hate most in life and to what am I true?
Over and over the questions beat in upon the waiting moment.
Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart. (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1981), 28-29.
The great psychoanalyst and mystic Carl Jung put it this way in his Liber Novus, or Red Book, as he described the painful lesson he learned from “the spirit of the depths”:
But one thing you must know: the one thing I have learned is that one must live this life.
This life is the way, the long sought-after way to the unfathomable , which we call divine. There is no other way. All other ways are false paths.
We can hear the echo of wisdom in these three sages, can’t we?
Why are you going in circles?
A better, richer life is available to us…
What are we doing with our lives?
One must live this life. This life is the way…
Carl Jung, Liber Novus. Edited by Sonu Shamdasani, translated by Mark Kyburz, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009), 128.
Our spiritual work means that we are constantly challenged to pay attention to how we are living, how we have ordered our days. St. Benedict, St. Francis, and the masters and mystics know this, of course, and this is why having a Rule of Life is so essential.
“Church,” then, becomes not some separate thing that offers a service that we can consume, but rather is a space where we actually bump into ourselves, become aware of our growing edges, and participate with the Spirit in the transformation of our very lives. For those who think that the church is just some organization which you can join, like a club to which you pay dues in order to receive a service, I want to disabuse you of that illusion. There is always an element of Christian community that is a mirror for us, to notice how the Spirit is calling us to grow.
The church is not just another vessel of the consumer-driven American social structure–or it shouldn’t be such. The church at its best and truest, as the Body of Christ, is a space–an organism–in which we learn a very difficult lesson. It is a lesson that we continue to bump up against, and it is a lesson that often causes us to project our frustrations out on someone else who we feel is not doing what ‘they’ should be doing to make ‘our’ lives easier, materially, emotionally, or spiritually.
The church is a space in which we learn this difficult lesson: that our life is our practice.
Here is what it looks like to realize that our life is our practice:
For those who are grieving over the loss of a spouse or family member: your life is your practice. You know the truth of this, how you learn a new way of being in the world, how you pay attention to how the flow, rhythm, and movement of your life is marked by grief with those strange bursts of insight and even joy when you are surprised by a memory of your loved one. You are surprised by grace and hope, and you can feel God’s presence with a deep sense of honesty.
For those who are parents of younger children and are unsatisfied with the stress in our lives, with the busyness of schedules, with the strain we feel, we don’t always know what to do with our hopes that our children can have lives with more meaning. The culture encourages quick fixes, but perhaps we know deep down that is a lie. Perhaps we think that “the church” should schedule more events around our children’s already packed schedules, but the very tension that we experience here is teaching us a lesson: your life is your practice.
This truth looks like this: We are called to live consciously, and our choices are our practice. When was the last time you told a coach you couldn’t do something because your child needed to be at church, to dedicate that time to their spiritual health? In those moments in your frustration at the busyness of your schedule perhaps we have a sudden insight that we are actually the one who schedules things, and we see the spiritual potential in making choices, in determining what really matters.
For those who are preparing for their child to graduate highschool and embark on an exciting and, yes, anxious next stage of their life: your life is your practice. All the theories and ideas around transitions and all the hopes and concerns you have had about your child take on flesh. We experience this liminal moment where our dreams for them give way to their dreams for themselves, and there is a deep beauty in that space.
For those who are wondering just who they are as they step into retirement: your life is your practice. All the assumptions you have had around your self worth, and all the ways you have seen your life tangled, perhaps, in the drive to accomplish and succeed, are challenged. You find yourself shifted into another gear, and it can be disorienting–to say the least.
My friends, this is how the Incarnation “works.” Our lives are our practice. God so entered into human life, so flows into our lives still, that our lives are the locus for our salvation, for our path to wholeness.
Of course we get caught in patterns, and so much of the economy right now is structured on us being distracted consumers. Global markets are all focused on harnessing our attention for someone else’s profit, so the pressure is enormous to actually be a conscious human being in this world. It benefits others if we remain numb and stuck in our patterns of mindlessly consuming and thinking that we should be entertained every moment of our lives.
But as St. Augustine said in the 4th century, our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God. Our souls know the truth, I believe, and in some quiet moments when we are still and allow ourselves to be honest about where we really are, about what we really hope for, the heavens open up for us too and we hear God’s voice reminding us of who we really are–and what we are really meant for.