Sermon by Gretchen Stolfo on 01.29.2012
I've never been to Palestine or Israel, so I enjoy reading what Emil Bock wrote about the journey from Nazareth to Capernaum. It's from a book he wrote in 1948, The Three Years the life of Christ between Baptism and Ascension. Although he was the leader of a denomination in Germany called the Christian Community when he wrote the book, Emil Bock was also a survivor of the concentration camp in Welzheim. It seems like his experience of imprisonment and release is echoed in the description of Jesus' move from Nazareth to Capernaum.
I was excited when I realized that the Gospel today was set in the synagogue at Caprnaum. There is a wonderful description of that synagogue in this book.
“The capitals and architraves, now lying mostly in ruins, are carved not only with magical symbols, but also with symbols of the sun and moon. The delight in image and symbol led even to the choice of a heart shape for the ground plan of the great corner pillars. The Old Testament prohibition of images, so strictly adhered to in the dark Hall of Nazareth, seems here to be disregarded and thrust away. Instead the Greek love of light is wedded with the severity of the ancient tradition.”*
In Luke we read that the construction of the synagogue in Capernaum was authorized and overseen by the Roman Centurion there, which is in stark contrast to the Roman presence in Nazareth. During Jesus' childhood the next village over from Nazareth had been destroyed and the inhabitants killed or imprisoned. In Nazareth the relationship is brutal occupier over victimized, occupied native population. Harmony between occupier and occupied population seems possible in the town where Jesus chooses to relocate.
In Capernaum Jesus begins a new life among the fishermen there. He invites them to join him in making their lives new as well in their village that enjoys breezes from the lake and influences from far distant countires. The heart chakra, our chakra for this Sunday, could be a metaphor for this geographical position, in that it has to do with breath and our inner circulation of sustaining elements that reach us from outside ourselves.
I have an exercise from Brenda Davies that I am going to read. Please feel free to follow or just observe, whichever you are comfortable doing.
“Air, breath—the most basic of our needs—is the element of this chakra.
We are going to try a little conscious breathing right now. Just close your eyes
and focus on your breath. Breathe in slowly to the count of six and, as you do so, visualize yourself breathing in peace and tranquility. Then gently breathe out to the count of six, breathing out any toxins, any anxiety and tension. Now allow a little pause to the count of two. Again, breathe in to a count of six and let feelings of peace flow through you, and as you breathe out, let go of anything you don't need, seeing your whole self being cleansed. A little pause to the count of two. Again, another breath, this time to the count of eight, and allow everything nourishing to flow in on your breath. Hold it for a couple of seconds as you absorb all the goodness from it and then let the breath go and with it all that you no longer need. One more breath, every part of you, cleansing, healing and balancing. As you breathe out, allow your whole body to relax. Just let go. Feel your weight on the earth. Then when you are ready, open your eyes again.
Breathing is essential for life and is one of the functions of the heart chakra
involving physical substance. The heart chakra is the middle chakra holding the balance point.
Now we come to the heart, the pivotal point of our spiritual
ascent, bridging the earthly and divine as the chakras below it hold
us securely in our human state while those above beckon us to the
spiritual.
So what is the energy of this chakra besides being a point of focus for our breathing in the physical sense and in the human soul function of living in physical and spiritual reality? Brenda writes:
The energy of the healthy heart chakra is what we call love.
It almost defies definition despite being the most talked about,
written about , sung about topic in the universe. Some cultures
have several words for it but, whether we are referring to the feeling
between lovers, parents and children, friends, siblings, our pets,
or that fervent veneration of God, the energy has similarities and we
call it love.
What is the function of this energy according to Brenda Davies? As we heard in the reading:
From its site in the middle of the chest, spinning at the speed of
green light, the heart chakra radiates its powerful healing energy not
only to the farthest point of our being, but to the whole universe.
This image is so beautiful and so frought with responsibility! Why do we have such power? Do the functions of our inner life matter so much?
Investigation of our inner lives is a relatively new science. There was a great awakening of thought and observation centered around our inner lives from 1850-1950 among the educated classes. Great minds in the U.S. And Europe struggled, conferenced, and wrote books about the make up and purpose of our inner psychology.
William James published Principles of Psychology after years of study and personal struggles with the role of religion, séance and science in our modern age.
It was a book that spoke to the people. Many people in the aristocracy and priviledged classes read it.
Jung and Freud, the pioneers of psychology read each others works and finally met. They were fascinated by each others' theories and work, but disagreed on the primacy, the central importance of the sex drive in psychological behaviour.
Freud felt that all patterns of soul illness and health were influenced primarily by a peron's relationship to their sex drive. Failure to submit to male and female roles resulted in abnormal behaviours.
Jung felt that there were other influences such as culture and art, history and humans relation to work and play, study and creativity, mythology and religion.
Ette Hillesum studied and had a relationship with Freud before she was sent to the concentration camps. As we heard of her struggle here at St. Hildegard's, we felt the love and courage that she lived in her year and some months of exploring the inner battlefield with her fellow holocaust victims. Shining the light of inquiry on her inner life while living in the most frightening place of human conflict that the people of her time had known, Ettie wrote and arranged to get her writings out of the prisons until the time she and her fellow prisoners were herded into the cattle cars to be taken to the death chambers.
Her writings show the gift of strength she found by dwelling in the heart and allowing the pain and joy to be there. This gave her a home, a channel of sanity, in the midst of that dark cruelty. Her last known act was to sing.
Mary Ermey has beautiful things to say about the level of touch involved in singing. When we sing, we touch and make known what is in our soul. That experience is simultaneous with those around us to the enchanting detail of their eardrums vibrating to the touch of impact from the sound waves we produce as our vocal chords form words on our breath.
We may feel sometimes like life is a battlefield that we try to keep at bay.
Really living with the pain of the world leaves little room for creating a loving inner soul life. Somehow Ettie Hillesum did go into the battlefield and let it live in her inner life without judgement. Thereby she found comfort, a comfort that helped those around her and helps us today when we read or hear her writings.
Where does this comfort come from? I propose that there is a breath of the life of Christ in our heart chakra. I don't mean that you have to say you believe in Christ to have a healthy heart chakra. I am saying that his true deeds created a spiritual pattern that we can access. Other spiritual leaders have contributed to the form that imbues our chakras as well.
Let's look at the gospel:
When they entered into Capernaum, straightway he taught
in their synagogues on the Sabbaths.
In Capernum Jesus taught in the synagogue and was not taken by a mob to be thrown over a cliff as he was in his own hometown.
And they were amazed at his teaching; for he taught them
as one with authority, and not as their scribes.
In this cosmopolitan crossing place, the townsfolk give recognition to the voice of authority, or possiby living authenticity, which they hear in his voice as it speaks the words usually read and inerpreted by scribes. Jesus who comes from a harsh, mountainous, more remote and smaller village can bring something new to these people who live everyday with people from other countries passing through.
There was a man there in their synagogue who had in him an
unclean spirit, and he cried out, saying, “Jesus of Nazareth, what
have we in common? Have you come to destroy us? I know who
you are, Holy one of God.”
The first sentence spoken by the unclean spirit is not welcoming like the
townsfolk. It comes out raw as if the unclean spirit is surprised to find Jesus' words and message gaining harbor in the heart of the man where the spirit has mastery.
“Have you come to destroy us?”
In these words the root is fear. Does Jesus have the power to destroy these dark beings that we let live in our souls whether we are conscious of them or not?
Who speaks the last statement?
“I know who you are, Holy One of God.”
Is it the man himself or the unclean spirit?
The outcome is that Jesus, without preparing the man, the unclean spirit or the group assembled in the synagogue, simply and boldly orders,
“Be silent and come out of him.”
In the final picture, the man is convulsed and falls, after which the unclean spirit cries out in a loud voice and leaves.
I propose that we have this voice of Christ that gives us the power to tell the self destructive stowaways in our heart to get lost. He/she lives in our heart chakra if we create a space there for ordinary miracles.
If we can access that voice that was heard in Capernaum so many years ago and now resides within reach of our heart chakra, why don't we? When we hear the same old self destructive chatter or divisive judgement talk, why don't we tell it to be silent? Sometimes we do, but it comes back.
We want to heal our heart chakra, but the battlefield gets more dangerous the longer we face it alone. Our exhaustion allows voices in we haven't got the strength to silence. We unload our burden on others. That's healthy, if we do it in a loving balanced conversation. But there's a risk our conversations become habitually about unloading the awfulness of our situations. Our small battlefield is calling in a louder tumult. What were Jesus' words?
“Be silent.”
How do we have that kind of strength?
Just as our physical body needs exercise, our spiritual inner life can benefit from regular exercies. The exercises in Brenda Davies book are helpful. You may have your own spiritual exercises that you have created time and space for. Today I will offer at the end of all these words, an exercise I learned at a workshop with Brenda Davies. It's a standing moving meditation.
Stand with your feet a little apart, hands at your sides. Let your knees feel liquid and relaxed. From your root chakra send a current of connection through your legs and feet to the space under the ground under your feet. Let this connection move further and into it pour the tensions of your body. Let your shoulders relax. Feel the connection flow through your fingertips into the earth. Feel your connection speed deep into the earth to its center and let all that worries you leave your consciousness and flow into the earth.
Feel golden light reaching you throught this connection with the earth. Feel it between your palms as a glowing expansion of light and warmth. Speak inwardly the words, “The earth loves me.” Do this twice, relaxing your arms and returning your hands to your side in between the two expansions.
Bring both arms up to the horizontal and feel that the reach of your fingertips goes from horizon to horizon embracing the width of space occuppied by sun and moon. Face your palms forward in acceptance. Speak inwardly the words, “People love me.”
Extend your arms upward until they are parallel above your head, palms facing each other. Feel that your reach extends to the farthest reaches of space. Speak inwardly the name of your spiritual guide or orientation in the sentence, “______loves me.”
Let your arms fall gently into gravity and swing them up to cross your hands in front of your chest either touching your chest or sheltering the space in front of your heart chakra and speak inwardly the words, “I love myself.”
Bring your arms to the horizontal, again feeling your reach from horizon to horizon, palms forward and speak inwardly the words, “I love people.”
Reach upward to bring your arms parallel, hands above head, palms facing each other and speak the words, “I love _____.”
Let your arms fall into gravity gently until your hands are again at your sides. Feel your connection with the earth and speak inwardly the words, “I love the earth.”
This is your exercise now. Use your own words and speak them aloud when you are alone.
*Emil Bock wrote as well that archeologists do not think that this synagogue was the one in which Jesus taught. They think that the synagogue beneath from earlier times was the one of his lifetime. It is of dark stone, basalt. I found out from the internet that there is a team of Franciscan archeologists, and they have exhumed large parts of the more ancient synagogue. Emil Bock thought that it was unlikely that the Greek style synagogue was built after Jesus' death. He cites the fact that synagogues were not built for a few centuries after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in the year 70.
READINGS
From the gounding of the root chakra, we moved to the sacral to embrace our sexuality and gain flexibility and strength. The solar plexus allowed us to combine our power and our will to open to our potential. Now we come to the heart, the pivotal point of our spiritual ascent, bridging the earthly and the divine as the chakras below it hold us securely in our human
state while those above beckon us to the spiritual.
From its site in the middle of the chest, spinnning at the speed of green light, the heart chakra radiates its powerful healing energy not only to the farthest point of our being, but to the whole universe. Her in this one chakra are the functions without which we cease to exist as human beings within a matter of minutes—our beating heart and our life-giving breath. Here also, love, compassion and touch reside, as the heart chakra demands that we reassess our relationship with ourselves and our profound connection with everything else in the universe.
-Brenda Davies
I feel like a small battlefield in which the problems of our
time are being fought out. All one can hope to do is to keep
oneself humbly available, to allow oneself to be a battlefield.
After all, the problems must be accomodated, have somewhere
to struggle and come to rest. And we, poor humans, must put
our inner space at their service and not run away.
-Etty Hillesum 1941
A significant turning point in the life of Jesus was the move from Nazareth to Capernaum. His whole youth had been spent in Nazareth on the Galilean heights, where to the west there is the gleaming Mediterranean, and quite near inland the cobalt blue basin of the Sea of Gennesareth, and the rounded summit of Mount Tabor. After the imprisonment of John the Baptist, when Jesus felt impelled to go about and work among the people, He left the town of His childhood and youth. From thenceforth the Gospels speak of Capernaum as His town.
At the time of Jesus, the life of the little town of Nazareth must have been harsh and narrow. It
was not a free settlement, but a colony of ascetic Essenes, whose strict rule of life had to be observed in part by those of the local people who were in the service of the Order.
Through Capernaum, on the other hand, there moved not only the refreshing breath of the lake, but the life of the great world outside. Here the ancient Via Maris follows the sea shore as far as Bethesda. These ancient military and caravan routes connected the civilized countries of the Old World, Babylon and Egypt.
-Emil Bock, The Three Years the life of Christ between Baptism and Ascension
