If I am not for myself, who will be
for me? If I am only for myself, then what am I? If not now, when?
-- Rabbi Hillel
Grace and
peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Back when
Jesus was learning his religion, the ideas of two great teachers dominated the theological
landscape. Rabbi Shammai and Rabbi Hillel were the founders of two rival schools
of Jewish morality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillel_and_Shammai Shammai was a strict legalist while
Hillel offered a more openhearted spirituality. Jesus formed his teachings in
the context of their dispute. By and large, Jesus was in the Hillel camp. His
arguments in the gospels with “the Pharisees” look like arguments with the
House of Shammai, and we see Jesus leaning toward the views of Hillel. Jesus
probably even learned the Golden Rule from Hillel’s disciples before he made it
the centerpiece of Christian ethics.
One of
Hillel’s most famous sayings is:
If I am not for myself, who will be
for me? If I am only for myself, then what am I? If not now, when?
1. The Individual
The text
loses a lot in translation. “I” renders anochi,
which means the core self, our deepest being, our very soul. It is the in-God’s-image
center that we are apt to miss except in times of prayer and reflection. “Myself” and “me” refer to the personality
formed by all sorts of external factors such as heredity, cultural imprinting,
social pressures, life experiences, etc.
Our soul
(I) is always in God’s image. In the Christian terminology of Lady Julian of
Norwich, our soul is forever one with Christ. This is perfectly in line with several
schools of psychology, most particularly the psychosynthesis model of Roberto Assagioli.
http://www.amazon.com/A-Psychotherapy-Love-Psychosynthesis-Practice/dp/1438430906 Assagioli says we each have a
Personal Self (soul), which is inseparably one with the Cosmic Self of the
universe (Christ).
Our
personalities on the other hand are all over the place. They have strengths and
virtues, but they are also flawed, broken, erratic, sometimes irritable,
sometimes downright sinful. Hillel teaches that our soul is for
our personality, even with all the personality’s foibles. Our soul mediates
God’s unconditional love, for if it did not, it would have no reason to exist.
That’s what a soul is for, what it was created to do.
But Hillel also reminds us that the soul’s loving appreciative support for the personality
cannot be confined to the personality. If this love radiates at all, it
radiates right out through our personalities to others. If our soul were not
“for others,” it would not be a soul at all. Love is not an ego-project. It
cannot be contained for our own use.
Authentic
Christian – or Jewish obviously – spiritual practices are not just about
getting in a zone or having an experience. They are about opening our selves to
God’s love flowing through us into the world. “Lord make me a channel of your
peace . . . “
2. The Congregation
In my
previous Epistle I wrote about a congregation’s temperament. http://bishopdansblog.blogspot.com/2015/07/17th-epistle-to-nevadans-what-is-your.html I said:
By “temperament,” I mean a habitual
mood, a pattern of acting, a spiritual default setting. Just as individuals
have temperaments, so too do congregations. Congregations have lots of feelings
running about in them and various people behave in various ways. But the group
has a basic was of being. Individuals have a lot of feelings in any given day,
sometimes several feelings at the same time. But the individual has a basic
temperament. It is the same with a congregation.
This
“temperament” of the congregation is equivalent to the personality (me, myself)
of the individual in Hillel’s adage. Just as our individual personalities are
formed by multiple external influences, so too is the temperament or
personality of a congregation. This includes traumas, wounds, betrayals, fights
won or lost, people who left or stayed. Even the new Church plant is born with
scars because the founding members come bearing baggage from their previous
church experiences.
So two
questions arise: 1. How does the congregation as a whole find healing? 2. Is the church there to serve its
members or to serve the world outside its walls?
These are
two questions, but from Hillel, we get a single answer to both: it is God’s
love mediated through the soul. We are called as individuals to love our quirky
congregations and all their quirky members with God’s love, to see them through
God’s eyes. We are called to live soulfully in our congregations. The beautiful
effect of that practice is to bring to life and consciousness the soul of the
congregation itself, the soul that is none other than Christ himself. Then we
have a congregation that can truly change the world outside and in.
There are
two ways of being Church that do not work so well for this spirituality.
Unfortunately both are rather common.
First,
there are inward looking congregations
who essentially exist to have worship on Sunday morning, having superficial conversations
with each other before and after. Such congregations get stale. For new people,
it is hard to break into such a group. They come a few times, but then drift
away. The inward looking Church is invariably declining. In some small towns
where the Churches are inward looking, I will mention at my hotel or a
restaurant that I am there to visit St. Swithens and the people will say, “Oh
are they still open?”
Second,
there are the outward looking
congregations. Canon Catherine perfectly nailed the problem with the outward
looking congregation in her presentation to this year’s convention. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xaq3lcEAnTk&feature=youtu.be
Trying to
fix people out there can be a way to avoid dealing with the sticky issues
inside – in our selves individually and in our own congregational relationships.
It is so much easier to deal for five minutes with the homeless person in need
of a meal or even 15 minutes with a hospital patient than to actually work out
our relationship with the problematic people we see week after week. “The more
chaotic my personal life gets,” as Canon Catherine said, “the more I want to
fix you,” The reason such Churches are not as effective as they might be is that
people need more from the Body of Christ than social services. What they need
most is a sense of belonging but if we are not in the process of healing
ourselves – both individually and as a community – we have nothing helpful they
can belong to.
So what’s
the right approach for a congregation to take?
If I am not for myself, who will be
for me? If I am only for myself, then what am I? If not now, when?
If we not for our congregation, who
will be for it? If we are only for our congregation, then what are we? If not now,
when?
Authentic
Christian spirituality starts with Christ in our souls and our souls in Christ.
It starts with setting our ego agendas aside long enough to find our true
selves where they have always been hidden. In Christ our true selves, our souls,
are never judging, jockeying for advantage, carping, criticizing, keeping
score. Such shenanigans are utterly foreign to the soul. The soul is always
caring, curious, compassionate, and patient. The soul looks like Jesus. We find
ourselves when we fall in love with “him who loved me and gave himself for me.”
Galatians 2: 20 I wrote about this from Turkey while studying the spiritual
teachings of St. Paul. http://bishopdansblog.blogspot.com/2015/06/live-from-anatolia-part-xi-its-not-crime.html
In Christ,
we have the grace and power to look at each other more generously, to see each
other as Jesus sees us. We can look past the difficult personality traits to
engage the other person, to see the wounds that need healing compassion or at
least patience. This does not mean giving people their way. In the church we
too often either react against bad behavior judgmentally or we enable it by
giving way to tantrums and manipulations. Compassion and patience do neither.
Compassion and patience stand still, responding with a kind sanity and a sane
kindness.
That habit
of seeing cannot be constrained by the walls of the Church. If we practice our
spirituality of community relationships faithfully, it will follow as the night
the day that we will serve the wider community outside our walls.
But there
is another side to this process. A congregation cannot form properly just for
each other. If a congregation is only for
itself, what is it? It is not a Christian congregation anointed to proclaim
good news to the poor and set the captive free. It is not an apostolic
community going to all nations to baptize them in the name of the Trinity.
Paradoxically we form sanctified friendships with each other while we work
shoulder to shoulder for someone else.
So which
comes first for a congregation, the inner work or the outer work? The answer
is: yes. The great spiritual teacher Elizabeth O’Connell wrote about this
process at as it was lived at The Church of the Savior, Washington, DC in Journey Inward, Journey Outward. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0060663324/?tag=mh0b-20&hvadid=3489372964&hvqmt=b&hvbmt=bb&hvdev=c&ref=pd_sl_atd7b6o99_b
Quaker
teacher Parker Palmer wrote of it in The
Active Life: A Spirituality of Work, Creativity, and Caring. http://www.amazon.com/Active-Life-Spirituality-Creativity-Caring/dp/0787949345/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1445654638&sr=1-1&keywords=palmer+active+life
Clergy, if
you want to learn how to better equip your congregations to form and deepen
their own relationships while organizing to serve others, the go to source is
Nevada’s own Arthur Gafke in Strong
Ministry: Strengthening Your Pastoral Leadership. http://www.amazon.com/Strong-Ministry-Arthur-Gafke-ebook/dp/B00C62ZU4Q/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1445654885&sr=1-1&keywords=Gafke+strong+ministry
We simply
have to do both at once. Some congregations fund little or nothing for
outreach. Others give huge percentages of their budgets to outreach but grossly
underfund the worship, formation, fellowship, and pastoral care that sustain a
congregation and equip it to actually do hands on outreach. A congregation can
only grow strong and healthy with a balanced diet.
3. Conclusion
So the
basic point from Rabbi Hillel’s famous saying is it has to be both/and. We find
our way into Christ though a spiritual discipline of relationship with each
other – and that “other” includes both those inside and outside the church walls.
This is clear in the New Testament and the theology of the Early Church. It is
well supported by what we are learning from modern physics (Margaret Weatley, Leadership and the New Science
http://www.amazon.com/Leadership-New-Science-Discovering-Chaotic/dp/1576753441/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1445656685&sr=1-1&keywords=wheatley+leadership+science) and from psychological models such
as psychosynthesis and systems psychology.
Seeing and
serving each other as Christ would serve us is the challenge and the
opportunity the Christian life affords. That opportunity leads us to Hillel’s
final question: If not now, when?
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