Angela Center

Integrating: spirituality, psychology, social responsibility and the arts

What's New

Reflection for January 16, 2005

Calendar

Psychotherapy /      Counseling Services

Conference Facilities

Registration

Contact our Staff

News

AC Press

HOME

Without Context - we end up very much alone: Part 2

Last week I quoted passages from four modern poets who, in musing over current events or personal situations, make subtle references to corresponding biblical events or situations. In this way they allow their private musings to resonate with images out of their larger cultural heritage (the Bible) and thereby better communicate their feelings to those who share that heritage - like putting new words to an old melody we all know.

For instance, here's Emily Dickinson again, regretting her growing old and losing the freshness of vision of her childhood days, which seemed like Paradise to her in retrospect. So what does she do? She identifies her sense of loss with that of Adam and Eve: Eden is that old-fashioned House / We dwell in every day / Without suspecting our abode / Until we drive away. // How fair on looking back, the Day / We sauntered from the Door - / Unconscious our returning, / But discover it no more.

Or here's Jonathan Henderson Brooks, who apparently as an aging father whose hopes of attaining fulfillment in life have waned, passes on his blessing and his hopes to his young son. And what does he do? He thinks of Moses on Mt. Nebo who with dying eyes viewed a Promised Land he would never enter and of old Jacob-Israel's farewell to his twelve sons: I greet you, son, with joy and winter rue: . . . / A sire sore tired of striving with the winds; / Climbing Mount Nebo with laborious breath / To view the land of promise through blurred lens, / Knowing he cannot enter, feeling death. // And, as old Israel called his dozen sons / and placed his withered hands upon each head . . . / So would I bless you with a dreamer's will: / The dream that baffles me, may you fulfill.

I also said last week that the Gospels do a similar thing with their account of Jesus. They narrate his life - to be sure - but always with explicit or implicit references to the Old Testament as a wellspring of light from which they might illuminate and not simply describe who Jesus was. As in the case of last week's Sunday passage about Jesus' baptism!

Now it's a fairly undisputed fact that Jesus was baptized by John at the Jordan River. But the narrator of that event expects his first century audience to catch - as Jesus rises out of the waters - the resonance of ancient Joshua's crossing of that same Jordan River, when the water parted and allowed the Israelites to gain access to the Promised Land. And he expects them to catch the echo of that night in Exodus when "the Lord swept the sea with a strong east wind" so that when the water divided the Israelites might march well beyond the reach of Egyptian tyranny. And he expects them to catch the echo of Noah's exit from the Ark when, after the return of a dove with an olive branch, he heard God's command: "Go out of the ark; bring out every living thing - and let them abound on the earth." And finally the narrator hopes we'll recall that very first moment of creation in Genesis when, hovering like a Spirit over the primeval sea, God said, "Let there be light!" and our whole world emerged out of nothingness.

Sensing all those allusions to past redemptive interventions of God, how could a first century reader view the Gospel account of Jesus' baptism as anything less than God's attempt to re-create the world in his image; raise humanity once and for all out of the deluges, the greed, ignorance and wars in which we immerse ourselves; and set us on our way once and for all toward a Promised Land that's no longer a territory in Middle East but an atmosphere, a breathing space, a Church permeated with mutual love? See how there's more than meets the modern eye beneath the Gospel's surface? See how important it is to know your biblical heritage if you're going to glean from it all that can make you as wise, as deep, and maybe even happier than Emily Dickinson?

-- Geoff Wood