Let’s open heaven for one another…

Let me explain, as best I can.

Today is a holy day in the Christian calendar: Pentecost.

A day of wild fire and transformation – not the sort we have just witnessed across our land.  Just the opposite.  As such, I believe that it is offers a pulsing lifeline of hope.

Pentecost marks the day when a group of hunted, frightened, persecuted, grieving men and women were suddenly given to see that THEY — and ALL OF US — are walking miracles, who have been granted the power to heal, to mend, to make whole what has been broken.  To speak truth, to dance, to shake off the cobwebs of fear and oppression, to know joy.

The historic event was the aftermath of the state-sponsored death of Jesus.  His followers, appalled, frightened, under threat of death themselves, moved from hiding place to place, attempting to evade capture, as they tried to make sense of what for them was a world-ending, hope-destroying, event.

We, here, now, in our quarantined cubicles after a week when we’ve been confronted with the worst that our own power structures can inflict on individuals, don’t need to imagine what it feels like to have every credible moral structure collapse.  We don’t need sermons or lectures or more photos to document the end of life as we know it.

Black and white, we know fear.  Anguish.  For our lives.  For our capacity to privilege the common good over individual security.  For the surfacing of naked cruelty in a time of astonishing generosity and sacrifice.  For what we can’t predict.  For all we don’t control — which friends, is almost everything.

Almost.

We can’t control the state, our jobs, health, homes, friends, lovers, children.

We control nothing — almost.

This is the crux of the matter that I want to try to explain.  The part we can control.  The way we see.  The choices we make.

It may be too soon, this morning, to talk about healing.  But it may be the only thing we should be talking about.

When people’s hearts and souls begin to heal, they tend to use one or two metaphors.

Some say that they feel as if they are giving birth.  Dreams of pregnancy, of intense physical transformation are common.  Babies appear in dreams, or bellies filled with a fire that does not burn.

The other metaphor that people often use is of “coming home.”  Home to a quality of being they’d forgotten.

One man I know recently left a monastery where he’d spent twenty five years of his life.  He speaks of his intense vulnerability, of feeling like a child again, starting over, reclaiming his given name, his love of nature freed from a confining enclosure of rules, the astonishing experience of loving with his body.

People on the path of healing and wholeness become mystics. Poets.  Artists.  When the shrouds and scar tissue of grief and anxiety are pulled away, the heart is so full of gladness and gratitude, peace comes in the form of radiance.

They begin to speak in ways they never have before.  They say things they didn’t know they knew.  New visions salve the traumas of the past and release the obsessions we now see for what they were: lower forms of perception.

We need others to help us heal.  To hear, or to share our stories, to witness the subtle movements we make in the direction of hope, and to stand with us as we climb out of despair into what feels like a safe place of affirmation and possibility — “coming home.”

This is what we are talking about.

It is the passage from hiding, fear, uncertainty, to the other side.

The chaos and violence of Good Friday turned into the wild fire and transformation to an entirely new common vision of how we can be together — filled with hope, generosity, and gratitude.

It is hard to imagine this morning that we might invite such a vision into our world.  Yet, in our heart, we know that this is what we are here for: not to suffer the hells of our own making, but to open heaven for one another.

No one knows what it will look like until it happens. But it does.  We know this.   We help one another on the journey by hearing the voice that reminds us that at our best we are artists, poets, mystics — when we believe that we are walking miracles.  When we believe.