On Our Way Up to Canaan Land, Part II

The sense of all this, as applied to the life of the individual, is intended to be an illustration of how close we are, all our lives long, to the realm of peace, freedom, abundance, and rest otherwise symbolized in the Old Testament as The Promised Land. In the New Testament it is called The New Jerusalem.

My Kingdom is not of this world, Christ says. It is in heaven. Heaven, in fact, is not of this world, and yet it is in this world. It is as near as a breath is near to the lips (the Greek for heaven being often translated as breath).

But if I cast out demons with the finger of God, surely the kingdom of God has come upon you.

Since the representatives of religion had accused Jesus of casting out demons by the power of Satan, they made it implicit in their argument that they believed a supernatural power to be at work in Jesus. He had only to finish their own argument to arrive upon the truth--If Satan casts out himself, the how will his Kingdom stand? But if I by the finger of God . . . and so on.

How will the Kingdom of heaven come? So asked the ever obtuse disciples, always so perfectly characteristic of mankind. Will it come by war? Will it come by force of arms, by the crowning of a new King, by fire and destruction, by civil war or revolution?

Not by revolution, but by revelation--and revelation by crucifixion--the overthrowing of all things, a surrender to death itself so that new life may rise.

Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain.

So it happens that in a world made of illusion and delusion, of pride and arrogance, of lies and conceits and fear, that our eyes are able to open and see very often only through pain and sorrow, through a series of mini crucifixions. We follow the Lord whether we like it or not. We follow whether we intend to or not. For this is life, pure and simple. One cannot live unless he dies, and truly we die daily, as the apostle Paul pointed out.

The core of life itself is composed of irony and paradox. Disease becomes a miraculous setback. In disease the weakness of the flesh is concluded, the pretense of power in the flesh is revealed. We fall back now upon what? Upon what is not flesh but spirit, what is not of this world, but of heaven. Disease becomes a key to health, a map which shows the short way to Canaan. We are not eternal, as we had thought, or had liked to imagine--and yet we see, though through a glass darkly, that something is, and always has been.

This is the blessing of infirmity, the glance afforded through the rent in the veil.

And we begin to hide our eyes no longer.

On Our Way Up to Canaan Land, Part I

One hears often enough from bible preachers how it took the Chosen People forty years to reach the promised land after the escape from Egypt, though it was a journey that could have been made in a matter of days rather than years. The preacher will tell you that this was because they were not ready to enter the promised land. He will tell you, moreover, that the only thing keeping them from a timely arrival at their destination was their stubbornness, their lack of faith.

It appears that the people went everywhere but the promised land during those forty years. They stopped for weeks of feasting on manna, and then on tiny birds. They stopped with parched throats, gasping for water in the middle of the desert (when there was likely a perfectly handy water faucet perhaps a mile further down the road). They stopped to see various marvels--a bitter stream made pure by a fallen tree, a vertical cloud by day, a fire by night, a bronze serpent on a pole which would heal those who gazed upon it, and the radiant face of Moses himself, just down from the mountain, the very sight of which was unbearable to the people. Behold, the skin of his face shone, and they were afraid to come near him.

Though God was with the people, it turned out that He made such a racket of thunder and lightening, fire and storm, and spoke, as it were, so loudly, that the people begged Moses to make Him go away, to meet with him thenceforth on one hilltop or another where there would not be such a confounded conflagration every time He and Moses spoke.

Well, the preachers are right. The destination of mankind has never been very far away, and the road has never been other than straight and narrow. It's just that we cannot see it, we cannot bear it. We must through the better part of our lives be wayward children. It is only as we near the end that our vision begins to clear, that the scales begin to fall away, and we find ourselves looking down from Golgotha, having entered at last into love.

Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in needs, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ's sake. For when I am weak, then I am strong.