mean for the city of Jerusalem? Perhaps that being measured out as special in God’s purposes would not be because it is embodied there in any final sort of way, but because it is a place where something could be learnt and recognized: a dynamic to be entered into . . . This would be a hugely significant shift in emphasis and understanding.
But it has also become a very problematic place, a place of deep struggle about something people won’t bring to the surface: ‘the deep and dark places’ (religious, political, social). How do we even begin to think of these things? If the creation of light brings darkness, perhaps holiness creates envy – or greed – a claim to a right of possession and a need to possess God, to be God. Perhaps that is what’s at the heart of idolatry and at the heart of the competition and fighting that have become such a part of Jerusalem’s history.
And what can counter this? A shift from Paul Ricœur’s ‘human economy’ of equivalence and exchange to the ‘divine economy’ of abundance and excess.23 God is not competitive: what is best for him is best for us, too. That’s the mystery of service: entering and going deeper into relation with God is not about loss and restriction, but gain. But there is a great sense of urgency about it all.
Entering Jerusalem
Jerusalem overlook: The old city
I found our entry into Jerusalem very powerful: the Holy Mount/Temple; the Wailing Wall and, even more so (to me), the entrance to the tunnel under the Western Wall. It’s not easy to say quite why, but what struck me as we walked down under the excavations of the old wall was the power of the place: the most ancient stones of the Temple, leading up to much later ones. It’s not the physical mass of the place in itself, but that it is alive: radiant with light. There was a Bat Mitzvah taking place down there and a steady stream of people stopping to pray. It gave me the sense of this being the repository of God’s light. One could see it phenomenologically, but it’s far more than that: it takes eyes to see it, that’s all. I just found I was embraced by the light.
Light on the temple walls
It was the sum total of all this that gave me a sense of the huge power of God’s light and energy and how the divine is at work. But the question is, ‘How to get it across?!’ It’s an infinitely probing thing: not so much light’s searching as light’s penetrating. What is it that attracts someone to something better? The strong sense I have is that the Goodness simply draws them to something fuller. It’s an opening and enabling process: an attraction and recognition of the life and source of life within. It is like a granulation of patterns, words, light, senses: things percolating up just like the waters of the Jordan; and a whole range of things coming to the surface, with a new awareness of the simple wonder and beauty of creation and life itself; and with that, the awareness of how little we’ve ‘got it’. So with the light comes sadness and loss but also a yearning to live from this source and to be oriented to it: to the life and health bubbling up deep within. The sense of sorrow is sharing in the grief of God and his longing for the best for his people and the world: longing for us not to be distracted or to waste time. It’s about recognizing how much more there is than you’ve ever seen before and being attracted by it and lifted up to it. This light is something that’s capable of lifting you deeply from within: the word I’ve used a lot for it is simply ‘attraction’.
The ‘Dominus Flevit’ Chapel (the site where ‘the Lord wept over Jerusalem’)
Something about the light is its openness and not being exclusive; its being open is inherent to it. We can’t contain the light however much we might want to or try to. Remember YHWH: ‘I am who I am and I shall be who I shall be . . .’ Our human attempts to hold and define God become inimical to the light. We cannot grasp hold: like trying to grasp Israel for the Jews. It is one thing to have a homeland, but it’s quite another to possess it and restrict it. Think what it’s like to have a child: it’s a gifting of responsibility.
So what is it to indwell somewhere and have a homeland without possessing it? How can we participate honestly in the huge reality of the light without needing to possess it? The divine light is lifting you to something you don’t need to possess: it is lifting you to another sphere. It enters you non-possessively and filters up within you. We’re regenerated – transformed and rebuilt – from deep within.
People don’t believe things can be renewed in that way. They’re too stuck, too fixed; that’s the heavy imprint of materialism that most people live with. But what if we were freed from that? What if we were given new categories and could shift away from the Aristotelian fixed units of measure to something new altogether? Into a sphere of indefinite possibility and the realization that this energy can reshape and redefine everything from within? That’s the language of the resurrection: measurement is redefined. It is not pre-ordained things, plans or units that define, but this ‘unit’ of the most primal energies – the life and energy of the Spirit. I wrote a paper once, while I was at the Center of Theological Inquiry. It was never published, but it was uniquely important for me: ‘Spirit of Creation, Reconciled’. It taught me the power and depth of the Spirit that I hadn’t grasped before: that the Spirit is primary in the Trinity, the bedrock of the Trinity. It was quite a shift for me. I think, like most people, I had a fairly conventional notion of it until then, seeing the Spirit as a sort of add-on dimension to the Trinity, not deeply intrinsic to it. But then I began to realize that it is much more fundamental. I began to recognize it as the energy of the divine: always there at the beginning and before the beginning, right at the heart of God.
People are often habitually drawn away from the light. So how, with all the leaves falling, covering it up and burying the light, how do we uncover it? This is our tragedy: extensity. We’re caught up in this thing after that thing and then another thing. When we meet someone who is open and drawn into this light – whose eyes are opened to see – it’s not just their personal experience. Something is happening in that person on behalf of humanity and he/she is making an authentic contribution: fulfilling something vital. People lose and miss the significance of who they are and what their purpose is. Sharing is important because if something good is not shared, something is missed. It’s about us sharing and participating in the depths of God and God’s goodness, indefinitely and infinitely. That’s where things get really exciting: there’s a depth in God that is fathomless. That’s where it gets quite dazzling: what might be! The infinite potential of the world. We limit ourselves so much! But the invitation is to get caught up in the re-creative Spirit of the divine: the Trinity.
Marc Chagall’s ‘The Tribe Simeon’ window at the Hadassah Hospital Synagogue, Jerusalem24
The world has huge potential that it’s sunk away from. But it’s important not to focus on the remedial: to focus, instead, on the huge potential: God’s goodness and Spirit at work in and among us! We need to be clever in the ways of the world and to see what’s gone wrong – and even perhaps why – but not get stuck there. It’s a matter of identifying the blocks and then moving on. It’s easy to get stuck in the blockages rather than focusing on the wonder and glory and vision of God and getting swept up and caught up in it. It’s not a matter of us working out ‘how’.
There is a strong temporal thrust of movement forward, a perfecting movement towards the fullness of God’s creation and God’s work, far beyond what we can see. What is the fullness of
