Genesis 2:18-24
Proper 22 (27) - Year B
I am curious about the phrase, "deep sleep." A beginning thought connects this with creation time when darkness hovered over the face of the deep.
In a sense creation keeps going and going, just like that pink bunny. It comes out of the deep and the dark. Then comes a word, an act and a spark of light, a mere glimmer sometimes, awakens a weary world to new hope.
From a deep sleep and from deep within comes the awareness of deep binding together.
This month, two congregations here will be doing an online study of an older resource, The Wounded Healer. From a deep and dark night of the soul comes a light of being bound together when it felt like everything was being torn and ripped open in preparation for abandonment and death.
In the wound is the healing; in the deep sleep is the awakening. In the Adam is the Eve, the new day – and it was evening and morning the next day.
The deep sleep of Eden and flood and slavery and captivity and crucifixion and the dark ages and the present age is intended to awaken us to a new day, a new earth and a new heaven.
In Thy Nature and Thy Name is Love: Wesleyan and Process Theologies in Dialogue, Michael E. Lodahl's chapter contains this related thought:
...There is a somewhat insidious implication of creatio ex nihilo that should be brought to light and expunged: The doctrine often seems to imply that God works like a magician who pronounces “Presto” and pulls a rabbit (i.e., the world) out of his or her top hat (i.e., nothing). In this picture the creation of the universe appears perfunctory and arbitrary with little, if any real, investment or care on the Creator's part – a picture that lends itself to a devaluing of the world and our lives in it. It is safe to say that this is not, and cannot be, what Christians (or Jews or Muslims) mean by creation out of nothing. The particularly Christian conviction that God has created by the Word – the Word that became flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth – belies any hint of arbitrariness or caprice in God’s act of creation, suggesting instead that creation is the deliberate expression of divine love revealed at Gethsemene and Golgotha. In this case, perhaps creatio ex nihilo might be well-complemented by: God creates out of (and as an expression of) self-giving, creative love....
What in you has been created by love? Is that enough? What of you is creating out of love? Is that enough?
Sleep deep. Awaken refreshed, a new creation.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2003/october2003.html
To walk in my integrity implies an understanding of what has been joined to G*D and therefore is joined to me. It is easy to see good joined to G*D, not so easy to see evil having a connection. This is probably a function of our ability to see rather than G*D's experience of what is termed good or evil.
It is easy to see inherent relationships between lovers who find themselves in one another, not so easy to see divorce as a sacred event (only a state event). Yet, for integrity’s sake, we find we cannot live only one side of an equation. What is being joined and separated in our living today? What is defined and named and to what are we still so blind we cannot see to name? This state of already and not-yet is the interface where we find the energy and experience of life.
May your helpmeet (experienced, whether legalized or not) assist you, with integrity, to both curse G*D and die, and come to yourself.
- - - - - - -
I wash my hands in innocence
again and again
I am washed away by life circumstance
again and againmy very same hand hugs my brother
again and again
that slaps my sister
again and againso I define and define
again and again
and am in turn defined
again and againuntil I cannot tell
again and again
truth from falsehood
again and againand am joined to the cosmos
again and again
and divorced from myself
again and againredeemed
again and again
gracious
again and again