I wonder if you have noticed how much of our spiritual endeavours are frozen into moral imperatives. You should do this; you should do that; you must not do this or that. I suppose it is, in part at any rate, the fruits of dualism, something that seems impossible to avoid as we wend our way along the path of life.

This troubles me, because moral imperatives can quickly become distorted in the interests of political expediency. They transmogrify into laws or regulations that enable one to say “Oh, that is illegal. That is against the law” (or vice versa) – the first response of discomfited politicians. Thus, morality dies a painful death in the hands of leadership, and spiritual endeavour suffocates.

Scholarly discussion of binding and loosing centres around regulations or laws concerning who has authority to do what. The historian, Josephus, reported that “The power of binding and loosing was always claimed by the Pharisees. Under Queen Alexandra [76 BCE to 67 BCE], the Pharisees became the administrators of all public affairs so as to be empowered to banish and readmit whom they pleased, as well as to loose and to bind."1

Rabbis, aka wise men with a spiritual bent, had similar power to decide disputes relating to the Law. That which was permitted in law they declared to be loosed,2 whilst a forbidden practice was called bound.3 To confuse the issue, however, there were different schools of thought. For example, there was a saying: “The School of Shammai binds; the School of Hillel looses.” 4

This manner of discussion is commonplace, but it leads to the frozen-ness to which I have already referred. This bothers me because something has been lost in translation. And I think that that something is our humanity, our divinity, the core of who and what we are.

This month we are to focus on CREATION with a capital C. So, let us start at the beginning.

As I told our Friday congregation last week, the Dutch theologian, Edward Schillebeeckx, wrote that our creation myths are “not a cosmological explanation for the origin and nature of the world and human beings,” but rather “a theological elucidation of God and God’s relationship with creatures.”5

The word creature comes from the same Latin root as the word creation. We are creatures, created beings, something we have in common with “all that is, seen and unseen,” as the creed has it.

So, I, a human being, am an integral part of, “all that is, seen and unseen” – closer than breathing. You too. This mystery of what we call existence, however, is one of total reciprocity. “On that day,” said Jesus,” you will know that I am in the Father and you in me, and I in you”.6 That is the closeness of creation. As our Buddhist friends might tell us,

When a drop of water falls in the ocean, When a speck of dust falls on the ground,
At that moment the drop of water is no longer a drop of water, It becomes the ocean,
And the speck of dust is no longer a speck of dust, It becomes the entire earth.7

In Christian terms the foregoing suggests to me that you and I and the rest of creation are imbued with a sacramental quality. That certainly makes sense in terms of my own understanding of Aboriginal Spirituality. However, like all sacrament, something becomes a sacrament for me when that is my own particular intention. Our world is our sacrament, if that is our intention.

His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew said,

It is our humble conviction that divine and human meet in the slightest detail contained in the seamless garment of God’s creation, in the last speck of dust. 8

So, as we exploit the environment, we permit an avoidable suffering of all creation. The gospel writer Matthew would say we do not bind that suffering, but rather we loose it. To quote Bartholomew again, we refuse to accept the world as a “sacrament of communion”. Schillebeeckx called it a neglect of “the physical and social aspects of salvation”, noting that

Jesus makes visible by his action that the whole of human reality – physical, social, and spiritual – are also part of the sphere of the offer of wholeness of life … 9

In all of this, we have the conundrum of how to access true wisdom; the wisdom to think, pray and act in a way that augments our precious world.

Barbara Brown Taylor wrote in her book, Holy Envy, that it can be “helpful to be authentically human.” 10 Schillebeeckx pointed to a God, who by nature, “is present to human beings in a deep and hidden intimacy”. 11 The contemplative world will suggest that we can access that wisdom within the practice of silent meditation or contemplation. But that is not necessarily everyone’s path.

In one of my all-time favourite novels by Charles Williams, Prester John, the mysterious, mythical, Priest/King of the Graal makes several appearances. His last one involves an encounter with Barbara, whose 4-year-old son, Adrian, has been rescued from a hideous end by John and a cohort of angels. Adrian wants to go to church, and Barbara blushingly confides to Prester John that “we don’t go as regularly as we should.”

“It is a means,” he answered, “one of the means. But perhaps the best for most, and for some almost the only one. I do not say that it matters greatly, but the means cannot both be and not be. If you do not use it, it is a pity to bother about it; if you do, it is a pity not to use it.”

I leave the last word to Jen Hadfield, a poet who lives on the Shetland Isle of Burra. Her words, as Mark Oakley remarked, “interrogate and bless the natural world … pour light on, and through, the people, animals and landscapes that make her feel “connected and protected.” 12 Her poem, Paternoster, is the Lord’s Prayer as uttered by a draft horse, and one can almost smell the mix of grass and mash on its breath as it repeats the words “it is on earth as it is inn heaven”

Paternoster. Paternoster.
Hollowed be dy mane.

Dy kingdom come.

Dy draftwork be done.
till plough the day

And give out daily bray

Though heart stiffen in the harness.
Then sleep hang harness with bearbells
And trot on bravely into sleep

Where the black and the bay
He sorrel and the grey

And foals of bearded wheat
Are waiting.

It is on earth as it is in heaven.
Drought, wildfire,

Wild asparagus, yellow flowers
On flowering cactus.

Give our daily wheat, wet
Whiskers in the sonorous bucket.
Knead my heart, hardened daily.
Heal the hoofprint in my heart.

Give us our oats at bedtime
And in the night half sleeping.
Paternoster. Paternoster.

Hallowed be dy hot mash. 13

Doug Bannerman  2020

Reflection on Matthew 18:15-20