Confession and the Tranfiguration

“…he was still speaking, when…”

--Matthew 17:5

The other morning, I went to confession over at Our Lady of Czestochowa. It had been a while, and it is summer. I guessed it was time for my quarterly check in with the sacrament.  One interesting thing I think I know about this church is: there used to be a Charlie’s Hamburger there back in the 70’s. “Over two-dozen sold,” was their slogan. There were a few around town, but they are all closed now (I believe).  If I remember correctly, the restaurant was in an old two-story house that also sold antiques. Regardless, the fact that it was there tells me that this piece of land over on Blalock has always been a place that feeds the soul. It must be Holy Ground.

I like going to confession over at Our Lady partly because the priests are Polish and there is the strong possibility that they won’t fully understand what I am confessing, but also because of the old-fashioned confessionals. They have the kind with a kneeler and a screen; like in the movies. It feels not only private, but special, solemn; more real.  I know there are people who like going to confession face to face with the priest, but I have always preferred the idea of anonymity. Of course it may be a sign of spiritual (and emotional) immaturity, but I have never gotten comfortable with the idea of a priest knowing exactly how I feel about Doritos! Tree climbing! and Lana Turner!  Just the possibility…  It’s more than I can handle.  And, I must say I don’t like to see the disappointment in their eyes when I begin talking about my struggles the 10 commandments (at least 9.5 of them).  But that’s another story…

What I really wanted to talk about was my penance.  The priest recommended that I meditate on the Transfiguration.  He recommended either praying the fourth Luminous Mystery of the Rosary (the Transfiguration) or getting out my Bible and reading the gospel account (Matthew 17: 1-8, Mark 9:2-8, Luke 9:28-36) and spending some time quietly contemplating it.  Well, like any good and overly scrupulous sinner, I went straight home and did both… But nothing much happened.  I wanted to feel overwhelmed with grace and mercy and salvation and all kinds of luminous stuff like that. Basically I wanted to feel something transformative… but, like I said, nothing much happened. I read the Gospel account and sat quietly for a while, my mind wandering about like an owl in search of a cigarette.  Then I went for a walk to the park and prayed the rosary and picked up a dead fish that someone had left in the road… But, basically, I felt un-changed.  I was pretty excited about this penance and thought –Wow! That’s a cool one. Man. I lucked out. But, in the end –I prayed and I meditated and …nothing seemed to happen. I was still just me… and I was a little disappointed.  And that’s how prayer works most of the time (in my experience).

But… Later (this is almost a little postscript; which may –in itself—be a sign of some kind) I was sitting in a lobby waiting for my daughter, reading a book and having trouble keeping my eyes open; I heard the slapping of sandals coming down a staircase and I was kind of startled awake.  I looked across the lobby (a large one --with an indoor garden) and I saw these two skinny legs coming down the twisting staircase slapping loose fitting sandals with each step.  The steps sounded like those of a small girl, half playing with the acoustics; perhaps delighting in the clap of her shoes as she walked. From my angle and distance I could see a pink gauzy skirt that came down just past her knees. It looked almost like a ballet skirt my daughters used to wear when they were very young.  As she came around the landing where the stairs turned back toward the main lobby I could see it wasn’t a child. It was a young woman; early twenties –I would guess—and she was walking as so many of us do these days with her face peering into her phone. She came down the rest of the steps just as loudly, but now the sound had lost its charm.  Now it seemed like the thoughtlessness of a distracted young lady who couldn’t be bothered to care whether anyone else was trying to read (or sleep).  She was too busy staring at her screen and emojifying things! I guessed.

And now that I was awake and cranky I was also a little perplexed by her outfit. Why was she dressed like an eight-year-old?  And why couldn’t she just put that phone away and stop slouching, and walk like a normal person (whatever that means, Old Man Sutter!)…

I watched her walk to the door still staring at the screen in her hand; her shoes still slapping the tile floor. I watched her open it and step through, still staring at it.  I watched as she let it swing closed and kept going, apparently oblivious to the other people who were walking past her to come in.  And as I did –my first thought was: of course, she won’t hold the door for anyone. She’s too caught up in her own little virtual world to bother about anyone else.  I had made up my mind about this young woman. And then something happened.  As she was walking away, she suddenly stopped and hurried back. And opened the door. And just stood there… as a very large (overweight man) walked stiffly and slowly past and through the door.  He nodded and may have spoken to her. I couldn’t hear from my vantage point.  But I could see her turn her head up from her phone and smile before she headed on her way.

What I witnessed that afternoon in that lobby was a type of transfiguration.  Like those sleepy apostles who looked at Jesus and thought they knew who he was. They had been with him a while and seen how He acted and heard Him speak and even seen Him heal people, but… Then he revealed Himself in a way they had never imagined.  Me… I was looking at that young lady and after just a few seconds of observing her, I thought I knew who she was. I thought I knew what I was seeing.  And that judgmental voice in my head just kept speaking. But, then she turned around and opened that door and… I too saw something I had never imagined. 

Shut your mouth, Mr. Sutter... and open your eyes.  There is more to God's world than you could ever imagine.

In my experience with the Lord, that is exactly how He works.  If I am acting all holy, and looking for a reward, nothing happens.  But, just when I am feeling exhausted and ready to give up on God, He comes clumping down the stairs in a pink ballet tutu looking like an overgrown 8-year-old.  When the priest gave me that penance, I had been kind of excited. Because I thought it was a sign from God. And I guess it was. But, just not in the one I had expected.  And yet, if I hadn’t gone to confession that morning, if the priest hadn’t given me that penance, and if I hadn’t gone after it like a dog after a bone, I wonder --would I have been ready to witness what I saw? Would my heart have been open to that little quiet moment of transfiguration if the seed hadn’t been planted by a priest I never saw sitting behind a screen in a little old fashioned “closet” (with a kneeler), on a weekday morning, in a Polish church in Houston, Texas? I wonder…

One thing I know for certain; somewhere along the way, I must have been on holy ground.  But isn't that true everywhere? I mean, think about who made it.

The lie unpunished --a meditation

“…the word of the Lord came to the prophet

who had brought him back…”

--1 Kings 13:20

 I’m still thinking about this story. It won’t let me alone, though I may be alone in this.  For me, the real question is why did the story teller tell this story?  If we assume that the story teller behind the stories in the Bible is God, that it is actually His word, then my question is: why is God telling us a story about a prophet who lies to a “man of God,” and tricks him into not fulfilling God’s call, and yet the liar goes unpunished, while the man who was tricked is killed by a lion for not doing exactly what God told him to do… and—another thing: Why put the prophecy of this doom into the mouth of the prophet who lied?  Why would the writer/creator of this tale, whether it is God or just a regular old story teller, create such a troubling story? Why not make it neater, with an obvious moral for the edification of the audience?

And, for me, well… I’ve ben struggling with what the actual lesson of this story is.  And now I am beginning to wonder if that struggle, my struggle, isn’t the point –or at least part of God’s lesson.

I keep getting hung up on the unpunished lie, but this story is no more a story about an unpunished lie (and a king’s withered hand [cf. 13:4]) than Hamlet is a play about ghosts and sword fighting! Which is what I thought Hamlet was about when I first bought myself a copy at the used bookstore on Long Point (near the old Kmart). It was 1973 and the copy I bought (for .65 cents) had a drawing of a dead body, a ghost and a man with a sword on the cover –and since I had just finished reading Frankenstein and Dracula and (I think) had just seen Captain Blood for the first time, it looked like the perfect cover to the perfect book for me!  And heck, I already had part of it memorized: “To be or not to be, …”

Yet, –much to my 13-year-old self’s consternation— Hamlet is not really a play about ghosts and swordplay; as I have learned with time and reading and rereading, it is so very much more. It is a work that –in fact—reveals itself again and again to be so much more with each rereading.

There is a complexity to it, and a multiplicity of meanings that arise from its multi-faceted characters and plot and the boldness and largeness of its language.  Some readers will focus on the patriarchal elements and derive lessons about male dominance and female subservience, others will see themes of Oedipal conflict in the struggles between Hamlet and his step father (and his beloved mother), and still others will find Hamlet’s psychological turmoil over the idea of revenge to be the most compelling elements of the play… but, for me –when I taught the play to high school seniors—I began to hear in it man’s struggle to define himself and his place in a universe where he feels alone and compelled to make his own decisions about what is right and wrong; I heard in it a drama of life in a post-Catholic world.  At the beginning of the play, Hamlet returns from Wittenberg (i.e. Luther’s 95 Theses), and Laertes comes home from the University of Paris (i.e. scholasticism, tradition & Thomas Aquinas).   And throughout the play Hamlet questions whether he has the right to decide things on his own (i.e. interpret the world for himself), while Laertes does what he is told –i.e. obeys the magisterium of king, culture and family… Yes, I know there is more to it than that.  Seemingly nothing about the play is as simple as one might imagine upon first, second, third, fourth, eight, twelfth reading. The writing is so imaginative, alive and unsettling that each time I read it, I hear or learn something new; with each new gaze, the depths of works like Hamlet and The Divine Comedy, Homer’s epics, The Bible, seem only to grow deeper and the truths ever more profound.  One is left to wonder who wrote such things (and how). 

Which brings me back to the enigmatic story at hand. In my reading, the complexity in this story derives more from what has been left out than what has been included.  The fact that no judgment is offered about the prophet who lies, leaves us to ponder his actions, and his role in the story?  To contemplate the meaning of his role.  And why God would continue to use him to voice his message.  What could that mean? According to my Jerome Biblical Commentary some scholars have argued that this is a midrash story redacted into a historical document, and their focus is on the “man of God” punished for being disobedient, but my focus is on the source of his disobedience: the unpunished lie. The more I meditate on this element of the story, the stranger it seems to me.  Of course, one might dismiss this enigmatic element by saying: clearly it wasn’t important to the author; so let it go and move on.  Don’t waste your time.

But when I was learning to pray Lectio Divina we were taught to hang onto that little piece, that word or phrase or element that caught our attention –hold onto it, because that was what we were being given to ponder.  

And so, there are two things I am still turning over in my head about this apparently unpunished lie.  First: was it actually unpunished?  Is the punishment of the lie found in the message the lying prophet is called to deliver?  When he turns to his dinner guest and says:

“This is what the Lord says: ‘You have defied the word
of the Lord and have not kept the command the Lord your
God gave you. You came back and ate bread and drank
water in the place where he told you not to eat or drink.
Therefore your body will not be buried in the tomb
of your ancestors.’”—1 Kings 13: 21-22

What horror must have run through his own mind –being the one who lied to the “man of God,” knowing that it was through him and his lie that God’s word had been defiled; is that not (perhaps) his punishment: to live with the knowledge of the dishonor and doom that he helped bring to a fellow prophet?  Certainly some of my own worst memories are of the evil I have brought to others, even more than the evil I have committed on my own.

And second: perhaps one thing God is telling me, is this:  it’s not always about the answers; sometimes it is about the questions.  The complexity of this little simple story inspires me to ask and ponder –and maybe what God is teaching me through it is this: nothing is ever as simple as it looks.  Open your eyes. Open your heart. Look. Listen. Ponder… Ask questions. Ponder some more. 

How often do we look at someone and think: oh, she’s this or he’s that… she’s a snob, or he’s a bully, or she’s a conservative and he’s a liberal, or she’s a goth and he’s a jock… We dismiss the complexity of their humanity by compressing it into a label.   But, no one is that simple.  Everyone contains a multitude of sorrows and joys and contradictions --unspoken… The truth is, as Bob Dylan once said: "...even the president of the United States must sometimes have to stand naked..." There is always something more to be revealed.  And (of course) some things that need to stay between you and your bathroom mirror....  Anyway, as Hemingway so famously claimed, sometimes the most important part of a story –is what was left out.  Think about that for a while... and when you're done, ponder it some more.

The Word of God & the Prophet Who lied

“As they were sitting at table, a word of the Lord

came to the prophet who had brought him back…”

--1 Kings 13:20

The other day I wrote about going home by a different route, and how seeing the world (or my neighborhood and neighbors) from a different point of view could also help me see myself in a new way.  My experience had strange echoes of that story from a story in 1 Kings 13 in which God commands a prophet (or “holy man”) to take a message to the king of Israel (Jeroboam) and warns him that when he is done, he should not eat or drink anything and should return home by a different route than the one he came by.  So, on my morning walk I took that little command literally and tried a different route.  Click here to read that essay, if you want to know what happened.

But there was something else in that odd little story that also caught my eye.  It was the character of a second prophet who lies to the “man of God” and convinces him to come back and eat and drink with him.  Though there are certainly more striking elements in this story, particularly the shriveling of the King’s hand, and the lion who kills but doesn’t eat his prey; the part of the story that I keep thinking about is that prophet who lies to the man of God.  Here is the part of the story that I am pondering:

Now an old prophet dwelt in Bethel, and his sons came and told him

all the works that the man of God had done that day in Bethel; they also

told their father the words which he had spoken to the king. And their father

said to them, “Which way did he go?” For his sons had seen which way the

man of God went who came from Judah. Then he said to his sons, “Saddle

the donkey for me.” So they saddled the donkey for him; and he rode on it,

and went after the man of God, and found him sitting under an oak. Then he

said to him, “Are you the man of God who came from Judah?” And he said, “I am.”

Then he said to him, “Come home with me and eat bread.” And he said, “I cannot

return with you nor go in with you; neither can I eat bread nor drink water with

you in this place. For I have been told by the word of the Lord, ‘You shall not

eat bread nor drink water there, nor return by going the way you came.’”

He said to him, “I too am a prophet as you are, and an angel spoke to me by the

word of the Lord, saying, ‘Bring him back with you to your house, that he may

eat bread and drink water.’” He was lying to him.  So, he went back with him,

and ate bread in his house and drank water. As they were sitting at table, a

word of the Lord came to the prophet who had brought him back…

  --1 Kings 13: 13-20

And that last bit there, that “word of the Lord” coming to the prophet who lied, that is what catches my imagination most in this story.   When I am reading a poem or any work of literature actually, I look for those clues. I listen for what sticks with me.  I don’t think of myself as any grand arbiter of what is important theologically or mystically or artistically… In fact, I try not to think of myself. I try to (instead) watch and see what I react to… and by doing so, try to understand myself just a little better.  So, clearly I may miss something of the utmost importance by focusing on a small detail that caught my imagination; it is not unlike being fascinated by the thorn that snags our sleeve and missing the beautiful rose that drew us to the garden in the first place.  But, so it goes.

And my question is: why would God give His word to a liar? Isn’t lying (bearing false witness) forbidden by the Ten Commandments? What gives?  God gives His word to this lying prophet.  What does this mean? 

First, it says to me that the ways of God are not the ways of man[1] and we should not presume to judge them.  And second, it reminds me of the famous saying that God writes straight with crooked lines.  He can use anyone He likes to convey His message –and it may not always seem fair or fine or glorious to us. It may seem downright inappropriate, even!  Regardless –it is not for us to judge the ways of God. 

Which makes me think back to the story of Saul, a handsome, tall young man who seems to be humble and obedient to his father (cf. 1 Samuel 9).  He was God’s chosen man to become the king of God’s chosen people, yet even before Saul was anointed, God warned His people about the king they were about to receive: he was going to take their property, enslave their children and by and large make a mess of their lives (cf. 1 Samuel 8: 10-22), but the people still wanted a king and God let them have him. And the results, one might say, were as sad for Saul as they were for Israel.  And yet we say God is a loving God.  A just God. A faithful God.  Certainly, one might be tempted to ask: are you sure?

Which brings me back to this poor “man of God” who obediently carries a fearful message from God to the wicked king –a heroic tale, one might say—yet ends up killed by a lion because he believes a lie told by another prophet who claims to have received a message from an angel of the Lord. My immediate reaction was how unfair that seems.  The man of God, for all we know, sincerely believes that the prophet has heard a message from God.  So, what is the lesson the story teller is trying to teach? That when we get a mission from God, we should follow it through completely without worrying about what anyone else says --including prophets? 

And that prophet who lied about God, yet is still given, by God, a prophecy to speak: the doom of the man he has lied to.  That moment at the table when he receives this message and must deliver it, that is an astonishing moment literarily. It is like something out of Shakespeare or Tolstoy.  The message he must deliver is a two-edged sword; and I wonder who it cuts worse?  The hearer knows that he has failed to be true to his mission from God, and knows now that he must suffer the consequences.  But the speaker must face the fact that what he has done, his lie, has brought about the doom of another… and the weight of that lie, like a millstone, is now hung around his neck.  Wow. This little story, with two unnamed characters, dropped down in the middle of a lengthy 2 volume history of kings and wars and corruption is astonishingly alive with meanings and lessons for us today: not only a lesson about being faithful to God’s call, but also about the cost of even the most innocent seeming lies, and one that we should probably remember every time we turn on the news: sometimes even a liar will tell the truth.

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[1] cf. Isaiah 55:8-9; Romans 11:33; Job 11:7; actually just about the whole book of Job & several Psalms, including 92:5; 139:6 & the book of Ecclesiastes