Sacred Spaces: Infinite Knots
March 01, 2009
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Joshua 24:13-28, Mark 8:27-38
My folks have a summer cottage in the Poconos on a small lake. Before it was a small lake, it was a smaller pond, but about 60 years ago, the pond had been enlarged to become Whitney Lake, about a mile long and half mile across. As a child, I fished and boated a lot on the Lake – but there were a lot of tree stumps in the Lake, about 10 feet out from shore typically, which remained from the enlarging process. It was easy to lose fishing lures on those stumps. Occasionally, if you hit just right, you could get a rowboat or canoe stuck there, on a stump. Eventually, using an oar or paddle you could get loose, but it was kind of a nuisance. And bringing the boat back to our dock was a precision operation – missing a stump on the left and then another on the right – and finally finessing in to the dock.
One winter, the lake association drew down the lake level using the dam at the south end. I was a child, and so I don’t remember why this was done, but after it had been drawn down enough, you could see a ring of land that normally lay underwater, and in was in this land were the tree stumps. With the lake level down so dramatically, it was easy pickings to harvest fishing lures that had long since been lost to the stumps, now exposed. And you could see that ground on shore, ground under stumps, all the same ground. When the lake level was higher, the stumps looked like they were on little islands, separate from the shore, but they were connected.
When we talk about the Trinity, we talk about the way people have experienced God as God the Creator, Jesus who was fully God and fully human, and the Holy Spirit, which is God within us. The apostle Paul talks about the Spirit within us, praying to God as we pray. The Quaker concept is called the Inner Light and is defined as “that of God” in each person. And it’s the same as the Hindi concept that results in the greeting Namaste which means something like “The Holy in me greets the Holy in you.” If there is “that of God” in each person, are we each separate little islands of God? No, we all are part of the same God. The center that is in me and in you are both parts of a deeper center in which we are all connected. Namaste. That unity is one of the essential attributes of God. The ancient Jewish creed called the Shema: Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad. Hear O Israel the Lord is our God! The Lord is one. And as we discuss the Trinity, three different experiences of God, we are equally certain that this God is One. Essential to our understanding of God is the concept of unity, three persons of God in communion: One God.
Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad. Hear O Israel the Lord is our God! The Lord is one. Namaste: the Holy in me greets the Holy in you. When we understand that we are connected in that essential way, we are beginning to understand that there is a larger whole that we belong to and the wholeness is truer than our separateness.
These connections emerge in Celtic spirituality – as I told you last week, the Celtic experience of Christianity that emerged in the British Isles during the first millennium of Christian history was a Christianity that emphasized the communion of God in the Trinity, the communion of the natural world, and humans within that natural communion. Listen to these portions of the prayer of St. Patrick:
I bind unto myself today
the strong name of the Trinity,
by invocation of the same,
the Three in One, and One in Three….
I bind unto myself today
the virtues of the star-lit heaven,
the glorious sun's life-giving ray,
the whiteness of the moon at even,
the flashing of the lightning free,
the whirling wind's tempestuous shocks,
the stable earth, the deep salt sea
around the old eternal rocks.
The Celtic infinite knot is a visual reminder of the unity that underlies the world. Although in any portion of the knot we can observe several different strands, it is in reality a single strand, and each piece is but a portion of the whole.
These connections also emerge in today’s scripture lessons. The first reading, from Joshua, comes just as the people of Israel are settling in the Promised Land after the flight from slavery in Egypt and 40 years journey through the wilderness. And Joshua reminds them of God’s care of them and challenges them to choose whom they will serve – will they will serve one of the pantheon of local gods vying for loyalty and tending to be the god of a dimension of life: the god of the harvest or the god of fertility or the god of this or that region? Or will they serve the God who is One God, the God of all who brings all into one unity? Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad. Hear O Israel the Lord is our God! The Lord is one.
And Joshua says, “Choose whom you will serve, but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” We can choose to live into the Oneness, to seek that greater whole that unites us all, to recognize that the center we share is deeper than our individual centers.
The connection is less obvious in the Gospel reading, until you understand that this unity with God’s creation is what drives Jesus. Jesus understands that there will come a time when his solidarity with God’s people and God’s world will drive him to reject violence up to the point of not saving his own life. He is headed toward Jerusalem at this point, toward a time when he knows he will be confronting the empire and those who are complicit with the empire. And he knows this confrontation will lead to the cross, which was the form of execution for political crimes. And his argument with Peter is because he knows that his ministry is not about his own power but about the witness of God’s way in the world, a way of communion with the world, not of power over the world. And living this way will inevitably lead to conflict with the purveyors of power, and will lead to his having to choose his individual wellbeing, or his commitment to nonviolence that is a dimension of his communion with all of life. He calls Peter “Satan” which means ‘tempter’, because he realizes that the great temptation to us all is to place our individual, false self in opposition to that greater whole in which we become most fully ourselves.
As he speaks of his suffering, it is a reminder that sometimes experiences which are painfully solitary are at the same time bringing us into a deeper communion with God and our unity in God. As Margaret Silf writes in her chapter on “The Infinite Knot” in Sacred Spaces, “Paradoxically, where we are most ‘alone’, we come closest to the ‘All-One’. The centre of our own heart is a fragment of ‘the heart of God’. It is the core of our being and the core of all being.” [page 30] Such will be the experience of the cross for Jesus.
We are designed for communion. That communion which is God has its echo in humanity, for (again quoting Silf) “From the very beginning we were fashioned out of togetherness, the result of a moment of communion.” [page 34] And as our lives continue, we are woven together from experiences of the community of the family, the community of our friends, the community of adults who mentored us as teachers and coaches and aunts, uncles and grandparents. Perhaps the writer of the letter to the Hebrews is talking about the weight of individuality, and our own selfishness that clings so stubbornly, when he wrote: Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.
The communion of saints is how we have tended to describe that “great cloud of witnesses” – the people throughout all time and space with who we are united in God. All who are, all who were, are part of the “All-that-is” that is the ground of our being.
And we see that same sense of communion in both of our sacraments. Again, reading from Silf’s sacred Spaces, “Christians express this fundamental desire to enter a living and cooperating relationship with the whole of creation and with its creator, in the sacrament of baptism. In this sacrament we acknowledge the incompleteness and potential Or actual harmfulness of our ‘island’ living and we surrender ourselves in trust to the waters that will lead us to the bedrock wholeness and ‘All-Oneness’.” [page 36]
We are part of a life that is more than our own life. We are a part of a Oneness whose holiness is part of all life. And we nourish ourselves in that oneness through the meal that we call, quite aptly, communion, for in it we recognize that we are part of God, and in God, part of all life. We speak of the bread, in which many grains become one loaf. We share the bread of life and the cup of hope. Our hope is indeed in communion, in recognizing that we are part of an infinitely complex unity of all life. Margaret Silf summarizes the lessons of the Celtic infinite knot. She writes, “It speaks to us of:
• Complexity held in a greater simplicity;
• Limitation held in limitlessness;
• Partialness held in wholeness; [and]
• Ourselves held in something infinitely greater than ourselves.” [pages 16-17]
Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad. Hear O Israel the Lord is our God! The Lord is one. Namaste: the Holy in me greets the Holy in you. Amen.
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Joshua 24:13-28, Mark 8:27-38
My folks have a summer cottage in the Poconos on a small lake. Before it was a small lake, it was a smaller pond, but about 60 years ago, the pond had been enlarged to become Whitney Lake, about a mile long and half mile across. As a child, I fished and boated a lot on the Lake – but there were a lot of tree stumps in the Lake, about 10 feet out from shore typically, which remained from the enlarging process. It was easy to lose fishing lures on those stumps. Occasionally, if you hit just right, you could get a rowboat or canoe stuck there, on a stump. Eventually, using an oar or paddle you could get loose, but it was kind of a nuisance. And bringing the boat back to our dock was a precision operation – missing a stump on the left and then another on the right – and finally finessing in to the dock.
One winter, the lake association drew down the lake level using the dam at the south end. I was a child, and so I don’t remember why this was done, but after it had been drawn down enough, you could see a ring of land that normally lay underwater, and in was in this land were the tree stumps. With the lake level down so dramatically, it was easy pickings to harvest fishing lures that had long since been lost to the stumps, now exposed. And you could see that ground on shore, ground under stumps, all the same ground. When the lake level was higher, the stumps looked like they were on little islands, separate from the shore, but they were connected.
When we talk about the Trinity, we talk about the way people have experienced God as God the Creator, Jesus who was fully God and fully human, and the Holy Spirit, which is God within us. The apostle Paul talks about the Spirit within us, praying to God as we pray. The Quaker concept is called the Inner Light and is defined as “that of God” in each person. And it’s the same as the Hindi concept that results in the greeting Namaste which means something like “The Holy in me greets the Holy in you.” If there is “that of God” in each person, are we each separate little islands of God? No, we all are part of the same God. The center that is in me and in you are both parts of a deeper center in which we are all connected. Namaste. That unity is one of the essential attributes of God. The ancient Jewish creed called the Shema: Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad. Hear O Israel the Lord is our God! The Lord is one. And as we discuss the Trinity, three different experiences of God, we are equally certain that this God is One. Essential to our understanding of God is the concept of unity, three persons of God in communion: One God.
Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad. Hear O Israel the Lord is our God! The Lord is one. Namaste: the Holy in me greets the Holy in you. When we understand that we are connected in that essential way, we are beginning to understand that there is a larger whole that we belong to and the wholeness is truer than our separateness.
These connections emerge in Celtic spirituality – as I told you last week, the Celtic experience of Christianity that emerged in the British Isles during the first millennium of Christian history was a Christianity that emphasized the communion of God in the Trinity, the communion of the natural world, and humans within that natural communion. Listen to these portions of the prayer of St. Patrick:
I bind unto myself today
the strong name of the Trinity,
by invocation of the same,
the Three in One, and One in Three….
I bind unto myself today
the virtues of the star-lit heaven,
the glorious sun's life-giving ray,
the whiteness of the moon at even,
the flashing of the lightning free,
the whirling wind's tempestuous shocks,
the stable earth, the deep salt sea
around the old eternal rocks.
The Celtic infinite knot is a visual reminder of the unity that underlies the world. Although in any portion of the knot we can observe several different strands, it is in reality a single strand, and each piece is but a portion of the whole.
These connections also emerge in today’s scripture lessons. The first reading, from Joshua, comes just as the people of Israel are settling in the Promised Land after the flight from slavery in Egypt and 40 years journey through the wilderness. And Joshua reminds them of God’s care of them and challenges them to choose whom they will serve – will they will serve one of the pantheon of local gods vying for loyalty and tending to be the god of a dimension of life: the god of the harvest or the god of fertility or the god of this or that region? Or will they serve the God who is One God, the God of all who brings all into one unity? Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad. Hear O Israel the Lord is our God! The Lord is one.
And Joshua says, “Choose whom you will serve, but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” We can choose to live into the Oneness, to seek that greater whole that unites us all, to recognize that the center we share is deeper than our individual centers.
The connection is less obvious in the Gospel reading, until you understand that this unity with God’s creation is what drives Jesus. Jesus understands that there will come a time when his solidarity with God’s people and God’s world will drive him to reject violence up to the point of not saving his own life. He is headed toward Jerusalem at this point, toward a time when he knows he will be confronting the empire and those who are complicit with the empire. And he knows this confrontation will lead to the cross, which was the form of execution for political crimes. And his argument with Peter is because he knows that his ministry is not about his own power but about the witness of God’s way in the world, a way of communion with the world, not of power over the world. And living this way will inevitably lead to conflict with the purveyors of power, and will lead to his having to choose his individual wellbeing, or his commitment to nonviolence that is a dimension of his communion with all of life. He calls Peter “Satan” which means ‘tempter’, because he realizes that the great temptation to us all is to place our individual, false self in opposition to that greater whole in which we become most fully ourselves.
As he speaks of his suffering, it is a reminder that sometimes experiences which are painfully solitary are at the same time bringing us into a deeper communion with God and our unity in God. As Margaret Silf writes in her chapter on “The Infinite Knot” in Sacred Spaces, “Paradoxically, where we are most ‘alone’, we come closest to the ‘All-One’. The centre of our own heart is a fragment of ‘the heart of God’. It is the core of our being and the core of all being.” [page 30] Such will be the experience of the cross for Jesus.
We are designed for communion. That communion which is God has its echo in humanity, for (again quoting Silf) “From the very beginning we were fashioned out of togetherness, the result of a moment of communion.” [page 34] And as our lives continue, we are woven together from experiences of the community of the family, the community of our friends, the community of adults who mentored us as teachers and coaches and aunts, uncles and grandparents. Perhaps the writer of the letter to the Hebrews is talking about the weight of individuality, and our own selfishness that clings so stubbornly, when he wrote: Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.
The communion of saints is how we have tended to describe that “great cloud of witnesses” – the people throughout all time and space with who we are united in God. All who are, all who were, are part of the “All-that-is” that is the ground of our being.
And we see that same sense of communion in both of our sacraments. Again, reading from Silf’s sacred Spaces, “Christians express this fundamental desire to enter a living and cooperating relationship with the whole of creation and with its creator, in the sacrament of baptism. In this sacrament we acknowledge the incompleteness and potential Or actual harmfulness of our ‘island’ living and we surrender ourselves in trust to the waters that will lead us to the bedrock wholeness and ‘All-Oneness’.” [page 36]
We are part of a life that is more than our own life. We are a part of a Oneness whose holiness is part of all life. And we nourish ourselves in that oneness through the meal that we call, quite aptly, communion, for in it we recognize that we are part of God, and in God, part of all life. We speak of the bread, in which many grains become one loaf. We share the bread of life and the cup of hope. Our hope is indeed in communion, in recognizing that we are part of an infinitely complex unity of all life. Margaret Silf summarizes the lessons of the Celtic infinite knot. She writes, “It speaks to us of:
• Complexity held in a greater simplicity;
• Limitation held in limitlessness;
• Partialness held in wholeness; [and]
• Ourselves held in something infinitely greater than ourselves.” [pages 16-17]
Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad. Hear O Israel the Lord is our God! The Lord is one. Namaste: the Holy in me greets the Holy in you. Amen.