Separation is an illusion, and a dangerous one, at that. You know the bumper sticker, the slogan, “there is no planet B”: this speaks to our togetherness, and the consequential nature of our lives. We have to figure out how to live together well, and to be in right relationship with Creation. There is no alternative.
The cosmology and the hope of Christ in our readings this morning go further. It is not just life on this Earth with which we are bound up. There is no being closer or farther to Creation itself, to being itself, to the body, to the stranger, to each other, or to God. I think of how the holy text of our Muslim siblings, the Qur’an, speaks of God as closer to the human person than their jugular vein. We are indelibly and intimately bound up with one another and all things and even with the Holy. Being itself is a dance with the God who made us.
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Our uneasy illusions of separation from Creation, God, and our own enfleshment privilege the mind as the site of our being. We get lost in thoughts and beliefs, and fail to know ourselves in our unbroken wholeness. We strain at Creation itself in search of freedom, and we seek our existence in those things which we can mentally grasp.
There is a paraphrase of the Sufi mystic Rumi that I am partial to, but having encountered it in an important moment of my life, I have never been able to find it once again, maybe I got it wrong. It goes something like this: “when God’s world is so big, why did you wake up in a prison?”
Those who awake in prisons could perhaps have done something differently, could have availed themselves of another way of life, and made different choices — this is the reading which we might be inclined to, as mostly upstanding people in a mostly orderly society. The question challenges and invites a reflection on will and power. How little we can restrain ourselves from those things which will take away our freedom entirely. Those who love their freedom lose it.
A belovèd friend described an encounter in his early adult life where he had confessed his own love of the joy of driving, particularly in ways that put him at-odds with the law. He was rebuked by someone who told him that he was welcome to go on driving like that, but he could do so only for a short while. To drive faster than the law allows will not get you very far. If, however, you can accept the restraints of the rules of the road, you can drive and drive forever.
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“When God’s world is so big, why did you wake up in a prison?”
I think about the times in my life when I have been detained, and my freedom momentarily curtailed. None of them have been of great significance, but they bear a disturbing imprint all the same. I have always been allowed to move along, eventually.
There was an inland border checkpoint on an Interstate Highway somewhere in Texas. There was the US-Canada border any number of times when there were questions about my intentions or my identity, in both directions. There were encounters with police in rural Russia and interior cities in China where my aloofness and confusion and baffling linguistic shortcomings were enough to have me sent quickly on my way.
It is not a good moment to find yourself in, where your freedom is uncertain, and your ability to continue onwards is disturbed. I know only too well the fear of being trapped, and the sense of both isolation from loved-ones and being unable to move freely through the world. From the depths of my soul, I would not wish even one moment of that on my worst enemies, and I am not sure even those who inflict such restraint cruelly on the innocent should have to bear it, themselves; I would rather, instead, that they knew a freedom deep enough that they would be willing to share of it, instead.
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Paul and the Apostles find themselves in a prison whose foundations and doors have failed and cannot hold them. Their jailer feels beaten and in despair. There is no reason for them to stay.
For the Apostles, however, there is also no reason for them to go.
They are as free in this place as anywhere they might go in all of Creation. They are as close to Christ as they would ever need to be, and so can endure anything. Who they are is not bound up in their ability to walk freely down the street, nor to drive as fast as they would like down the road. That is not the kind of freedom, the kind of life, they require.
The prison is a place to sing and to rest. God’s world is so big that a prison is a place of freedom.
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“When God’s world is so big, why did you wake up in a prison?”
This is something you could ask yourself in any moment of your life. You could wake up right now to the reality that God is with you, and the Kingdom has come near. You could feel within your body, somewhere infinitely closer than your jugular vein, and set more deeply and firmly than your bones, the presence of the Holy anywhere you might find yourself. Even here, now.
We live in prisons of our mind, from illusory societies which seek to curtail the inherent freedom and dignity of the human person, to the bale of individual and collective trauma which traps us somewhere far removed from our flesh, our soul.
It is a terrible thing to be stripped of your being so much that you lose the ability to see Creation right in front of you as a companion and a friend; to see the Other as a terrifying stranger, an alien to be destroyed in your midst and then removed; to not know your own body which holds you, which nourishes you, which loves you.
The world is so big that it can contain so many prisons, and each of us is a jailer in our own mind. We set ourselves in deep holes from which there is no return, we cut ourselves off from being and loving alongside our fellow broken travellers on the human journey’s road.
Christ prays to the Father so achingly and urgently for our release from these illusions, for us to find that we are not so far away, that the dimensions of our depths are of no consequence, and that wherever we go and whatever happens to us, we are loved and we are whole and we are free.
There is no prison that can claim us, and nor should they be built, which would ever try.
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May you know that you and the Creator are closer to one another than can be separated by any prison walls, that you share enfleshment with one another more deeply than any lover’s embrace, that you know one another more fully than the mind can grasp. May you be a bearer and a steward of the dignity, freedom, and grace for which all human beings are made, and work for the liberation of all your siblings and all strangers and all enemies alike. May you break the bonds that so restrain you, and awake in every moment to the Kingdom that everywhere calls you home, and evermore claims you as its own. Amen.