Which Way?

Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” John 14:6 NRSV

Oy vey, the ways these words of Jesus have been used to insist that Christianity is the sole, one true religion, with all others falling short, at best. It’s yet one more place where a line from God’s love letter to God’s people is used to bludgeon them.

This passage comes from the book of John, which begins: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” So seems to me we need to come to this particular Gospel with a pair of eyes that don’t read only what’s on the surface of the pages, but also discern what’s beneath and behind the writing. We need to read in brief bits, stopping to ponder what we’ve read, asking what it means. To apply John’s words literally is to miss their point and their intention by a wide mark.

Look again at what Jesus said: “No one comes to the Father…” This isn’t about getting God closer to us; it’s about our getting closer to God. After all, this is the same God who’ll leave the ninety-nine gathered sheep in order to search for the lost one sheep. The same God whom St Paul says loves us so fiercely and persistently that there is nothing whatsoever at all that can separate us from that love. And surely one of the reasons God’s ways are not our ways is because God is so phenomenally beyond human perception.

It doesn’t seem to me that such a God would have but one singular port of entry. Too, there’s an earlier verse in John, where Jesus says, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. [10:14]” We’re dealing, again, with metaphor; but one interpretation made by Christian scholars is that Jesus is including non-Christians as members of The Sheepfold of God. So, what was Jesus talking about in the opening passage? I think it’s worth discussing.

Harmonic Frustration

In one blog I follow, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer posts a poem of hers, every day. A recent post refers to the song of a river; and what keeps it from falling into the clogged waters of cliché is Trommer’s telling us this riversong is due to the river being frustrated in its course, being impeded by changes and obstacles in its path.

Here’s the poem I’m referring to:

Tanka

The river song

fills the evening—an homage

not to flow

but to what

stands in its way.

Like most folks, I don’t like being frustrated. This poem, though, has me thinking. Just maybe there is something substantial to the cliché regarding the silver linings of dark clouds, or of the lotus flower blooming in a pile of yak flop. It also got me remembering that sounds, and especially musical ones, don’t happen without vibrations; and vibrations can’t occur unless there’s a disturbance to an object’s stasis, its sense of stillness and poise. Until, say a guitar string, is strung in taut tension and then plucked, there is no note, no music.

And I’m not all that comfortable with how this applies to life—to my life, especially. It makes me squirm, seeing that it’s only by being stretched and struck, or by being thwarted, that allows music to be manifested. But it does offer another meaning to the notion that we’re to be instruments of God’s will.