6th August Trinity 2018, Be Opened

Mark 7, 31-37

6th Trinity August

As he was again leaving the region around Tyre, he went through the country around Sidon to the Sea of Galilee in the middle of the region of the ten cities of the Decapolis. They brought to him one who was deaf and who spoke with difficulty and asked him to lay his hands on him. And he led him apart from the crowds by himself, laid his finger in his ears, and moistening his finger with saliva, touched his tongue, and looking up to the heavens, sighed deeply and said to him, “Ephphata, be opened.” His hearing was opened and the impediment of his tongue was removed and he could speak properly. And he commanded them not to say anything to anyone. But the more he forbade it, the more they widely they proclaimed it. And the people were deeply moved by this event, and said, “He has changed all to the good: the deaf he makes to hear and the speechless to speak.

6^th August Trinity

August 26, 2018

Mark 7: 31-37

The inner ear is formed in a spiral like a seashell. Sounds whirl in ever tightening circles through the organ of hearing. This movement is an incarnational one; it generates words; it generates thought and meaning in the soul, which can then spiral outward again as creative speech.

The deaf-mute is someone who is hindered in this process. He can neither take in words and their meaning nor create them. Such a hindrance also cuts one off from one’s community. It tends to generate fears and suspicions in the soul. It hinders the exercising of our highest human function: objective thought, creative speech. Even without an organic problem, we human beings can be mind deaf, heartsick, soul mute.

Tissot

Christ’s healing consists of an intimate quality of touch. With His fiery words, ‘Be opened’, He opens the man’s ears, loosens his tongue, opens his soul. He restores to him his full human capacities—open senses, open heart and mind, open speech. The man goes from being imprisoned within himself to being able to spiral outward again. He is healed of his illness.

We too all suffer from “the sickness of sin”, the sickness of the human condition. But even this illness is there to create new capacities. In the words of John O’Donohue,

When the reverberations of shock subside in you,

May grace come to restore you to balance.

May it shape a new space in your heart

To embrace this illness as a teacher

Who has come to open your life to new worlds.

May you use this illness

As a lantern to illuminate

The new qualities that will emerge in you.*

*John O'Donohue, "A Blessing for a Friend on the Arrival of Illness", In To Bless the Space between Us, p. 60

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6th August Trinity 2016, Hand That Loved Me (Redux)

6th Trinity August

Mark 7, 31-37

As he was again leaving the region around Tyre, he went through the country around Sidon to the Sea of Galilee in the middle of the region of the ten cities of the Decapolis. They brought to him one who was deaf and who spoke with difficulty, and asked him to lay his hands on him. And he led him apart from the crowds by himself, laid his finger in his ears, and moistening his finger with saliva, touched his tongue, and looking up to the heavens, sighed deeply and said to him, “Ephphata, be opened.” His hearing was opened and the impediment of his tongue was removed and he could speak properly. And he commanded them not to say anything to anyone. But the more he forbade it, the more they widely they proclaimed it. And the people were deeply moved by this event, and said, “He has changed all to the good: the deaf he makes to hear and the speechless to speak.

6th Trinity August

August 28, 2016

Mark 7, 31-37

A wall separates two spaces. A doorway is an opening between the two. And the door itself opens or shuts. It regulates the flow between them.

Our senses are the doors between the inner life of the soul and the outer life of the world. In sleep, the doors of the senses are closed.  Upon waking, all sensory doors open. They will remain open or close, depending on where we choose to direct our attention. Being absorbed in the activities of the world, all doorways are open; being absorbed in the inner life can close the doors of the senses, making us oblivious to noise, for example.

The deaf mute’s sense organs for hearing and speech had become permanently closed. An exchange of words had become impossible. His friends bring him to Christ, the Logos, the Living Word. At Christ’s intimate and loving touch, at His fiery word – Ephphata! Be opened! – the closed doors open. The man can hear and speak again. He can fully engage with the world.

At the same time, Christ has opened the same doors in the crowd. And though He tries to tell them not to proclaim the event far and wide, they will talk. They represent that in us which cannot yet regulate our speech, which cannot yet recognize when to close the door.

Christ said of Himself: My I AM is the Door. He is that capacity in us that is able to choose to open or to close, and to know when it is time to do which. Both capacities, opening and closing, are necessary for the soul. It is only the extremes – always open, or always closed – that are unhealthy. Christ, the Door, helps us to know when we are to open and when to close.

The deaf mute’s experience of Christ is expressed in a poem by Antonio Machado:

Tissot

From the door sill of a

dream they called my name…

It was the good voice,

the voice I loved so much.

“—Listen: will you go

with me to visit the soul?…”

A soft stroke reached

up to my heart.

“With you always”… And

in my dream I walked

Down a long and

solitary corridor,

Aware of the touching

of the pure robe,

And the soft beating of

blood in the hand that loved me.*

*Antonio Machado, translated by Robert

Bly, from the book

Times Alone: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (Wesleyan Poetry in Translation)