Days of Awe and Wonder

by Marcus J. Borg

  So that is my stake in what we are doing today. Once we have given thanks for Marcus Borg’s good life, what about the gifts of his good death? This is an early report, I know. Beatification can take years. But it’s never too early to learn what we can from those who have gone before. Marcus’s wife, Marianne, is my chief witness here, the one who told me how things went these last few months, so I hope you will hear the testimony of her whole family in the scraps I was able to gather up (yes—twelve baskets full).

  Her first words to me were: “Marc died with such equanimity. He was not afraid. He had no pain. He did not gasp or grasp, though he had every reason to do both. His death was so economical—there was no excess, no drama. He was Scandinavian! It was real and it was hard, but once the threshold was in front of him, he crossed over it so quickly. He was always ahead of me, Barbara; I’m still catching up. My IQ has gone down 30 points since he died.”

  So there’s one gift: no drama. This is easier, I think, for someone who has done what you might call “pre-hab.” Almost thirty years ago, Marcus wrote about the importance of being mindful of one’s own death. “People may need to be convinced that it’s important,” he said, but he was already there. He “worked out” with death before it was time, so he would have the strength he needed when the time came. In this, he stood in a long line of Christian sages. “Keep death daily before your eyes,” St. Benedict wrote in his Rule in the middle of the sixth century. It’s number 47 in his list of “instruments of good works,” and it’s not morbid. It’s the key to abundant life.

  Here’s something else Marianne said about Marcus: “He had no unfinished business. There was no rancor in him for anyone; he did not waste his time on things like that.” That’s hard enough when all speak well of you, but when you have had quite a lot of rancor directed at you—well, there’s a second gift. Most of the time I think people in the public eye are luckier than people who are not, because they have more opportunities to handle their egos. Marcus returned rancor with his own brand of Scandinavian cool. He debated his critics with such respect that they invited him out for drinks after. At home, in matters of the heart, he was all caught up.

  The only thing he was working on when he died was his second novel, in which a character very much like Marcus was working through the death of his sister, who was very much like Marc’s sister. Its tentative title was Through a Glass Darkly. “I don’t know how it ends,” he told Marianne, “but I want it to end on Thanksgiving.”

  As his lungs gave out, Marianne said, his body was (in the words of Mary Oliver) “a lion of courage.” Against all odds, so was his sense of humor: a third gift. Apparently there was some mention of stuffing Marcus after he was gone, abandoned because he wasn’t sure what his beloved pooch Henry would make of it. And never mind the T-shirts he had made up when Marianne became canon at Trinity Cathedral (“Canon Without Balls”). I wasn’t going to include that because I thought it might be inappropriate. But to laugh in the face of death is not necessarily to scoff; it may simply be a tip of the hat to the unbearable lightness of being.

  Marianne didn’t say this part, but the greatest gift of Marcus’s good death for me was his willingness to trust God with insufficient information. “How do you know you’re right?” someone asked him after a lecture. “I don’t know,” the wise man replied, pulling at his beard. “I don’t know that I’m right.” Does any of us, ever? Thank God Marcus told the truth.

  During the last several months, Marianne said, she and Marcus leaned heavily on something William Sloane Coffin said when his son Alex died in a car wreck at the age of twenty-four. Ten days later, Coffin delivered Alex’s eulogy at Riverside Church in New York City, where he was senior minister. Among many other things, he said this:

  In . . . my intense grief I felt some of my fellow reverends—not many, and none of you, thank God—were using comforting words of scripture for self-protection, to pretty up a situation whose bleakness they simply couldn’t face. But like God herself, scripture is not around for anyone’s protection, just for everyone’s unending support. And that’s what hundreds of you understood so beautifully. You gave me what God gives all of us—minimum protection, maximum support. I swear to you, I wouldn’t be standing here, were I not upheld.

  Minimum protection, maximum support. “Marc and I held on to that,” Marianne said, “even while we wondered if it would turn out to be true.”

  “And?” I asked.

  “So far, so good,” she said.

  If there isn’t enough victory in that for some of us, there is a surplus of truth in it for others—something to listen for when the wind, the earthquake, and the fire have spent themselves—when the sacred night bears down and the sound of sheer silence is all that remains.

  “So far, so good,” she said.

  “To die unto God and hope for the best,” he said.

  That’s more than enough for a raven to live on, more than enough to get a lily through the night. And for some of us—when it is our turn to go—it is enough to help us leave not as tearful slaves, but as kings and queens who rise from the table with no further wants, having eaten and drunk to the full.

  Will we worry between now and then? Of course we will. Why else did Jesus spend so much time doing pre-hab with us? Because he knew pretenders when he saw them, and what their pretending would do to their hearts. Because he knew firsthand the weight of the sacred night. Because he too worried about his life sometimes. And still—once he got through with all the finger-wagging—all the raven-praising and kingdom-coaching (was it one of those sermons the preacher preaches because he needs to hear it himself?)—he met us right where we are today: “Do not be afraid.”

  How did you know?

  Oh, little flock, it’s written all over your faces.

  Because Jesus said it, we take it on faith—until the time comes for each of us to discover firsthand if it’s true. Or until, like Marcus, we make it true—by the way we live and by the way we die—and all for the love of God.

  One last gift, from Marianne this time. “I’m so used to Marc being on the road,” she said, “I kept expecting him to come home.” She paused. “We were such a good match that I worried what I would do without his love. Then the other day while I was walking the kids (Henry and Abbey), I realized I still feel that love. I still have it—not in a sentimental way, but at a molecular level. You know how Jesus said, ‘My peace I leave with you’? We’ve all heard it. Oh, I thought, so this is what that feels like.” Firsthand.

  Do not be afraid.

  My peace I leave with you.

  Come one, come all, and follow to the banquet hall.

  Amen.

  NOTES

  CHAPTER 1: Listening to the Spirit

  1. I believe that he was quoting or paraphrasing Karl Barth, though I am not aware whether it is published somewhere in Barth’s writings or whether it is anecdotal.

  2. See the excellent statement by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon in “Embarrassed by God’s Presence,” Christian Century (January 30, 1985): 98–100. They argue that both the modern church and modern theology are pervaded by the “practical atheism” of our time, that way of seeing and living that takes it for granted that there is no reality beyond the visible.

  3. There are exceptions, to which I am indebted. Two studies from the last decade stand out: Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew (New York: Macmillan, 1973), which treats the Jewish charismatic tradition contemporary with Jesus, and James D. G. Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1975), a scholarly study of texts and traditions relevant to Jesus’s relationship to the Spirit.

  4. Of the many books that treat the subject of the modern worldview (or Weltanschauung, a German term that often appears even in books written in English), I have found two to be especially useful: W. T. Stace, Religion and the Modern Mind (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1952), and Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth: The Primordial Tradition (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).

  5. Though this is not th
e place to develop the point at length, the term “faith” has thus undergone a subtle but decisive shift in meaning in the modern period. For many people, faith now means “believing in the existence of God.” In earlier times, it didn’t take “faith” to believe that God existed—almost everybody took that for granted. Rather, “faith” had to do with one’s relationship to God—whether one trusted in God. The difference between faith as “belief in something that may or may not exist” and faith as “trusting in God” is enormous. The first is a “matter of the head,” the second a “matter of the heart”; the first can leave one unchanged, the second intrinsically brings change.

  6. The phrase comes from Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth; see also his Beyond the Post-Modern Mind (New York: Crossroad, 1982). Other scholars have developed the same basic understanding, but I find Smith’s phrase “primordial tradition” as well as his exposition of the notion to be especially illuminating and helpful.

  7. See, e.g., Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1959; originally published in French in 1956); and Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1958; first published in German in 1917). Otto introduced the term “numinous” as a way of speaking of the “holy,” understood not as a moral term meaning righteous or pure but as a designation for the overpowering mystery (the mysterium tremendum) that is experienced in extraordinary moments.

  8. In addition to the works by Smith, Eliade, and Otto already referred to, see William James’s classic study The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Macmillan, 1961; originally published in 1902). James finds the origin of belief in an “unseen” world in the experience of “religious geniuses” who experience firsthand the realities of which religion speaks and carefully distinguishes this primal experience from what he calls “secondhand” religion, the beliefs that people acquire through tradition; see esp. 24–25, though the distinction remains important throughout his book.

  9. To use Eliade’s terms for a moment, the two worlds intersect in “theophanies” (manifestations of God) and “hierophanies” (manifestations of the holy). Otto speaks of experiences of the numinous (i.e., of the holy, or numen, a Latin term for “God”), which underlies phenomena.

  10. For example, the temple at Delphi in Greece was seen as the “navel of the earth,” the axis mundi connecting the two worlds; for other examples, see Eliade, Sacred and Profane, 32–47.

  11. This is what the notion of God as creator has become in much of the modern world. Beginning with the deists of the seventeenth century, the concept of God began to function primarily as an intellectual hypothesis to account for the origin of everything. In cultural retrospect, this development may be seen as part of the process whereby Western intellectual culture weaned itself (or “fell,” depending upon one’s point of view) from a religious worldview to a secular worldview.

  12. Neither the Old nor the New Testament uses abstractions such as omnipresence or transcendence, but the notion is clearly present. Classic Old Testament texts that point to the omnipresence of God are Ps. 139:7–10; 1 Kings 8:27; Isa. 6:3 (“the whole earth is full of his glory”). The notion of the immanent Logos at the beginning of John’s Gospel points in the same direction, as do the words attributed approvingly by Luke to Paul in Acts 17:28: “In God we live and move and have our being.” God is not “elsewhere”; we live in God.

  13. See Smith, Forgotten Truth, 21: The “higher levels (of the primordial tradition) are not literally elsewhere; they are removed only in the sense of being inaccessible to ordinary consciousness.” Or, to paraphrase William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience, we are separated from this other world only by the filmiest screens of consciousness; see esp. 305, 331, 335, 401.

  14. For other experiences of the patriarchs involving contact with the other world, see, e.g., Gen. 12:7–9; 15:1–17; 17:1–2; 18:1–33; 26:23–25; 32:22–31.

  15. The author of the book tells us that he received this vision while he was “in the Spirit” (1:10), presumably a state of nonordinary consciousness in which he momentarily “saw” into the other world. Revelation, part of the New Testament, is of course not in the Hebrew Bible, but it reflects the same worldview.

  16. Though most of the Pentateuch concerns Moses, only a few chapters in the books of Kings speak of this ninth-century BCE prophet: 1 Kings 17–19, 21; 2 Kings 1–2.

  17. Almost all of the Spirit-filled mediators mentioned in the Hebrew Bible are men. No doubt this is because the religion of ancient Israel was dominated by men. “Official” religious positions such as priest, prophet, and sage were restricted to men and, so far as we know, all of the biblical authors were men. Given this, it is noteworthy that the tradition does mention two charismatic women by name: Deborah the judge and Hulda the prophet. So also in other cultures dominated by patriarchy, though religious functionaries may have been male, the Spirit seems to show no gender preference.

  18. For this whole section on Jewish “holy men” at the time of Jesus, see esp. Vermes, Jesus the Jew, 65–78, 206–13. Also relevant are E. E. Urbach, The Sages (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1975), 1:97–123; and, earlier, A. Büchler, Types of Jewish Palestinian Piety (New York: KTAV, 1968; first published in 1922), 87–107, 196–252.

  19. From the Babylonian Talmud: Taan. 24b, Ber. 17b, Hul. 86a, all cited by Vermes, Jesus the Jew, 206. Vermes also notes that Rabbi Meir was called “Meir my son.”

  20. From the Mishnah, Taan. 3.8, cited by Vermes, Jesus the Jew, 209.

  21. Besides being known as people whose concentration in prayer was great and as mediators of divine power, they shared a number of other characteristics. Vermes notes that they were relatively detached from possessions, perhaps because the other world had a reality compared to which the preoccupations of this world seemed trivial. They were also suspected of being inadequately concerned about the laws of their tradition (like many before and since whose awareness of the other realm is direct and experiential). Finally, though not restricted to Galilee, they seem to have been largely a Galilean phenomenon. Hanina, for example, was from a town in Galilee about ten miles from Nazareth.

  22. See also 1 Cor. 12–14, where Paul speaks about the “gifts of the Spirit,” some of which clearly involve direct relationship to the world of Spirit.

  23. It is described three times in the book of Acts: 9:1–8; 22:6–11; 26:12–18.

  24. In a poll I have taken in both university and church settings for about ten years, 90 percent of the participants regularly reply to stories of paranormal phenomena such as walking on burning coals in South Asia and Polynesia with, “It violates my sense of what is possible.” Their sense of what is possible flows from the modern one-dimensional understanding of reality, in which everything must be explicable by chains of cause and effect within the material world, simply because that is the only world they see as “real.”

  25. Rudolf Bultmann’s proposal for “demythologizing” the New Testament is a case in point. Recognizing that the New Testament writers often use the language of a three-story universe (heaven as “up,” hell as “down,” earth in the “middle”), Bultmann rightly stresses that such language is not to be taken literally (heaven is not really “up,” and so forth). When the early Christians spoke of Jesus ascending into heaven or descending into hell, they could not have been describing a literal up-and-down motion through space. But, as Bultmann continues, it becomes clear that demythologizing involves not only a deliteralizing of the three-story universe, but also a collapse of the world of Spirit itself. That too does not conform to the modern worldview. See esp. his essay “New Testament and Mythology,” in H. W. Bartsch, Kerygma and Myth (New York: Harper & Row, 1961; originally published in German in 1941), 1–16.

  26. For a useful summary, see Smith, Forgotten Truth, 96–117. See also Ian Barbour, Issues in Science and Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 273–316; and Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics (Berkeley: Shambhala, 1975).

  27. The historical and anthr
opological evidence is very strong. Not only are there frequent accounts of subjectively entering the other world, but paranormal happenings in this world are also reported. Paranormal healings are overwhelmingly attested in both the ancient and modern world. Clairvoyance is also quite well authenticated, and even something as bizarre as levitation is reasonably well grounded.

  CHAPTER 4: Jesus, Our Model for Being Spirit-Filled

  1. Two of the Gospels, Mark and John, say nothing at all about Jesus before his ministry, not even about his birth. Matthew and Luke do include accounts of his birth and early childhood, though in somewhat different form from each other (see Matt. 1–2; Luke 1–2). Moreover, the accounts contain many symbolic elements. Symbolic elements can be based on actual historical occurrence, but how much is historical we can no longer know. For a compact treatment of the birth stories, see W. Barnes Tatum, In Quest of Jesus (Atlanta: John Knox, 1982), 108–12; for a full treatment, see Raymond Brown’s authoritative The Birth of the Messiah (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977).

  2. See Mark 6:3; Matt. 13:55; see also Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 21–22.

  3. Torah in Hebrew means “divine teaching or instruction” and is most commonly translated “law.” It has a range of meanings, sometimes referring to the first five books of the Bible (or Pentateuch), as in the phrase “the law and the prophets.” It can also refer to the 613 specific written laws contained in the Pentateuch or, more broadly, to those laws plus the “oral law,” which expands the written laws. To be trained in the Torah refers to being familiar with both the content of the law and the methods of interpretation and argumentation.