THE PEARL OF GREAT PRICE (MT 13:44–52)

In Mt 13:47–50 Jesus ends a series of parables about the kingdom of heaven with the image of a “net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous…” It reminds me of the two parables of the weeds and the wheat that come just before it, before we hear of the treasure buried in the field and the pearl of great price, when the Master of the house says to let the weeds and wheat grow together until harvest time.” So this net tossed into the sea picks up all the fish, good and bad. It also ties in with the last thing Jesus says, that those who really know the kingdom of heaven will be able to discern what to bring out of the treasury, from the old and from the new, what’s useful and what’s no longer useful. The spiritual path teaches us a certain degree of discernment, the kind of wisdom that Solomon asked for (1Kgs 3). And, you know, discernment is not always a choice between good and bad; St Ignatius would say that real discernment is a choice between goods, between one good and another, until we reach the greatest good. C.S. Lewis agreed with this and wrote in The Great Divorce that things grow farther apart as they reach perfection. Good becomes different from evil, and then it becomes different from other goods. But, like the weeds and the wheat, we do not have to fixate on that judging capacity. Sometimes we can just relax and let the weeds grow up with the wheat, let the bad fish get in the net with the good fish, and the angels will separate them. We can leave these things to God if––and this is a big “if”––if we are fixed on the good, fixed on the goal, the treasure buried in the field, the pearl of great price.

I’ll get back to that, but for a moment let’s look what is in between these two parables. First, the treasure buried in the field. I remember a brother monk and I having practically the same experience one day listening to this Gospel being read, and we walked around for weeks, every time we saw each other saying, “And he bought the whole field. The whole field.” What’s the whole field? Well, I later used this as one of the readings for my solemn profession; the whole field of monastic life meant living with my brothers, taking my turn doing pots and pans, getting up every morning and trudging to chapel to sing at 5:30 AM. If I want the treasure, I have to buy the whole field in which it is buried. What’s the treasure of married life? Procreative conjugal love! What’s the whole field? Reality, bills to pay, kids to pick up at soccer practice, sickness and death, in-laws, alcohol and drug problems. In any other profession or way of life, there is the treasure, and then there is the whole field it comes in.

But there is something marvelous about this treasure buried in the field, if you don’t mind me mixing my parables up. This treasure in the field is like yeast in the dough, salt in the earth. It changes the whole field from the inside out. It makes the whole field holy. What I learned about monastic life was that the holy work was not just in my cell alone with God, not just at liturgy praying and singing; the holy work was changing Bro Phillip’s catheter bag, and doing the pots and pans, vacuuming the library and welcoming guests. What people learn from family life is that holiness is in all the details, in the pigtails as well as the trips to the emergency room, in the good grades and in the run-ins with the police, in sickness and in health, in richer or in poorer.

My favorite of these parables is this little jewel about the pearl of great price, and I think it follows nicely from the previous one on the treasure buried in the field. What is the pearl of great price? You will no doubt tire of hearing me say this: It is the Holy Spirit who has been poured into our hearts, the Spirit living in us! We’re reminded of 1Pet 3:4, where St Peter refers to the “hidden person of the heart,” our real “I” that is found in the heart’s hidden depth. (Most modern translations of this passage fail to do this phrase justice, but the old RSV translates it beautifully, especially apropos to our theme: the pearl of great price is “. . . the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable jewel of a gentle and quiet spirit (pneuma). . .”) I think it is akin to what the Tibetan Buddhist tradition calls the “jewel in the heart of the lotus,”––OM mane padme hum––that divine spark within us, that is none other than the fire of God; the stream of living water within us that Jesus speaks of in the Gospel of John that is none other than the Holy Spirit; the breath of ruah that was breathed into the clay to make Adam, the first human being, which is none other than the breath of God. And once we discover it, that pearl of great price buried in the field of our very bodies, in the field of our very persons, it changes everything, and we are left with no choice but to sell everything and buy it, to forsake all for it. This is why women and men all the way from Antony of the Desert to Francis of Assisi fled to solitude, to be with that treasure until it transformed their very beings, body and soul. “Seek first the kingdom of God, and ll these things will be added unto you.”

I read recently a startling statement by Carl Jung. “’Life has gone out of the churches, and it will never go back.’ … As its next dwelling place the Holy Spirit appears to have selected the human individual.” At a second glance, this is not so startling; this is another way of understanding the revolution, or the evolution, that is accomplished in Jesus. The saying from Hosea that Jesus quotes twice in the Gospel of Matthew––“It is love that I desire, not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than holocausts” ––seems foundational for him. The stream of living water that flowed from the side of the Temple in the Ezekiel, now flows from Jesus’ side, and Jesus says it will also flow from out of the believer’s heart. The temple, Peter and Paul will also tell us, is us––“God’s temple is holy and you are that temple!” (1 Cor 3:16-17). Even better: 1Cor. 6:19 “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you…?” So the Holy Spirit is the pearl of great price, the treasure buried in the field, and the field is our very self. The Holy Spirit has chosen the human individual as a dwelling place. This is the core of the Gospel.

Jung also taught that “the Holy Spirit’s task and charge [is to] to reconcile and reunite the opposites in the human individual through a ‘special development of the human soul.’” This then is the weeds and the wheat, the good fish and the bad fish. To tie back in with my first point, of how the dragnet brings in fish of every kind, and how the weeds and the wheat grow up together––perhaps the reason that we are supposed to let the weeds grow up with the wheat. Perhaps this is because, just as we do not know how to pray as we ought, we do not know how to sort these things out as we ought. Is this why Jesus tells us so many times not to judge? Many of the things that we think of as weeds or bad fish could quite possibly be, Jung would teach, “a part of our own nature which has become split off from awareness” and it “returns into consciousness with an alien or negative face, as most things or people do who have been excluded or repressed.” In Jungian psychology, it is specifically this that is the “transcendent function”––“the capacity of the psyche to unite conscious and unconscious contents, giving rise to a new attitude.” As Amelia Jaffe describes it, insofar as it represents the assimilation into consciousness what was formerly unconscious, it is nothing short of the psychological equivalent of the Incarnation, the birth of God, perhaps what Meister Eckhart would call “the eternal birth of God in the soul.” This dialogue between the conscious and the unconscious generates a “special development of the human soul,” an “incarnation,” the “realization of the divine being in human life.” The foundational process Jung describes as “individuation” is in reality this natural and spontaneous “transcendent function.” Short of saying that the Spirit is responsible for it as a work of grace, Jung at least says, “Psychology has no proof that this process does not unfold itself at the instigation of God’s will.” This is our leap of faith, that this process of individuation is God’s will and destiny for us, that God wants us to become who we really are, temples of divine glory.

How it ties in with our meditation is very simple: even the thoughts that plague us during our meditation time are like the weeds and the wheat, the good fish and the bad. During our practice of training our senses and stilling our minds, all these things that have been buried in our unconscious––repressed, oppressed and suppressed––may and often do “return into consciousness with an alien or negative face, as most things do who have been excluded or repressed.” This is part of the purgation process we undergo in the spiritual life, and while we benefit greatly from talking it all out and sorting it out with a good companion, director or counselor, the real locus of the work is right here, in meditation. As we train our senses and still our minds that “transcendent function” kicks in naturally and spontaneously. And while it does, the great teachers teach us to not fight the thoughts. We do not entertain them, fight them, or feed them. Our job during meditation is not to sit judging them and sorting them out. We can leave that to the Master of the Harvest and to the angels. Our job is to stay focused on the treasure buried in the field of our own being, our very person, in the cave of our heart. Our job is to stay focused on the pearl of great price, the jewel in the lotus of our heart. Our meditation is our striving for conscious contact with that Spirit living within us which makes the whole field holy, the field of our very beings, body and soul.

cyprian 25 july 05