ELIJAH-SANNYASA

In classic Brahmanic culture in India, human life in this world is seen as a journey toward God, and each stage of the journey is called an ashram, a stop-over on the pilgrimage to eternal life with God. There are considered to be four stages or asramas in life. At first, as a young person one is a bramacarya, or student; then one becomes a householder, grihasta; this is the time in life to marry, raise a family. Later husband and wife can retire to a more contemplative life and become avanaprastha, or forest dweller. But at the very end of life one can enter what is known as sannyasa, the stage of renunciation. And at this last stage when one becomes a sannyasi, the person makes sacrifices for their ancestors one last time, and says the sacred mantras one last time, and then goes into the waters of a sacred river--very much like a baptism rite--, goes underwater and strips off all their clothes and then comes out naked to the shore where their teacher waits. Then the teacher wraps them in the orange colored robes, whispers in their ear their mantra which they are to say for the rest of their life, gives them their walking stick and begging bowl and sends them out to wander. From then on out, according to the strict classical teaching, they are no longer to live anywhere for any length of time. (The foxes have lairs, the birds have nests. . .)

In classical tradition this was considered the last stage in life, as I have said, and one should only take sannaysa when all one's obligations to family have been fulfilled. Now in modern times in India, sannyasa has been domesticated along the same way that monasticism and religious life have been domesticated in the West; young men and women go into monastic orders and take vows and are considered sannyasis even at a very young age. But every now and then you hear a story of someone who bursts out of the system, someone who has had an experience of God and naturally becomes a sannyasi and just wanders away from home to live in a cave or to wander. Of course this same thing happens in the Christian tradition like when Antony the Great left everything and moved out to the desert to live in the caves before there was any such thing as a monastic order; or Francis of Assisi, who Hindus say was a Christian sannyasi, who never went to the seminary or joined any of the established monasteries of his time, but was so overcome with his experience of the Spirit raging in his heart that his only response was to run and dance and sing and strip himself naked of his father's clothes and spend part of his time alone and ecstatic in abandoned churches and caves in the hills and mountains of Umbria, Tuscany and Le Marche, and the rest of his time wandering around chanting the glories of God in his heart and out loud when he couldn't hold it in, before his movement got domesticated and organized into a respectable order that owned churches and buildings and then schools, universities and convents.

It is some of this dynamic that is going on in the juxtaposition of our the first reading and the Gospel today. Elijah throws his cloak over Elisha, in this dramatic symbol of passing on his spirit of prophecy. Elisha wants to take leave of his family first, and Elijah lets him go do so. But in the Gospel Jesus is showing us this other kind of immediacy. The reign of God is at hand! There is an urgency about Jesus' message. Now is the hour, this is the day! Let the dead bury their dead! Whoever puts hand to the plow but keeps looking back is unfit for the reign of God! There is another interesting parallel that we are supposed to intuit as well in this scene, with the apostles wanting to call down fire on the Samaritans who would not welcome them. Just before this scene in the Book of Kings, Elijah had slain all the prophets of Baal after a contest of strength. But Jesus turned and reprimanded the apostles for wanting to do likewise. Jesus has no time for this either. The reign of God is at hand!

It all has something to do, I think, about suddenly being able to discrimminate between the permanent and the impermanent, of having an experience of eternity suddenly break into one's life and awareness, and shatter our deafness and dispel our blindness, as St Augustine said, and from that experience our focus changes completely, and nothing is the same again, and we are able to see through appearances to the "really real", and from then on out all judgment is based on this knowledge, all thoughts, words and actions are based on this experience; and the memory or the taste of this experience becomes the fundamental principle of action.

It is also some of what Paul is teaching us today about the freedom of the children of God. Paul says if you are guided by the Spirit, you are under no law. That's great freedom. I love the phrase "Follow your bliss" that we have gotten from Jos Campbell, but at the same time I am not naive enough to think we can do so without a lot of help, that, like the journey most of us have to take to the ultimate renunciation, it takes us a long time to understand that the deepest bliss has little to do with immediate gratification, the short term gains and the momentary pleasures that we think we want. Real bliss comes from having learned, as Paul teaches, to be guided by the Spirit, who is none other than the Spirit of the risen Christ which has, incidentally, been poured into our hearts and, if we open them, keeps on being poured into our hearts through our spiritual practices, through our life of charity toward one another and by the sacramental life of the church. Let's pray for a double portion of that Spirit as we approach the altar today, through him, with him and in him.

cyprian

6/26/04

13 sunday OTC