TALES
OF THE MYSTIC JOURNEY – MOSES AND THE EXODUS
As a whole, mysticism is about finding definition
through perspective. I will discuss this further in a concluding series of
posts on the mysticism of art (both aural and visual). Mysticism offers a perspective on what it
means to be, from the intimate inward to the distant outward and from the
distant outward to the intimate inward; in seeing the divine cosmic at work in
the chaotic quantum environment of mundane human existence. It is very imaginative – very creative – and
filled with both meanings and unanswered questions. It’s a mindful and soulful journey of which I
am only touching upon the very surface of a small but significant part of its
domain in these posts.
THE
TORAH
I’ve been literally skimming through stories found
in the Torah as a way of introducing basic thematic schemes found in most
mystic experiences and tales. The Torah
is both central and foundational to mysticism as experienced and understood in
Western civilization. For Judaism it is
central. For Christianity it is
foundational. Neither of these two
religions would exist in their present forms without it. Attributed to Moses, the Torah was
written by a variety of Judaic schools of thought. It honors the Moses as Judaism’s greatest
prophet, as all roads leading to the Moses and the Exodus event and all roads
proceeding from that event.
The Torah is an attempt to codify the human
experience in relation to a divine intuition.
It does this through the establishment of laws written in response to
observations by humans about the human experience and given a divine
imprimatur. When viewed from a distance
one can see that they are a way to identify, differentiate, and measure the
quantic, human behavior. It
is the universal nature (found in almost every ancient and primitive
civilization) of these laws; particularly regarding the preservation of life
and property that enables one to intuit a divine imprimatur. They (the laws) actually
say very little (on the surface) about the divine cosmic, but the Torah, as a
whole, reveals a great deal about the divine cosmic (God) in relation to human experience. In fact, it is
in this tale of Moses and the Exodus that the nature of God is revealed reflecting
a universal understanding of the divine that emerged during the axial period in
which the Torah was written.
THE
ENSLAVEMENT OF ISRAEL
In the tale of Moses, Moses picks up the thread of
God’s love that was discussed in the last post.
In fact, Moses acts as a threaded needle to sew together the fabric
of the Chosen People, or a spindle upon which their tale is spun. His tale picks up where Joseph’s tale
ended. Like Joseph, Moses begins as a
slave, is adopted by an Egyptian princess, becomes a prince of Egypt, and then
flees Egypt after murdering an Egyptian for beating a Hebrew slave. It is in the wilderness of Midian that Moses
becomes the mouth-piece of God, like Joseph became the mouth-piece of
Pharaoh. As Joseph brought Israel to
Egypt, Moses will lead Israel out of Egypt.
There is a theological symmetry to the enslavement of Israel – the four
hundred years Israel was in Egypt.
Unlike those before him, Moses is depicted as having face to face
conversations with God. In fact, Moses’s
conversation with God at the burning bush is one of the longest direct
conversation between a human and God recorded in the entire Holy Bible. In other parts of the Torah, God speaks at
length to Moses regarding laws and the construction of the Tabernacle, but the
burning bush incident is a conversation unlike any other in the scriptures
because in it, God reveals God’s nature.
FIRE
The tale of Moses and the Exodus is a story of
meaning. Implicit in all of these tales
is the question, “Why?” Why
Abraham? Why Joseph? Why the enslavement of Israel? Why Moses?
Why forty years in the Wilderness?
Why?
The why of any event is at its root always a
mystery: Why this? Why that?
Why now? Why-questions are never
answered by why-answers or answers that begin with “because.” Because-answers actually answer “what,” “who,”
“when,” and “where” questions since they answer the conditions and situations
in which events occur, but they never get to the root of why something
happens. If one can ask a why-question
that prompts a because-answer, the questioning and answering can result an
endless cycle of such questions and answers.
It is like a parent trying to answer a small child’s question about why
something happened with a because-answer. To every because-answer the child
intuitively and invariably asks, “But why?”
As comedic and frustrating such questions can be, they make children of us all. We adults find ourselves in the same place as the child as there is never a final definitive answer that begins with “because.” We usually end a cycle of why-questions by admitting “I don’t know” or by curtly stating “because I said so,” or “that’s just the way it is." The latter response revealing an unintentional insight into mystery as it brings one to the liminal expanse of being.
As comedic and frustrating such questions can be, they make children of us all. We adults find ourselves in the same place as the child as there is never a final definitive answer that begins with “because.” We usually end a cycle of why-questions by admitting “I don’t know” or by curtly stating “because I said so,” or “that’s just the way it is." The latter response revealing an unintentional insight into mystery as it brings one to the liminal expanse of being.
Moses can’t help but examine a bush that is blazing
on fire but not consumed by it in the dryness of a desert. All his questions about what and how are
immediately transfigured into who and why questions. As he approaches the phenomenon, Moses finds
himself in the presence of God, told to remove his sandals and intuitively
covers his head. Initially God
introduces godself as I am the God of your fathers Abraham, etc. and goes on to
tell Moses that he has been chosen to lead Israel from bondage and inform
Pharaoh to let God’s people go.
Moses objects and explains that he is not up to the job; that he cannot speak well. Like the story of Jacob and his fight with man in the darkness, Moses is faced with his own sense of failure – and struggles with his own doubt. This is not about trying to get out of job, but rather engaging with one’s sense of integrity – “all hearts are open” to God from whom no secrets are hid”[1]
Moses objects and explains that he is not up to the job; that he cannot speak well. Like the story of Jacob and his fight with man in the darkness, Moses is faced with his own sense of failure – and struggles with his own doubt. This is not about trying to get out of job, but rather engaging with one’s sense of integrity – “all hearts are open” to God from whom no secrets are hid”[1]
God’s gentleness is evident with Moses who grants
Aaron to be his mouthpiece. Like Abraham
being concerned that he is too old to see God’s promise of son of his own body,
Moses is concerned that walking into the Israeli communities back in Egypt to
announce that God has told him to tell them that they will be set free to
engage in a journey to the Promised Land won’t fly. Egypt is land full of identifiable gods and
goddesses. It is clear from reading
scripture that not only the Egyptians worshipped these gods, but so did their
slaves, including the people of Israel.
Moses intuits that walking back to the Israelites, much less, the court
of Pharaoh, to say God (a god) of our
fathers has told me to tell you… won’t
go over very well either, so Moses asks, “Who shall I say is sending me?’’
The answer is staring Moses in the face, but God
answers, "I am that I am," which is sometimes translated as "I
am what I am" or, since Hebrew does not have a future tense to
express future tense, it is sometimes translated as "I will be, what I
will be." Regardless of how it is translated, the meaning is clear. God
is pure creative energy, a fire that does not destroy but rather creates,
recreates, and transfigures what is created. God is a paradox, a nominal verb,
who "neither slumbers nor sleeps."[2]
This one declaration in scripture is, in itself, a
transfiguring moment. God is truly holy
– truly other – there are no human words that can contain the sense that God is
as represented as a flame that creates, refines, consumes[3],
but does not destroy. Moses has an answer that cannot be spoken, but rather
that must be acted out, and so to demonstrate the presence and will of God we
have the Ten Plagues.
What is intriguing in the account of the ten plagues
is the “hardening” of Pharaoh’s heart. Exodus
give two versions of Pharaoh’s hardened heart.
At first it states that Pharaoh hardens his hearts and then, as the
plagues increase with intensity, it says God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. I think what can be taken from this,
mystically speaking, is that God goes to some extent where we go; that God
works with, uses, the material at hand; in this case, Pharaoh’s stubbornness. The result is that in each refusal to let
Israel go, God’s power; God’s presence is increasingly revealed to the point
that Pharaoh’s priests convince him that their might cannot compete, and he
should acquiesce to Moses’s demands. Even the death of Pharaoh’s firstborn and that
of the Egyptians does not quell his thirst for revenge against a god who had
power over life and death, as he pursues the Israelites to the Red Sea only to see his
army drowned as a result.
The path of one’s mystic journey is always forward.
The past is the past and it is closed to us.
We can recall it. We may long for
it, but we can never return to it and this becomes the lesson the Children of
Israel are taught in the wilderness.
Up until now, the Hebrew scriptures tales of the
mystic journey have focused on individual, but in the Exodus, the journey
broadens out to include the whole people of Israel and from this point forward
the journey must be seen and understood in the context of the Chosen People,
who are chosen to represent the whole of humanity, the nations of the world – a
light to them and a light on them.
Exodus tells
us that there were shorter routes for the Israelites to take to the Promised
Land, but that they would have had to face fierce foes in the Philistines. After all they have no skill for battle, they
have been slaves. They did not have the faith to deal with the grace that was
thrust on them, so God directs them to the longer path, the longer journey – a journey
into faith based on grace of God.
Pause, as presented in scripture is a time to
instill faith and integrity. Integrity
is impossible without an active faith. We
have seen pause used this way in the tales of Jacob and Joseph and we see it
being done in the tale of Israel’s time spent in the wilderness.
The essential point of this tale is to say that it
is easier to transfigure and individual than a whole emerging nation. We see the struggle the Israelites have with
placing their faith – their trust in God and turning that faith into an active
process. They long for the certainty of
the past. They knew their lot in life as
slave, but faith thrusts one into the unknown – to walk with God not by sight,
but by faith, as Paul would say some fifteen hundred years later.
In fact, at the start of their journey, God is said to have led
them as fire – a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Later this imagery fades and the Israelites
must rely on the unseen. Even though
they are sustained by water and manna in the wilderness, the results of God’s
direct intervention, they complain of the condition which I suspect had more to
do with having to depend on unseen that led them to question their status – who
were they? Who is God? Can God be trusted or is God capricious? Better to know that one is a slave to than to
be a toy in the hand of a capricious god.
They long for Egypt from time to time.
TRANSFIGURATION
It has been suggested that the forty year of
wandering in the wilderness was needed for a whole new generation to arise who
did know slavery in Egypt, who could not long for the certainty[4] it
represented, but who grew up living with the need to trust God and live life as
an act of free and willful faith rather than from the perspective of certain fear.
There are many details given in the tale of Israel’s
exodus wandering in the wilderness that are worthy of their own mystical exploration (the Passover, the receiving of the law, the creation of Ark of the Covenant and the Tabernacle). Apart from
Joshua and Caleb, none of those who originally left Egypt make it to the promise land,
including Moses. A new generation arises
that is transfigured in the wilderness from being slaves to fear to being faithful servants
of God – a holy nation, a people set apart.
In a broader context, the Exodus tale is about the
transfiguration of not only the nation of Israel, but of theism – from a world
that was largely polytheistic and exclusive in its various theistic (each kingdom, tribe, and family
having its own gods) to its narrowing as monotheism and inclusiveness – one God
above all gods, one people to be a light for all people.
The story of the exodus is a story of global transfiguration on so many levels that one could spend multiple posts on its implications, but the purpose of this series of posts to illustrate how it fits in telling the broader tale of the mystic journey.
The story of the exodus is a story of global transfiguration on so many levels that one could spend multiple posts on its implications, but the purpose of this series of posts to illustrate how it fits in telling the broader tale of the mystic journey.
The concept of a Chosen People is to provide a lens
into seeing ourselves as such people, to connect rather than disconnect and
differentiate, which unfortunately has been more often the case than not when it
comes to anti-Judaic and anti-Semitic activities and sentiments.
We are all chosen people in the broader sense of creation, as Genesis points out and we all have histories of enslavement and release and wandering in the wilderness – moments of Pause and Transfiguration.
We are all chosen people in the broader sense of creation, as Genesis points out and we all have histories of enslavement and release and wandering in the wilderness – moments of Pause and Transfiguration.
We are all on the same journey of faith, even if we
don’t share the same beliefs or share the same perspectives because faith is inherent
in human existence. We’re all on a blind
journey of faith, guided by hope, and embraced by an active love many call God.
[1]
From opening collect in the Eucharistic service from the “Book of Common
Prayer.”
[2]
Psalm 121:4
[3]
What God consumes is not destroyed, but becomes part of God. As Paul writes, God is that being in which we
live and move and have our being. All
things are in God. In essence all things
can be said to be consumed (taken in by God, part of God) and refined, renewed
and transfigured. The burning bush is
aglow with fire of God that consumes it.
It is in God, but not destroyed.
[4] We
humans are prone to become addicted to certainty. When it is in the form of a
concretized ideological belief, certainty becomes antithetical to faith.
No comments:
Post a Comment