Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, "Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?" He said to them, "Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,

'This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines.' You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition."

Then he called the crowd again and said to them, "Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person."

Mark was making breakfast for himself—and I, I was looking for something other than that awful white powder to put in my morning tea. Mark is the person at our Diocesan office who “runs the house,” that is, who’s responsible for the clean-up and maintenance of the offices and the care of the gardens outside. That office is called “the house” because it is a house, a small Capitol Hill mansion with great views that was given to the Diocese many years ago.

At any rate, this last week Mark and I were both in the kitchen at Diocesan House trying to find milk: he, for his little bowl of dry grape nuts and I, for my morning tea. Realizing that we had a common interest, we began searching the refrigerator. But we found no milk there.

Finally after taking out item after item, Mark pulled a carton of soy milk from the back of the refrigerator. It was blue and green and groovy looking, its package touting its virtues: “healthy, high in calcium, anti-oxidants and omega-3.” Mark checked the expiration date, opened the top and smelled it, and then giving me one of those encouraging, I-think- we’ve-got-it kinds of looks, he began to pour the soy milk onto his grape nuts.

But instead of a smooth white breakfast-ready liquid, what came out was something that looked quite different--dirty water followed by a rush of ruinous white clots. I gasped. Mark and I looked at each other. “Well, I guess I’ll be using that white powder after all!” I said. Mark smiled, and ever the philosopher, replied “I guess you can’t always tell what’s on the inside by what’s on the outside!”
My mind, of course, went to our gospel for this morning—to Jesus who is being questioned by the Pharisees and Scribes about what his own disciples have been doing “on the outside” that is eating without washing their hands or washing their food, the traditional way Jewish people of the time would avoid the possibility of becoming ritually unclean through contact with others outside their community. In response to this, Jesus tells everyone that the spiritual life, living in life-giving relationship to God and to others is not maintained or made healthy by obsessing over a set of proscribed external “on the outside” acts. Rather, the health or unhealthiness of spiritual life is grounded in what’s going on inside us.

And so Jesus agrees with my friend Mark—outside actions or how things are packaged doesn’t always tell us about what’s inside, and, according to Jesus this morning what’s inside the heart really, really matters.

And so I wonder this morning—what’s been going on inside you of late? How is your heart? Is it feeling all mucked up, full of dirty water and ruinous clots even though your outside actions would like to present something different to the rest of us or to God? Or is your heart in a better place these days? More connected to your own life’s good energies and more accessible to you in the way you live your good life?

Where I’m going with this is that this Gospel, which is so often used to suggest that we’re all thieves, murderers, adulterers, liars, and slanderers, because we’ve done these things in our hearts, has another more positive point to make to us today.

The spiritual life is about nurturing a heart that desires, an inside that longs, an energetic center that drives us in the direction of meaning and hope and connection. Along with this, the spiritual life is about that heart, that longing, that drive for meaning and connection becoming actions, being shaped and structured in a way that says yes to some things and no to others, that turns in some directions and abandons others, that expresses both a congruence and integration between the heart and how we live our lives.

Ron Rolheiser’s book The Holy Longing, which I’ve referred to often, is all about this. For Rolheiser, spirituality is neither on the fringes of human life nor is about a series of seemingly rational choices on which specifically religious practices to follow: “Will I or will I know engage in this or that kind of prayer?” Instead, Rolheiser says, spirituality is something more basic and elemental. Spirituality, he says, is what we do with our desire, the energy within us that wants to go someplace, wants to do something, the longing that each of us carries for we know not what. Spirituality is about how we channel this longing and this desire.

For Rolheiser, then, spirituality has two dimensions—first, simply finding a way to keep the fire in our veins alive, “keep(ing) us energized, vibrant, living with zest, and full of hope as we sense that life is ultimately beautiful and worth living.” At the same time, spirituality has to do with focus and actions that come as a result of keeling us glued together, integrated, and congruent.

Rolheiser speaks of this as a principle of chaos (that is raw energy and desire) and a principle of order(ing) (that is integration and congruence) that operates within every healthy spirituality. “Every healthy spirituality,” he says, “…will have to worship at two shrines: the shrine of the God of chaos and of the God of order. One God will keep us energized and the other God will keep us joined together.”

Which shrine is the shrine that beckons to you this morning? Are you in need of the touch of our God who brings energy and fire to your heart? Or is it the touch of the God who brings order, focus, integration and congruence?

Know that no matter which you seek, you’re in the right place. You’re in a place that honors the one who was and is the heart of God, Christ Jesus, the enfleshed unstoppable longing of God for us. You are also in a place where we glimpse in that same Christ Jesus what it is to live a focused, integrated and congruent life, a life where the inside matched the outside, and costly life, for cost will always accompany a life where fire joins with congruence, where God’s own heart and action that lives out that heart are joined. You are in the right place.

Later on the same day, at Diocesan house, I was sitting by the window in my little make-shift office trying to work but spending more time watching Mark as he pruned and trimmed the bushes and roses that grow so luxuriously on the grounds there. He is a young man with boundless good energy, and so it was fitting, somehow that he was about the business of giving order (to use Rolheiser’s term) to the great garden that surrounds that house, expressing in his actions that focusing, choosing and pruning function important to the spiritual life.

But for some of us, it is the other dimension, tending to the energy of the heart that is our call at this time. For this dimension, poet Stanley Kunitz, artist, husband and gardener, gives us a beautiful image of what it is in the late summer of life to want, to need to be in touch with the heart, the longing and the desire that is at the center of the spiritual life. His poem called “Touch Me” is addressed to his wife. It might also be addressed to our God who is the source of all our ordering and is also the ground of our heart’s desiring.

Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that's late,
it is my song that's flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only, and it's done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

Works cited and consulted
Ronald Rolheiser: The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality
Stanley Kunitz: The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden

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