Taurus (2): Letting the Light Shine
Taurus (2): Letting the Light Shine
Story: The Dog in the Hall of MirrorsThere once was a dog who wondered into a room filled with mirrors. The dog looked around and seeing all of the other dogs, growled and showed his teeth. Upon seeing all of the other dogs do the same, he got frightened and cowered.
The world is merely a reflection of our
attitude toward it.
The word ‘parable’ comes from the
Greek, and it means ‘thrown beside’. A parable is something – usually a story –
which is placed beside something else for the sake of comparison. The parable
is an attempt to explain in simple narrative terms something that would
otherwise appear complicated or abstruse, and spiritual teachers have used them
since the beginning of time for three main reasons. First, they have the
natural appeal of all stories. No matter how old we are, or how sophisticated
we consider ourselves to be, we are all captivated by the words, ‘Once upon a
time....’ Stories cannot fail to get our attention. The second reason is that
stories engage our imagination and our judgement in ways that theological
discourse does not. With a story we are obliged to come to our own conclusions,
and these conclusions may differ according to the individual, so there is an
‘open-ended’ quality to a story, and room for the imagination to roam around.
The third, but by no means the least important reason,
is that stories are memorable; generally speaking, we only need to hear a story
- or a joke - once before we are ready to tell it, and once it is fixed in the
memory it can be accessed even years later without too much trouble. Contrast this
with mathematical theorems, chemical formulae, historical dates, geographical
features, theological propositions and the like, which stay in our memory just
long enough for us to use them in the examination before disappearing without
trace. Sarah Tinker, our minister in Kensington, tells how she recently met up
with a group of old school friends and they discussed what they could remember
about their years of secondary schooling. The only thing they had a clear
memory of from a dozen years of schooling was the formation of an ox-bow lake.
It’s a common experience, which our educators, with their growing concern to
impart a ‘body’ of knowledge, would do well to take notice of. But, for all
that these women have forgotten the facts, I’ll bet they can remember the
stories their teachers told them, or read to them. I can certainly recall the
ones that I was told. I can still remember, well over fifty years ago,
listening while the teacher read us the Labours
of Hercules, or The Adventures of
Wurzel Gummidge, or Peter Pan, or
Children of the New Forest. Facts
disappear: stories stick.
The power of the story was not lost on Jesus. When
asked – as reported in Luke’s Gospel – ‘Who is my neighbour?’ by a man who
wanted to put him to the test, Jesus did not reply with a philosophical or
sociological definition like, ‘In popular usage, your neighbour is the person
who lives in close proximity, usually next door. But, taken in a wider sense,
it refers to anyone who may be in need of your assistance.’ No. Jesus told a story.
‘A certain man was travelling from Jerusalem to Jericho....’ he began, and he
went on to tell the story of the Good Samaritan, one of the most important and
memorable stories in the whole of religious literature. And at the end of the
story, Jesus’ questioner was asked to draw his own conclusions, thereby
producing an impact on the listener that would be impossible with a lengthy and
convoluted argument.
But the spiritual story was not the invention of
Jesus. In the Jewish scriptures we read how Nathan the prophet brought King
David to repent his shameful treatment of Uriah the Hittite by telling him a
story. David was taking the air on the roof of his house one day when he spied
the beautiful Bathsheba, whose husband Uriah was away at the wars. David
seduced her, and, on learning that she had become pregnant, arranged for her
husband to be killed. He then took her as his own wife. The prophet Nathan came
to David and told him the story of a poor man who had just one lamb, which he
treated like one of his own children. However, a rich man, with plenty of
sheep, had an unexpected visitor, and so he took the poor man’s lamb and
slaughtered it. ‘What do you think should happen to such a man?’ asks Nathan.
‘He is deserving of death,’ thundered an indignant David. ‘You are that man,’
says Nathan, fearlessly. ‘Stealing the wife of Uriah the Hittite was even more
reprehensible than what this rich man did.’ Nathan’s parable alerted David to
the monstrous nature of his sin.
The stories I tell the children here on Sundays are
for the most part similar spiritual parables, and the fact that they are taken
from all the world’s spiritual traditions – Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Christian
etc. – underlines the ubiquity of the story as a vital aid in spiritual
teaching. Today’s story, the Dog in the Hall of Mirrors, from the Zen Buddhist
tradition, illustrates one of the oldest and most widespread spiritual
teachings of all: the principle of karma, or the notion that the external world
reflects the internal disposition. ‘What you give out will be what you get
back.’ If you perceive the world as hostile it is because you yourself are
harbouring hostility; remove your own hostility and you’ll find that the
external world will cease to threaten you. This principle is also found in
chapter four of Mark’s Gospel, although it does not appear in story form. ‘What
you give out will be what you get back,’ says Jesus.
How strange then, in the light of all this, that Jesus
says something very odd about parables in the Gospel of Mark. He doesn’t say
that he tells parables because they are pithy, engaging, memorable, or
powerful, as we might expect. He says that he tells them in order to keep the truth from people.
When he was alone, the Twelve and the
others around him asked him about the parables. He told them, ‘The secret of
the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside
everything is said in parable, so that ‘they may be ever seeing but never
perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding, otherwise they might turn
and be forgiven. (Mark 4:10-11)
What
is implied here is that there is a secret teaching which is only imparted to a
certain few – those ‘inside the house’; to those ‘on the outside’ everything is
given in parables.
We can only guess the nature of that
secret teaching, but I am sure that it had something to do with the approach to
Mark’s Gospel which we are studying in these sessions: that there is a ‘hidden’
meaning behind all the Gospel stories, and that this meaning will only be
imparted to those who are ready to receive it. The rest will have to be content
with parables.
But this ‘hidden meaning’ will not
remain hidden for ever. In the verses which immediately follow the Parable of
the Sower, Jesus says,
Do you bring in a lamp to put it under a
bowl or a bed? Instead, don’t you put it on its stand? For whatever is hidden
is meant to be disclosed, and whatever is concealed is meant to be brought out
into the open. If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear. (Mark 4:21-23)
The Nebra Disk (c.1660 BCE)
The Pleiades are at the top right
But
what the ancient sky watchers found so intriguing about the Pleiades was the
fact that there was no agreement about how many stars the naked eye could see.
Some authors say that you can see six, some say you can see seven.
Consequently, the mythology of the Pleiades concerned seven daughters, six of
whom were married to gods, and so became immortal, but one of whom was married
to a mortal; so, while six immortal stars shone brightly, the mortal one was
only dimly visible, and only occasionally seen. Now we can understand why this
little piece occurs where it does in Mark: ‘For whatever is hidden is meant to
be disclosed, and whatever is concealed is meant to be brought out into the
open.’
We must be careful not to misinterpret
this little saying of Jesus. It is not a threat of exposure and embarrassment:
it is a promise of enlightenment. Jesus is not saying that God, like some
celestial Big Brother, is spying on us and that every one of our secret vices
will be made known to the world at some time in the future; he is saying that
the deepest and most obscure truths about the nature of the world and the
purpose of human life can and will become clear to us. How will that occur?
Jesus says that we don’t know how, any more than we know how it is that the
seed which the farmer scatters on the ground eventually becomes a plant. The
farmer simply does what he has to do and trusts that the mysterious process of
transformation will take place.
So it is with our own enlightenment. It does not
require us to engage in some self-conscious and narcissistic activity called
‘spiritual development’. The promise is that it will come to us as we go about
our daily life in a spirit of wakeful attentiveness. Listen to this passage:
When I was four, a sound slipped into my bedroom and
woke me up. It was a persistent sound of scratching on my window screen. It was
an awful sound, really. Loud and grating, and given the darkness and shadowy
images moving across the curtains, I suppose I could have become afraid. But I
wasn’t. I was struck only with curiosity, with a kind of wonder about this noise
in the darkness. I remember lying in bed imagining increasingly magical
explanations for it, unaware that I was about to engage a mystery that would in
some way linger with me for the rest of my life. Armed with an array of vivid
possibilities, I crept out of bed and made my way through the house to my
parents’ bed. I shook my mother’s shoulder. ‘Mama, there is an angel scratching
against my window’.
I waited to hear what she would say… …She did not say,
‘The scratching on your window is only the wind dragging an old branch across
the screen. It’s nothing. Go back to bed’.
Instead, even groggy with sleep, she knew that the
ability to let go and listen creatively to the world as a mythic and sacred
place, that the power to listen to the humdrum and the familiar and hear the sacred
possibility of music inside it is a tender, fragile thing, easily lost. So,
rather than douse my first foray into holy imaginings, she put her blessing on
it. She said, ‘An angel? Wonderful. Say hello for me’. (Sue Monk Kidd: Beliefnet 15th April 2007).
When
the seed of the Spirit is nurtured and watered by constant care; when we trust
in the power of the Spirit to transform our lives in its own way and in its own
time, then we may begin to hear the divine voice within the apparently chaotic
and cacophonous sounds of the world. We will begin to see and to perceive, to hear and to understand. We may not be able to articulate what we
discover; we will certainly not be able to put it into a creed or a series of
propositions; but when we suddenly realize that the scratching on the window is
announcing the presence of an angel, that (in Tagore's words) the world has a deeper meaning than what is apparent, we will know that our consciousness has been
transformed and the kingdom of God has arrived.
My book The Gospel and the Zodiac: The Secret Truth about Jesus is available for a mere £6.89 from
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