Cancer (2): Opening Up
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| Cancer, by Dan Hodgkin |
Mark 6:45-52
Straight
afterwards, Jesus urged his disciples to get into the boat and go on ahead to Bethsaida
Mark 7:24-37
From there Jesus went to region of Tyre and went into a house where he hoped to escape
notice. But it wasn’t possible for him to remain hidden for long, and a woman
whose daughter was possessed by an evil spirit heard about him and she came and
fell down at his feet. She was a Greek – a Syrophoenician – and she begged him to cast the demon out of
her daughter. He said to her, ‘Let the children be fed first; it’s not right to
take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ She replied, ‘Yes, Lord, but
the dogs under the table eat the children’s scraps!’ And he said to her,
‘Because of what you’ve just said, go on your way. The demon has left your
daughter.’ When she went home she found the child lying on her bed, and the
evil spirit had gone.
Leaving the region of Tyre he went through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee, up through the
middle of the Decapolis.
And they brought to him a deaf man with a speech impediment and they begged
Jesus to lay his hand upon him. Taking
him privately, away from the crowd, he placed his fingers in his ears, and
touched his tongue with spittle. Looking up to heaven he sighed aloud as he
said, ‘Ephphatha!’
(which means, ‘Be opened!’ ) The man’s ears were opened, his tongue was loosed,
and he began to speak correctly. Jesus ordered them not to tell anyone, but the
more he told them to keep quiet, the more they proclaimed it. They were
completely amazed, saying, ‘He’s done everything well; he makes the deaf hear
and the dumb speak!’
They
came to Bethsaida
****************************
‘It is well to remember that the whole
universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.
’(John Andrew Holmes)
Last week I explained how the
zodiacal sign Cancer was associated
in the ancient world with the stomach and food and
how it also symbolises the natural tendency of the human being to be isolated,
to build a barrier keeping out unfamiliar experience and unfamiliar ideas. And
it is this aspect of the sign’s symbolism that I want to look at today.
The
traditions we inherit and
pass on, the prejudices we develop, our natural instincts, act like the crab’s shell to cut us off from what we consider to be alien or strange. It
is probably a survival mechanism, built into our genes, but one objective of
the spiritual life is to
identify and then try to eliminate those instinctive factors which work to give
us short term survival advantages, but which have now outlived their usefulness
and which actually impede our development as a species.
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| Jesus Walks on Water (Ivan Aivazovsky) |
The visceral – ‘gut’ – reactions,
which all human beings exhibit in the presence of the unfamiliar, are a feature
of our emotional life. They come unbidden, up from the depths, and we have
little immediate or conscious control over them. We instinctively prefer those
people who look like us, talk like us, and who share our assumptions and our
outlook. This is why the story of Jesus walking on the water is so appropriate in the
Cancer section of the Gospel. It is astronomically
appropriate because one of the constellations surrounding Cancer is Argo, the mythical and magical
ship of the Argonauts which, according to the Roman writer Manilius was the ship ‘which conquered the waters’. But
this story is also related to the idea of overcoming our emotional reactions to
things, because Water has perennially symbolised the turbulent
emotional life of the individual and, by walking on the water, Jesus is
demonstrating his mastery over those instinctive responses to life which will
often override our intellectual convictions and which are the cause of so much
emotional turbulence. Walking on the water is not a marvellous demonstration of
the uniqueness of Jesus, a proof of his divinity; nor is it a misapprehension
on the part of eye witnesses who saw Jesus walking on some kind of rocky
outcrop and mistook it for a miracle. It is, rather, something we are all
called upon to do: we too must learn to conquer the internal emotional turmoil
which militates against any genuine acceptance of unfamiliar customs and
people.
There are three more miracle stories
in this section, and although they seem like separate incidents, they must be
taken together to get the full impact of the lesson the Gospel writer is trying
to teach us.
The first one is the story of the woman who
asks Jesus to cast out a demon from her
daughter. It is important to remember that this woman is a Gentile – a non-Jew - and it is for this
very reason that Jesus initially refuses her request. ‘It’s not right to give
the children’s food to the dogs,’ he says. This, of course, is a terrible
insult, and the fact that it is uttered by Jesus himself has proved quite
embarrassing to conventional commentators, who try to soften it a little by
saying that the word used is rather an affectionate term for a dog, and anyway, Jesus was really
only testing the woman’s faith. Does Jesus really come out of it better if we assume that
he is playing some sort of game with this distressed woman? If she had been
unable to respond cleverly to his insult would he have refused to heal her
daughter?
The significance of this story only becomes
apparent when we read it in conjunction with the story of the deaf man, which
follows. After putting his fingers in the man’s ears and touching his tongue
with spittle, Jesus says the Aramaic word Ephphatha, and the man finds
himself able to hear properly and to speak coherently.
It is unusual to find Aramaic words or phrases in the Gospels. Aramaic was the first
language of the Palestinian Jews, and so would have
been the language of Jesus and the apostles, and commentators regularly point out that it is present in the
Gospels – which were all originally written in Greek – because these would have been the actual
words that Jesus said. But, as we noted in the story of Jairus’ Daughter, Aramaic is almost certainly used for emphasis in the
Gospel of Mark. The Gospel writer is saying, ‘I’m writing this word in another
language, so pay attention to it. It’s important’.
The word Ephphatha means ‘Open up!’ (It was from this word that we
took the name of our monthly magazine Oscailt, meaning ‘open’ in Irish.) What
Jesus is saying to this deaf man is
the Gospel’s message to you and me. This man was suffering from a physical
deafness; we are suffering from spiritual deafness. Our ears are closed to
the entreaties of those who live in foreign countries, whose skin colour is
different from our own, whose way of life does not correspond with ours. We are
deaf to the words even of those who live in close proximity to us, but whose
traditions are different from ours. We
don’t hear what they are saying, and so our opinions about them and their
customs are garbled and worthless. The Jewish exclusiveness displayed by Jesus
in his encounter with the Gentile woman dramatically illustrates
our own clannishness, our instinctive conviction that ‘blood is thicker than water’, that
‘charity begins at home’. It’s a shocking reminder of our own refusal to listen
attentively to the unfamiliar voices. It is only when we are prepared to open
up that our prejudices can be eroded; and only then that the impediment in our
speech will be removed and our opinions will be worth listening to. We have to
break the shell of our own tribalism and exclusiveness.
This theme is explored further in the
final scene of this section, the Cure of the Blind Man (Mark 8:22-26). As Jesus enters Bethsaida
The blind man, like all the characters in
the Gospels – when the Gospels are read as
psychological, spiritual treatises and not as historical reminiscences –
is you and I. We have received the first rub of
the spittle, and we can see – that is, we have the sense of sight - but we
don’t quite see people, we see walking trees – or, in contemporary language,
ciphers, zombies, humanoids. We recognise their general shape and their mobility, but we have yet
to grant them fully human status. What we need is a second metaphorical rub of
the eyes to correct our vision, to remove the residual film which prevents us
seeing people as they really are, as ends in themselves, and not as means to
our own ends. Einstein expresses the same sentiment as Mark, but less
dramatically and more philosophically, as follows:
A human being is part
of a whole called by us ‘universe’, a part limited in time and space. He
experiences himself, his thoughts, and feelings as something separated from the
rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires
and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free
ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all
living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
The
function of all spiritual practice – from whatever tradition it comes –
is to help us to narrow the gap between self-awareness and other-awareness, to
remove that residual film from our eyes which is deluding our sight. But how,
practically, do we achieve it? Like so many of the spiritual lessons contained
in this Gospel, it takes a lifetime to learn, but I suggest, as a starter, that
whenever we say the Lord’s Prayer we pay particular attention to the first two
words: ‘Our Father’. Forget the dispute over the word ‘Father’ and whether it
is sexist or not. This is just a distraction. The important word is ‘Our’. God is ‘our
father’, not ‘my father’, and throughout the prayer we ask ‘give us our daily bread’ and ‘forgive us our trespasses’ as ‘we forgive those who
trespass against us’. This prayer is
written in the first person plural. It’s not about me, it’s about us.
Be conscious of those moments – and there
will no doubt be many, no matter how spiritually evolved you consider yourself
to be - when you figuratively retreat into your shell, when you act and think
as Jesus is shown acting with the Gentile woman, when you cut yourself off
from somebody with the thought, ‘He/she/they is/are not like me. Their problem is nothing to do
with me. I am white, I am Irish, I am European, I am male, I am civilised.’
This happens more frequently than we might suspect. An essay in the book All
I need to know I learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum, describes a subtle example of it. It concerns a man called Nicolai
Pestretsov, a Russian soldier who was stationed in Angola
We too have to try to fight against the
tendency to see people as walking trees. Try doing this. Every day select one
person that you casually encounter, and make a special imaginative effort to
tell yourself that this person, whose name you do not know, whose history and circumstances you do not know, is a
thinking, feeling, hurting, doubting, frightened, rejoicing human being, just
as you are. Wish him or her well with a silent blessing.
 | |
| The Dalai Lama: 'My religion is kindness' |
Last week I was in Oxford for Maud
Robinson’s valedictory service. On Tuesday morning I went to breakfast in the
college dining room and was met, very early in the morning, with a big smile
and a cheery ‘hello’ from the steward, who inquired after my health, indicated
the breakfast fare on offer, asked me my name, and generally made me feel
welcome and at ease. Indeed, he made me feel like a human being.
A month or so ago I ordered a book from
Amazon, but they didn’t have a copy so they put me in touch with Bon Bon Books who did. When I received my copy
a few days later, there was a little note which said, ‘Dear Bill, I hope you
enjoy this book’, signed Ian from Bon Bon Books. I was really charmed by this,
and said as much in an email to Amazon when they asked me to rate the service I
received from this private seller. Yesterday I received an email from Ian
thanking me for giving his company a five star assessment. Now we are Ian and
Bill, not just customer and bookseller. How different from the anonymity and
indifference which characterise so many of the commercial transactions we
undertake.
The lesson? Make the people you encounter
feel human. That’s all. Then you’ll be making a significant contribution to the
transformation of the world.
These little exercises and practices
– and others that you may devise for yourself – are designed to take us out of
our natural solipsism, the feeling that I exist in a way that is different from
the way that others exist, and to bring us to an appreciation of our
connectedness ‘in mystery and miracle, to one another and to the world’.
And it can all be summarised in that one
word in Mark’s Gospel ‘Ephphatha: Open Up’.
My book The Gospel and the Zodiac: The Secret Truth about Jesus is available for a mere £6.89 from
My book The Gospel and the Zodiac: The Secret Truth about Jesus is available for a mere £6.89 from
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