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Today let's look at the rest of The Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 9.
Instead of going line by line through this chapter, let's draw out the various themes that appear in it.
Parables
One of the central features of the Zen tradition is the koan. These are short stories or riddles which are intended as themes for meditation. Koans are nearly always paradoxical, and to deeply enter into them is to leave behind the illusion of a world of fixed and stable forms. "Baso said to a monk, “If I see you have a staff, I will give it to you. If I see you have no staff, I will take it away from you." "What is the face you had before your mother and father were born?" "A monk asked Master Haryo, 'What is the way?' Haryo said, 'An open-eyed man falling into the well.'"
In the work of Plato, myths and allegories play a similar role. Plato's allegory of the cave is probably the best known. When you encounter a myth or allegory in Plato, you should imagine it surrounded by large red signs reading PAY ATTENTION. Nor should the myth or the allegory simply be read-- it must be read, re-read, and encountered in meditation.
This is how you should treat Jesus's parables. They should be read and re-read, considered in their own light and in the light of all his other parables, and in the context in which they appear in the story.
In this section we are given the following parable:
This occurs right after Jesus describes himself as the bridegroom. I could give you my interpretation of these images, or a link to the traditional interpretation of any theologian or denomination that you like, but you'll get far more out of it if you do the work yourself. Take these passages and engage them in discursive meditation. What do they have to teach you?
Healing
Jesus continues his healing ministry. This is central to his message and his work; really it is his message, and his work. I've said a great deal on this topic already, but it's worth re-considering it every time we find it. The work of Jesus is to heal, which is to make whole.
Notice two things that are highlighted in this chapter:
First, in order to receive divine healing, which is whole-making, we have to be open to it. We ourselves must cooperate with the divine power in the restoration of our souls.
Second, who is it that needs healing?
"Only the sick need doctors."
Healing (Often) Hurts
In the Gospel, Jesus's healings are accomplished quickly, without much ado. He commands the demon to depart, and it departs; he commands the girl to rise, and she rises.
It's important to remember that we are in a myth, and that the central figure of the myth is the Son of God. In real life, healing is often a much slower and more painful process. Indeed, the full scope of healing-- the complete restoration of the soul to its proper wholeness-- is the work of a lifetime. Remember that the majority of the demons that we encounter in our daily lives consist of habits, addictions, and patterns of destructive thinking. They can be understood as demons, living things, in that they reproduce themselves; like living things, they tenaciously defend their existence. And the truth is that we don't want to be rid of them. We cling to our demons, our ghosts, our habits, our misbehaviors, our liquid or electronic drugs. They become part of us, and to cut them away causes extraordinary pain.
In the Gorgias, Plato discusses the nature of healing. There are-- he says-- two arts which are given for the improvement of the body, which are gymnastics and medicine. Each of these arts has a kind of toxic mimic, a facsimile which produces the appearance of success without the facts of it. These are fashion and what he calls "cooking," meaning confectionry or the making of sweets. In a memorable passage, Plato has Socrates imagine what it would be like if a cook were to try a doctor before a jury of children.
We don't heal because we don't want to. Like children demanding ice cream for dinner, we want to cling to our vices because they are sweeter and easier than the harder way of virtue. I am no exception to this.
Pistis
On certain occasions, a person sets down an addiction and takes up a new way of life all at once. This happens when they are well and truly ready for it. We see the model of this in the Gospel: "Your faith has made you whole."
There are those who take this passage and interpret it to mean that, therefore, the only thing necessary for the Christian life is faith, by which they mean opinion. If you have the opinion that Jesus gave his life for you and you also agree that that was a fine thing for him to do, then you can expect to go to Heaven-- though not until after you die-- regardless of how you're living your life, your spiritual practices or the state of your soul. In the same way, if you don't share that particular opinion, no matter the reason, then, regardless of the way you're living your life or the state of your soul you're going to go to Hell-- again, though, not until after you're conveniently dead enough to be unable to offer any objection.
You won't be surprised to hear that I think Jesus is saying something more subtle and more interesting than that.
The word he uses for "faith" here is "pistis," which does indeed refer to opinion. In the Republic, Plato suggests that the soul or psyche has four powers, of which two are higher, and two lower. The higher functions of the soul are, at the highest, the nous, of which we've heard so much already, and dianoia, the power through which we grasp intellectual objects. The two lower functions are opinion and image-thinking, by which he means sense perception.
Now the higher functions of the soul are associated with the mental world, the lower functions with the physical world. Pistis, or opinion, is derived from the lower functions. But it is the way of things in the Platonic world that the higher shapes and forms the lower. We can change our pistis, which is our experience of the world. We start "from above," as it were, by aligning our wills and our psyches with a particular Spiritual Reality (this is usually called a "religion," and everyone has one, especially those who think they don't). We then let that Spiritual Reality shape how we interact with the physical world. This, in turn, shapes our experience of the physical world, which in turn reinforces our alignment with the Spiritual World.
This is what magical training and spiritual training of every kind is meant to do. The fact is that you don't see the world unmediated; in fact, there is no unmediated world.
I studied Anthroplogy in college (for all the good it did me). I recall a professor in a Medical Anthropology class talking about how researchers in the field regularly found their bodies conforming to their subjects' medical views. It's a common view, for example, in many cultures that one shouldn't drink hot drinks in the winter, lest one become ill. In the winter, cold drinks should be taken, to balance the body's internal climate with that of the external world. That's exactly the opposite of how we do things in the United States, and on a scientific materialist view it's impossible. Nevertheless, researchers regularly found themselves developing sore throats if they persisted in drinking hot liquids in the winter in countries in which it was known to cause problems.
Every system of magical training works this way, and this is why students are given regular ritual practice and the requirement to meditate on texts in their tradition. The more we immerse ourselves in a tradition and let it shape our experience of physical reality, the more it will shape our pistis. We will then find that, like the anthropologists becoming sick from drinking hot cocoa in January, we can heal ourselves by magical means, and so on. You know it's working when you start doing it automatically, without thinking it.
Some years ago I was immersed in qigong and related practices of Chinese magic, including 3 or more hours a day of regular practice. During this time I was also teaching a qigong class at the local park. On a particular weekend, I knew I would be unable to teach my class, because I was attending a 3-day weekend class of my own. Without thinking about it, I formed a ball of energy, charged it with the thought "Class is cancelled this weekend because Steve will be at class," and sent it to my student. The next time I saw him, he said, "I figured class would be cancelled this weekend, since you were at your class."
I doubt I could do that today, because I'm not immersed in that particular Spiritual Reality. If I want to return to it, I know how to.
The Practice of the Christian Life
Historically, the Christian world was overflowing with practices meant to align the soul with the particular pistis of the Church. Much of this was abandoned during the Reformation, and still more was abandoned during the long slog of the Modern period. The Catholic Church preserved far more of the old practices than the Protestant denominations, but it abandoned and even forbade those practices during the Great Desecration of the 1960s and '70s. The result is that most Christians are immersed in the Spiritual Reality of late modern secularism. They are atheists for all intents and purposes. And they wonder why their prayers go unanswered.
Studying the Gospels is good. Studying the Gospels and regularly attending church services is better. Doing the foregoing while also participating in the traditional practices is the key to developing the true Christian faith.
Fasting and Feasting
Jesus is asked why his followers don't fast. He responds that there will be time enough to fast, once he is gone. The cycle of fasting and feasting was once a key part of the Christian life, and so it should be again.
The season of Advent begins in two weeks. This was the traditional beginning of the Christian liturgical year. Advent-- what we now know as the "Christmas Shopping Season"-- was traditionally a fast, lasting the length of the four Sundays prior to Christmas. The Advent Fast culminates with a particularly strict fast on Christmas Eve. It is then followed by a 12 day feast.
Announcement
Starting at the beginning of Advent, I'm going to add a feature to this blog. In addition to our Gospel study, we're going to go through the traditional Christian liturgical year. We'll discuss how traditional practices fit within the magical Platonist worldview of this blog, and how we can encounter them for ourselves and adapt them to the needs of our current day. If that sounds interesting, please feel free to join in the practice, and the discussion!
9 And as Jesus passed forth from thence, he saw a man, named Matthew, sitting at the receipt of custom: and he saith unto him, Follow me. And he arose, and followed him.
10 And it came to pass, as Jesus sat at meat in the house, behold, many publicans and sinners came and sat down with him and his disciples.
11 And when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto his disciples, Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners?
12 But when Jesus heard that, he said unto them, They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.
13 But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.
14 Then came to him the disciples of John, saying, Why do we and the Pharisees fast oft, but thy disciples fast not?
15 And Jesus said unto them, Can the children of the bridechamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them? but the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken from them, and then shall they fast.
16 No man putteth a piece of new cloth unto an old garment, for that which is put in to fill it up taketh from the garment, and the rent is made worse.
17 Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved.
18 While he spake these things unto them, behold, there came a certain ruler, and worshipped him, saying, My daughter is even now dead: but come and lay thy hand upon her, and she shall live.
19 And Jesus arose, and followed him, and so did his disciples.
20 And, behold, a woman, which was diseased with an issue of blood twelve years, came behind him, and touched the hem of his garment:
21 For she said within herself, If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole.
22 But Jesus turned him about, and when he saw her, he said, Daughter, be of good comfort; thy faith hath made thee whole. And the woman was made whole from that hour.
23 And when Jesus came into the ruler's house, and saw the minstrels and the people making a noise,
24 He said unto them, Give place: for the maid is not dead, but sleepeth. And they laughed him to scorn.
25 But when the people were put forth, he went in, and took her by the hand, and the maid arose.
26 And the fame hereof went abroad into all that land.
27 And when Jesus departed thence, two blind men followed him, crying, and saying, Thou son of David, have mercy on us.
28 And when he was come into the house, the blind men came to him: and Jesus saith unto them, Believe ye that I am able to do this? They said unto him, Yea, Lord.
29 Then touched he their eyes, saying, According to your faith be it unto you.
30 And their eyes were opened; and Jesus straitly charged them, saying, See that no man know it.
31 But they, when they were departed, spread abroad his fame in all that country.
32 As they went out, behold, they brought to him a dumb man possessed with a devil.
33 And when the devil was cast out, the dumb spake: and the multitudes marvelled, saying, It was never so seen in Israel.
34 But the Pharisees said, He casteth out devils through the prince of the devils.
35 And Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every sickness and every disease among the people.
36 But when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd.
37 Then saith he unto his disciples, The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few;
38 Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest.
Instead of going line by line through this chapter, let's draw out the various themes that appear in it.
Parables
One of the central features of the Zen tradition is the koan. These are short stories or riddles which are intended as themes for meditation. Koans are nearly always paradoxical, and to deeply enter into them is to leave behind the illusion of a world of fixed and stable forms. "Baso said to a monk, “If I see you have a staff, I will give it to you. If I see you have no staff, I will take it away from you." "What is the face you had before your mother and father were born?" "A monk asked Master Haryo, 'What is the way?' Haryo said, 'An open-eyed man falling into the well.'"
In the work of Plato, myths and allegories play a similar role. Plato's allegory of the cave is probably the best known. When you encounter a myth or allegory in Plato, you should imagine it surrounded by large red signs reading PAY ATTENTION. Nor should the myth or the allegory simply be read-- it must be read, re-read, and encountered in meditation.
This is how you should treat Jesus's parables. They should be read and re-read, considered in their own light and in the light of all his other parables, and in the context in which they appear in the story.
In this section we are given the following parable:
No man putteth a piece of new cloth unto an old garment, for that which is put in to fill it up taketh from the garment, and the rent is made worse.
Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved.
Healing
Jesus continues his healing ministry. This is central to his message and his work; really it is his message, and his work. I've said a great deal on this topic already, but it's worth re-considering it every time we find it. The work of Jesus is to heal, which is to make whole.
Notice two things that are highlighted in this chapter:
First, in order to receive divine healing, which is whole-making, we have to be open to it. We ourselves must cooperate with the divine power in the restoration of our souls.
Second, who is it that needs healing?
"Only the sick need doctors."
Healing (Often) Hurts
In the Gospel, Jesus's healings are accomplished quickly, without much ado. He commands the demon to depart, and it departs; he commands the girl to rise, and she rises.
It's important to remember that we are in a myth, and that the central figure of the myth is the Son of God. In real life, healing is often a much slower and more painful process. Indeed, the full scope of healing-- the complete restoration of the soul to its proper wholeness-- is the work of a lifetime. Remember that the majority of the demons that we encounter in our daily lives consist of habits, addictions, and patterns of destructive thinking. They can be understood as demons, living things, in that they reproduce themselves; like living things, they tenaciously defend their existence. And the truth is that we don't want to be rid of them. We cling to our demons, our ghosts, our habits, our misbehaviors, our liquid or electronic drugs. They become part of us, and to cut them away causes extraordinary pain.
In the Gorgias, Plato discusses the nature of healing. There are-- he says-- two arts which are given for the improvement of the body, which are gymnastics and medicine. Each of these arts has a kind of toxic mimic, a facsimile which produces the appearance of success without the facts of it. These are fashion and what he calls "cooking," meaning confectionry or the making of sweets. In a memorable passage, Plato has Socrates imagine what it would be like if a cook were to try a doctor before a jury of children.
Oh my boys, many evil things has this man done to you: he is the death of you, especially of the younger ones among you, cutting and burning and starving and suffocating you, until you know not what to do; he gives you the bitterest potions, and compels you to hunger and thirst. How unlike the variety of meats and sweets on which I feasted you!' What do you suppose that the physician would be able to reply when he found himself in such a predicament? If he told the truth he could only say, 'All these evil things, my boys, I did for your health,' and then would there not just be a clamour among a jury like that? How they would cry out!
We don't heal because we don't want to. Like children demanding ice cream for dinner, we want to cling to our vices because they are sweeter and easier than the harder way of virtue. I am no exception to this.
Pistis
On certain occasions, a person sets down an addiction and takes up a new way of life all at once. This happens when they are well and truly ready for it. We see the model of this in the Gospel: "Your faith has made you whole."
There are those who take this passage and interpret it to mean that, therefore, the only thing necessary for the Christian life is faith, by which they mean opinion. If you have the opinion that Jesus gave his life for you and you also agree that that was a fine thing for him to do, then you can expect to go to Heaven-- though not until after you die-- regardless of how you're living your life, your spiritual practices or the state of your soul. In the same way, if you don't share that particular opinion, no matter the reason, then, regardless of the way you're living your life or the state of your soul you're going to go to Hell-- again, though, not until after you're conveniently dead enough to be unable to offer any objection.
You won't be surprised to hear that I think Jesus is saying something more subtle and more interesting than that.
The word he uses for "faith" here is "pistis," which does indeed refer to opinion. In the Republic, Plato suggests that the soul or psyche has four powers, of which two are higher, and two lower. The higher functions of the soul are, at the highest, the nous, of which we've heard so much already, and dianoia, the power through which we grasp intellectual objects. The two lower functions are opinion and image-thinking, by which he means sense perception.
Now the higher functions of the soul are associated with the mental world, the lower functions with the physical world. Pistis, or opinion, is derived from the lower functions. But it is the way of things in the Platonic world that the higher shapes and forms the lower. We can change our pistis, which is our experience of the world. We start "from above," as it were, by aligning our wills and our psyches with a particular Spiritual Reality (this is usually called a "religion," and everyone has one, especially those who think they don't). We then let that Spiritual Reality shape how we interact with the physical world. This, in turn, shapes our experience of the physical world, which in turn reinforces our alignment with the Spiritual World.
This is what magical training and spiritual training of every kind is meant to do. The fact is that you don't see the world unmediated; in fact, there is no unmediated world.
I studied Anthroplogy in college (for all the good it did me). I recall a professor in a Medical Anthropology class talking about how researchers in the field regularly found their bodies conforming to their subjects' medical views. It's a common view, for example, in many cultures that one shouldn't drink hot drinks in the winter, lest one become ill. In the winter, cold drinks should be taken, to balance the body's internal climate with that of the external world. That's exactly the opposite of how we do things in the United States, and on a scientific materialist view it's impossible. Nevertheless, researchers regularly found themselves developing sore throats if they persisted in drinking hot liquids in the winter in countries in which it was known to cause problems.
Every system of magical training works this way, and this is why students are given regular ritual practice and the requirement to meditate on texts in their tradition. The more we immerse ourselves in a tradition and let it shape our experience of physical reality, the more it will shape our pistis. We will then find that, like the anthropologists becoming sick from drinking hot cocoa in January, we can heal ourselves by magical means, and so on. You know it's working when you start doing it automatically, without thinking it.
Some years ago I was immersed in qigong and related practices of Chinese magic, including 3 or more hours a day of regular practice. During this time I was also teaching a qigong class at the local park. On a particular weekend, I knew I would be unable to teach my class, because I was attending a 3-day weekend class of my own. Without thinking about it, I formed a ball of energy, charged it with the thought "Class is cancelled this weekend because Steve will be at class," and sent it to my student. The next time I saw him, he said, "I figured class would be cancelled this weekend, since you were at your class."
I doubt I could do that today, because I'm not immersed in that particular Spiritual Reality. If I want to return to it, I know how to.
The Practice of the Christian Life
Historically, the Christian world was overflowing with practices meant to align the soul with the particular pistis of the Church. Much of this was abandoned during the Reformation, and still more was abandoned during the long slog of the Modern period. The Catholic Church preserved far more of the old practices than the Protestant denominations, but it abandoned and even forbade those practices during the Great Desecration of the 1960s and '70s. The result is that most Christians are immersed in the Spiritual Reality of late modern secularism. They are atheists for all intents and purposes. And they wonder why their prayers go unanswered.
Studying the Gospels is good. Studying the Gospels and regularly attending church services is better. Doing the foregoing while also participating in the traditional practices is the key to developing the true Christian faith.
Fasting and Feasting
Jesus is asked why his followers don't fast. He responds that there will be time enough to fast, once he is gone. The cycle of fasting and feasting was once a key part of the Christian life, and so it should be again.
The season of Advent begins in two weeks. This was the traditional beginning of the Christian liturgical year. Advent-- what we now know as the "Christmas Shopping Season"-- was traditionally a fast, lasting the length of the four Sundays prior to Christmas. The Advent Fast culminates with a particularly strict fast on Christmas Eve. It is then followed by a 12 day feast.
Announcement
Starting at the beginning of Advent, I'm going to add a feature to this blog. In addition to our Gospel study, we're going to go through the traditional Christian liturgical year. We'll discuss how traditional practices fit within the magical Platonist worldview of this blog, and how we can encounter them for ourselves and adapt them to the needs of our current day. If that sounds interesting, please feel free to join in the practice, and the discussion!
