“Knowing Me, Knowing You” Vance L. Toivonen
READING
John
17:20-26
"I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. "Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you; and these know that you have sent me. I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them."
READING Coming to the Senses, Jon Kabat-Zinn
…perhaps you have noticed that the sense of self is telling us all the time that we are not complete. It tells us that we have to get someplace else, attain what needs to be achieved, become whole, become happy, make a difference, get on with it, all of which may indeed be partially true and relatively true, and to that degree, we need to honor those intuitions. But it forgets to remind us that, on a deeper level, beyond appearances and time, whatever needs to be attained is already here, now – that there is no improving the self – only knowing its true nature as both empty and full, and therefore profoundly useful.
SERMON
One of the first things Joan Shiels asked of me as we began our work together in ministry was to use the Meyers-Briggs identifiers as a way of better understanding who we are in relation to one another. It had been decades since I reviewed this categorization of the self, and it was interesting to visit it once again. I don’t recall what my Meyers-Briggs M.O. was 20 years ago, but I was reminded that it is now ISFP (which stands for Introverted, Sensory, Feeling, and Perceiving).
In his book, Please Understand Me II, David Kiersey describes the ISFP as The Composer. He describes ISFPs as “concrete in their communication and utilitarian in their use of tools…preoccupied with technique, practical, optimistic, cynical, and focused on the here and now…They want to be seen as artistic, audacious, and adaptable…they trust their impulses, yearn for impact, seek sensation, prize generosity, and aspire to virtuosity…with their friendly nature they tend to play the informative role of Entertainer more comfortably than the tough-minded, directive role of Operator.”
This does a pretty good job of introducing my self. However, as we talked about the categories and descriptions, I discovered there were many moments of uncertainty about whether or not I really fit those categories and descriptions. Understanding our selves, literally pinning down and analyzing the self that we seem to be, or think we are, or even that others think we are, is a difficult task. It will likely remain an incomplete task, and a life-long work for us.
In his book Coming to the Senses, Jon Kabat-Zinn invites us not to take our selves so personally. Often the work of discovering our selves is impeded by our tendency to take offense at our awareness of the self. He suggests that we view our selves with a certain amount of objectivity, reminding us that we are created quite objectively to begin with. We are, he writes, “the product of impersonal causes and conditions following the laws of physics and chemistry.” He tells us that the Buddha taught our experience, our forms, feelings, perceptions, impulses, and consciousness itself – or what the Buddha called the five skandas (or heaps) – “is empty of any enduring self-existing characteristic; that try as one might, one will not be able to locate a permanent, unchanging self-ness inside or underneath any phenomenon.”
Life is constantly changing. Our day to day experiences, thoughts, events change us. Changes that occur in others bring changes to us. We have begun to understand that changes in other parts of the world, changes in human communities with which we do not have immediate contact, effect us. The changes that we make in our little piece of the world effect people in other parts of the world. I think we are experiencing the inter-connectedness of the human community, and of the planet in general, in a deeper and richer sense than ever before in human history. All of the talk about global warming has caused us to consider our impact on the earth in a way that human beings 100 years ago did not.
Self-knowledge is vitally important. It is essential for us to understand the way in which our behavior, our choices, and our energies impact others, and the world in which we live. Living in this small community of Hope we are confronted with this time and time again. We bounce off of one another like many atoms, and the interaction of those atoms creates this community. This causes joy when the interaction is warm and loving, and consternation when it is not. We experience both extremes, and both extremes are indicative of our self-ness, of who we are at any given moment.
That last line of the second reading may seem a bit disconcerting. Kabat-Zinn writes, “there is no improving the self – only knowing its true nature as both empty and full, and therefore profoundly useful.” I suppose it is good to know that we are at least profoundly useful. Our self-knowledge teaches us that we are not fully formed, that we are works in progress that will, I suppose, never be complete. This is what spirituality and the great spiritual teachers tell us, that we are living in a constant process of becoming that is never finished. The Christ & and The Buddha are archetypes of some kind of fully formed human being, something we can spend our lives aspiring to, yet never fully achieve.
Jesus stands out because he was the ideal human being, or at least very close to the ideal. We have many pictures of Jesus. Let me suggest, as have John Shelby Spong and other scholars (Borg, Crossan, Levine), that Jesus represented the convergence of divinity and humanity on a trajectory of living. In the daily encounters and moments that made up his life the divine met the human community with which Jesus interacted. So much so, in fact, that Christians later claimed that Jesus was God. However, if Jesus was God he becomes inaccessible to us, an unreachable goal, an impossible dream.
The first reading from the gospel of John reminds us of a symbiosis between Jesus and God, and subsequently between Jesus’ followers and God. There is a unity of being expressed in this passage, stressing the interconnectedness of the human and the holy, the earthly and the divine. And there is the prayer that they may all be one. Which brings me to that other aspect of self-knowledge – namely, that I can only know you to the extent that I know myself. If I know myself intimately, warts and all, and need to acquire a certain degree of compassion for myself, this will lead to more compassion for you and for others. If I hide from myself, I will likely disconnect from you and others. Knowing me is a path to knowing you.
Knowing Jesus is a path to knowing what we can become, and how the divine and human intersect with one another. We are, each one of us, grand experiments in the petri dish of life. Jon Kabat-Zin writes, “…in a very real sense you are not who or what you think you are. And neither is anybody else. We are all much larger, and more mysterious.” And, if I might add, so much larger and mysterious that we will spend our entire lives on the case. The Psalmist said it best by describing us as “Fearfully and wonderfully made.” (Psalm 139). To put that in modern terms, you and I are awesome, vast territories that are inexhaustible natural resources for exploration. Knowing me, and subsequently knowing you is a life work. Knowing Jesus, or Buddha, or other great wisdom teachers of choice is a life work.
The great joy of living in a community like Hope Church is that we can engage in this exploration together, openly admitting to one another our fears and our hopes, our shortcomings and our strengths, our brokenness and our wisdom. I close now with a piece of prose by Margaret Wheatley, from a book that is all about this co-exploration titled Turning to One Another. This piece is titled Flawless.