A New Creation

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew 5:7

"I am so grateful to be here in this hospital sitting in this wheelchair. And do you want to know why? Because right here in this chair is where God is."

So said Muriel, 83 years old and dying of cancer, a patient in my hospice. She seemed especially blessed. "I have no pain," she often said. And perhaps more remarkably, she had no fear.

Muriel did know moments of deep discomfort. Not infrequently I would see her holding a plastic basin in front of her mouth. She was prone to fits of vomiting. Still, it never affected her spirit. She always had a "So what?" attitude about it. When you feel God present with you. what's a little thing like vomiting?

Muriel loved music, especially Gospel hymns. She warmed to the ones I sang. But she still had her favorite, a hymn I had never heard before, which she broke into every time I saw her:

I thank you, Jesus,
I thank you, Jesus,
I thank you, Jesus,
I thank you Lord.
Oh, you brought me, yes you brought me from a mighty,
A mighty long way, a mighty long way.

So things had not always been easy. Muriel had come "a mighty long way" to acquire her faith. I wanted to know where her faith came from. She could not easily tell me herself, but her daughter filled in many of the details.

Muriel first learned about faith from her mother. The faith her mother taught her was genuine, rooted in love and expressed in acts of love. When Muriel was a child they had a neighbor, Miss Jane, who was old and frail and who could not feed herself. Muriel's mother prepared meals for Miss Jane and sent Muriel to feed her.

Muriel never forgot Miss Jane. After she grew up and became active at her church, Muriel cooked Thanksgiving turkeys for the homeless people in one of the city's worst neighborhoods, and brought the dinners to them herself. And when others came to this country from her native Trinidad and had no place to stay, she would open her own home to them for as long as they needed.

Muriel's final hours were among the most peaceful I have witnessed in my two decades of hospice work. She showed no signs of distress, nor the agony that can afflict people with end stage pancreatic cancer. It was as though God, who was always present with her, had rocked her to sleep.

I have seen this before. Surprisingly often, those who face sickness and death with the most faith and confidence have lived lives of love and service, and the love they shared with others comes back to support them when they need it most.

Muriel was extremely fortunate not only because her faith was genuine and based on love, but also because she learned this faith as a child. Her mother had been a good teacher, imparting the most precious of all resources to help her daughter at critical moments. This is something else I've noticed in my years of hospice work: those patients whose faith was strongest, who were best prepared spiritually and emotionally to deal with their illness, usually learned that faith when they were children.

This poses a dilemma for the rest of us. If we did not learn this faith during our childhood, when we could have absorbed it most easily, how can we learn it now? Even for the most prepared, faith can be a challenge. Accidents and tragedies may leave us feeling there is really nothing beyond ourselves that we can trust, and that faith is an illusion. It can certainly seem that way when we observe other people's lives from the outside: we witness their suffering but cannot go inside it to know if they had a chance to find a redemptive meaning. Even if we have faith we may not easily succeed in finding the meaning of our own suffering, and may experience strong doubt and fear. Muriel told me that sometimes when her spirits were low she might feel discouraged, but music always reconnected her to her faith.

Doubt and fear are very much part of the life of faith, and must not be mistaken for signs that a person has no faith. The question is not whether doubt and fear are present, but whether they are victorious. Faith can sometimes be dormant, but nevertheless constant, returning to awareness at unexpected moments.

When something shocks us we have a tendency to regress, to go back to the familiar and react in ways that may or may not be the best but that offer the security of what we know. For this reason most people never change their religion. They may strongly believe the religion of their own upbringing coincidentally happens to be the only true one - the association with childhood is powerful and hard to break, and the need for the security such certainty provides is strong. When we are under extreme pressure, we take refuge in our roots and fall back into response patterns we learned early, which by now may have become automatic. If we were blessed to have been brought up in faith, then when we return to the past, faith is what we find. If upon our return we find trauma and fear, then that is what comes with us to the present.

Jesus saw one man struggling with this, Nicodemus, a Pharisee who wanted to know about faith and who wanted the faith Jesus had.

It is as if Jesus were telling Nicodemus, "If you want real faith, you can't rely on what you've already learned. The circumstances of your birth may not have prepared you for faith. You need to experience a new, spiritual birth." And Nicodemus answers: "But we only have one birth, one childhood. If I've emerged from that childhood without faith, how can I go back?"

Jesus answers, but his answer is a riddle:

"Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, 'You must be born anew.' The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit." (John 3:5-8)

Jesus tells us there is hope, that we need not remain limited by the circumstances of our human birth and childhood. We were intended for faith, and even if we did not learn faith when we were young, it need not be denied to us. But what can it possibly mean to be "born of water and Spirit"?

In the Bible water is a symbol of life. In both Hebrew and Greek, the term for running water is "living water." Water is also a symbol of purification. A rebirth through the Spirit purifies us and gives us life. When a traumatic event jolts us and shakes us and we return to that new birth in place of our human birth, then instead of our childhood fears we find the Spirit of God.

Clearly it will take more than belief to accomplish this. Simply adopting a certain creed will not make us "born again," a term that has unfortunately become a cliché. We require a complete inner transformation - something Paul understood well. He had his own language for it. He called it the "new creation":

And elsewhere we read:

We can become a "new self" or a "new creation." How does this transition take place?

To answer this question we need to return to the meaning of genuine faith, which we defined in the previous chapter. Genuine faith is the awareness of the power of eternity. It is conscious contact with a reality beyond the sensible world, which becomes a source of meaning and hope. We find this reality through the awareness and practice of goodness, in all its forms. Each of us must discover it in our own individual life. If we are exposed to others who have genuine faith, we are greatly helped. By the way they live their lives, by their acts of kindness and goodness, and by their response of love to fearful situations, such people show us the face of God. If those people happen to be our parents, or others who raised us and took care of us when we were young, then we are remarkably blessed. We still have to do the work, but we have a tremendous head start. Muriel learned faith from her mother, but she strengthened that faith and made it her own by the love she practiced throughout her whole life.

Many of us are not so blessed. Many of us begin life trained not in faith but in fear. Our primary caregivers may not only have lacked faith, they may have been actively abusive, or our earliest years may have been marked by some other kind of trauma. If this is our experience, finding faith can be extremely difficult. Faith can seem an unattainable ideal once trust has been shattered.

Once again Paul gives us a clue: "...nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God." (Romans 8:39). And there is also this:

Paul speaks of height and depth. Faith is not simply a "peak experience," accompanied by feelings of spiritual elevation. Faith can be found when we are at the lowest, most desperate points of our lives. At precisely those moments we can become most open to faith. As one reads through the Gospels, one discovers a truth that applies today as much as in Jesus' time: Those whose lives were comfortable, who thought they already had faith, were not the ones open to the real message Jesus brought. They may even have thought they knew everything Jesus had to teach - and so they felt no need to change. They may have rejected Jesus, been indifferent to him, or even called him "Lord" (Matthew 7:21, Luke 6:46): all of them tuned him out. No, it was those who felt desperate, who knew they had no faith, who felt rejected by both God and their community: it was those who turned to Jesus in true open-heartedness and poverty of spirit.

We have already met the woman in Luke 7 so despised by others and who despised herself because of her life as a prostitute. Yet Jesus accepted her and loved her without wanting anything from her. This unexpected acceptance shook her so deeply that she could not speak, but could only wash Jesus' feet with her tears and dry them with her hair. Faith is born in moments like this.

In moments like this the eternal enters our experience and we are held by its power. This is faith. Sometimes it comes only after our last defense has been broken.

What such experiences have in common is exposure to a different consciousness. It is the consciousness of Absolute Goodness in the form of infinite love. We may call it the "Christ consciousness," since those who came to Jesus for help felt this love transmitted through his presence. Experiencing this consciousness is our key to finding faith if we have been lacking in faith.

If we are not familiar with this consciousness, how can we come to know it? We can look for examples of it, like the above, and meditate on them until we understand them not just with the mind but with the heart. We can wonder what that woman must have felt in Jesus' presence, and perhaps catch some of the mystery of the infinite love people felt when they came to him for healing. And, perhaps most importantly, we can imitate this love ourselves.

The Bible tells us we can do it: "Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 2:5). We too can be channels for the Christ consciousness. We may not do it perfectly, but that is not expected of us. "The Imitation of Christ," not "The Duplication of Christ," is the title of a great spiritual classic. We can imitate, however imperfectly, the love we sense through the consciousness of Christ, until it starts to become real to us.

Whenever we are kind and loving in act or in deed, with no expectation of a return but only with awareness of the other's individual circumstances and needs, we are bringing to that person the Christ consciousness. In so doing we contribute not only to that person's healing but also to our own. Note the emphasis on awareness: this is not an exercise for do-gooders. Many people do good for selfish reasons, but if our true motivation is the awareness of the individuality of others, we cannot be selfish. Without this awareness, even good intentions can have harmful consequences.

As our awareness grows, we will see people everywhere searching for this love - even if they seem to reject it. I did my internship in music therapy at a hospital for people with neurological disabilities. One patient in my group, Lucille, age 60, was recovering from a stroke. She was angry, and antagonized the other members of the group. "There is not enough love in this hospital!" she would announce, with audible bitterness. She lectured others about their lack of love, which did not inspire them to become more loving. She attacked me too, letting me know quite clearly that she did not trust me and did not like the way I ran the group.

One day on my way to the group I heard a loud crash. I rushed into the meeting room and found Lucille sprawled on the floor. She did not like the position of her chair, but did not trust others enough to ask for help to change it. So she tried to move the chair herself, even though she could hardly walk. She slipped and banged her head hard on the floor. Fortunately the nurses were able to revive her. She had to be taken to another hospital for treatment, and returned to our group two weeks later.

Even though Lucille was still as ornery as ever, the group members welcomed her back warmly. One of them faced her and said, "You know, there's a lot of love in this group." This time Lucille heard it. She allowed the Christ consciousness to enter her.

On the last day of my internship Lucille was too sick to come to group. I went to her bedside to say good-bye and gave her a copy of the group songbook, in which I had written a personal note. She looked up at me and said, "You really do love me."

That was all she really wanted.

The Christ consciousness is always present, but may seem invisible. We can learn to detect openings for it. Whenever it is asked for, it has an opening. And it is asked for much more often than we realize. Anger often masks a plea for the Christ consciousness, as in the case of Lucille. Learning to see the need, to respond not in kind but with this special consciousness, which is loving awareness, can transform not only the situation but ourselves as well.

When we are in need of faith, when our experience seems to tell us there is no God, this will be our greatest resource. As we contemplate examples of the Christ consciousness - in the Gospels, in our own experience, in the experiences of others - it becomes increasingly a part of us. Then when stress and suffering threaten to break us down, instead of regressing back to the fears of childhood we can fall into the Christ consciousness, which replaces those memories as our refuge in times of crisis.

We can approach this consciousness by always asking, What would it feel like to be in the presence of Christ? What did those people feel, who actually were in Christ's presence? When else have we known such moments? If we are assaulted by self-doubt or self-hatred, we can reverse our position by asking, How does Christ consciousness see us? How would we see someone who has been through what we've been through, if we practiced this consciousness ourselves? Our responses to these questions must come not just from the mind but from the heart. Only then can genuine faith take root in us.

The Christ consciousness, infinite loving awareness, is Jesus' answer to Nicodemus. Through the presence of this consciousness we can become a new creation. We can be born anew. We can discover faith.