The Wonderment

Responsibility, Penance, and Blessings

The reality of being human is that we will make mistakes, break vows, and hurt one another, sometimes intentionally and rather often unintentionally. We can be jealous. We can misread, misunderstand and disbelieve one another. We can lose trust and faith in each other and in ourselves. Basically, any way we can ruin relationship with the Holy, we can ruin relationship with each other and with ourselves. We are, after all, obligatorily gregarious (meaning relational) primates, so it isn’t surprising that how we relate absorbs a great deal of our spiritual practice lives and our creative expression. Relating to one another is an essential part of what it means to be human, which is why isolation is such a horrific punishment, depriving us of what our bodies, minds, and hearts need for well-being. Part of how we develop a sense of right and wrong is that sense of separation or isolation from the flow of life’s basic necessities, including loving care, that we require to thrive. Indeed, we need one another so much, we will cling to and endure abusive relationships rather than be alone, apart, or threatened with further isolation, even as abusive relationships typically isolate us from others not in the abusive system. The first days of freedom from abusive situations and learning to be ourselves by ourselves are fairly terrifying and impossible if there aren't other relationships that allow us some connective security net, from friends, family, spiritual community, and medical support. 

 

This section of Numbers recognizes that in living as free people we can and are capable of hurting one another intentionally or unintentionally. Doing so is breaking faith with the Holy, for one of the ways we live faithfully with the Holy is to love and care for one another (Num.5:6).  The Priestly writer carries on what it means to break faith with the Holy through breaking faith with our life pledged partners, betraying each other, or being jealous and misbelieving. This includes a ritual test of a woman’s faithfulness (the water of bitterness and the meal offering of jealousy), perhaps, we might conclude in the Ancient Near East, some men struggled to trust women’s words and needed verification from the Holy that she was speaking truth or falsehood. The terms of observing the nazirite vow (a vow of penance) are described, and conditions of violating the vow and completing it laid down. In other words, Numbers is describing two of the most common ways we can hurt one another relationally and how to begin the ritual process of making amends. What ritual processes of making amends do you observe? How many times do you apologize? What forms of accepting guilt to do you observe? How are these part of communal spiritual ritual life? 

 

Numbers 6:2-27 specifically concludes this section of repairing relationship with the ritual blessing upon the people, confirming the Holy’s covenant with the people. That is, once penance is done and relational repair pursued, blessings can follow. Again, how we are to be blessed by the Holy says something also about how we might offer one another blessing. How do we bless and protect one another? How do we deal kindly and graciously with each other, especially after making apology and seeking to make amends? How do we show one another that our relationships are well and offer one another peace? What do we pursue individually and what do we do in our spiritual communities to nurture blessed relationships with one another, and thus, also with the Holy?

 

Breaking relationship can create something like a mini-exile in our lives, isolating us from the best parts of relating with one another and what we cherish about each other. Let us remember: we need one another to be fully, wholly ourselves. We need one another to show up the best each of us can, with the love, presence, compassion, generosity, gratitude, wonder, and joy all of us require to thrive. Meaningful relationships are more than transactions for one party or both’s benefit. Meaningful relationships can ask us to sacrifice at times and also means sometimes we can call on someone else’s sacrifice for us, but without a balance column approach to who gives more or less. Meaningful relationships value us in our differing strengths and weaknesses, our differing gifts and flaws, our differing learning edges and wisdom to offer. Meaningful relationships can protect us and give us space to fly; comfort us and challenge us to grow; delight us and strain us at times as we seek one another again in love.  

 

Practices of turning and repentance, owning our responsibility and shouldering the consequences is part of living an adult life faithfully. Why faithfully? Because one of the biggest ways we encounter the Holy every day is through our relationships with one another, and so how we treat each other matters greatly. Do we cultivate lives of greater love, trust, and responsibility? Or do we break one relationship after another, undermining our sense of one another as sacred and beloved of the Holy, and ultimately, undermining our sense of self as lovable or loved? 

 

I’m certainly not calling for the tests of the meal of jealousy or the water of bitterness. I find that particular trial one that can be too easily interpreted for human cruelty to come out on top. Yet how and that we take responsibility for our choices, vows, and relationships matters. What do we do when “sorry” isn’t enough or is just the beginning or turning and tending one another with care? As free people who are agents in and of our own lives, we can mess up mightily. As free people who are agents in and of our own lives, we need practices of relational repair and tending. We can bless one another in a myriad of ways. One of those ways we can bless ourselves and each other is when we tend how we’ve cursed each other with bad behaviors including distrust and betrayal. Other primates have their processes of relational repair; we need ours too, individually and socially, spiritually and communally. How do we live faithfully? Love the Holy, live humbly and love one another at least as much as we love ourselves. No one can rescue us from responsibility. That’s on us as free people.

 

Our Ancestral Houses

This week we begin reflecting on the Book of Numbers, with Numbers 1:1-4:20. This first section of Numbers belongs to the Priestly writing tradition and concerns itself with the people’s first days after slavery. How do we organize ourselves to direct our lives in relationship to the Holy and not in relationship to overseers and Pharaoh? In slavery, people are dehumanized, having their names, families, traditions, and authority to choose removed systematically. Under authoritarianism, only some names, families, traditions and authority are elevated and everyone else’s is subsumed in service to those few. In freedom, we must learn what it is to be fully human and agents in our lives, lest we fall into the patterns of unfreedom we know, authoritarianism or slavery. As one of the first acts of freedom, the Israelites conduct a census of all the men age twenty and older, and of the households, dividing themselves once again into ancestral houses. One of the first things they do is reconnect with their histories and their families and find out who is actually present. Following the Holocaust and other genocides or mass relocations of people, folks sought out their families to see who was left, and to reconnect to their history and traditions. 

 

Part of our whole selves is rooted in knowing whose we are. Yes, we belong to the Holy in sacred covenant, and there’s also this whole familial history to name and connect to. We may repudiate parts or all of that familial history, depending on how abusive, rejecting, or outright awful that history and those folks were (as in, it is more settling for many to claim ancestry from Salem’s accused witches than from Salem’s witch persecutors, when the realities of intermarriages mean those folks are often in the same family tree). But knowing where we come from is part of naming who we are and choosing how we move forward. To know we were adopted by people who risked loving and cherishing us very much may we part of our history, and that may in turn influence how we choose to love and cherish and make family also. To know other gay and transgender or Two-Spirit family members may make it much easier for us and our families when it turns out we are also; there is a story of being present and choices ahead in creating families of love and acceptance. And so, the Israelites regroup into their ancestral houses, numbering individual men, as in the Priestly source’s historical framework, that’s who counts. That’s one way to name our ancestral houses. May we cherish the multitude of ways we can name those houses (matrilineally and adoptive or chosen or, what S. Bear Bergman in Blood, Marriage, Wine & Glitterbeautifully calls glitter are some other choices).

 

Protecting ourselves is also an urgent concern following trauma. Here are the people in the wilderness and there is, as we’re told repeatedly here, lots of folks. That large a group of displaced people is going to be a target for violence and generate fear wherever they go, because where will they land? What does it mean for their new homeland? Consider just how much agitation there is around the world about migration today. As millions of people are displaced by conflicts and resource failures, by climate change driving economic and political change, how does the rest of the world respond to these mass migrations? Fear has certainly become a rallying point for many reactionary and authoritarian governments, amplifying folks’ sense of not knowing what it means to practice radical hospitality and make way and welcome for these folks desperately seeking a place to make home again. While I wish we would respond with compassion and understanding instead and stretch into radical hospitality, rising fear tends to develop into increased hostility and violence (both of which has been recorded) and the resulting concerns of masses of migrants in defending and protecting themselves. Unfortunately, this fearfulness is part of why the ancient Israelites have to organize themselves to protect their people and prevent them from being dragged back into slavery or slaughtered from fear and hate.

 

Part of choosing our whole selves is establishing our spiritual practices as adults. So too, the newly freed people are figuring out how to worship the Holy, how to literally make space for the Holy (see Leviticus as well) so they can always travel with the Holy, and who is responsible in the community for that space and keeping and teaching the spiritual practices and beliefs. The newly freed people are reconstructing their relationship with the Holy through what they understand Moses and Aaron bringing them for guidance. As we will read further along in Numbers and have already read elsewhere in Exodus and Leviticus, those pursuits don’t always go so well. Part of being free to choose means sometimes we choose badly and then bear those consequences. Freedom’s responsibilities challenge us to keep learning, to study, to practice, to try, to turn again and again, connecting in part to our history and traditions (whether we are upholding or changing them), and seeking to understand how to live faithfully as free people.

 

In living faithfully as free people, this first portion of Numbers invites us to know our ancestral houses, to recognize that each individual matters (ok, each man over age 20 does, but I’ll extend that today to each individual), and that our gifts are necessary working together to care for one another and to cultivate care and reverence in our relationship with the Holy. Today, I give thanks for those who resisted and persisted in the Stonewall Rebellion and beyond, who taught the world that each of us matters as we are and state intimidation to abandon ourselves and each other is to be resisted. I give thanks for all those who insisted that love is love and consenting adults should be free to choose. These are my people, also loved by the Holy, free to choose, for better or for worse. Some folk still use sexuality and gender identity to intimidate and encourage fear and hate, rejection and violence. But we’re called to something different, to create refuge and welcome for one another, to create more love and compassion in this world. May we remember that in our day-to-day lives. May we remember that as we see more migrants forced into seeking new homes. May we remember we are free to choose now, and we don’t have to choose fear. May we remember fear and hate are tools of enslavement, authoritarianism, and reactivity. May we remember each and all of us matter and are needed, here and now, for this world to be saved, to be full of joy, and to be full of free folk discovering how to be free people together.