CarSeatHeadrest225
patreon
Biblical Wanderings: Mark 8:14-19
🕑 Added 2024-02-26 17:08:11 +0000 UTCThey had forgotten to bring bread with them, and they had only one loaf on the boat. And he was instructing them, saying, “watch out - take heed of the leaven of the Pharisees, and the leaven of Herod.” And they were saying to one another, “it’s because we have no bread.” Perceiving this, he said to them, “Why do you think it’s because you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive or understand? Is your heart hardened? Having eyes, do you not see? Having ears, do you not hear? And do you not remember? When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many basketfuls of fragments did you take away?” “Twelve,” they said.
Repeating what I said in an earlier week: a parable is like a painting - there is no simple meaning. It’s not a popsicle stick with a question on one end and an answer on the other. The common approach is to split things into “literal” and “metaphorical” meaning, discard the literal and say, “here’s the metaphor. But if you don’t sit with the literal meaning first, you don’t actually get any of it. A metaphor isn’t something separate from the literal thing. It’s like an additional resonance that rises up out of the thing.
So let’s start by sitting with leaven. Let me tell you what wikipedia tells me about leaven. Leaven, or yeast, is a culture. It’s a collection of single-celled organisms - living beings. When you combine leaven with flour, these organisms consume the sugar in the flour and create carbon dioxide bubbles. These bubbles puff up the bread, making it lighter, and by the gods of Wikipedia’s standards, “tastier”. Bread without leaven is flat, like a tortilla or corn chip.
I wanna linger on that word “culture” for a moment, because a lot of us don’t use leaven very often, but we’re all very used to culture. We, too, are organisms that ping-pong about, generating a whirlwind energy and building stuff up. That’s “culture”. So you can see this delicate interplay between meanings in a parable.
Unleavened bread has a big ritual significance in Jewish culture. Making bread without that yeast culture was a symbolic act that represented living a life outside of the empire, outside of mainstream culture. Away from Egypt, away from Babylon, away from these domineering forces of conquest. Matza is Jewish flatbread, and it’s a big part of Passover, which will be relevant later in the story.
So when Jesus says, “take heed of the leaven of the Pharisees and of Herod,” it’s a bit subversive, because he’s pointing the finger at Jewish culture and saying, “that’s culture too”. That’s also leaven - that’s also people consuming one thing and spitting out another. This is where we start to stumble upon the larger image. What are these people receiving? It’s divine wisdom, divine inspiration. What do they spit out? Something lesser. This is an eternal problem for every religious tradition: how do you communicate to others something beyond words? In Zen, they refer to this problem as “a finger pointing at the moon”. You see the moon. You want other people to see the moon. So you start pointing at the moon. Suddenly, everyone is talking about your finger instead! They’re looking at you, not at what you’re looking at. This is how human culture works.
And yet no one can escape human culture. Even if you go live alone on a mountaintop, you’re still surrounded by your own voices. I think it’s significant that Jesus doesn’t say, “don’t eat the bread of the Pharisees.” He says, “take heed - beware”. Everyone needs to eat. Just be mindful of what you are eating. It’s like eating a muffin with nuts in it, and you’re allergic to nuts. Eat around the nuts, pull the nuts out - don’t wolf it down. Everyone lives in culture. But you don’t have to receive it and amplify it mindlessly. When a chimp reaches a muddy stream, it digs a hole close to the riverbank and waits for the hole to fill up with water. When water comes into the hole, it’s filtered - that earth between the river and the hole filters out the muck, so the chimp can drink. It’s better to sit near culture and dig a hole of your own than to drink directly from the stream.
How do we do that? How do we build up that filter? Jesus tells us in three questions: “Do you have eyes and not see? Ears and not hear? Don’t you remember?” See. Hear. Remember. My favorite passage of the bible comes near the end of Deutoronomy, after a long list of arcane rules:
“Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. It is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask, “Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?” Nor is it beyond the sea, so that you have to ask, “Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?” No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it.” (Deut 30:11-14)
Divine wisdom isn’t an unreachable quest. It’s not high up in the sky or across a distant sea. It’s inside of you, already there in your mouth and heart. You’re constantly receiving and harboring it. See, hear, remember. When we enter into culture, these three things become our enemies. My eyes are showing me a fuzzy constellation of shimmering dots, and reflections and smears on my glasses, but what I need to be seeing is the message I’m responding to on my laptop. So, away with seeing! My ears are hearing the ticking of my heating unit when I’m supposed to be listening to what someone is saying - away with hearing! I’m remembering a nightmare I had last night instead of thinking about my work - away with memory! We need to forgive these fugitives of their anti-social crimes and restore them in our lives. Otherwise, we never stop chasing something on the outside that’s really on the inside - never stop looking for someone who’s going to climb into heaven or sail across the seas to give us what we already have.
See. Hear. Remember. Savor your experiences. Value them. Recognize what goes on inside of yourself. That will help you develop a filter, so that every new thing that pops up doesn’t drag you along with it. Those are just carbon dioxide bubbles drifting by. Don’t get caught up in it - recalibrate. What’s in front of your eyes? What’s coming into your ears? What’s that taste on your mouth? What memory is sitting within you?
Remember. It’s like the start of a story. You’re walking around in your normal life, and some mysterious stranger comes up and says to you: “Don’t you remember?” And then you unlock some memory deep in your past - oh yeah, I was fated to this fate. I was born for epic adventures. My greatness has been foretold. It’s a deeper, richer story that swallows up the shallow one you were consumed with. St Ignatius started out as a soldier. Then he got wounded by a cannonball, and had to hole up in bed for months. The only thing he had to entertain himself with were two books - a book of chivalrous fairy-tale adventures, and a book of the lives of the saints. Eventually, he became entirely consumed by the book of the lives of the saints, because their story was so much more exciting than the adventure book. It was that deeper excitement that you get when something is really true. Walking the spiritual path doesn’t mean giving up all your fantasies - it means standing alongside them and digging deeper, finding out where they come from. You become unmeshed from smaller goals - objectives of culture. A large automobile, a beautiful house and a beautiful wife. This is the leaven in the bread. These are fingers pointing at the moon. See, and hear, and remember, and you find the moon instead.
Comments
Sam Bradley
We can learn a lot from the natural world, and it’s inherent cycles. As humans, our adoption of culture as dogma has done nothing but hurt us. It’s pulled us outside of the influence of the divine. We continue to drink from these muddy streams, when solutions are simple. I have a lot of fascination with the divine and the subconscious, and how it conveys itself through the art people create. Because while a lot of modern media is quite flat, and un-inspired - the stuff that really sticks usually has a divine message wrapped within it. I think a lot about Dune, The Dark Crystal, the Labyrinth, Space Odyssey, The Last Unicorn, Twin Peaks, the Alien movies. A lot of these more fantastical stories feel a lot more honest to me. Some people don’t take the time to dig deeper into what they’re consuming, these examples are outliers beloved by the people who resonate with them. I think when creating art, we have to be mindful of what we pull inspiration from. If it’s not divinely inspired, is it honest? Generally not. There ought to be a shift in the media being produced, it’s coming. There is a lot of karmic retribution going on in the media industry right now. David Lynch dying, and Los Angeles burning is just a sign of the times. There’s a shifting of the tides, and there’s going to be a large change in the way people view American media. People are going to start digging their own holes by the water, I know I have!
Raíssa Leão
This reminds me of the way some more aggressive preachers and pastors talk about ‘worldly ventures’. I was raised to believe anything ‘worldly’ is necessarily separate from the divine and, ultimately, the very notion drove me away from my belief in Jesus as savior. It’s funny, I’ve only recently, as of last year to be precise – I’ve only recently been developing a close, intimate relationship to God and, truthfully, Will: only through your words was I able to remember how much I missed God and Jesus’ teachings. How much I missed spiritual guidance because I was too sad about no being able to live ‘worldly’ with divine intentions & beliefs. I don’t know if I’m making any sense. But this passage made me understand what Jesus really wants from us when he talks about ‘worldly’ influences: to filter. To find deeper meaning. To reject superficiality, to reject tradition for the sake of tradition, to reject religious dogmas for the sake of it. To fully understand and to hear, see and remember deeply. This new interpretation makes me feel static. I couldn’t thank you enough, Will, for guiding my way to ultimate guidance.
Luka Buchanan
this was a particularly insightful and beautiful session, thank you :’) thinking about yeast…
Luka Buchanan
it’s funny you share this, because i’m reading Devotions at the moment (a big collection of Oliver’s work), and it is a wonderful supplement to these biblical wanderings (or vice versa). i think last time i commented a poem of hers that really resonated with me called Praying that reminded me of the biblical topic. i’m about halfway through Devotions - it’s a hefty collection to be sure - and it is just wonderful, so so delightful, navigates with profound grace the messiness of humanness; of culture, and the divine, the sense of Spirit. it is just so grounding and life-affirming and spirituality-affirming. Wild Geese is the first poem of Oliver’s i ever read and it’s such a quintessential reminder… i am constantly repeating to myself “YOU DO NOT HAVE TO WALK ON YOUR KNEES FOR A HUNDRED MILES THROUGH THE DESERT REPENTING!!!!!!!”
damian
it's a big coincidence that today's study approaches how human culture makes you aim for acceptance in lots of different ways because i was talking about this with a friend of mine yesterday; your music helped me come to terms with my sexuality a few years ago... i developed a unique relationship with your lyrics that changed through the years and as time passes, they resonate more and more with my life... (i like to joke with my closer friends that i understand your lyrics in a brazilian-trans-gayish way.) thanks to that, i learned to like myself. i stopped feeling like i need to change my personality to fit in what people expect of me, i am who i am and that's cool. tl;dr your music made me stop wanting to be accepted as someone who i'm not... while being a gay man. does that make sense? i'm writing this on the bus heading home and it's 11 p.m. and i'm really tired lol but hear you talking about this stuff right after i spent last night thinking about it really got me (in a good way!) also i would like to share that my relationship with your music helped me in my decision of pursuing my dreams of being a language major (as i mentioned in a comment another week) :) now, a silly thing... i left a little laugh out when you started listing the things you were seeing, hearing and thinking and how we constantly try to suppress these actions in order to "function properly" (at least that's how i got it...?) because i was doing exactly the same thing while listening to the audiobook lol. i sat next to the bus engine and i couldn't listen to your voice clearly because of the noises. i started to get lost in the landscape of são paulo's downtown (as the architecture photographer i am) and immediately after i noticed i was getting distracted i started to think "wait... i can't keep looking through the window... i need to focus on what he's saying..." but why not trying to do both? and so i did. on my way to classes earlier today i listened to your wanderings while appreciating the view from inside the bus and i can say it made me feel very human in my own, personal way. have a lovely week, will! sorry for the long comment, i got a little carried away.
gumby
what you said about culture reminds me of the last verse of the mary oliver poem “wild geese” “whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting over and over announcing your place in the family of things.” it took me a long time to understand what she meant, and an even longer time for those words to resonate.
Greylyn Morningstar
This one made me think of a passage from The Raft Is Not the Shore: Conversations Toward a Buddhist-Christian Awareness. It's a beautiful dialog between Thich Nhat Hanh and Daniel Berrigan. In the first chapter they discuss memory, and Nhat Hanh says: "In French they have the word 'recueillement' to describe the attitude of someone trying to be himself, not to be dispersed, one member of the body here, another there. One tries to recover, to be once more in good shape, to become whole again. And I think that is the beginning of awakening. People speak about sudden enlightenment.... The distance separating forgetfulness, ignorance, and enlightenment-- that distance is short; it is so short that it is no distance at all. One may be ignorant now but he can be enlightened in the next second. The recovering of oneself can be realized in just one portion of one second. And to be aware of who we are, what we are, what we are doing, what we are thinking, seems to be a very easy thing to do-- and yet it is the most important thing: 'se recueillir'-- the starting point of the salvation of oneself."
Enoch
These are so nice to listen to, very insightful. It’s cool when you go off the script as well and share more personal stuff, which makes it easier to relate to. I’m surprised that I’ve been looking forward to and enjoying these readings when I always thought I’d swear off religion, because in my mind they’ve always been bad and people have been hateful.
damian
gonna listen on my way to classes later today! i'll be back to leave my thoughts on it :D
duke
I really like what you said about the metaphor building off of the literal meaning. I think, especially when writing, we focus too much on metaphors and allusions and making things have more meaning than they really need to, sometimes the simplest answer is right in front of us. I’ve always really wondered about unleavened vs. leavened bread and the significance, so I did enjoy you going into that. The dive into human culture and the similarities as to what it was and what it is today was really fascinating. The knowledge that “no human can escape human culture” really really hits, as someone who has wanted to do so before. It’s just so ingrained in who you are as a person, and maybe human culture is what really makes us human in the first place, even with how very negative it is. Maybe I’m just saying things, I very rarely look back over these paragraphs honestly. Recently I’ve found myself struggling with the act of escapism from reality, the mantra you mentioned will hopefully help me get out of that cycle. With so many options and things that are available to just “escape” for a while, it’s very tempting. However, this then throws you into a cycle of not actively living, and more passively staying alive. I struggle to be able to sit and just remember things, but it would be much worse to forget. I really really like the way you phrased “putting yourself into a package that’s more consumable for people”. Spending your whole life attempting to be more digestible for people is a serious struggle, especially being part of many disliked communities, and just feeling so lost. I like to think I’ve improved from the person stuck in a box I was a few years ago, but there’s only one way to figure that out. I like the idea of sitting along your fantasies, not running from them. For now I suppose I’ll just be seeing, hearing, and remembering, and looking for the moon. Sorry this one’s a bit long, and hello to the folks who reached out.
alex
yippeeeee
duke
frick yeah bible time
