A woman afflicted with a bent back, who, for 18 years looked only at the ground, is healed by Jesus on the Sabbath Day. On this day of days, the holy of holies, she experiences a foretaste of resurrection. And she didn't even ask - she just happened to be near Jesus at the right time. Jesus faced the sacred moment: so did the woman.

This causes controversy of course. But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, "There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day."

But the Lord answered him and said, "You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?" Luke 13:14-16

If it were me, I'd accept healing any day - but healing on the Sabbath day brings home even more profoundly the hope of resurrection, transformation, peace, fulfillment.

For this week's meditation process, I went first to one of my favorite and continually inspiring books, Abraham Heschel's The Sabbath (Meditation One). I chose a prayer of Augustine's for healing in body and soul (Meditation Two). Niceta urges the church to seek Christ for healing (Meditation Three).

It occurs to me for the first time that praying in the sphere of Christ is like praying in the sphere of the Sabbath. But then, Jesus did say, "I am the resurrection..." Let us offer one another prayers for insight, healing, and hope, and let us LIVE sabbath graces in a troubled, difficult world as a sign of God's reign.

Standing up straight,
-Suzanne

O what their joy and their glory must be
those endless Sabbaths the blessed ones see;
crown for the valiant, to weary ones rest:
God shall be all, and in all ever blest.

Truly, “Jerusalem” name we that shore,
city of peace that brings joy ever more;
wish and fulfillment are not severed there,
nor do things prayed for come short of the prayer.

There, where no troubles distraction can bring,
we the sweet anthems of Zion shall sing;
while for thy grace, Lord, their voices of praise
thy blessed people eternally raise.

Now, in the meantwhile, with hearts raised on high,
we for that country must yearn and must sigh,
seeking Jerusalem, dear native land,
through our long exile on Babylon's strand.

Low before him with our praises we fall,
of whom, and in whom, and through whom are all;
of whom the Father; and in whom, the Son;
through whom, the Spirit, with them ever One.

-Peter Abelard 1079-1142
trans. John Mason Neale 1818-1866

The Word became flesh to communicate to us human beings caught in the mud, the pain, the fears and the brokenness of existence, the life, the joy, the communion, the ecstatic gift of love that is the source of all love and life and unity in our universe and that is the very life of God.

-Jean Vanier, b.1928

Of COURSE Jesus healed on the Sabbath! The Sabbath is the sphere of heaven hovering, resting over earth, merging with earth, tantalizing us with the hope of completion and healing, justice and mercy and beauty and rest. Jesus, the Word made flesh, joined heaven to earth and earth to heaven, as we say in the Christmas blessing. And heaven, of course, not as a place in the sky (do I even have to say this?) but a quality, an influence, a consciousness, a beauty at the heart of the unfolding universe and in the dark unknown of the soul.

But then I got thinking. What makes human beings even conceive of the possibility of a heaven, Nirvana, Valhalla, Elysium, Paradise, or that vague euphemism whispered in funeral parlors, “a better place” ? Why is the the human imagination predisposed to the idea of any sort of life after death? Maybe we sense eternal consciousness passing through us within time. So our ideas of an afterlife come from an intuition of that part of us that, for lack of a better word, borrows us for self-revelation. When we “bliss out” we “lose ourselves” to eternity, although we may “return” in a flash. These are words we use to describe the indescribable. People who have mystical experience confess that the Reality of connecting nothingness or everythingness makes ordinary life seem “fake.” Similarly, I've interviewed plenty of people who revived after experiencing "clinical death" who fear death no more. (They would pass on the pain part, but death itself is anything but fearful.)

Here's a thought experiment: imagine that sentient beings participate in co-creating heaven through our evolving consciousness. Heaven unfolds and evolves as we do - with battles between good and evil taking place on the heavenly planes (as in the vision of John the Divine) as well as on earth. Heaven is what our evolving consciousness will make it - characterized by universal compassion or strident exclusivity. We influence the sphere of becoming.

Unfortunately, if the heaven we're creating is anything like the heaven we are destroying - this magnificent, beautiful, biodiverse, teeming earth - heaven won't be much different from the consequences of our suicidal denials against what we already see creeping, no, tumbling from the edges of nature.

That Jesus healed on the Sabbath is the very sign we're looking for. Not because he is a promise of some future “better place” we'll deserve when we die. But because he calls us to act beyond convention, as if the very soul of heaven is at stake - not just for ourselves but for all being. A Dreamer's dream we dream and love and sacrifice and die for.

Heaven to earth and earth to heaven.