Wake Up a-little Suzy

The rainy Monday that started the week, ended with the rays of the sun bursting through. Earlier in the day, I met with a friend and we exchanged energy sessions. I always enjoy my time spent with this friend and usually leave with renewed vigor and clarity.

When it was her turn for table time I barely began when the song, "Wake Up a-little Suzy" started playing in my mind and not very quiet. Smiling, I relay what I'm hearing. She informed me that her middle name is Sue and it was also that of her mothers who transitioned a number of years ago. The pictures in my mind's eye that followed during the session were that of a lock and then a locket. I asked her if someone had given her a locket and she said, "Yes, her Great Grandmother gave her one many years ago." She had it inscribed with the name, "Peach Blossom" on it as it was her nickname for her. She told me later that inside the locket contained a mustard seed. When I thought of her Great Grandmother the words, "Symphony of Love" streamed through. This energy brought tears to my eyes, as it flowed through my energy channels.

My sessions sometimes are like playing clue. Often random pictures are shown which make little sense to me at the time. One of the funniest ones today was the picture of licorice. Later we went for lunch and my friend ate cheese and drank a glass of wine, thus she said her nose was stuffing up. I guess the combination of foods do that to her. Later on in the evening I looked up licorice in one of my dream books and it says, "Licorice - Egyptian memory; for circulation; for the nostrils." Looks like we were also given a remedy for the upcoming physical symptom she was to experience.

While thumbing through the dream book I opened to the page, "Peach Blossom" and it said these words meant "A symbol of a promise of new and pure events." Tonight I was searching for meanings of the mustard seed and ran across this following article. Although the usual interpretation is that of having faith and moving mountains, this one written by Fr. Thomas Keating felt more aligned for me.

My thought....When we unlock the locket (our heart and mind) to the grace of the mustard seed sown, we will know and live each ordinary day as the Kingdom of God, due to a change in our attitude and perception on reality, without having to wait for an apocalypse or someone to deliver us from our difficulties, as Fr. Thomas writes.

On one web site as I looked at a picture of a peach blossom, it also said that it was of China origin and a member of the rose family. The Peach Blossom is always welcomed in my garden. :-)

The Kingdom of God is Like . . .
By Fr. Thomas Keating

The Parable of the Mustard Seed

He said therefore, "What is the kingdom of God like? And to what shall I compare it? It is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in the garden; it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches." (Luke 13:18-19)

The thrust of the parables is to subvert the distorted myths in which people live their lives. To understand what we mean by "living in a myth" just think of a couple of our own contemporary myths. Take the myth of "the All American Boy," for example. This is the young man who gets straight A's in college and graduate school, climbs the executive ladder, and perhaps becomes the head of a multinational. Or the "American Dream:" two cars in every garage, vacations in Florida, houses in Spain, and so forth. On a more serious level, the American dream has been a vision of America's invincibility, of its absolute entitlement in the eyes of God.

A myth is often what holds people's lives together. It is an attempt to resolve the tensions of everyday life by promising an idealized future in which one will be rescued from all the problems of ordinary life. When a myth begins to falter, great leaders may try to find ways to recapture the glory of earlier days, like John F. Kennedy's effort to rekindle the American dream by sending a man to the moon. American astronauts did go to the moon, but meanwhile the Vietnam war devastated the prestige of American invincibility and with it the American dream.

For the Israelites of Jesus' time, the tension between everyday reality and a mythical vision of Israel as God's chosen people was felt with particular urgency. From the heyday of national power and prestige during the reigns of King David and King Solomon, Israel had been on a downhill slide for several centuries, its kingdom conquered and divided several times over. If one lives in occupied territories, as the Israelites of Jesus' time did, the question naturally arises, "Is this ghastly oppression by the Romans a punishment from God, or is our suffering just part of the human condition?" In the particular myth in which the people of first-century Israel were living, the kingdom of God had specific connotations of power, triumph, holiness, and goodness. The kingdom, when it came, would introduce a glorious new age of universal peace, with God's chosen people at the head of the nations.

The cultural symbol for this myth was the great cedar of Lebanon. Cedars of Lebanon were comparable to the huge redwood trees of California. They grew straight up for two or three hundred feet or more. Every kind of bird could enjoy their shade. This image was deeply embedded in the cultural conditioning of the Jewish people. The kingdom of God as a nation would be the greatest of all nations just as the great cedar of Lebanon was the greatest of all trees.

Instead, Jesus proposed this parable, "What is the kingdom of God really like? It is like a mustard seed"--proverbially the smallest and most insignificant of all seeds--"that someone took and sowed in his garden." for an alert hearer of Jesus' day, the detail about the garden would be a tip-off. In the Jewish view of the world, order was identified with holiness and disorder with uncleanness. Hence there were very strict rules about what could be planted in a household garden. The rabbinical law of diverse kinds ruled that one could not mix certain plants in the same garden. A mustard plant was forbidden in a household garden because it was fast spreading and would tend to invade the veggies. In stating that this man planted a mustard seed in his garden, the hearers are alerted to the fact that he was doing something illegal. An unclean image thus becomes the starting point for Jesus' vision of the kingdom of God in this parable.

If the starting point is an unclean image, the rest of the parable becomes even more perplexing. What do we know about a mustard seed, botanically speaking: it is a common, fast-spreading plant, which grows to about four feet in height. It puts out a few branches, and with some stretch of the imagination, birds might build a few down-at-the-heel nests in its shade.

Steeped in their cultural images of the great cedar of Lebanon, the hearers would be expecting the mustard seed, Jesus' symbol of the kingdom, to grow into a mighty apocalyptic tree. Jesus' point is exactly the opposite. It just becomes a bush. Thus the image of the kingdom of God as a towering cedar of Lebanon is explicitly ridiculed. According to Jesus, the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, which some man illegally planted in his garden. It became a shrub and a few birds nested in its modest branches. That's all. The parable subverts all the grandiose ideas about what the kingdom is going to be like when it finally arrives.

One of the most firmly held Israelite expectations was that the kingdom of God would manifest the final triumph of God in history. Its arrival, heralded by the long-awaited Messiah, would rescue Israel from its miserable subservience to the Roman Empire. It was a future kingdom, not one in the here-and-now. Jesus' parable implies that if we accept the God of everyday life, we can find God in everyday life. We do not have to wait for an apocalyptic deliverance. We do not have to wait for a grandiose liberation. The kingdom is available right now.

The parables, according to Scott, are like handles on the mystery of the kingdom, pointers suggesting both what it is and what it is not. We cannot fully understand the kingdom because it is a mystery that transcends any possibility of being contained in a concept. But by rotating the wisdom of Jesus' sayings in our mind's eye and with the help of the parables, we can at least get a glimpse of it.

A parable points to something we only gradually come to know as we absorb the teaching of Jesus. In this parable he intimates that God is not necessarily going to intervene in this world for the triumph of the just. He may not intervene in an apocalyptic manner to deliver Israel or bring about justice and peace. He has entrusted the latter to us. We are not to wait around for an apocalyptic intervention to do the job.

If we lead a holy life--as opposed to a merely respectable one--we are likely to lose most of our friends and relatives. We might get one or two of them to follow our example, but it is like the mustard seed. We may get a modest result, but it is not in the nature of cedar of Lebanon. All we are likely to get is an inconspicuous shrub of which there are plenty of others all around in great variety. The mustard seed is just one step ahead of being an ordinary weed.

How are we to understand this deliberate use by Jesus of the unclean and insignificant as images of his kingdom? It suggests that God's greatest works are not done on a grandiose level. Not in cathedrals, big buildings, or large mausoleums. Cathedrals can become museums rather than sources of inspiration for the Christian community. The kingdom is in everyday life with its ups and downs, and above all, in is insignificance. Such is where most people actually live their lives. The kingdom is thus readily accessible to everybody.

The parable affirms that grace is like a mustard seed sown in us, the smallest of all seeds. It is growing, but it is not going to turn us into a cedar of Lebanon. We will be doing well if we become a modest shrub.

So hard was it for people of Jesus' time to get over their idea of the kingdom of God as a triumphant institution that even the evangelists tried to change it into something great anyway. In other words, the myth recaptured the parable. The parable was meant to change one's idea about the kingdom, but what happened was that the old mindset began to interpret the parable in a way that was consistent with its former mythical expectations. There are four versions of this parable in the Gospels, three in the synoptics and one in the Gospel of Thomas, a document recovered about fifty years ago in the Nag Hammadi Gnostic Collection, which many exegetes think is closer in some places to the original oral tradition. For Luke and Matthew, contrary to all botanical good sense, the mustard seed does turn into a tree. In Mark, it turns into the greatest of shrubs. In Thomas, it turns into a great branch so that a lot of birds can rest in its shade. All of these expectations are contrary to the facts A mustard seed does not become a tree, the greatest of shrubs, or put forth a great branch, however much one may want it to. The oral tradition was evidently influenced by the old expectations of grandeur as people gradually slipped back into their former mindsets. They lost the radical thrust and the incredible freedom to which the parable called them. For us too, it is a threat to our preconceived ideas and mythical belief systems, and hence there is a strong tendency to resist its stark realism.

If we are looking for a great expansion of our particular religion, nation, ethnic group, social movement, or whatever, into some great visible organization that fills the earth, we are on the wrong track. This is not God's idea of success. Where are the mightiest works of the kingdom accomplished? in our attitudes and hence in secret. Where there is charity, there is God. Opportunities to work for the homeless, the starving, the aging, are all readily available. No one may notice our good deeds, including ourselves. The kingdom of God manifests itself in the modest changes in our attitudes and in the little improvements in our behavior that no one may notice, including ourselves. These are the mighty works of God, not great external accomplishments.

"To what shall I liken the kingdom of God?" Jesus asked. The kingdom is manifested in ordinary daily life and how we live it. Can we accept the God of everyday life? If we can, then we can enjoy the kingdom here and now, without having to wait for an apocalypse or someone to deliver us from our difficulties.

http://www.centeringprayer.com/kingdom/kingdom05.htm