Giving Away the Great Pearls
The start of my message refers to the telling of the “Parable of the Great Pearl” Godly Play story. You can watch the whole story below, or skip to 7:10 to get to the heart of it.
The great pearl story is a fascinating one. It is one of my favorites to tell in the Godly Play classroom. We have a merchant who is in search of the “greatest pearl” and when they find it, they give all their possessions away for it. One of the questions that we ask at the end of this story is, “I wonder what could be so precious that a person would exchange everything for it?”
I love listening to our children answer this question. There is intrigue about things of value. Just last week my daughter asked me, “Papa, what is the most ‘expensivest’ car in the whole world?” Before long we found ourselves talking about the Pyramids, and how precious gold and gems were intricately hidden within them.
Entire industries rely on this pursuit of value. I have bins full of baseball cards in a closet at my mom’s house that I still have some hope will contain some kind of return on investment. With the cryptocurrency phenomenon, the stock market, and stamp and antique collectors, we seem to be in a constant dance with what is valuable.
But the parable is odd, and the children can sense it. The introduction of the story says, “Once there was someone who said such amazing things and did such wonderful things that people began to follow him. as they followed, he told them about a kingdom: the Kingdom of Heaven. But they did not understand. They had never been to such a place. And they didn’t know anyone who had. They didn’t even know where it was. So one day they simply asked him, “What is the Kingdom of Heaven like?”
And Jesus gives them this story. Perhaps what is odd is that the characters in the story seem to have different perceptions of the value of the Great Pearl. Something must be up.
I have been wondering about valuable things. My intrigue about value still has a childlike quality to it. When Queen Elizabeth died, I fell prey to a clickbait title that read, “How much are all the Queen’s jewels worth?” But I think there are a few precious jewels that we aren’t often aware of. These gems have names. The first one is called “Our Desire” and the second one is called “Our Attention.”
For a moment, try to comprehend how many physical resources have been used and moved about the planet to satisfy human desire. Think about how many institutions, once you boil down their sole purpose for existing, are about trying to claim both our attention and our desires. Our attention and desire are directly tied to the physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional resources we have, and people and institutions are hoping to gather up those precious resources.
We need not look too far for the proof of this. Many of us grew up in religious institutions that knew that if our desires could be manipulated then we could create life-long devotees each willing to give at least 10% of their income each week into the offering plate. There is no better way to get a person with a pocket full of money to come back and give their money again next week than to tell them that unless they come each week, they won’t get the ultimate payout of Heaven, and instead the eternal punishment of hell.
An entire reformation happened to address the predatory nature of the church, who realized they could cash in on the fear of our afterlife destinations. The Church has learned how to capitalize on both our attention and our desires.
The stop of the 95 thesis by Martin Luther - Julius Hübner
I imagine Jesus would need to be working on his table flipping form if he came to America today, lest he throw out his back. There are lots of tables in need of flipping. I can’t imagine the betrayal that Jesus must feel about the condition of the movement that bears his name, especially when he discovers that we have given away our Greatest Pearls to televangelists, to Instagram and Facebook, to our employers, and to people and institutions that really have no interest in our well-being.
And the true evil of this is that it appears to be an intentional move to keep us distracted from the truest desires of our heart, which often cannot be capitalized on, and which move our attention away from consumption for the sake of monetary profit, to presence for the sake of compassion for ourselves and our neighbors.
I have long wondered about the spiritual heavyweights of our time talking about “not existing.” In a summary of Thomas Merton’s work on this Robert Inchausti says, “The world cultivates the false self, ignores the real one, and therein lie the great irony of human existence: The more we make of ourselves, the less we actually exist.”
I think Merton said it best when he playfully wrote this line, “What we are not seems to be real, what we are seems to be unreal.”
“What we are not seems to be real, what we are seems to be unreal.”
-Thomas Merton
The process of discerning the truth of our desires, and becoming aware of the ways in which our attention has been preyed upon, will result in us becoming more resistant to giving our attention away to people and institutions that want nothing more than to manipulate our own desire for their personal gain. At this point, we become far less attractive to these forces, and if we do it really well, we will become entirely invaluable and thus non-existent to them. Perhaps the idea of “not-existing” is not about making our impulses feel shameful, but to make ourselves no longer usable to systems that benefit from the manipulation of our desires.
“Perhaps the idea of “not-existing” is not about making our impulses feel shameful, but to make ourselves no longer usable to systems that benefit from the manipulation of our desires.”
So far I have been talking about individuals, but I think the same applies to communities. This last week I met with about seven different people from our community for coffee. And without any real prompting, what came up during our conversations had to do with desire. Each of us has desires for this community, and a lot of times what I hear from people is the ways in which those desires are going unfulfilled.
Often, when I am sitting with someone who eventually tells me a true desire they have for a community like West Hills, it is something so simply human.
I want connection
I want silence
I want to show up as a parent and know my kid’s spirituality is being tended to while I also attend to mine
I want to feel heard
I want to be known
I want to offer my gifts
I want my family to be accepted even though it looks different than yours
I want to know that my Queerness is appreciated as a gift
I want to show up and call the Divine by the name I know them by and not be shamed for it.
And almost always those statements of desire are followed by tears. The chemistry of those tears seems to be equal parts frustration with equal parts sadness.
This week I saw some of those tears. I also noticed my own longing to fulfill all of those desires and the sadness of knowing that I can’t. But I also felt angry. I felt angry for all of the ways that our lives have taken the shape of another person’s desires. The way we have been duped into giving away our energy to things that continue to show up hollow for us. I felt the frustration of “I want this to be true for our community, but I know people are tired, and I don’t know what to do about that.”
And in the midst of these conversations, I feel both called to hold the hand of someone bumping up the sad reality of what could be, but what actually is, while also feeling the impulse to flip the tables over that are set up in our most sacred places. If our body is our temple, then perhaps it is time to take note of who and what has set up their tables there.
And maybe we need to take some Jesus-like rage to those tables and tell them to get out. If we clear the inner temple of our hearts from all of the external manipulators, swindlers, and Instagram influencers, while also giving the thumb to all of the inward manipulators, the voices of self-doubt, and judgment, we would be doing Jesus-like work.
I was raised to be cautious of my desires, as if indulging in them would surely lead me into a life full of debauchery, dancing with the devil straight into hell. I have flipped that table that I had assumed was bolted to the ground in my heart. It just took me a while to loosen the bolts. What I am finding is that there is a table in my heart that has been there all along, and I have a seat at it. It is a feast that the Divine has prepared for me and all of us. A feast that so many people have been denied entry to because all of the forces that benefit from us sitting at their table know it’ll be mighty hard to pull us away from that one once we taste what it has to offer.
What are the tables that feel bolted to the ground in your heart that are blocking your way to the table you actually want to sit at? Can you imagine God on all fours, wrench in hand, taking out the bolts with you?
Have your desires been manipulated? By whom? By what? How are you reclaiming your desires?