The Harried Mystic

Several posts back, I presented a Sanzen moment around a Western Koan-like teaching from the Gospel of Thomas: “Jesus said: Be Passers-By.”

“How do you show this?”

I received two thoughtful replies and I am returning to it this morning having meditated on it myself, since posing it, with the following results:

One commentary interprets this as counsel to be an itinerant, peripatetic pastor, a wandering bishop offering the message and then moving on to the next place and time: a Johnny Appleseed of the “Good News.” Within the context of the times and the expectation that end times were not far off, abandoning all to the mission at hand seems a reasonable basis for the teaching. But, there is so much more to it as it continues to instruct and reach into my psyche in November, 2009.

What is my first immediate gut reaction to the question: How do you show what it means to be a passer-by?

Next question?!

The Teacher of Righteousness speaks to our need to dwell, ruminate, hyper-masticate, and confabulate. We are masters of tall towers, majestic edifices to the powers of imagination. His aim is to cultivate the free-flowing fountain of direct and spontaneous, unfettered, whole bodied and disinhibited intuition as a balance for the gifts of intellect and emotion. What flows into mind as I say this is the separate admonition to “be again as little children.” Surely, this isn’t a call to whining, pouting, tantrums, food fights, truculence, biting, soiling, or breaking perfectly good toys. The Divine Child, the Platonic Form, the pristine image of the puer, is one of vital instantaneity, playful movement from one thing to the next without too great a residue that might interfere with the next big wonder.

My grandmother, an unschooled peasant from Southern Italy, was the wisest person I’ve met. She had no reluctance to pick up a crayon and draw with the children. She did so not to entertain us and keep us company but because she found it pleasurable. She would laugh hard when things were funny and cry hard when things were bad. She found joy in the simplest things and loved company, eating, singing, drinking a good red table wine, and then on to tomorrow. We found her, after her passing, in bed with a smile on her face.

Being a passer-by is to set the neurotic preoccupations aside by annihilating time. The only way to annihilate time is to dwell in an experience so completely that time itself stops. We have all experienced just this when we become so engrossed that when next we step out of the elan vital we are surprised at how far the clock on the wall has moved.

The beauty of a koan is that there is always more in it, more fruit to taste, more depth to hear, and so I pose it once more as I step into my day:

What is it to “be a passer-by,” and am I living this counsel?

© Brother Anton and The Harried Mystic, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.