A Creator of Worlds

A Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent

What kind of world are you creating?

If you’ve been attending at all to “what’s what” in the culture these days you know that the name of Oppenheimer has been at the forefront of the cultural consciousness. This is primarily due to a film about J. Robert Oppenheimer which was released last summer and is currently garnering all sorts of accolades and awards.

J. Robert Oppenheimer is a complicated and conflicted representation of both the creative and destructive potentialities of the human mind. It is said that later in his life, after his own particular brilliance was forever tied to the brilliant shock and blinding light of the nuclear explosions over Japan, that in an interview Oppenheimer quoted Krishna from the Bhagavad Gita saying:

“Now I am become death, the Destroyer of Worlds.”

Exactly what Oppenheimer meant by the quote is debatable. But for a man who was at the center of creating humanity’s greatest source of mass destruction, perhaps it was an acknowledgement of “the world he had a hand in creating”? A quote spoken with the kind of dread that wells up when you realize the very real human power and responsibility that is yours in either creating or destroying the world.

I remember vividly when my mother died, some 8 years after the passing of my father, and I was profoundly struck by the fact that not only were my parents now gone, but an entire world went with them. The world they created was the world in which I came into being, the world out of which I made choices, the world I sometimes resisted, but so often adored. It was somewhat sobering and bracing to realize: We are all creators of a world while we are here on this planet. So what is the world we are creating?

Jesus says in our gospel passage today: “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” Jesus wasn’t critiquing a Capitalist system that didn’t yet exist, but he was critiquing, perhaps even condemning, a Mercantile Spirituality and mode of relationship that is too often the practice of people of faith. Remember, Jesus, in this gospel passage, is criticizing people who are in the temple, who are in the Father’s house and not those outside.

The German mystic and theologian, Meister Eckhart, way back in the Middle Ages, where the money-centered economy was only just coalescing as the means to do business, already saw the inherent danger. He called it Kaufmanschaft or Mercantilism. And it was dangerous in as far as it was rooted in human Eigenschaft or possessiveness.

So what kind of world might be rendered by such a spirit of mercantilism where the fundamental human drive to possess is left unchecked? Well we only need to look to Exodus and the Decalogue: It’s a world of idolatry, dishonor, theft, coveting, bearing false witness, and finally killing. And can’t we see all that perhaps too clearly around us today: Ideologies that dehumanize, deep disrespect, envy, jealousy, the cancel culture, human trafficking, aggression and war, the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, and the destruction of the environment in much more constant, consistent, and subtle ways than an atomic explosion, but just as deadly. We too can participate, even unaware, in becoming “Death a Destroyer of Worlds.”

So where is the hope here? How might each of us say, with our own lives, in our own words: “Now I am become Life. A Creator of Worlds.”

Well according to Meister Eckhart there is only one spiritual practice that can get at the heart of our own desire to possess, and thereby destroy, and that is another fun German word: Abegescheidenheit or Detachment. Eckhart believed that the heart of the Christian Spiritual life was to learn detachment, letting go, and surrender, in small ways and large, so we eventually can even become dispossessed of our desire to possess. Such a person creates a world centered not on human strength and human wisdom, but rather on the foolishness and weakness of God.

And it isn’t too hard. We don’t have to be brilliant physicists. You just let go. Let go of that thing or object, that fixed ideology, the grudge, the unhealthy relationship, the past that haunts you, the life that didn’t turn out the way you thought it should. And slowly, over time, we create a world uncluttered and therefore accessible and free. A world where people can exist in a space that gives them hope and inspires them to create worlds that do the same for others.

If the atomic bomb is based on a chain reaction that leads to utter destruction. Detachment, you could say, also works as a chain reaction but one that always leads to life.

So what kind of world are you creating?