by Rev. Dr. Jim Warnock
Easter season is upon us. It’s a period of 50 days beginning with our recent Easter Sunday and concluding with Pentecost, this year on June 8th. On May 4th, the Third Sunday of Easter, we will have a visit from the Rev. Cristi Chapman, our Canon to the Ordinary. She will celebrate and preach at our 9:30 service. Her appearance reflects a new policy that Bishop LaBelle has instituted. He intends to visit parishes in the diocese every three years, about as much as he can given the size of the Diocese of Olympia. Every year, however, each parish will get a visit from a diocesan official, and this is our time with Rev. Chapman. I’m looking forward to it. She was very helpful at the passing of Deacon Jeffrey, and she wants to maintain a relationship with us.
On the same day Bishop LaBelle will visit All Saints Goshen, the Kenyan congregation that we host. This is a huge event for them, and they have baptisms, confirmations and the installation of several people into their Mothers’ Union. We’re still working on how to coordinate these events.
Bishop LaBelle has also begun a new discipleship program in the diocese, and he has invited everyone to participate. It’s based on a theology of Zimzum which I suspect most of us know little about. In the 16th Century, Rabbi Isaac Luria was a student of the Kabbalah, a form of mysticism based on the Hebrew Bible. Its adherents have a long history of esoteric practices and spiritual insights into the meaning of Scripture.
Rabbi Luria was particularly interested in how God, all powerful and all knowing, could create a finite world. He came to believe that God began creation by limiting the Godhead in order to allow space for the world to exist. He characterizes this as a contraction of God allowing a vacant space for the world to develop. This is Zimzum in Hebrew, a paradox of simultaneous divine presence and absence. To me it seems much like the Christian concept of kenosis, Jesus’ emptying himself of the godhead to become human. Paul develops this in Philippians 2.
For our purposes, the idea is that Zimzum gives us a sense of quiet in a world full of distractions, cultivating a deeper spiritual sense of God’s presence. Bishop Phil is calling for a three-year study of this aspect of spirituality. He will provide a video every two months, 18 in total, along with accompanying materials. He suggests that we meet in small groups to discuss and hopefully benefit from new insights into our lives today.
This is an interesting concept. It comes out of our Bishop’s involvement in interreligious work in Massachusetts, and I think it unique in the Episcopal Church. Kresha and I are planning to be involved, and I’m inviting all of you to join us in this process.