Spiritual Training Wheels
Ancient Testimony ~ Numbers 22: 22-30
January 27, 2008
by Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper

It has been a hard week.  The magnetism—or something―wore off my new transit pass after the other machine had taken ten minutes to recognize the magnetism on my credit card, and I kicked my donkey at the West Fourth Street Station.  Not only did the MTA employee not care that I had a brand new monthly pass, she did not care vociferously, actively, and with malice.  “My transit pass is brand new and it doesn’t work,” said I.  “What am I supposed to do about?” said she.  That’s when she handed me the envelope in which I could once again mail in my complaint, with all the letters and numbers and 8x10 glossy pictures, and give a little more of my short life span to being folded, spindled, and manipulated.  I became Balaam in this unfortunate incident.  I had to get somewhere.  You know what I mean by that, “Had to get somewhere,” and she was a version of my mule.  Neither of us saw that there was an angel in the way and that we were both trapped in a narrow place.  No Exit comes to mind.

I recall being in an airport once during a fierce snow storm.  A man practically strangled the woman (aka donkey) behind the desk, while saying these words: “I have to get to New York tonight.”  “No,” said she, “you don’t.”

The magical realism story of Balaam and his mule underscore this contrast of the sublime with the ridiculous.  Journey big and journey little, we might call it.  Journey-lite and journey-real is another mode.   Balaam thinks he is on a mission from God.  Just like the American Right and the American Middle and the American Left, Balaam is a man with places to go, things to do, armies to field, and elections to win.  In the middle of his journey, an armed angel gets in his way.  His donkey respects the angel’s timing; it does a sit-down strike.  Balaam finds himself in an increasingly narrow place.  Spiritually, he is stuck.  Physically, he is stuck.  He is stuck, stuck, stuck.  He takes out his anger on his donkey.  And the donkey has the sense to complain.  Christ-like, the smallest character in the story makes the most sense: “Haven’t I been your mule for a long time?  How come you hit me?”

Besides this story making us laugh, it can teach us a lot about who we are spiritually.  It is a spiritual assessment, like the one some sage suggested we all take before we get stuck in an elevator some day.  That sage said we could measure our mental health by whether we picture ourselves as needing the jokes or making the jokes in the broken elevator.  While we wait for the “HELP COMING” sign to blink on, what do we do and who are we?  In other words, who are we when we get thrown off our path and get stuck in a place we don’t want to be?  Who are we when our computers crash or our “passes” don’t work or an armed angel stops us on the road?  Who are we in 2008, as the ice melts?

I think that we are people on tricycles, spiritually.  Some of us have graduated to two-wheelers with training wheels.  But very few of us know what to do with angels in the road.   Very few of us are free of the captivity: “I have to get to New York tonight.”  We are all people meant to ride and glide, but instead we are dependent on props, on parents, on stock markets, on resumes, or on acting talent to get us into the fast lane of the highway.  When confronted with an angel in the road, we rarely have time to see her.  We can’t really be bothered with a Christ-like donkey that wonders why we are kicking him.

Consider the very important drama we just witnessed as our modern testimony.  Roe v. Wade.  35 years old and still waiting for a bicycle.  Still in training for reality and maturity and freedom.  Still propped up by filaments of possibility instead of foundations of liberty.  Makes me wonder if women really matter at all.  I know in my heart’s mind that if men needed abortions they would be a sacrament.  Sorry, gentlemen, I don’t mean it personally.  Some of my best friends are men.  I take the role of donkey in Balaam’s story when I think of how far we have to go and how the folk riding us are kicking us.  “Am I not your donkey, which you have ridden all your life to this day?  Have I been in the habit of treating you this way?”  No, said Balaam.  Don’t men say they love women?  Don’t women treat men better than men treat women?  Does that not matter?  And is my question here not a training wheels question?  One that says I need approval, confirmation, affirmation, guaranteed constitutional rights before I can be whole?  Is there not a place for me to be whole and spacious even when in this narrow place of anger and despair and restlessness?  I think, yes.  I think it is the place where I glide, like that girl I was the first moment my grandfather pushed me off, right after he taken the training wheels up and I didn’t know they were gone.  Did any of you learn to ride a bike this way?  By being tricked into it?  Maybe spiritual maturity is like magical realism: it is a trick we employ when stuck in elevators or in the 21st century.

I want to glide while waiting for this narrow place to widen.  I want to glide through the crevices and corners and stuck-ness of this hard moment―and the other hard moments coming our way.  You’d have to be asleep not to realize that the trouble is accelerating.  Stock markets.  Global weirding.  All the money spent in Iraq.  Women still waiting for the medical practice of abortion to be taught in med schools, where it is mostly not, even today.  We are people who are going to face a lot.  For all I know we have long been in a narrow place and just thought we were gliding along, uninterrupted by armed angels who demand our attention.  Who is this armed angel anyway, the one with the sword that won’t let us pass?  Why is she the accomplice of a donkey? What kind of God is this anyway?  If you want to know, read the story again and take each part in its drama.  Be the donkey that gets kicked and speaks up anyway.  Be Balaam who is a man on the move.  Be the angel with her drawn sword, saying, “Balaam, stop, for God’s sake, stop, and look around.  Look at what you are doing.”   And if all that is too high fallutin’ for you, come back with me to the West Fourth Street Station.

I am standing there kicking my would-be transportation.  She is telling me there is nothing she can do.  I am needing to blame something on somebody other than myself.  I am stuck in a narrow place and I can’t get out.  I have gone back to tricycle from training wheels.  There is no glide in me or in her.  We are both stuck, I in my overdone-ness and she in her sneering I-don’t-give-a-damn-ness.  What might be different?  We could glide toward each other, I with less impatience about not getting where I had to get, she with more courtesy and caring about something over which she had little control.

When I speak of gliding as spiritual maturity, even gliding in the narrow stuck places, what I mean is this: we care about what we don’t have to care about.  We treat our donkeys well.  We chill.  We train ourselves to be the ones who tell the jokes in the elevator.  We become angels who demand and get recognition without having to use our swords.  Amen.