The Last Go First
I listened to Brené Brown interview Father Richard Rohr on her podcast, Unlocking Us, while I made dinner on Christmas Eve. It was a wide-ranging conversation about faith, suffering, the perils of organized religion, and how Christianity—as frequently practiced today—doesn’t have much to do with what Jesus supposedly said. I found their chat deeply resonant, particularly as it dovetails with my own patchworked faith—a faith I’ve come to on my own. (I went to Jewish services as a child, and an Episcopalian boarding school with near daily chapel attendance but have never belonged to a religion.)
But clearly—as the focus of my own book attests—I’m very interested in how religion becomes culture. And more specifically, the way religion informs our psyches and subconscious beliefs.
But I digress. As I listened to Brené and Father Rohr chat, I had to laugh as she explained to him that the “Parable of the Vineyard” grates her Enneagram Type 1 nerves. (Father Rohr is also a Type 1, as am I—if you’re Enneagram curious, I highly recommend this $12 RHETI test from the Enneagram Institute.) The “Parable of the Vineyard” (Matthew 20:1-16) is a story that Jesus tells about how it is in the Kingdom of God. In brief, the owner of a vineyard hires some men to work in his vineyard, agreeing to pay them a denarius. He hires another group of men looking for work a few hours later, agreeing to pay them a fair wage. He proceeds to hire more people throughout the day, offering them the same fair wage, including a group an hour before the workday ends. Then he instructs his foreman to pay each of them—“beginning from the last, up to the first”—a denarius. When the men who have worked all day grouse at the inequity of being paid the same as the late joiners, he responds, “Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for a denarius?”
This story chafes our very idea of capitalism, where our hard work is appropriately measured and rewarded. The way Jesus tells it just doesn’t seem fair. In many ways, this story underlines how our very human ideas of fairness and justice are flawed and inadequate (after all, when does justice ever feel entirely complete?), but there’s a deeper message here. And to be honest, I didn’t know what it was.
I had to then LOL while reading Sufi mystic and teacher Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee’s Working With Oneness yesterday. I have to love the synchronicities of the divine—particularly when they’re this hard to ignore. Though LVL is Sufi—the mystical arm of Islam—in this particular passage, he writes about Jesus, specifically the “Parable of the Vineyard.”
Each of those who works in the vineyard of the Lord is given a penny, a symbol of his own wholeness. This is the gift for spiritual work: we are given ourselves. It is given to all those who participate. Those who have worked since dawn and “borne the head and burden of the day” may complain, but they do not understand that to participate in the work of the whole for even an instant is to be given access to one’s own wholeness. This is the experience that is now being offered to all who are drawn into the sphere of spiritual life. As a culture we are so identified with patterns of hierarchy and their levels of exclusion that we overlook the primary truth that the dimension of oneness is all-inclusive. The moment we turn our focus away from our own ego-self and participate in the work of the whole, we step into the circle of our own wholeness. There are no levels of initiation: one is either in or out. And someone who has just begun on the path is given as much access as someone who has been engaged in spiritual practice for many years. (p. 8) [Emphasis mine.]
LVL goes on to explain the elusive nature of wholeness: “Wholeness can be difficult to recognize because it is complete; it does not function through comparison, through the opposite of light and dark. It is difficult to recognize wholeness through our ordinary modes of perception, by defining it against what it is not.”
In many ways, Working With Oneness is about our fixation on materialism and its attendant capitalism—and how this keeps us mired in a certain type of thinking, one where our value and very worthiness is meted out by effort, attendance, and hard work. LVL, like Jesus, flips this on its head: The last go first. It is not about being perfect in our diligence, it’s about stepping into a different reality where we are all worthy, all equal, all deserving based on who we are, not on what we do. It’s that simple. There is no hierarchy in wholeness. It’s just complete.
There’s much more to come from me on the idea of wholeness in the coming weeks. I am convinced—not just because of this fit of synchronicity—that it is the foundational layer of what this human experiment is all about.