I am reading from the tenth chapter of John:

It was winter, and the festival of the Dedication was being held in Jerusalem. Jesus was walking in the temple precincts, in Solomon's Cloister. The Jews gathered round him and asked: 'How long must you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah say so plainly.''! have told you,' said Jesus, 'but you do not believe. My deeds done in my Father's name are my credentials, but because you are not sheep of my flock you do not believe. My own sheep listen to my voice; I know them and they follow me. I give them eternal life and they shall never perish; no one shall snatch them from my care. My Father who has given them to me is greater than all, and no one can snatch them out of the Father's care. My Father and I are one.'

Once again the Jews picked up stones to stone him. At this Jesus said to them, 'l have set before you many good deeds, done by my Father's power; for which of these would you stone me'?' The Jews replied, 'We are not going to stone you for any good deed, but for your blasphemy. You, a mere man, claim to be a god .'Jesus answered, 'Is it not written in your own Law, "I said: You are gods"? Those are called gods to whom the word of God was delivered-and Scripture cannot be set aside. Then why do you charge me with blasphemy because I, consecrated and sent into the world by the Father, said, "I am God's son"?

Now, I have tried to say four things: first, taking care of yourself means you experience your experience. My father was a nut on chewing your food. He would sit there and almost count the times we had to chew before we swallowed. It burnt me up as a kid. That came back to my mind last night as I was thinking about experiencing your experience. I think my father wanted cows and he got kids. Second, taking care of yourself has to do with the Dark Night of the Soul, and third it has to do with meditation, and fourth, it has to do with the whole idea of God taking care of you. But, I am not flowing; I am not going anywhere. I am saying the same thing each way.

Standing at attention to your life is something you do not like to do. The bottom of that is the Dark Night of the Soul. Standing at attention is the triggering of what I mean by meditation. And meditation has nothing to meditate on except the Dark Night of the Soul. Whatever machinery it uses, standing at attention to the Dark Night of the Soul is meditation. I want to put it that strongly. And the stirring of the waters of the Dark Night of the Soul is Being's care for Being. That is what I want to talk about for a little bit.

Now, the first thing I want to call attention to is that God is the sovereign of your life. You have no choice about that. That is a faith statement. But now I will change it. There is a sovereign that is unsynonymous with any activity initiated by the subject: that is the absolute sovereign. Now, when you say "God," that is a faith statement. You do not experience it as God who is your sovereign in the raw experience of the fact that you are not running your life. Now, usually, a word that is a nice easy word to use is "faith". But the trouble is we are so trained in abstraction that we think of faith as a philosophical principle rather than a realty that we are phenomenologically aware of. Even when I say, "I showed up a man rather than a woman", I tend to think of being yanked out of my Mama's womb and coming out male rather than female. That is a subtle form of abstraction to the degree that I really experience myself limited in a concrete situation by being male. At that point I am experiencing the over­againstness that I am trying to talk about as sovereign. Male is just one thing. I could go on with the fact that I am 64, I am not 24. These days every time I come upon myself, I am nearing 64.

Now, maybe this is a better way of coming at it. I go around filled with resentment all the time. When I peel back the artichoke and get at the core, I find that resentment is to the volitional aspect of my being as absurdity is to the intellectual dynamic of my being. For instance, I am always out to do something and as yet nothing has come off the way I have set out to do it. Do you understand what I am talking about? There is a factor in every situation that is unsynonymous with my own volition that enters in between my deed and the consequences thereof. And that entree remains unfathomably mysterious. It is the enigmatic power. Now, when I say that resentment is the cognitive equivalent to absurdity why, you can understand resentment! Here I am a being with consciousness and therefore creativity, and in every, not every other, situation, it is thwarted. And finally, I die and nobody asks me. This is what I mean by the experience of a sovereign power. And of course you and every man, whether he knows it or not, sooner or later, has to say before that one "Faith" or "Father" or the equivalent poetry thereof. Now, about this you have no choice. I speak from "Faith". God is your sovereign and God is my sovereign.

This is point three. People ask these days, "What does it mean to trust?" What does it mean to trust God'? I am talking about taking care of yourself. Whatsoever else it means, it means that you self­consciously in every given situation acknowledge, God's sovereignty. We were in a group of people four months after my son. John, died. and someone made a statement that made me feel that John ought not to have died. I cannot describe the explosion that went off in me! It took me a lone time to know something about it, but do you know what the explosion was? I went through hell to maintain the faith posture that I was not simply the subject of fate but my Father was my father. Do you hear what I am talking about? I believe that when you understand the sovereignty of God you never again have any excuse about anything . I am talking about trusting God, not in some abstract theology, but in the concretion of your life. If you can ever blame any situation on anything, then you are not hearing what I mean by trusting God. I am talking about taking care of yourself. You get up one morning and you forget, and you say, "This is a hell of a day." That is sacrilege. That is untrust of God. This is the day God gave you. You let go one day, and you will not notice it, but the next day when you get up you are exactly that much shorter than you were the day before. You do it two days in a row and you are that much shorter. You do it three in a row, and then pretty soon you are there like a heap of shaking palsy collapsed in life. You let one go and the trouble has started. I could go on with that, I won't.

Oh, I have to tell this on myself. Someone once told me that I was the kind of guy who shot and killed the bearer of bad news. Just imagine the general who is fighting a war and his whole right flank has collapsed. If he does not do something about it, everything is gone, but he shoots the guy who brought the news, because it is bad news! And then a few days ago I read in history that in the old days generals did precisely that; they shot the bearer of bad news. I suppose that is where the saying came from originally. Well, you know that is not entirely true about me, but he has a point, as some of you have learned. Anybody is welcome in my cubicle as long as they have good news. Well, so that my boasting will be tempered, to the degree that he is right or in that situation where he is right, that is what I mean by lack of trust in God. Then it is that your caring for yourself is in bad shape.

Now what do you mean when you say God cares for you? To get this in secular language so you will not think it is some religion stuck in here, Being cares for Being. Now, you have noted Being could care less about deeds and could care less about knowledge. Have you noticed that? Evidence of it is that the edges of the pyramids are beginning to round off. Every deed passes away. Or, maybe the best evidence is this fine body I have, which is my deed. One of these days they are going to stick it in a 6foot hole and then finally it will not be there anymore. Now what is my being? I do not want to deal with it in abstract philosophy, but in concrete experience. The way I experience my being is to know my knowing and to do my doing. Do you grasp that? When somebody says, now empirically what are you pointing to when you are talking about your being? I am talking about the experience of the intensification of knowing and the intensification of doing, more concretely, of my knowing and my doing. And, by "knowing my knowing", I mean standing present to my knowing. I mean being in the sense of expression, in the sense of manifestation, in the sense of presencing in whatever form, my knowing. I used to sometimes say to a colleague, "You and I must do something." Then the night before we would sit down and make a model and then lay it aside and the next night make another one. What you make models for is to bring them into being, and the way you bring them into being is to appropriate them in your being. That is knowing your knowing. This is why abstract thinking of any kind whatsoever is finally naught. This is what the existential dynamic of our time has taught us all. This is my being. Knowing my knowing. Almost like eating my knowing. I do not want an idea that I am not. This is what I mean by integrity.

Secondly, being does not care anything about your doing. Somebody asks you now what do you mean? My way of knowing my knowing is doing my doing. In some ways that is a little harder to get said, but in another way it is not. It is the difference between doing a job and sticking the one God­given life you have even into washing a white linen handkerchief. The cross is not something that happened two thousand years ago. It is at the heart of Being itself when you stick your life, the one life you have, which means stick your death into the least of all deeds. That is your being, that is doing your doing. Now, what I am trying to say is Being takes care of being. This is what I mean by endlessness. You know your knowing and you do your doing. . . What does it mean to take care of yourself? Very simple! You know your knowing and do your doing and Being always takes care of being.

My last point has to do with this thing I read. I have been taught in theology that I studied and probably by preachers long before that Jesus never said he was the Son of God. I have come back to that tenth chapter over and over again. The thing that shocks me is that he did make that claim. The fact that he grounded it in the Scripture is beside the point at the moment. That was strategy. No, it was not, it was saying, "Why aren't you saying the same thing?" That is more than strategy. He stood up, "I am the son of God". It was the tenth chapter that rocked me into seeing that precisely in the aliveness of the Dark Night of the Soul, precisely there and only there one hears the heavens open and the voice saying "Thou art my beloved son". But the Jews could not hear that day what Jesus had heard as he said "I am the son. I am the son of God." What does it mean to take care of yourself? You cannot divorce it from standing at attention to life. It would not even dawn on you to say "I am God's son". If the meditation were not happening symbolically with the council that is internalized in yourself, you would never agree or dare. If you were not taking into yourself the humiliation and the weakness and the resentment and the suffering and the dislocation and the sense of ineffectivity and expenditure and unfulfillment, you could not even dream of making such a statement. I wish for one second I were not quite so fat and not quite so short. I would like to stand tall before you. I am God's son. It is like in Faust, the broken sword picked up with the hilt showing, there is the cross and Satan flees. I am proud, as I hope you are proud, this day and every day to be a son of God. I hope always when I feel the pressures that I will not forget to throw my shoulders back. I hope I do it so you can see it. I am a son of God. I am not what you think I am. I am not what I think I am. I am not what anybody thinks I am. I am what God thinks I am, therefore I say, I am a son of God. Take care of yourself.

Joseph W. Mathews