2022-12-06 A Meditation on Backstories

“For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them. How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! If I would count them, they are more than the sand. I awake, and I am still with you.” (Ps 139:13–18 ESV)

If you ever stop to ask someone how they came to be what they are, you know that there isn’t mercy sufficient in the world for the quantity and honesty of story. So many stories, each spiritually moving and real. So many traumas, each creating oddly-shaped people today. For we blush at the hard facts, preferring a lie, preferring a rosy picture. But each of us can be unashamed of that odd zone called Gospel, a hair’s-breadth away from loserville: we are tempted to dismiss and label “weak” the Spirit that descends through voice and through appeal and through plain give-and-take honesty.

The mercy sufficient for this comes from a Father in Heaven, the Father in Heaven, for whom life is no give-and-take, no zero sum game, no balance and counterbalance; but rather, it is all systems go, all-in investment, support and upbuilding unto that bitter-at-times endgame. This Father does not judge based on today’s self-portrait, awkward as it is, but reckons sincerely with our Advocate (the Spirit), who points out what hardships and formative times we’ve been through, who allows us to be a certain kind of genius with respect to how we’ve responded to life; our outlays are humored and sincere, curious, exemplary, joking, fitting, and peace.

Too, we see there is a minefield called “expectation”. People form us based on their expectations: do they expect good from us? Do they expect wickedness? Are we already being considered a sinner, so what’s the point of trying to be something else? So all of us are like a son or daughter with a father: “Dad, if you don’t love me, then what’s the use, I’ll sabotage my life, I’ll wrestle with your desires for how you wish I would be”. If ma or pa can love us as the curiosity-blessed and inquiring, learning, humoring, friending people that we are, then their bemusement has the counter-effect of false expectations: their delight in us builds up the inner woman or man in each of us.

This is the ministry of the Father, so to induct us through hair-raising Encounter, that we realize life and death is no longer the final arbiter. No longer are we forlorn about aging and our own eventual demise (we even go so far as to wonder if age is just an illusion, if tomorrow is the same as today, not so much older as reframed to be more like those who have gone before us in years, those whose belief systems allow for aging and old age). So we become those no longer bargaining with a murderous and doubt-filled world, but standing tall and allowing the devil to take his best shot at that bulls-eye on our vest. No matter: we shall soldier on. And, having coped with manifest fears, including the fears of still being in sin, we are attentive and servant-minded to the orders of God Most High.

We no longer try to resolve henceforth to be perfect, but know Him curiously delighted to have His creatures, whose value to Him and to the world is a mystery and untold beauty. He cares, when we scream and shout in doubt. He cares, when we try to cope with many things untaught, and left to be discovered, in our rebellious forays, in our patient coping, in our plea for explanation: why can you let me dawdle and dwell in this forlorn place? Because, my son, my daughter, they are the people whom I love. More than that, history is patiently working out many details, and many are trapped in caves and cisterns, awaiting a time already won: the victory is already descending on the Earth. The solution is no final pain but a luminous joy, for all who have passed over unto the realm called “Faith”.

We are emissaries and we are those strangely weaned off addiction to money or to longevity or to curmudgeonly hoarding or frustrated jealousies or to bland dismissal of the witness of others. Witnesses touched. Witnesses creating fantastical dreams and scenarios. Witnesses given burdens lifted, burdens of secondary thoughts, of lusts and temptations, of false “Gardens of Eden”. So where two or three are gathered, we do leap—because of the existential strange frame suddenly upon us—to make the bold conversation, and to dispel that coy spirit that tempts, that self-conscious fear that only creates the very thing it is afraid of, by the power of suggestion. No, we are more than conquerors, through rolling with it, through blessing all who have penetrated our bubble of good works and sanguine living. We fear no longer to “let the wrong one in”; we are not offended at the pairing with members of different lifestyles or genders, as though we have now failed to “fast”, to “protect”, to “walk upright”: they will not hurt you, O Christian! And so we charge ahead, knowing some in our midst to be predestined by that Wondrous Father to salvation, strange and awkward and unruly as it is in the denouement. And some to frustrated self-obsession, empty works, bargains unwisely agreed to.