2022-12-30 A Meditation on Loving Who We Are

“All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Working together with him, then, we appeal to you not to receive the grace of God in vain.” (2 Co 5:18–6:1 ESV)

Learning to love who we are, not whom we want to be, requires first of all coping with how we careen this way and that, unable to see clearly, unable to think practically, overlooking plain error or denial in our midst. For we motor along with premises unchecked. And so the task is to learn to hand all things over to the Gospel.

All things: including the frustration that we didn’t live in someone else’s skin. All things: including the dissatisfaction with our status as “Vessel, broken”. All things: including the illusion that Man is a good species, needing only a little correction. For Man has lofty thoughts of service and goodness writ large, yet if “writ large” then Man flatters himself it is by his proud hand that the writing takes place. See how the good intentions warp and twist, when they are the things leaned upon. See how Man most of all fails to be that even keel to his or her own lives. See the Call this day to become our own “alternative, other”, just as Jesus is our alternate: alternate to the person who doubts they are loved; who, minus love, cannot see the broader picture; who is struggling under thoughts that oppress, because it is too much for us to think that anyone can see life in clear light. That clarion light only comes as gifted, in moments of vulnerability. In moments of handing all things over to the Gospel.

Therefore any frustrated jealousy gives us the biggest prize on earth: the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Meantime, we can pray for each other, that we will with humility put ourselves aside, simply to delve into the location of another’s abode. Where do they dwell? Are we not newcomers to their strange land? Yet see that an ounce of understanding spares a pound of animosity. So we are encouraged that each of us can “Come to Jesus” without permission from any earthly authority. We are built up, even though it exasperates us to see the profligacy, now or in the past, of others. We are lovers of soul, not of bodies and limbs, but of souls. We never wish spiritual harm to another. We never wish any kind of harm to another, but especially we do not deny the Spirit that accompanies even sinners in their life and on unto their death march.

So all things in their order, and in season. If this is occasion to be a sinner, then a sinner we shall be. If this is an occasion to be a friend, then friend we shall be. If this is occasion to be forgiven, then forgiven we shall be. We are eager to judge others lightly, no matter the strangeness of their past, no matter the ways their past needles us. We are eager no longer to summarize lives by certain fashionable (or hated in a fashionable sense) deeds; to summarize one’s life as all boiling down to fleshly indulgence or drink or drug (or cheating, or shoplifting, or graffiti or smoking, or…), can fail to broach the broader picture of a different kind of society, with friendships eternal even, and with its own level of pain tolerance, searching society, weak and disenfranchised society, personal-efforts-all-that-matter society. Was there love? Was there any ostentatious spoilage or coddling, or did these now victims of the church at one time strive and earn their own keep and stare into the abyss that any good “Christian”, “Religious” parent spares their kids from, not having quite the requisite faith and personal encounter of equal impossible bent.

So we try to love ourselves, and many amongst us have a hero-motif: overlooking their own spiritual estate, they try to heal others. But all first of all need to move beyond the fractured self, to move beyond the muttering, frustrated soul, and to accept a distant-by-now memory of what it is to love oneself fully, to look outward not gape at personal wounds. To internalize and develop resilience to the knowledge that someone “out there” hates us. For indeed this has been our life thus far. We are no heroes, but earned material knowledge that is tailor-made for this Gospel. The Church wants to levy higher taxes on us, certain that as the purveyor of Gospel faith that it is the ultimate victor. But we have a slightly more foundational faith; our experience is a little more gospelly, we have this treasure knowing full well we have nothing but faith to prevent it being ripped from our hands. Yet we aren’t trying to outdo one another, only to be faithful stewards on behalf of God. He needs our ambition. He needs the ways in which each, not only is given a talent, but is capable of earning some amount of cash; some seem to mint the Benjamins, while others scramble over a pocket of change. Both are children of the Most High. Both eat at the same table, with Peter and Paul, Jesus and Mary Magdalene, with the Holy Family and the disciples, the saints through history.

Does honesty heal the one unhappy with who they are? Can we make light of all the ways we in times past were without a teaching priest, without a gospel, without that bedrock? And can we reassure that our lives know all the same frustrated ironies and layering back upon itself faith expression. We strive to unlayer and to go direct once more: real Jesus where that name is used (I.e. not in vain); real sympathy for Christian persecution (where some go so far as to think it funny to “persecute” a Christ-follower); real faith that we shall one day dwell with loved ones, careening in and out of our lives to the present, in the age to come.