Dear Folks,
The moniker “Christian” has been hijacked lately, disconnected from its meaning as a practice that seeks the well-being of others. I have heard it wielded as a weapon that chooses power over instead of suffering with, exclusion instead of welcome, fear mongering instead of love. Here’s another way to think about it.
Every one of us has a wound inside, maybe several: an experience of loss, of meanness or betrayal that feels like death. The miracle is that life can begin there. When we let ourselves be met by Spirit in that wilderness, trusting that healing can come from what’s broken, we can hear a holy voice speaking.
“You are the one that I have created, and in you I am well pleased. Go! Love! Live! Bless and feed my sheep. Whatever tomb you’ve stumbled into or been thrust inside, wherever you feel most stuck or lost or powerless, God can stir hope there and raise you up.”
Jesus gave himself to others, made space for them, believed in their potential, loved what he saw despite our foibles. He knew that love denied in one place can be born in another. He taught that love gives us the means to triumph over all that separates us from each other, from God, and from our best selves. He showed that love never dies.
Hidden just below the surface these days is a world of people with broken dreams or hearts or terrors in the night… people whose relationships are rocky, whose children are in trouble, whose jobs are unfulfilling, overwhelming, or shifting in some disconcerting way… Some folks are sick or scared to make a change, hungry for food or meaning, grieving the loss of a loved one or a cherished culture or both.
Many days you wouldn’t know it to look at us, because we function on the cheerful surface most of the time. We keep our pain to ourselves, the way our parents taught us or our coaches expected. If we cry, its into our pillows at night or in the car driving down the highway. Stiff upper lips are a badge of honor, we say, as if holding anger or sorrow at bay is a way to deal with it. But as Anne Morrow Lindberg wrote in Gift from the Sea, the tide comes in eventually bringing everything with it… Do we really think no one notices our anger or sadness or exhaustion?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to cultivate some particular form of asceticism (as a sinner, a penitent, or a saint), but to be a man” or a woman as we are intended to be: fully alive and engaged with the world, reconciled with ourselves and each other, compassionate toward all. “It is not some religious act which makes a Christian what he or she is, but participation in the suffering of God” in the life of the world. (The Cost of Discipleship) If we will let it, the very pain that lays us so low today connects us to every other person who ever lived, and so equips us to be healers ourselves. The cross isn’t the end of the story, but the beginning.
Will you go and say, “Tell me who you are and where it hurts,” to your brother, the stranger, the friend, and the foe?
Love,
David