We are God’s blessed and beloved ones before we can do anything at all to earn our status as such.
“No ism, no phobia, no empire, no market, no machinery of contempt gets to define what God has already named beloved.”
So, chatbots or children, desert-wandering tribes or vineyard tenants, what we all want to know is how to be good… What is the cornerstone upon which we can build flourishing, compassionate, just, and merciful lives? I think we need rules and stories, but rules and stories that remind us of the foundational relationships that construct our lives.
Annie Dillard asked whether we have the foggiest idea of what kind of power we invoke in this place, and maybe this is it: the power to love the world without possessing it, the power to resist domination without becoming what we resist, the power to descend without disappearing, the power to give ourselves away because we finally know
We can follow the frustrating experience of those worrying workers who see the world as competitive and their fellow workers as threats, and then watch as they are invited to move toward a place where maybe the beautiful world contains enough, and where generosity toward others need not lead to grudges and grumbling. They are offered the opportunity to
Forgiveness surrenders the fantasy that another person’s suffering will heal me. I can seek truth, protection, accountability, and repair without making someone else’s destruction my salvation.
His yoke of forgiveness is so much easier, and His burden of reconciliation is so much lighter than the righteous indignation, the resentments, the anger, and the old hurts He asks us to let go of in exchange.
“The practice of love offers no place of safety,” but safety was never the promise on offer anyway. The promise was and is still finding life, finding our lives in this precarious world with all these risky people. The promise was and is still love rung out and quite unsafe.
*the quotation is from bell hooks
Friends, if you ask about the grace that’s on offer in the sacraments of baptism and our Holy Eucharist, it’s that in them we present ourselves, our souls and bodies, to the same divine life-giving energies that those faithful human midwives lived by.