From Birth to Birth

Dear Eugene,

These past two weekends have to be among the most meaningful, beautiful in recent memory.

The week before we've made new friends who are like long-lost family, reunited in the Adamic wilderness where we've first lost sight of one another, only to be able to make out the others' face once again when we are finally found in Christ.

This past weekend my family was busy serving at church to kick off a new season of ministry.  The cry for God, for the Good News in this Bad News World is overwhelming.  Thank you for making us see, we prayed, but this is really too much!  Please help us do your will...like, Big Time Help!

Yet despite all the beauty and blessing, joyful toil and exuberant hope, before yesterday was soon over I've lost my temper with...you guessed it, my son.  Again.

And it was over absolutely nothing.  Really, no false modesty here; one shouldn't waste even a Meh on it.  Of course I can say this now.  But when it was happening I made it look and sound like the welfare of humanity as a whole past present and future was hinging on that one wrong that I must right.

How could someone so magnanimous in pouring out his life for others only a moment ago be so stingy in love in the next?  How could a father who had tirelessly made many gentle but deliberate attempts over a day to invite his son to see wider and further be so implacably shortsighted himself before the day was over?  How could a peacemaker be so unpeaceable, ready to fight to his death for...his own pride?

I remember what Marilynne Robinson once wrote (in the Preface of "John Calvin: Steward of God’s Covenant"):

 "[John Calvin] did not set out to refute or prove but to enlist. 

 Think what a wonderful creature you are—'such agile motions of the soul, such excellent faculties, such rare gifts, especially bear upon the face of them a divinity that does not allow itself readily to be hidden.'

 And think what a terrible creature you are, how inclined to indolence and selfishness, dishonesty, pride and error, cruelty.

 Everything about you that is wonderful points to God, because it is his much marred but still perceptible image. Everything that is terrible about you points to God, because in confronting it you feel the vastness of the difference between yourself and any conception you can form of him: 

 ‘To this extent we are prompted by our own ills to contemplate the good things of God; and we cannot seriously aspire to him before we begin to become displeased with ourselves.’

 This paradox, which is typically Calvinist, enlarges and complicates the meaning of self and self-knowledge by placing them in the moment of the grandest, indeed the most metaphysical, experience of the wonder of being."

Is this not a beautiful invitation to forgive others and ourselves, from birth to birth, bringing to this creation in exile the child of God that we are, reflecting our Father's image, however dimly, nevertheless glorious?

Yours, Alex

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