Busting out


Dear Eugene,

I like the word "robust."  It means having a healthy strength, wholesome goodness, with a dynamic answering power to the complexities of life, things and people that make no sense to us from where we are standing now but we are open and attentive to the challenges of the strange and new, going from strength to strength with a however hesitant honesty about our own flaws and failures past, present and very likely the very next minute.

That's not the exact dictionary definition but how I meant it every time I used the word.  It is never a word of achievement to me but one of faith and yearning, a vision.

The opposite of robustness is not cowardliness or powerlessness; it is brute force: twisting people and things out of their shapes into a contortion we deem right, cookie-cutting with a machete and we ain't chopping cookies either, and the most disgusting of all, in the name of love and goodness, God on our side.  "What would Jesus do?" we ask the twisted, crying object on the ground to bow down to this call and live up to it.

Well, what Jesus the Word actually did do was to speak most definitively about who His Father really is by letting people with fire of self-righteousness coming out of their nostrils to twist Him into a contortion they deem right, dead meat on plain wood for our anger and deceit to feed on, that's what He did.  And he said now follow me, die the same death (baptism) so that you can live again, a new life that is not a possession for my personal use, even less a passport to "heaven," but, simply, a life to be lived in Him starting in the here and now, minute after minute, day after day, not on an elevated ground of achieved moral clarity, timeless truths, but plunging ever more deeply into the chaos of humanity, taking it all in, avoiding not the complexities of life we used to fear and detest, short-circuiting not the dark nights of Gethsemane we used to stigmatize in ourselves and mostly in others.  Get real.  Be robust.

That's what Jesus did and calling us to do likewise.

Yours, Alex

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