Who Believes?


Dear Eugene,

This morning I was contemplating on what Rowan Williams said here:

"So we come back, by a longish detour, to the point to which Mark's narrative brought us: the contemplative enterprise of being where we are and refusing the lure of a fantasized future more compliant to our will, more satisfying in the image of ourselves that it permits. Living in the truth, in the sense in which John's Gospel gives it, involves the same sober attention to what is there—to the body, the chair, the floor, the voice we hear, the face we see—with all the unsatisfactoriness that this brings. Yet this is what it means to live in that kingdom where Jesus rules, the kingdom that has no frontiers to be defended. Our immersion in the present moment which is God's delivers the world to us—and that world is not the perfect and fully achieved thing we might imagine, but the divided and difficult world we actually inhabit. Only, by the grace of this living in the truth, we are able to say to it at least an echo of the 'yes' that God says, to accept as God accepts.”

I think, I hope, it will be a lifelong contemplation, throughout all my days, especially in the mornings.

Earlier this week my son commented when I carried him back from the mountain, "Everybody says we should be the best version of ourselves..."  He was talking about David Beckham's perfect hairstyle, even when on the ball field.

God is the best version of ourselves.  God accepts being human, "with all the unsatisfactoriness that this brings."  To trust in this God is to accept what this God accepts.

All the time we speak about what we can't accept, where our "baseline" is drawn.  Anyone half-honest would see all day long we go around with a pencil and a ruler and a scale.  We can't accept a God who would accept what we can't.

Who believes what we’ve heard and seen?
   Who would have thought God’s saving power would look like this?

 The servant grew up before God—a scrawny seedling,
   a scrubby plant in a parched field.
There was nothing attractive about him,
   nothing to cause us to take a second look.
He was looked down on and passed over,
   a man who suffered, who knew pain firsthand.
One look at him and people turned away.
   We looked down on him, thought he was scum.

We look down on God and live beneath the baseline of being human.

Yours, Alex

Comments

  1. RoseSeptember 1, 2019 at 3:25 PM

    Always be joyful. Never stop praying. Be thankful in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you who belong to Christ Jesus.
    1 Thessalonians 5: 16 - 18

    ReplyDelete

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