Chapter 61. Now, here, this

“We tend to underestimate two things:

1) how intense it is to be human, and

2) the capacity of the heart.”

For lent in 2016 I journey via the book Behold Your Life. I read this on Good Friday and tear at the beauty of the coupling of woundedness with gift: 

“Standing before the cross, I proclaim…

Here is my life. This is who I am. Here is my gospel – my bittersweet good news. I am wounded, broken, and scarred. Yet with all these burdens I am still able to be your song...

Here at the foot of the cross my blessings seem to stand in the background. I invite them to come closer, and they do. It feels like a great homecoming. Everyone is present.

Deep gratitude is here. She stands close by, reminding me of all the ways she’s blessed me.

Immense love and healing grace are present.

Fierce yearning is here.

Constant conversion and childlike trust have arrived.

 Always forgiving is here.

Abundant joy is present.

Lasting beauty stands by my side.

Ever faithful smiles through the crowd.

Even quiet peace has arrived on the scene.

The two sides stand and look at each other as if to say, “We’re not really divided. We’ve always been one.” The blessings embrace the bruises. The bite is gone in that embrace. I look upon the cross and I am healed.”

I substitute "cross" with Love: I look upon LOVE and I am healed.

Just the day before reading this, after Maundy Thursday service, I comment to Gregg that the cross for me now is more about God, through Jesus, demonstrating God's supreme love; not about Jesus needing to die for my sins. It wasn't until my early 50s that I finally came to a realization that "the joy set before him" (Hebrews 12:2) was not about Jesus getting to sit at the right hand of the Father, but rather about Jesus getting to demonstrate love to us and give LIFE to us.  

Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity.

Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God.

– R. Rohr

Love softens me and brings me to a place of openness rather than bitterness.

Only vulnerable people change. Only vulnerable people change others.

Jesus presented us with an icon of absolute vulnerability, and said, "Gaze on this until you get the point. Gaze on this until you know what God is like!"

That demanded too much of us, so we made the cross instead into a juridical transaction between Jesus and God ("substitutionary atonement theory"),

which in great part robbed the cross of its deep transformative power.

– Richard Rohr

When love is present, bruises and blessings can comingle in a meaningful and thus beautiful unity. Death and pain are transformed. As Teresa of Avila said in the midst of a culture of war and want

“All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Or as Horatio Spafford proclaimed after the wrenching loss of his wife and daughter at sea-

It is Well With My Soul

When peace like a river attendeth my way
When sorrows like sea billows roll
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say
It is well, it is well with my soul.

Even during the moments when I don’t believe all is well, I still want to. I’ve sung these words as a young person, I sing them now to myself and my grandchildren, I will sing them in my dying.

That want to – a belief that all is well – is with me in the midst of deep sadness. In summer 2016, my mom suffers through her final struggle with cancer and is ready and wanting to die as she sits in the nursing home, Methodist Manor room 22. Gregg’s folks have given up their house and car and reside in an assisted living facility. Their way of living up until now is gone: so many losses of what was.

Harder than my own suffering, it seems, is watching the suffering of loved ones. Yet still, when my body and mind don’t as easily embrace this truth of “well” there is a deeper part of me that yearns for an acceptance and even an embracing of what is, with an awareness and hope of what will be.

“Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms, 

you would never see the beauty of their carvings.”

Storms happen, and have their effects. Neither life nor death is merely black or white - darkness is as light.

I appreciate these simple reminders:

“Now. Here. This.”

– Father Greg Boyle

Contemplation is learning how to offer 

“a long, loving look at the Real.”

-William McNamara as quoted by Walter J. Burghardt, Church, No. 5 (Winter 1989), 14-17

The genius of the biblical revelation is that we come to God through “the actual,” 

the here and now, or quite simply what is. - Rohr

What I want is to acquiesce to oneness, serenity, acceptance, love. And operate under the assumption that ultimately: All is well and shall be well.

What I need is here.

 “You wander from room to room

Hunting for the diamond necklace

That is already around your neck!” 

― Jalaluddin Rumi

“And we pray, not

for new earth or heaven, but to be

quiet in heart, and in eye,

clear. What we need is here.”

– Wendell Berry, New Collected Poems, 180