A Chance Meeting and God’s Grace

This post is in honor of my friend, Jim Connell. He was recently diagnosed with cancer, and I have been told he is not doing well. I have been meaning to tell our story. His sickness and thinking about our time together challenged me to finally put it to paper.

I walked into the sanctuary alone. It was my third day in Moscow, and I was craving conversation. I had spent the last three days grunting, pointing, and google translating in order to connect to the Russian people I lived with and met on the streets. My sanity began to wane as moments of frustration and isolation piled up. I was extremely lonely.

I searched online for an Anglican prayer service. To my surprise, a church (one of three Anglican churches in Russia) was located just a few blocks away from Red Square, and they had Morning Prayer every day at 8 am. The small apartment I bunked at was about a 45 minute train ride from the center of the city, so I woke up early, and snuck out of the apartment before my hosts woke up.

St Andrews was quiet. There were two solitary figures in the front — one sitting on a stool facing the entryway, the other in a chair on the end of a row with an alter view. Thinking I was early, I sat on the opposite side of the center aisle, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible in a room of three meant for five hundred. I wonder why I still fall into my anti-social tendencies at the most inopportune times.

Neither of the men said a word to me. I fidgeted uneasily in my chair feeling — knowing — my presence solicited wonder amongst the “crowd”. I avoided eye contact and examined the pale white walls with waves of spotted yellow creeping down from the vaulted ceilings of this old cathedral which once acted as the recording studio for Soviet Russia. The stories told within these dilapidated walls…

I fumbled through the prayers and the prayer book — a lost Bible Belt soul clueless on the Canterbury trail. When the service ended, I wasn’t quite sure what to do. Should I talk to them? They didn’t seem interested when I arrived. Should I wait and see if they talk to me? Should I flee at the last Amen and avoid any awkward interactions? The latter is my default in these situations, so as the service came to a close, I began to gather my things, and make my way toward the exit. But, before I could bolt, the two interested gentlemen grabbed me by the arm and ushered me to the parsonage for tea.

Father Simon Stephens and Jim Connell had been friends for quite a while. Jim was in his 70s and a retired Navy officer. During his time of service, Jim spent much of his time in the Soviet Union. Because of this, when the USSR fell in 1991, he was appointed to command a joint military commission between the US and Russia that searched for information in the newly released Russian archives on MIAs during the Cold War. Since Russia was his home away from home, St Andrews became his church, and Father Simon, his priest.

After tea, I was on the verge of departing the men when Jim offered to show me around Moscow. Joyfully, I agreed. The English language was too sweet to resist. I desperately needed a companion — even if it was a 74 year old Navy man from Arlington, VA.

As we walked and we talked, we came across statues of Russian musicians and artists. Jim preceded to tell me their stories and why these particular statues are important to the Russian imagination. We walked to Tverskaya Street, the main thoroughfare in Moscow, where a statue of the founder of Russia, Yuri Dolgoruky, stood. He spoke confidently and passionately about the history of his surrogate homeland. I sort of wish I recorded Jim’s words.

Next, we wandered into a nearby orthodox church. The church was small; it was not very deep, but the ceiling rose and seemed to extend much longer in length than the width. At the highest point, there was a painting of a white dove, wings extended in mid-flight, as if the Spirit was in descent to bless this holy place.

The priest was in the middle of his homily. We stood off in the back and watched. Jim translated the message for me – a crystal clear exhortation for the church to live out the gospel of Christ. As the priest spoke, the people listened in fervent, participatory worship. Icon after icon lined the beautiful walls of the church. Men and women alike, men in their work clothes, women with scarves covering their heads in reverence, walked up to each icon, crossed themselves, bowed and kissed the plexi-glass protecting the Window to God, and quietly prayed to the God who saves. As the service came to a close, I followed Jim’s lead and kissed the ring of the priest as he bore the cross of Christ in his hands.

Jim had me at hello.

We spent a few more days together – listening to a pianist and violinist at the Moscow Conservatory, and experiencing the oldest one ring circus in Moscow (He went twice that week. He loved the circus). After my five days in Moscow, I was off to the home of Raskolnikov and the Hermitage – St. Petersburg. We shook hands, said our goodbyes, and went our separate ways.

“A strange period began for Raskolnikov: it was as though a fog had fallen upon him and wrapped him in a dreary solitude from which there was no escape.”

I walked in weary lonesome circles amongst thousands of people. It was noon on my last day in Petersburg, and I was getting hungry. I had met no “Jim” during my four days in Peter the Great’s city. My hostel was empty, and those at the local English speaking church I attended said a passing hello and congregated and communed only with their own. The Raskolnikov fog enveloped me in a burdensome darkness (A previous reflection about the darkness I experienced in Russia).

This last day was supposed to be a culmination of how the Russian culture transformed my views on life and God; this trip to Russia was supposed to be a measure of grace – the measure of grace – I needed to affirm the work of God in my life. Yet, as I wandered the city, I desperately tried to enter simple restaurant after restaurant to satisfy my hunger, but I did so to no avail. My mechanical hand grabbed hold of door knobs and door handles, only to be repulsed by the cold chill of the steel and metal. Sickened, I released my grip, and continued aimlessly on the circuitous path around the Church of the Spilled Blood and Nevsky Prospekt.

After an hour and half of this diseased existential crisis, I was able to eat, and make my way to the last place of interest on my trip – the Dostoevsky Museum (fitting). Yet, as I descended down the stairs of the restaurant, I was swept up in the same sickness from before. In a trance, I slowly began to walk the opposite direction of the museum on the Nevsky Prospekt…

As I unconsciously passed by the coffee shop the Russian poet Pushkin frequented, a familiar orange hat floated above the crowd of people on this busy street. I stopped. Why do I know this hat? I tried to shake off the haze which cloaked my rational thoughts and voluntary movements. I squinted; I watched; I tried to focus as the hat drew closer and closer. The bright orange hat began to pierce through the fog of the darkness which consumed me. As its radiance pushed aside the mist of sorrow, I was overcome with the realization that Jim Connell was walking toward me! 450 miles from where we originally met, I see the one and only person I know in Russia!

My heart began to race. What do I do? Do I let my depression dictate my decisions and keep destroying my soul in isolation? Almost instantly, before I am able to decide, he is parallel to me, mere feet away. Uncontrollably, with no regards to the masses which encircle us, I let my emotions decide for me. I shoot my hand to the sky and wave ecstatically, and I shout with a quiver in my voice, “Jim! Jim! It’s me, Justin! Jim!” As he passes by, he hears my cries and turns his head toward my direction. His eyes meet mine; his face lights up and matches the bright warm color of his hat. We embrace and marvel at the chance of our meeting.

Jim introduces me to his Russian wife, Irena. He insists I spend the day with them. I said, “Anything to be in the light, Jim.”

We go to the hotel the military used to put him up in. They buy me a cappuccino, and we listen to the harp player who plucks her beautiful instrument every day at 2:00 pm. Afterward, they take me to the Dostoevsky Museum. At the museum Irena told me about her journey to faith — about how Dostoevsky and Tolstoy brought her out of the darkness of her communist Atheism and into the light of the Orthodox Church. I always suspected certain literature had the transformative power of the Spirit. Jim just sits in the corner and watches us. He shakes his head, “I can’t believe I saw you again, Justin”, as a smile stretches from ear to ear.

In Sam’s last post, he reflected beautifully on the grace inherent in brokenness. God himself is in the brokenness, not solely a spectator removed from the events of our sorrow and shame placing bets with the angels on whether or not we serve him through it all. If this presupposition is true, then our response to it should be an overflow of joy in all situations of our lives and the lives of others because what is seen through them is God himself and the hints of his glory. It is an attempt to frame the reality of the world around the truth of God as the one who redeems and is redeeming all things to himself – even the broken things.

God used Jim to remind me of his inherent goodness – that his inherent goodness trumps the reality of my brokenness. I oftentimes fail to remember this simple truth as the darkness shrouds the light which presses constantly against the unrelenting nature of sin and death.

But, the image of Jim and his orange hat remains. It tells the story of how God redeems, and he continues to redeem, and he will never cease to reveal his goodness to those who seek it.

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Happy Birthday, Flannery O’Connor!

Southern author Flannery O’Connor was born this day in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia. She was an orthodox Catholic who used the grotesque to reveal the grace and love of Christ. If you have read a short story by O’Connor, you were probably appalled, at first glance, with the way she communicates this grace — actually, you probably couldn’t recognize it through the images of one legged woman being deceived, a young boy drowning himself in a river as a way of purification, and a man, seemingly out of spite, tattooing a picture of God, “not Christ” on his back. Her images haunt you, they disgust you, but the brutality of them force you to stop….and examine the seed of Truth rooted in each and every one of her stories.

She explains her purpose in communicating truth in this particular manner as such:

An author must “know how far he can distort without destroying, and in order not to destroy, he will have to descend far enough into himself to reach those underground springs that give life to big work. This descent into himself will, at the same time, be a descent into his region. It will be a descent through the darkness of the familiar into a world where, like the blind man cured in the gospels, he sees men as if they were trees, but walking.”

As we (and she) descend into the darkness of the life external and the life internal, our brokenness, “The Freckled and Flawed“, don’t consume us, but instead, bring for the springs of life. But, you must confront this darkness to experience the life promised through the death and resurrection of the Christ. O’Connor, in her wit and vulgarity, accomplishes this very thing. She leads us into the darkness, for the sake of light itself. It seems counter-intuitive, but in reality, the reality we all know and experience, it is the way to union with our God.

In honor of her work here on earth, here is one of my favorite passages from her short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

“Jesus!” the old lady cried. “You’ve got good blood! I know you wouldn’t shoot a lady! I know you come from nice people! Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady. I’ll give you all the money I’ve got!”….

“Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead.” The Misfit continued, “and He shouldn’t have done it. He thrown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow him…”

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The Freckled and Flawed: The Ressurected Beauty of the Broken

     Glory be to God for dappled things         ~Pied Beauty

Everyone in my family has freckles on their arms, legs, and faces. My mother and older sister both have so many freckles that the brown blemishes simply blend together. Yet, anyone who knows them would call them beautiful, the kind of beautiful that only grows as you get closer to them, the unassuming, West Texas kind of beauty.

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; / For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; / Fresh firecoal chesnut-falls; finches wings; / Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; / And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

For most of my life, I’ve known two types of beauty: the beauty of the pristine, majestic, overwhelming, awe-inspiring beauty, and the lowly beauty of differences, humble and counter. Growing up in a culture full of divisions, I inhaled the view of the high and low worlds. One world was ethereal, untouchable in its purity, the perfect face, the pristine place, the efficient truth, and the purity of light. This was where the beauty of God was. His was the beauty of the “mind” or “spirit” or, on occasion, the emotive heart when a perfect, well-wrapped story was told – none of this beauty had any dirt on it. The other world of beauty, the messy world of freckled beauty, I did not appreciate until I was brought out of the ground in which I had buried myself.

When I was in high school, I loved physics, the purity of its laws, logic, and broad explanations of a dynamic world. One of the laws of physics that stuck with me and helped me explain the world was the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics which states: “All things tend to disorder.” The classic analogy for this law is how easily your room tends to turn into a mess and how hard that mess is to pick up. The analogy clearly resonated with me and its message became lenses through which I could understand the physical world. The physical world was heading to hell; it was easy to see. I did not need to worry too much about cleaning its messes or contemplating its beauty. But something happened to me when this God I had separated from the physical world and from my own life exhumed me and gave me a heart of flesh. When the truth took a hold of my heart and began to transform me, and renew my mind (Romans 12:2), a life began to grow in me that was messy, un-boxed, and beautiful.

A life.

Life is a mess of mad cells struggling desperately to survive(why?) against the lifeless order surrounding it. A still, lifeless object under the microscope has a beautiful, ordered structure to it. Its atoms and particles align themselves stoically next to each other. But when you put a muddy mess of life under a microscope what you see is swimming bacteria, vociferous cells, all violent in their fecundity. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard writes about the absurd messiness of life:

“If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn’t believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe….No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.”

Life does not fit into clean explanations, none of it makes perfect sense. And worst of all, life can be harsh and revolting to our senses, because from the smallest single celled organisms, to ferocious insects, to decrepit men, life reeks with its own waste and brutality. Yet, the great paradox remains, our experience still tells us life is beautiful.

Christians have done a lot to remove God from the messiness of the world, to protect God from the harsh realities of a broken world. I have often wondered if Darwin as a biologist who saw the radical variety of an ever-changing world could not have been partially motivated to write his Origin of the Species to separate God from the pervasive wretchedness of nature. Darwin once said: “What a book a Devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!” The cultured Anglo-Victorian god of the mid 1850’s could not have been directly responsible for the mess Darwin and his compatriots found when they really began to dig into the natural world. Separating God from his creation happens all the time when we try to explain to ourselves  tragedies and mysteries with bumper sticker theology and trite words of comfort. Even if we excuse an omnipotent God because he used evolution to create our present world or we try to attribute the mass horrors of it to the Fall, He is the first cause, and it remains His creation, His responsibility, and still, a window to who this God really is.

God himself has never shied from revealing to us the world as it is. There are few more devastating tales in literature than the destruction of Jerusalem as told by Jeremiah or the life of Job (why is the honestly questioning Job who demands God answer for Himself, for this world He has made, and the horrible story He is telling in Job’s life the only commended character while all the other characters blaming Job’s downfall not on God are condemned?), yet we are afraid of it. I’ve heard so few honest assessments of the book of Job that it took a Jewish college professor to open my eyes to what is really being said (it isn’t that hard to see: God does not have to listen to our sensibilities, He’s God). We are afraid of the tiger in the night, the full reality of this whole world being caused by an omnipotent, loving(?) God who we can’t understand; this does not fit our boxed and framed god.

 

The Wedding Feast

Small talk. I shudder at the very business of typing those insidious words and the meaning they represent. But, to navigate this world with any sort of sanity and success, you must learn how to endure it well and keep the chills which creep slowly up your spine veiled with the mask of cheer. These opportunities to shoot the breeze with a stranger happen often. They usually begin with a cordial “hello” and an exchange of pleasantries – names, place of origin, and marital status. From there, and fairly quickly I might add, the topic of work comes up.

Typically, this topic is a safe place to dig a little deeper into the heart, psyche, and passions of your new friend. The majority of this person’s conscious day is spent at work, thinking about work, or trying to find work, so focusing on this part of their life makes it easier and more interesting to develop any sort of continuity in the conversation.

Whenever I am asked to share my occupation in these situations, I tell them I am a teacher. Then, a part of them seems to light up with curiosity, and they just have to know what I teach. I tell them I teach sixth-grade History, Literature, and English. Their enraptured look of curiosity changes ever so slightly to a queer smile as they remember their middle school years. “I don’t know how you do it,” they say while shaking their head. Outsiders always share an unnatural depth of pity for job where I get to skirt the use of Excel. I don’t get it…

Well, to clarify for my mystified stranger, I go on to tell them about my school which values the education of the whole person for the Kingdom; I tell them about my students who generally love to learn; I tell them about the teachers I teach with who I regard as some of my closest friends; I tell them about the subject I teach; I tell them – “It could be worse.”

Pieter Breugel the Elder’s painting from the 16^th century, The Peasant Wedding, adorns the banner of The Vicarious Life blog. It is also a painting my students encounter as we discuss the Renaissance. Teaching paintings like this help me forget the badgering my new friends perceive I deal with (correctly) on a daily basis. When I teach Breugel, being that they are sixth-graders, we don’t go into much detail about the painting (or really anything), but we marvel at the fact he is depicting peasants at a time and in a place when humanism and the study of the classics begin to creep out of the “graves” of the middle ages and into thought of the upper class – those who would be patrons of Breugel’s particular work. We wonder the reasoning; we hypothesize about the merits of painting the peasantry; but we move on quickly in order to cram in some other aspects of the Northern Renaissance.

Recently, I began to research Breugel with the hope of determining his purpose for including the peasantry in his later paintings. In the 16^th century, Breugel followed the trend of northern artists and traveled to Italy to learn about the re-discovery of the classical modes of art and the innovation of artistic methodology which derived from the increase investment in the discipline. He apprentices under a famous artist for a bit, and then leaves Italy and returns to the north as a landscape painter. Yet, towards the tail end of his life, the motif of the peasantry, which is a removal from the humanistic ideology of the Italian Renaissance, begins to encompass his work.

As with anything of worth, once you in engage it critically and honestly, one thing becomes clear: the complexity of the very thing you examine. So it is with determining with any certainty Breugel’s rationale for representing the peasant life. Perez Zagorin, in his article “Looking for Pieter Breugel”, sums up the complex nature of the scholarship of Breugel as such:

They have been variously perceived as comic and sympathetic representations of peasant life by a humane observer, as detached and accurate descriptions by an objective recorder, as graphic allegories of human folly, as visions of an organic community which is passing away, as products of a literary and pictorial genre of satirical commentaries on peasant crudity, gluttony, and lechery, and as an expression of the social condescension and moral superiority which humanist intellectuals and the dominant landed and urban classes of the painter’s time are said to have felt toward peasants and popular culture.

He seems to be empathetic of the peasants and the life they live…No, no, his work is satire – yay intellectualism!…Wait a second, working the land, tilling the ground – Breugel is saying we can’t lose those traditional values! Yay peasants!…

What becomes known is what is not really known with any certainty.

Oftentimes, as critics search for meaning in a particular artist and his work, they attempt to give a voice to the artist. It is an incredibly necessary role of the scholar. These voices bring insight into a foreign world in which we, in the west, derive our identity from. But what do we make of these different voices of Breugel? How do we interpret the truth of Breugel’s peasant purpose?….

What do we make of the different voices in our own time today? How do we interpret the truth of the broken “peasant” life in our own culture of the 21^st century?

At the Vicarious Life, in the midst of our Post-Christian world, we know three things to be true as the many voices compete for our attention:

1. We are mere peasants, seemingly “less-than” we are intended to be. Our humanity is caught in tension with the reality. It has the debilitating tendency to consume our true identity. Yet, on this side of glory, the tension will remain.
2. While our peasantry is a reality, the bridegroom became a peasant for the sake of his downtrodden bride, nullifying, in his union with the bride, the stigma attached to their toil and labor.
3. Because of this union between the peasant bridegroom and the peasant bride, the reality which supersedes all other realities is a new one: the feast which follows the ceremonious. In Breugel’s painting, the bridegroom is oftentimes seen as the man pouring wine for his guests on the bottom left. He personally distributes the drink for all his guests to celebrate his joy in becoming one with his bride. The guests sit with patient excitement, and experience with each other the freedom to be one with another, drink the pleasing fruit of the vine, and eat the bread which commemorates all that was accomplished on the day of celebration.

In our brokenness, in our peasant-ness, we are given the opportunity to live each day within the freedom of the wedding feast – a unique feast that is ongoing and present, and not only in the future. A wedding feast that is perpetual, even when it seems to have ceased long ago, or seems shrouded by the consequential toiling of the peasant life. The many voices which seek understanding aren’t meant to tear you away from the feast, but instead, they point to the feast itself…

If you pay close enough attention.

We are not whole until we are alive in another

When I returned from the summer before my sophomore year in college, a rather distinct choice in lifestyle confronted me. I had seen that summer the possibility of a selfless life and experienced firsthand how freeing and fulfilling this life could be. Yet, I also knew that my second year in college opened up the possibility for all kinds of self-fulfillment: parties, interesting classes, a girlfriend, all of the things college students know and love, and all of them fairly good things. I chose self-fulfillment, and it was surprising how well things went for me at first. I tasted and enjoyed most of the immediate desires of my heart. However, within a year, I either lost the things I desired most or found out that these things tasted bitter when made as my only food.

Once, while I was a freshman in college living in a dorm room full of various left over food items and delicious fungi, I woke up in the middle of the night starving. Living with a roommate, I did not turn on the lights, and I stumbled around the room groping for something to fulfill my desire. I found a loaf of bread sitting innocently on one of our shelves and quickly tore it open. I bit into it only to shockingly find it the most bitter thing I had tasted in my life. When I turned on the lights to find out exactly what I had eaten, I had one of the worst shocks of my life: this loaf of bread was completely molded, and the entire center of the bread I had taken a bite out of was white with fungus- it was bitter, crumbling dust in my mouth.

This was my experience in the worst years of my life following the beginning of my sophomore year in college. I pursued myself: whatever fancy, lust, or care my heart desired, I latched onto it, bit into it, and found it utterly bitter to my taste. Everything I regarded depended on self-fulfillment, a oneness with only my desires. I left the loneliness of others to find myself in myself. I was not unkind nor discourteous, but rather, I lived in separation, seclusion, segregation. I let no one be responsible for me, nor I be responsible for anyone else. And in all of this, I was utterly depressed.

I often consider that time of my life and what exactly made me so utterly depressed. Recently, I came to one very fixed truth: the life of separation where there is no regard for others, no desire to be held responsible for others or have someone else take responsibility for you, is the closest thing to a living death that we can know. The abstraction that our choices, both personal and social, have no bearing on anyone around us is a destructive inaccuracy. Our lives are never alone, and if they are alone, they are not lives.

When I awoke from my lifeless life, I awoke in the lives of others. Somehow by the grace of God, the kindness of others, and the love of my parents, I was allowed to be a part of fellowship program at a church in Houston. There were others there who made themselves responsible for me, and I became responsible in a small part for them. Choices were made to join me in my brokenness and bear some of what I could not bear myself, and through prayer and community, life began to be breathed back into me. The Holy Spirit whose work is always in the weaving together of the living body of Christ moved through everyone around me, their love, prayer, words, and kind rebukes, to quite literally raise me from the dead. I was once again a part of a community and rejoined humanity.

This time in my life has lead me to deeply consider what is it about community? How important is it to our lives?

Much of what I have learned and come to believe about this topic I owe to Charles Williams. In his writing, I found someone who spoke so honestly and radically orthodox about life in this world. He is the least known writer amongst the big three in the group known as the Inklings (which is made up of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkein, and Williams, and of course, he is the least known because he does not have an initialed first name). The word co-inherence and the title of this blog comes from his writings, and what I want to finish this blog post with is a union of some of his thoughts on the vicarious or exchanged life and my own thoughts on it quickly summed up.

To begin, the human soul desperately needs community, both in its natural existence and in its spiritual existence, every life requires the life of others.

Naturally, we are born from another, we live with each other, and our deepest death occurs when we are separated from our others by deed, distance, or death. The existence of life in every form depends on a separate life. The life of its progenitors, its food, and its environment are all essential to the beginning and continuation of any form of life. This is more radically true for us. We are conceived in our mother’s womb and carried for nine months, we are desperately in need of parental protection and provision much longer than most other animals, and virtually everything we eat had some prior life that is now giving us life. A life with each other, from another, and for another is basic to our existence.

Historically, the dependence on others is inherent to cultural advancement. One of the fundamental evolutions towards culture in history is the specialization of individuals to certain tasks. When human communities move away from spending all their time simply providing for themselves, but instead, begin to become craftsmen, tradesmen, priests, poets, and painters and allow others to farm and produce food for them, culture begins to become what we call culture. There is no culture without some doing for others that which they cannot do for themselves.

This is the natural order that we simply take for granted, yet the reality of our dependence on community extends infinitely deeper to the heart of our happiness, our souls, and our purpose in life.

In the Christian faith, the center of man’s salvation is the dependence on someone else. On the cross, mockers jeered the crucified King saying: “Others he saved; himself he cannot save.” To paraphrase Charles Williams, this quote paradoxically sums up the state of our life as Christians. Christ showed himself first in all things, even in this humility: in his love, he would not, and if I may go so far, he could not save himself, yet in this, he has made the way to life for all others. So, on our way in the Way, every step forward is grace- this most precious of overused words that means too much to trample on with more overuse yet is so beautiful I cannot help but use it. We are given everything for an abundant life by another, both ultimately in Christ, and presently by others. Everyone who would come to know this abundant life must lay down their own attempts to save themselves. The deeper beauty is in the exchange: we have nothing to save ourselves, yet we are to work in unison with God to bring His love into the lives of others. Mysteriously, we act as the messengers, the feet, the hands, the beating heart of a living God in this world. Others we will save, but ourselves we cannot save.

The extent of the exchanged or vicarious life in this universe runs to the life of its Maker. The Creator always lives in community.

In Genesis, God decrees that it was not good for man to be alone and so, even though all God had made was by itself good, it was not truly good until it was given life in another. Anne Ridler in a great rephrasing of God’s decree wrote that “it is not good for God to be alone,” for He never was alone and is always an Us.  Creation imitates its Author. The initial unity of man with God is not made perfectly right until woman is made out of his very flesh and joined into the triangular relationship. The threeness of God is repeated: His life is breathed into man and the life of woman formed from man, and then this web of glory is perpetually replicated in the generation of every born human life. A new life is begun in the mother, from an act with the father, and always out of the life of others. So in this simple union of family, the trinity is imaged. The Divine’s nature comes from each individual person of the trinity living as one in the love of all three.

In this same way, we are sewn and rooted, often excruciatingly so, to everyone around us, and everyday we are faced with the choice to live lives moving towards our own being in others and in their Maker or away from it. A living-in-love Triune God is the image from which we were made: we will only truly live in, out of, and from love with another.

There is too much more to be said about this, but a blog post is a blog post and many will look at its current length and give up hope and woefully shake their heads at me. I get that, I do it too, but I hope you read this and hope you will read whatever Justin and I have cooking in our minds down the road, at the very least for the sake of Justin. He has dreams of being famous, please placate those dreams by reading his posts and giving him a pat on the head. Hopefully, in some small way we can illuminate what we find is good, true, and beautiful in the glimpses of culture and the world around us that we are so entwined within. We want to affirm that everything was created as good and beautiful by God, including the very creativity that gives us the ability to recreate within this world. However, much of the goodness in creation rejects its own existence by cutting itself off from the unity of creation and failing to see just where its goodness lies and knows evil in this rejection, yet it cannot deny it’s own beautiful existence. It will speak its part, even if it is broken, and much of what Justin and I would like to write about is how even the broken pieces of this world sing songs, and sometimes very beautifully.

I will leave you with St. Patrick’s invocation of the Trinity from his Breastplate Prayer which I hope will remind you just how awesome the man whose day we will be celebrating soon was:

I arise today
  Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
  Through belief in the Threeness,
  Through confession of the Oneness
  of the Creator of creation.

We are not whole until we are alive in another.

-Sam