Postmortem 16

Well, it's a new day.  The operative word is still love.  It is really a difficult word, not so much for the many wrong-headed connotations but because it is so costly.  When we are living our lives predicated on love, this requires of us a huge opening of our souls.  Love, in it's initial stages with us, anyway is going to be traumatizing.  It has to be.  It cannot and will not be anything but.  At first anyway.  Love must wound before it can heal.

People often naturally separate truth from love.  They really are one and the same.  A loving God is also the God who will not countenance lies.  The living water that proceeded from the temple and poured over and lifted in its current the prophet Ezekiel is also the flaming coal from the altar of heaven that burned and purged the unclean lips and tongue of the prophet Isaiah.

For us to become people of love, we must first allow the work of love to break us open and penetrate us to the very quick like cleansing fire.  In practical terms, this really means abandoning joyfully and renouncing all in our lives that doesn't bear the light and love of Christ.  This is going to mean different things to different people, but this almost always begins as an experience of profound loss, especially for those who have been born into and enjoy lives of privilege. 

For the already wounded, the already traumatized, the work has already begun, and so the same God of love and truth becomes for those of us who have always lived as outcasts a healing and comforting balm.  God knows what each one of us needs, the very moment that we are needing it.

It isn't that he delights in afflicting us. Rather, he wants us to be, not exemplary citizens, nor good and faithful church people, nor good little anythings or good little nothings.  He wants us to be more like him.  And for this work to be underway, it more often than not is going to mean a lifetime of renunciation and repentance, and a lifetime of renewal and growth.  There is no standing still in the Kingdom Of God.

We remember the first of the Beatitudes, "Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of God."  And really, Gentle Reader, how can we really enter into our eternal inheritance except through acknowledging and accepting our need and our neediness.  We remember that throughout his life and ministry, Jesus called not the strong, nor the powerful, nor the learned, nor the successful, but people who were poor, imperfect, broken and wounded.  They were the poor in spirit, and thus the first true inheritors of the kingdom of God.

In terms of ourselves, today, while we our being held hostage by this pandemic, I have only these words to say:  "Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you."  But for us to begin to seek, we must first feel and fully experience our need, our hunger and our great poverty.  There is no other place where we can begin.