Unfolding

There is part of me that is screaming, “DO NOT POST THIS.”

This part is very compassionate, and very, very concerned that my words might be taken out of context, might be turned against those who have been told, and perhaps are being told, that they are unlovable and who often live beyond society’s circle of compassion. There is none of that in these words. No condemnation for you, or anyone you may know. Just none.

This is a self-reflection. It is about my faith. It is about the things I faintly hear when I am still. It is about some of the creative ways I find to reject God, and God’s always-compassionate response. It is about that and no more. Because, frankly, that’s plenty.

Maybe I ought to pay attention to the part of me that is so deeply concerned and tuck the whole thing away in my journal. But I think I am going to post it for the same reason I post other posts. Because it’s on my heart, and I wonder if there might be others who also wonder about such things, and who wonder if they are alone in their wonderings. I post so that you might know you are not. That you might know we are always connected. You and I, and, I suspect, many others.

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Do you think the gray squirrel wakes each morning and asks,
	Is today the day 
        I finally get my wings?
Do you imagine the gray whale says, 
       I've been a slacker far too long. 
       It's time I learned to walk.
Well, I do not.
I think the gray squirrel 
gray squirrels, 
and the gray whale 
gray whales.

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Dear Friend,

Just before I read your first text, I was sitting with these lines from Rilke’s Book of Hours:

…I want to unfold.
Let no place in me hold itself closed,
for where I am closed, I am false.

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I was lost in wondering if I have but one job: to embody trust, and in so doing, to unfold. To become who I already am, and all the way. To allow God to strip away ego and insecurity and striving and, especially busyness (I think them all as one and the same), and to trust that God designed and formed me precisely as God intended me to be. 

I was wondering if this isn’t the gospel distilled to its essence. 

Dear Chris, Let go of your striving, your longing to be more than I made you to be. Simply unfold, beloved one. That you will know the depth of my delight in you. Let nothing be hidden from me, and then, and only then will you know that I am love and my love for you is made complete in your unfolding.

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Sin is another one of those churchy words that feels so slippery to me. I think that sin is real, but I wonder if I’ve carried the wrong idea about it most of my life. I recently had a conversation with a friend regarding sin and we circled around the term like hawks over a valley, as it seems I usually do. Noticing all the ways I violate the ten commandments or some other code of conduct and call it sin, but never getting close enough see what’s really happening in the river.

I am wondering today if this misses the mark, and misses it by a fairly wide margin. Maybe thinking of sin in this way makes me feel good when I can honestly say, “Well, I may have told a lie here or there. But murder? Never murder.”  

I find myself wondering if sin has almost nothing to do with my verbs - with what I do. Just as I strenuously reject the idea that love is just a verb, and I am coming to reject the idea that sin is just a verb just as strenuously, and to think of it as an action covers up a far inkier darkness. Both love and sin seem to go way deeper than what I do. What I do seems, instead, to flow from who I am. I might be love. I might be sin. And my doing follows. It must flow out of me like, well like a river.  

I am now  wondering if my distrust, or even my fear of God’s specific design for me is the truer definition of sin. I am not suggesting it is a softer definition. Actually, this definition feels far more violent to me. This distrust, when acted upon, must lead, I think, to self-immolation, and which, in turn, prevents me from playing my role in the grand drama as God wrote it, and then things fall apart, and the center cannot hold.

The stakes feel much higher to me than, “I did a thing. Sorry.”

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When I think of sin in this way, the Biblical version of the fall shifts dramatically from what I had learned as a child. It becomes the story, not just of two people eating fruit forbidden by the creator, and perhaps not a story of disobedience at all, but a story of two people who convince themselves that they might improve on God’s design - or at least correct God’s miss. That the knowledge of good and evil, they surmise, ought to have been a design feature in the first place, and because God forgot to include it  -  an obvious oversight -  they could cover up God’s error with their own doing.

Dear God, Fixed that for you. You’re welcome. Love, A & E ❤️

The sin was not in the eating. It was not in the disobedience, per se. It was in the distrust, the insecurity, the ego, the rejection of their own belovedness, and their striving to make themselves whole.  In their belief that they could out-god God. This was about distrust, and distrust changed everything. They closed up.  They became precisely what God had intended them not to be. They rejected the steps God had intended for them, and them alone, to dance. So the whole system sort of went sideways.

This way of viewing the fall is far more compelling to me: And far more damning. Suddenly, my actions that I desperately hope might appear so generous and compassionate and loving are exposed as something else entirely, and the consequences more significant.

Honestly, this doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to me, and maybe it’s even self-evident to you. Jesus said as much in both his words in his interactions. Compare his responses those pious men of faith who actions were simply, and in every way, above reproach, to his responses to those whose actions had made them outcasts. It certainly appears that Jesus is seeing beyond mere actions into places that I simply cannot see. That he looked well past mere verbs. I wonder if this was behind his admonition against condemnation of others. It was recognition that my vision isn’t quite what I think it is.

Some might reasonably counter that to ignore the inner voice that pushes us toward growth, toward movement, toward becoming more and better than we already are, is a form of distrust of God’s design, as well. That God planted that voice in the first place. Perhaps.  But it’s hard for me to hold that in my arems. I have spent most of my life striving to be better, do better, love better. Results have, at best, been mixed. I have come to think (and maybe even believe) that inner voice, pushing me to self-improvement is something entirely different, something far more sinister. I think it might be the vicious wolf wrapped up in soft white fleece, and no less than that.

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(As an aside, I suppose one might wonder why God would not have engineered a more robust system, one that could absorb seemingly small perturbations such as a couple of kids, really, eating from the wrong tree. That might be a discussion for another day, but even the question makes me smile. I mean, didn’t God? When I start with God knows what God is doing, the robustness and beauty of the redemptive order of the universe - my pastor calls it the natural redemptive order -  takes my breath away…But again - a conversation for another day and one I would love - would really love -  to have with you. This idea of the natural redemptive order is hope, the very thing with feathers.)

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Okay. Maybe it feels like we’ve strayed a long way from your texts. Thank you for being patient.  Let’s go there now.

In your first text you said: 

“...in the past few years (I have grown to realize) how freeing… vulnerability can be.” 

And because of timing or grace or whatever, I heard: 

In the past few years I have grown to realize how freeing it can be:
     to unfold, 
     to trust God’s design for me and to share it freely.
     To do the gospel.

So I slept beside these thoughts all night. And then I woke to your second text in which you quoted Kathleen Norris. She was describing her preparation to conduct a study session on, of all things, the Antichrist.

…I went to see a pastor, hoping that he could help me. He quickly summarized and dismissed the tendency that Christians have always had to identify the Antichrist with their personal enemies, or with those in power whom they have reason to detest. It’s an easy temptation….the Antichrist has been equated with Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, …

What the pastor said then was so simple it will remain with me forever. “Each one of us,” he said, “acts as an anti-Christ whenever we hear the gospel (the invitation to unfold) and do not do it.”

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It’s hard for me to overstate how beautifully your two text messages, the second sent eleven hours after the first, one about vulnerability and the other about Antichrist knitted together an idea that felt like it had been hiding in plain sight for so long. The idea that distrusting God’s design for me, by not unfolding, by not surrendering, by holding back, by hiding, by not doing the gospel, I am refusing the steps that God gave to me, and upon which the interconnected order of all things depends. Not because I, alone, am somehow special or unique, but because we all are special and unique. Merton (and many others) suggested that every living thing reveals some aspect of Christ. I am then, in my distrust, in my staying closed, in my refusal to reveal that aspect of Christ being an anti-Christ.  

But to trust, to accept that God has designed me and formed me just as God intended? This is to embody trust and to unfold, and to let no place in me hold itself closed, to dance the steps that have been assigned to me? Perhaps this is what it means to be in-Christ. I’m thinking so.

In an earlier poem, in the same book Rilke writes:

If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.

This, today, is my prayer.

Oremus, dear friend. Can we?