Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging (11 page)

Our hope is inextricably connected with the conscious awareness of present risenness. During a writing session early one morning, for no apparent reason, a pervasive sense of gloom settled in my soul. I stopped writing and sat down to read the early chapters of the manuscript. I got so discouraged I considered abandoning the whole project. I left the house to get the brake tag on the car renewed. The office was closed. I decided I needed exercise. After jogging two miles on the levee, a thunderstorm hurled sheets of rain, and a howling wind almost blew me into the Mississippi River. I sat down in the tall grass, vaguely aware of clinging to a nail-scarred hand. I returned to the office, cold and soaked, only to get a phone call from Roslyn that led to conflict. My feelings were running rampant
 
—frustration, anger, resentment, fear, self-pity, depression. I repeated to myself, “I am not my feelings.” No relief. I tried, “This, too, shall pass.” It didn’t.

At six that night, emotionally drained and physically spent, I plopped down in a soft chair. I began to pray the Jesus prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner,” seeking out His life-giving Spirit. Slowly but perceptibly I awakened to His sacred presence. The loneliness continued but grew gentle, the sadness endured but felt light. Anger and resentment vanished.

A hard day, yes. Rattled and unglued, yes. Unable to cope, no.

How does the life-giving Spirit of the risen Lord manifest Himself on days like that? In our willingness to stand fast, our refusal to run away and escape into self-destructive behavior. Resurrection power enables us to engage in the savage confrontation with untamed emotions, to accept the pain, receive it, take it onboard, however acute it may be. And
in the process we discover that we are not alone, that we can stand fast in the awareness of present risenness and so become fuller, deeper, richer disciples. We know ourselves to be more than we previously imagined. In the process we not only endure but are also forced to expand the boundaries of who we think we really are.

“The mystery is Christ among you, your hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27). Hope knows that if great trials are avoided, great deeds remain undone, and the possibility of growth into greatness of soul is aborted. Pessimism and defeatism are never the fruit of the life-giving Spirit but rather reveal our unawareness of present risenness.

A single phone call may abruptly alter the tranquil rhythm of our lives. “Your wife was in a serious accident on the beltway. She is in critical condition at the hospital intensive care unit.” Or “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but your son has been arrested for peddling crack cocaine.” Or “Your three-year-old daughter was playing with mine by the side of the pool. I just left them alone for a minute, and your daughter . . .”

When tragedy makes its unwelcome appearance and we are deaf to everything but the shriek of our own agony
 
—when courage flies out the window and the world seems to be a hostile, menacing place
 
—it is the hour of our own Gethsemane. No word, however sincere, offers any comfort or consolation. The night is bad. Our minds are numb, our hearts vacant, our nerves shattered. How will we make it through the night? The God of our lonely journey is silent.

And yet it may happen in these most desperate trials of our human existence that beyond any rational explanation, we may feel a nail-scarred hand clutching ours. We are able, as Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jewess who died in Auschwitz on November 30, 1943, wrote, to “safeguard that little piece of . . . God in ourselves”
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and not give way to despair. We make it through the night, and darkness gives way to the light of morning. The tragedy radically alters the direction of our lives, but in our vulnerability and defenselessness we experience the power of Jesus in His present risenness.

…

Present risenness unravels the riddle of life.

In Anne Tyler’s novel
Saint Maybe
, Ian Bedloe’s mother is a Pollyanna living in a red-bow world. Ceaselessly flashing a pasted-on smile, she runs around like Lancelot’s horse in four directions at once. But after the sudden death of her oldest son, she has a moment of deep reflection. Driving home with her husband on Sunday morning from the Church of the Second Chance, she says to him,

“Now, sweetie,” he said.

“We’ve had such extraordinary troubles,” she said, “and somehow they’ve turned us ordinary. That’s what’s so hard to figure. We’re not a special family anymore.”

“Why, sweetie, of course we’re special,” he said.

“We’ve turned uncertain. We’ve turned into worriers.”

“Bee, sweetie.”

“Isn’t it amazing?”
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After this dialogue, Bee gathers herself together and resumes her all-sweetness-and-light way of being.

Treating life as a series of disconnected episodes is a habit deeply rooted in many of us. We discern no pattern in the experiences and events coming from outside ourselves. Life seems as disjointed as the morning news informing us of a drop in the stock market, the rising flood waters in the Midwest, a foiled terrorist plot in New York, the latest way to cut cancer risk, Miss America’s wardrobe, and on and on.
The panoply of information, events, emotions, and experiences stuns us into passivity. We seem content to live life as a series of uncoordinated happenings. Visitors drop by, feelings and ideas come and go, birthdays and anniversaries are observed, sickness and loss arrive unannounced, and nothing seems interrelated.

This is particularly true as the years roll by. In what Shakespeare called “the heyday of the blood,” life seemed to be more vivid, events seemed to have more meaning, and the crazy quilt pattern of each day seemed to weave a design. Now, a little older, we are less affected
 
—more “philosophical,” we like to tell ourselves. We pride ourselves on having learned in the hard school of life to “cut our losses,” and we look back on the past with a certain indulgent pity. How simple things seemed back then, how easy the solution to the riddle of life. Now we are wiser, more mature; we have finally begun to see things as they really are.

Without deliberate awareness of the present risenness of Jesus, life is nonsense, all activity useless, all relationships in vain. Apart from the risen Christ, we live in a world of impenetrable mystery and utter obscurity
 
—a world without meaning, a world of shifting phenomena, a world of death, danger, and darkness. A world of inexplicable futility. Nothing is interconnected. Nothing is worth doing, for nothing endures. Nothing is seen beyond appearances. Nothing is heard but echoes dying on the wind. No love can outlast the emotion that produced it. It is all sound and fury, with no ultimate significance.
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The dark riddle of life is illuminated in Jesus; the meaning, purpose, and goal of everything that happens to us, and the way to make it all count, can be learned only from the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

Living in the awareness of the risen Jesus is not a trivial pursuit for the bored and lonely or a defense mechanism enabling us to cope with the stress and sorrow of life. It is the key that unlocks the door to grasping the meaning of existence. All day and every day we are being reshaped into the image of Christ. Everything that happens to us is designed to this end. Nothing that exists can exist beyond the pale of His presence
(“All things were created through him and for him”
 
—Colossians 1:16), nothing is irrelevant to it, nothing is without significance in it.

Everything that is comes alive in the risen Christ
 
—who, as Chesterton reminded, is standing behind us. Everything
 
—great, small, important, unimportant, distant, and near
 
—has its place, its meaning, and its value. Through union with Him (as Augustine said, He is more intimate with us than we are with ourselves), nothing is wasted, nothing is missing. There is never a moment that does not carry eternal significance
 
—no action that is sterile, no love that lacks fruition, and no prayer that is unheard. “We know that by turning
everything
to their good, God cooperates with all those who love him” (Romans 8:28, emphasis added).

The apparent frustrations of circumstances, seen or unforeseen, of illness, of misunderstandings, even of our own sins, do not thwart the final fulfillment of our lives hidden with Christ in God.

The awareness of present risenness affects the integration of intuition and will, emotion and reason. Less preoccupied with appearances, we are less inclined to change costumes to win approval with each shift of company and circumstance. We are not one person at home, another in the office; one person at church, another in traffic. We do not pass rudderless from one episode to another, idly seeking some distraction to pass the time, remaining stoic to each new emotion, enduring with a shrug of our shoulders when something irks or irritates. Now circumstances feed us, not we them; we use them, not they us. Gradually we become whole and mature persons whose faculties and energies are harmonized and integrated.

…

When Jesus said that whoever saw Him saw the Father, His hearers were shocked beyond belief. For those of us who have heard these words so often, they have lost their shock value. Yet they contain the power to shatter all our projections and false images of God. Jesus affirmed that
He was the incarnation of all the Father’s feelings and attitudes toward humankind. God is no other than as He is seen in the person of Jesus
 
—thus Karl Rahner’s phrase, “Jesus is the human face of God.”

The central miracle of the gospel is not the raising of Lazarus or the multiplication of the loaves or all the dramatic healing stories taken together. The miracle of the gospel is Christ, risen and glorified, who this very moment tracks us, pursues us, abides in us, and offers Himself to us as companion for the journey! God
pazzo d’amore
and
ebro d’amore
(“crazed with love” and “drunk with love”
 
—Catherine of Siena) is embodied in Jesus dwelling within us.
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Paul wrote, “We, with our unveiled faces reflecting like mirrors the brightness of the Lord, all grow brighter and brighter as we are turned into the image that we reflect; this is the work of the Lord who is Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:18).
The Jerusalem Bible
offers four helpful notes here: (1) Unveiled
 
—as Moses had been. (2) Reflecting or contemplating. (3) The brightness of the Lord is the glory of the risen Jesus, being the glory on the face of Christ (4:6). (4) The contemplation of God in Christ gives the Christian a likeness to God (Romans 8:29 and 1 John 3:2).

Paul had the audacity to boast that he had the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16). His boast was validated by his life. From the moment of his conversion, his entire attention was riveted on the risen Christ. Jesus Himself was a force whose momentum was ceaselessly at work before Paul’s eyes (Philippians 3:21). Jesus was a Person whose voice Paul could recognize (2 Corinthians 13:3), who strengthened Paul in his moments of weakness (12:9), who enlightened him and consoled him(2 Corinthians 1:4-5). Driven to desperation by the slanderous charges of false apostles, Paul admitted to visions and revelations from the Lord Jesus (2 Corinthians 12:1). The Person of Jesus revealed the meaning of life and death (Colossians 3:3).

In the novel
To Kill a Mockingbird
, Atticus Finch said, “You never know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them.”
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Paul looked
so unflinchingly at himself, others, and the world through the eyes of Jesus that Christ became the ego of the apostle
 
—“I live now not with my own life but with the life of Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). Didymus of Alexandria said that “Paul was full of Christ.”

Contemplation is gazing at the unveiled glory of God in the risen glorified Christ. Contemplative prayer is above all else looking at the person of Jesus.
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The prayer of simple awareness means we don’t have to get anywhere because we are already there. We are simply coming into consciousness that we possess what we seek. Contemplation, defined as looking at Jesus while loving Him, leads not only to intimacy but also to the transformation of the person contemplating.

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous short story
The Great Stone Face
, a young boy stares at the face carved in granite and regularly asks tourists in town if they know the identity of the face on the mountain. No one does. Into manhood, midlife, and old age he continues to gaze on the face at every opportunity, until one day a tourist passing through exclaims to the once-young boy who is now a weather-beaten old man, “You are the face on the mountain!” Contemplative awareness of the risen Jesus shapes our resemblance to Him and turns us into the people God intended us to be.

…

Present risenness is the impulse to ministry. “When he saw the crowds he felt sorry for them because they were harassed and dejected, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36). This passage of exquisite tenderness offers a remarkable glimpse into the human soul of Jesus. It tells how He feels about human beings. It reveals His way of looking out on the world, His nonjudgmental attitude toward people who were looking for love in wrong places and seeking happiness in wrong pursuits. It is a simple revelation that the heart of Jesus beats the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Every time the Gospels mention that Jesus was moved with deep emotion for people, they show that it led Him to do something
 
—physical or inner healing, deliverance or exorcism, feeding the hungry crowds or intercessory prayer. Above all, it moved Him to dispel distorted images of who He is and who God is, to lead people out of darkness into light. I’m reminded of this messianic prophecy of Isaiah: “He is like a shepherd feeding his flock, gathering lambs in his arms, holding them against his breast and leading to their rest the mother ewe” (40:11).