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Authors: Brennan Manning

Tags: #Christian Life, #Spiritual Growth, #Christianity, #God, #Grace, #Love

Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging (16 page)

BOOK: Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging
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When we hear the footsteps of the Grim Reaper, our perception of reality changes drastically. With precious time slipping away like sand in an hourglass, we quickly dismiss all that is petty and irrelevant and focus only on matters of ultimate concern. As Samuel Johnson once said, “The prospect of being hanged concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully.” Although a panic attack might be our initial response, we soon realize that sobbing is only wasting valuable time.

In one of her novels, Iris Murdoch depicts a man in a boundary situation. Time is running out for him. He is trapped in a cave waist deep in water. Soon the high tide will inundate the place. He thinks,
If I ever get out of here, I will be no man’s judge . . . not to judge, not to be superior, not to exercise power, not to seek, seek, seek. To love and to reconcile and to forgive, only this matters. All power is sin and all law is frailty. Love is the only justice. Forgiveness, reconciliation
 
—not law
.
[16]

The denial of death is not a healthy option for a disciple of Jesus. Nor is pessimism in the face of today’s troubles. The significant shift in priorities that comes through living twenty-four hours at a time is not mere resignation to what we know cannot be changed. My life in the confrontation with trials and tribulations is not stoic passivity. My death-defying
no
to despair at the end of my life and my life-affirming
yes
to seemingly insurmountable problems in the midst of my life are both animated by hope in the invincible might of the risen Jesus and in the
immeasurable scope of His power in us who believe
(Ephesians 1:19).

We are not cowed into timidity by death and life. Were we forced to rely on our own shabby resources, we would be pitiful people indeed. But the awareness of Christ’s present risenness persuades us that we are
buoyed up and carried on by a life greater than our own. Hope means that in Christ, by entrusting ourselves to Him, we can courageously face evil by accepting our own need for further conversion, the lovelessness of others, and the whole legacy of sin in the world around us and in our own heritage. We can then face death just as we can face life and the mammoth task before us, which Paul described as killing “everything in you that belongs only to earthly life” (Colossians 3:5).

The Christ within who is our hope of glory is not a matter of theological debate or philosophical speculation. He is not a hobby, a part-time project, a good theme for a book, or a last resort when all human effort fails. He is our life, the most real fact about us. He is the power and wisdom of God dwelling within us.

William Johnston was a wise old contemplative teacher at Sophia University in Tokyo. In a letter to a young colleague who was about to open a prayer center, he fairly shouted, “Never banish the thought of death from your consciousness.”
[17]
To those brave souls who long to forego fantasy for a life of fortitude, I would add, “Never deliberately banish the awareness of present risenness, and as you finish reading this chapter, for a moment listen to the Rabbi’s heartbeat.”


9 •

The Rabbi’s Heartbeat

GOD IS LOVE.

Jesus is God.

If Jesus ceased loving, He would cease being God.

Much of contemporary writing on spirituality has elucidated this theme with great clarity and depth. The unconditional love of God is the
leitmotif
of innumerable books, articles, sermons, and conferences. References to a limitless love that knows no boundary, caution, or breaking point are not in short supply either on the Christian analyst’s couch, the preacher’s pulpit, the theologian’s classroom, or Andrew Greeley’s novels. To cite a few examples,

The love of God is not a mild benevolence but a consuming fire.

 
— BEDE GRIFFITHS

God’s love is not conditional. We
cannot
do anything to deserve God’s love
 
—for which reason it is called grace; and we need not do anything to provoke it. It is always already there. Any love that is going to be salvific must be of this type, absolutely unconditional and free.

 
— BEATRICE BRUTEAU,
RADICAL OPTIMISM

One of the keys to real religious experience is the shattering realization that no matter how hateful we are to ourselves, we are not hateful to God. This realization helps us to understand the difference between our love and His. Our love is a need, His a gift.

 
— THOMAS MERTON,
THE NEW MAN

A false and illusory notion of God . . . sees God as someone who is gracious to me when I am good, but who punishes me relentlessly when I am bad. This is a typical patriarchal notion of God. He is the God of Noah who sees people deep in sin, repents that He made them and resolves to destroy them. He is the God of the desert who sends snakes to bite his people because they murmured against Him. He is the God of David who practically decimates a people, because their king, motivated by pride perhaps, takes up a census of his empire. He is the God who exacts the last drop of blood from his Son, so that his just anger, evoked by sin, may be appeased. This God whose moods alternate between graciousness and fierce anger, a god who is still all too familiar to many Christians
 
—is a caricature of the true God. This God does not exist. This is not the God whom Jesus reveals to us. This is not the God whom Jesus called “Abba.”

 
— WILLIAM SHANNON

Those luminous extrapolations of the gospel faithfully echo the words of the Great Rabbi in John’s gospel:

  • “A man can have no greater love than to lay down his life for his friends.” (15:13)
  • “I do not say that I shall pray to the Father for you, because the Father himself loves you.” (16:26-27)
  • “I will not leave you orphans.” (14:18)
  • “Anybody who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I shall love him and show myself to him.” (14:21)
  • “I shall see you again, and your hearts will be full of joy.” (16:22)

Our response to these wondrous revelations varies widely. One person hears the words, “God loves you as you are and not as you should be,” and says, “That is dangerous teaching. It promotes complacency and leads to moral laziness and spiritual laxity.” A second responds, “Yes, God loves me as I am, but He loves me so much He won’t let me stay where I am.”

A third way to respond is from the detached vantage point of the religious dabbler, who reacts to Jesus’ self-disclosure with, “Very interesting.” Eugene Peterson has a sharp response to this mind-set: “Scripture . . . is not for entertainment. It is not for diversion. It is not for culture. It is not a key for unlocking secrets to the future. It is not a riddle to intrigue the pious dilettante.”
[1]

A fourth response is the cynical one: “It’s all just words, words, words
 

abracadabra
.” Cynics debunk everything. There is nothing true, good, or beautiful under the sun. In actuality, the cynic is a hurt sentimentalist turned inside out. There is no Santa Claus. “I’ll never trust anyone again.” “I didn’t know what love was until I got married; then it was too late.” A father, alienated from his three sons for many years, was asked how he liked children. Quoting W. C. Fields, he replied, “Fried!”

In sexual love the cynic perceives lust; in sacrifice and dedication, guilt; in charity, condescension; in political skills, manipulation; in the powers of the mind, rationalization; in peacefulness, ennui; in neighborliness, self-interest; in friendship, opportunism. The vitality of the old is pathetic; the exuberance of the young is immature; the steadiness of the middle-aged is boredom.
[2]

And yet even for the most disillusioned cynic, an aching longing remains for something true, good, or beautiful.

Lastly, we come to the sincere disciples who listen attentively to the Word of God, yet remain curiously unmoved. The words inform them about God but do not involve them in
knowing
God. They respond, “The thoughts and words are beautiful and inspiring.” But the problem
is, they stop there. Endless rational analysis substitutes for decisive commitment.

The words engage their minds, but their disengaged hearts remain elsewhere and otherwise. They live in a world of what Professor H. H. Price called “uncashed symbols.”
[3]

The engaged mind, illuminated by truth, awakens awareness; the engaged heart, affected by love, awakens passion. May I say once more
 
—this essential energy of the soul is not an ecstatic trance, a high emotion, or a sanguine stance toward life: It is a fierce longing for God, an unyielding resolve to live in and out of the truth of our belovedness.

The love of Christ (not our love for Him but His love for us) impels us. The integration of mind and heart shapes a unified personality living in a state of
passionate awareness
.


The unaffected heart is one of the dark mysteries of human existence. It beats dispassionately in human beings with lazy minds, listless attitudes, unused talents, and buried hopes. Like Ian Bedloe’s mother, they never seem to get beneath the surface of their lives. They die before they ever learn to live.

Years wasted in vain regrets, energies dissipated in haphazard relationships and projects, emotions blunted
 
—passive before whatever experiences the day brings
 
—they are like snoring sleepers who resent having their peace disturbed. Their existential mistrust of God, the world, and even themselves underlies their inability to make a passionate commitment to anyone or anything.

Paradoxically, we attain self-awareness, not by self-analysis, but by the leap of commitment. According to Viktor Frankl, a person finds identity only to the extent that “he commits himself to something beyond himself, to a cause greater than himself.”
[4]
The meaning of our lives emerges in the surrender of ourselves to an adventure of becoming who we are not yet.

The unaffected heart leaves a legacy of Disney World paraphernalia and a thousand lost golf balls. The sheer vacuity of the unlived life guarantees the person will never be missed. “These people, living on borrowed emotions, stumbling through the corridors of time like shipboard drunks . . . never taste life deeply enough to be either saints or sinners.”
[5]


Sebastian Moore made this astonishing confession: “It has taken me thirty years to understand that the admission and forgiveness of sin is the essence of the New Testament.”

Before assigning him to a slow learners’ group, let us examine carefully our own comprehension of sin and forgiveness. To what extent are we truly reconciled to God and ourselves, and to what degree do we actually dare to live each day as forgiven men and women?

For most of us, the generic confession of sinfulness comes easily
 
—that is, all human beings are sinners; I am human; therefore, I am a sinner. A hasty examination of conscience reveals minor infractions of the law, or what Roman Catholic locution calls “venial sins.” This vague admission of wrongdoing is necessary in order to qualify for membership in the community of the saved. But saved from what?

Our blindness to the sinfulness of the late Mother Teresa exposes our superficial understanding of the mystery of iniquity lurking within every human being. Her heroic works of charity shield us from the truth of her inner poverty as well as from our own. For if we emulate her sacrificial love in some small fashion, we are lulled into a false sense of security that persuades us that we have no need of repentance today. When the little Albanian saint humbly confessed her brokenness and her desperate need for God, we are either uncomprehending or we secretly suspect her of false modesty.

Paul Claudel once stated that the greatest sin is to lose the sense of sin. If sin is merely an aberration caused by oppressive social
structures, circumstances, environment, temperament, compulsions, and upbringing, we will admit the sinful human condition but deny that we are sinners. We see ourselves as basically nice, benevolent people with minor hang-ups and neuroses that are the common lot of humanity. We rationalize and minimize our terrifying capacity to make peace with evil and thereby reject all that is not nice about us.

The essence of sin lies in the enormity of our self-centeredness, which denies our radical contingency and displaces the sovereignty of God with what Alan Jones calls “our sucking two-percent self.” Our fascination with power, prestige, and possessions justifies aggressive self-assertion, regardless of the damage inflicted on others. The impostor insists that looking out for Numero Uno is the only sensible posture in a dog-eat-dog world. “That unwed mother made her own bed,” shouts the false self. “Let her lie in it!”

The evil operative within us resides in relentless self-absorption, in what Moore calls “our inescapable narcissism of consciousness.”
[6]
Therein lies the source of our cruelty, possessiveness, jealousy, and every species of malice. If we gloss over our selfishness and rationalize the evil within us, we can only pretend we are sinners and therefore only pretend we have been forgiven. A sham spirituality of pseudorepentance and pseudobliss eventually fashions what modern psychiatry calls a borderline personality, in which appearances make up for reality.

Those who stop short of evil in themselves will never know what love is about.
[7]
Unless and until we face our sanctimonious viciousness, we cannot grasp the meaning of the reconciliation Christ affected on Calvary’s hill.

Humility, recovering alcoholics like to say, is stark, raving honesty. Recovery from the disease cannot be initiated until the deadly denial dwelling in the subterranean personality of the drunk is exposed and acknowledged. He or she must hit bottom, arrive at the moment of truth when the pain it takes to hang on to the bottle becomes much greater than the pain it takes to let go. Similarly, we cannot receive what the
crucified Rabbi has to give unless we admit our plight and stretch out our hands until our arms ache.


If we search for one word to describe the mission and ministry of Jesus Christ,
reconciliation
would not be a bad choice. “In other words, God in Christ was reconciling the world to himself, not holding men’s faults against them” (2 Corinthians 5:19). When Jesus said that if He be lifted up from the earth, He would draw all men and women to Himself, He is referring to His being lifted up on a crossbeam. The body of a helpless Rabbi writhing in agony and bleeding to death is the total and final reversal of our flight from ourselves. Calvary is the unbearable place where all the evil in our shabby selves tries to hold its own against God, “and thus provokes the thunder of resurrection.”
[8]

Through His
passion
and death Jesus carried away the essential sickness of the human heart and broke forever the deadly grip of hypocrisy on our souls. He has robbed our loneliness of its fatal power by traveling Himself to the far reaches of loneliness (“My God, my God, why have You deserted Me?”
 
—Matthew 27:46). He has understood our ignorance, weakness, and foolishness and granted pardon to us all (“Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing”
 
—Luke 23:34). He has made His pierced heart a safe place for every defeated cynic, hopeless sinner, and self-loathing derelict across the bands of time. God reconciled
all
things, “everything in heaven and
everything
on earth, when he made peace by his death on the cross” (Colossians 1:20, emphasis added).

The Cross reveals that Jesus has conquered sin and death and that nothing,
absolutely nothing
, can separate us from the love of Christ. Neither the impostor nor the pharisee; neither the lack of awareness nor the lack of passion; neither the negative judgments of others nor the debased perceptions of ourselves; neither our scandalous pasts nor
our uncertain futures; neither the power struggles in the church nor the tensions in our marriages; nor fear, guilt, shame, and self-hatred; not even death can tear us away from the love of God, made visible in Jesus the Lord.

Listening to the faint heartbeat of the dying Rabbi is a powerful stimulus to the recovery of passion. It is a sound like no other.

The Crucified says, “Confess your sin so that I may reveal Myself to you as lover, teacher, and friend, that fear may depart and your heart can stir once again with passion.” His word is addressed both to those filled with a sense of self-importance and to those crushed with a sense of self-worthlessness. Both are preoccupied with themselves. Both claim a godlike status, because their full attention is riveted either on their prominence or their insignificance. They are isolated and alienated in their self-absorption.

The release from chronic egocentricity starts with letting Christ love them where they are. Consider John Cobb’s words:

The spiritual man can love only . . . when he knows himself already loved in his self-preoccupation. Only if man finds that he is already accepted in his sin and sickness, can he accept his own self-preoccupation as it is; and only then can his psychic economy be opened toward others, to accept them as they are
 
—not in order to save himself, but because he doesn’t need to save himself. We love only because we are first loved.
[9]

BOOK: Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging
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