Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging (5 page)

And so the elaborate game of pretense and deception began. Because it worked, I raised no objection. As the years rolled by, you/I got strokes from a variety of sources. We were elated and concluded the game must go on.

But you needed someone to bridle you and rein you in. I had neither the perception nor the courage to tame you, so you continued to rumble like Sherman through Atlanta, gathering momentum along the way. Your appetite for attention and affirmation became insatiable. I never confronted you with the lie because I was deceived myself.

The bottom line, my pampered playmate, is that you are both needy and selfish. You need care, love, and a safe dwelling place. On this last day in the Rockies, my gift is to take you where, unknowingly, you have longed to be
 
—into the presence of Jesus. Your days of running riot are history. From now on, you slow down, slow very down.

In His presence, I notice that you have already begun to shrink. Wanna know somethin’, little guy? You’re much more attractive that way. I am nicknaming you “Pee-Wee.” Naturally, you are not going to roll over suddenly and die. I know you will get disgruntled at times and start to act out, but the longer you spend time in the presence of Jesus, the more accustomed you grow to His face, the
less adulation you will need because you will have discovered for yourself that He is Enough. And in the Presence, you will delight in the discovery of what it means to live by grace and not by performance.

Your friend,

Brennan

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3 •

The Beloved

AFTER COLLEGE PROFESSOR
William Least Heat-Moon learned that his job was terminated because of declining enrollment and that his wife from whom he was separated was living with another man, he set out to explore the “blue highways”
 
—the backroads of North America.

One morning, while he was eating breakfast in the campus cafeteria at Mississippi College in Clinton, “a crewcut student wearing mesh step-in casuals sat down to a tall stack of pancakes. He was a methodical fellow. After a prayer running almost a minute, he pulled from his briefcase a Bible, reading stand, clips to hold the book open, a green felt-tip, a pink, and yellow; next came a squeeze-bottle of liquid margarine, a bottle of Log Cabin syrup wrapped in plastic, a linen napkin, and one of those little lemony wet-wipes. The whole business looked like the old circus where twelve men get out of a car the size of a trashcan. . . . ‘I thought he was going to pull out a Water-Pik and the Ark of the Covenant next.’”
[1]

In this sketch, Moon offers a glimpse of the true self
 
—un-self-conscious, unpretentious, immersed in life, absorbed in the present moment, breathing in God as naturally as a fish swimming in water.

Spirituality is not one compartment or sphere of life. Rather, it is a lifestyle: the process of life lived with the vision of faith. Sanctity lies in discovering my true self, moving toward it, and living out of it.

As the years in the monastery passed, Thomas Merton began to see that the highest spiritual development was to be “ordinary,” “to become fully a man, in the way few human beings succeed in becoming so simply and naturally themselves . . . the measures of what others might be if society did not distort them with greed or ambition or lust or desperate want.”
[2]

John Eagan, who died in 1987, was an ordinary man. An unheralded high school teacher in Milwaukee, he spent thirty years ministering with youth. He never wrote a book, appeared on television, converted the masses, or gathered a reputation for holiness. He ate, slept, drank, biked cross-country, roamed through the woods, taught classes, and prayed. And he kept a journal, published shortly after his death. It is the story of an ordinary man whose soul was seduced and ravished by Jesus Christ. The introduction reads, “The point of John’s journal is that we ourselves are the greatest obstacle to our own nobility of soul
 
—which is what sanctity means. We judge ourselves unworthy servants, and that judgment becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We deem ourselves too inconsiderable to be used even by a God capable of miracles with no more than mud and spit. And thus our false humility shackles an otherwise omnipotent God.”
[3]

Eagan, a flawed man with salient weaknesses and character defects, learned that brokenness is proper to the human condition, that we must forgive ourselves for being unlovable, inconsistent, incompetent, irritable, and potbellied, and he knew that his sins could not keep him from God. They had all been redeemed by the blood of Christ. In repentance he took his shadow self to the Cross and dared to live as a forgiven man. In Eagan’s journey one hears echoes of Merton: “God is asking me, the unworthy, to forget my unworthiness and that of my brothers, and dare to advance in the love which has redeemed and renewed us all in God’s likeness. And to laugh, after all, at the preposterous ideas of ‘worthiness.’”
[4]

Struggling to shrink the illusory self, Eagan pursued a life of con
templative prayer with ruthless fidelity. During his annual, silent eight-day directed retreat, the revelation of his true self hit with sledgehammer force. On the morning of the sixth day, he was visiting with his spiritual director.

Then he states something that I will ponder for years; he says it very deliberately. I ask him to repeat it so that I can write it down. “John, the heart of it is this: to make the Lord and his immense love for you constitutive of your personal worth.
Define yourself radically as one beloved by God;
God’s love for you and his choice of you constitute your worth. Accept that, and let it become the most important thing in your life.”

We discuss it. The basis of my personal worth is not my possessions, my talents, not esteem of others, reputation . . . not kudos of appreciation from parents and kids, not applause, and everyone telling you how important you are to the place. . . . I stand anchored now in God before whom I stand naked, this God who tells me “You are my son, my beloved one.”
[5]
[emphasis added]

The ordinary self is the extraordinary self
 
—the inconspicuous nobody who shivers in the cold of winter and sweats in the heat of summer, who wakes up unreconciled to the new day, who sits before a stack of pancakes, weaves through traffic, bangs around in the basement, shops in the supermarket, pulls weeds and rakes up the leaves, makes love and snowballs, flies kites, and listens to the sound of rain on the roof.

While the impostor draws his identity from past achievements and the adulation of others, the true self claims identity in its belovedness. We encounter God in the ordinariness of life: not in the search
for spiritual highs and extraordinary, mystical experiences, but in our simple presence in life.

Writing to a New York intellectual and close friend, Henri Nouwen stated, “All I want to say to you is, ‘You are the Beloved,’ and all I hope is that you can hear these words as spoken to you with all the tenderness and force that love can hold. My only desire is to make these words reverberate in every corner of your being
 
—‘You are the Beloved.’”
[6]
Anchored in this reality, our true self needs neither a muted trumpet to herald our arrival nor a gaudy soapbox to rivet attention from others. We give glory to God simply by being ourselves.

God created us for union with Himself: This is the original purpose of our lives. And God is defined as love (1 John 4:16). Living in awareness of our belovedness is the axis around which the Christian life revolves. Being the beloved is our identity, the core of our existence. It is not merely a lofty thought, an inspiring idea, or one name among many. It is the name by which God knows us and the way He relates to us.

As He has said, “If anyone has ears to hear, let him listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches: to those who prove victorious I will give the hidden manna and a white stone
 
—a stone with a
new name
written on it, known only to the man who receives it” (Revelation 2:17).

If I must seek an identity outside of myself, then the accumulation of wealth, power, and honors allures me. Or I may find my center of gravity in interpersonal relationships. Ironically, the church itself can stroke the impostor by conferring and withholding honors, offering pride of place based on performance, and creating the illusion of status by rank and pecking order. When belonging to an elite group eclipses the love of God, when I draw life and meaning from any source other than my belovedness, I am spiritually dead. When God gets relegated to second place behind any bauble or trinket, I have swapped the pearl of great price for painted fragments of glass.

“‘Who am I?’ asked Merton, and he responds, ‘I am one loved by Christ.’”
[7]
This is the foundation of the true self. The indispensable
condition for developing and maintaining the awareness of our belovedness is time alone with God. In solitude we tune out the naysaying whispers of our worthlessness and sink down into the mystery of our true self. Our longing to know who we really are
 
—which is the source of all our discontent
 
—will never be satisfied until we confront and accept our solitude. There we discover that the truth of our belovedness is really true. Our identity rests in God’s relentless tenderness for us revealed in Jesus Christ.

Our controlled frenzy creates the illusion of a well-ordered existence. We move from crisis to crisis, responding to the urgent and neglecting the essential. We still walk around. We still perform all the gestures and actions identified as human, but we resemble people carried along on the mechanical sidewalk at an airport. The fire in the belly dies. We no longer hear what Boris Pasternak called “the inward music” of our belovedness. Mike Yaconelli, the cofounder of Youth Specialties, tells about the time when, dejected and demoralized, he trundled off with his wife, Karla, to Toronto, Canada, to make a five-day retreat at the L’Arche (the Ark) community. He went hoping to draw inspiration from the mentally and physically handicapped people who lived there or find solace in the presence and preaching of Henri Nouwen. Instead, he found his true self. He tells his story:

I heard him, and my slumbering soul was filled with the joy of the
prodigal son. My soul was awakened by a loving Father who had been looking and waiting for me. Finally, I accepted my brokenness. . . . I had never come to terms with that. Let me explain. I knew I was broken. I knew I was a sinner. I knew I continually disappointed God, but I could never accept that part of me. It was a part of me that embarrassed me. I continually felt the need to apologize, to run from my weaknesses, to deny who I was and concentrate on what I should be. I was broken, yes, but I was continually trying never to be broken again
 
—or at least to get to the place where I was very seldom broken. . . .

At L’Arche, it became very clear to me that I had totally misunderstood the Christian faith. I came to see that it was in my brokenness, in my powerlessness, in my weakness that Jesus was made strong. It was in the acceptance of my lack of faith that God could give me faith. It was in the embracing of my brokenness that I could identify with others’ brokenness. It was my role to identify with others’ pain, not relieve it. Ministry was sharing, not dominating; understanding, not theologizing; caring, not fixing.

What does all this mean?

I don’t know . . . and to be quite blunt, that is the wrong question. I only know that at certain times in all of our lives, we make an adjustment in the course of our lives. This was one of those times for me. If you were to look at a map of my life, you would not be aware of any noticeable difference other than a slight change in direction. I can only tell you that it feels very different now. There is an anticipation, an electricity about God’s presence in my life that I have never experienced before. I can only tell you that for the first time in my life I can hear Jesus whisper to me every day, “Michael, I love you. You are beloved.” And for some strange reason, that seems to be enough.
[8]

The unperfumed tone of this narrative gives off the scent of a man without pretense. No pious facade, no false modesty. Something changed that wintry night in Toronto. An earthen vessel with feet of
clay laid hold of his belovedness. Yaconelli continued to brush his teeth, coif his ragged beard, pull on his pants one leg at a time, and sit eagerly before a tall stack of pancakes, but his soul was suffused with glory. The tenderness of God had battered the defenses Yaconelli had erected. And hope was restored. The future no longer looked ominous. Taken captive by the
now
, Yaconelli had no space left for anxiety about tomorrow. The impostor did return from time to time, but in the desert of the present moment, Yaconelli rested in a safe place.

We are looking not at some spiritual giant of the Christian tradition, but at an ordinary evangelical man who had encountered the God of ordinary people. The God who grabs scalawags and ragamuffins by the scruff of the neck and raises them up to seat them with the princes and princesses of His people.

Is this miracle enough for anybody? Or has the thunder of “God loved the world so much” been so muffled by the roar of religious rhetoric that we are deaf to the word that God could have tender feelings for us?

…

One thing that struck me in reading Yaconelli’s
Back Door
column was the simplicity, honesty, and directness of the words. They stand in marked contrast to the gaseous language of the impostors who hide in evasions, equivocations, and obfuscations.

Back in the heyday of my impostor, I wrote a book review for a fellow impostor’s first published work. I defended his prose style, saying, “His floridities are merely orotundity. Nevertheless, his unremitting gaseousness has an organic fluidity and turgescence difficult to duplicate and oddly purgative for the reader.” See what I mean?

I began a lecture on the eleventh step of the AA program with a story about a man in a crisis who notices and eats a strawberry. I was emphasizing his ability to live in the present moment. Then I launched into what I considered to be a dazzling explanation of the step, an interpretation filled with profound ontological, theological, and spiritual insights.

Later, a woman approached the podium and said to me, “I loved your story about the strawberry.” We agreed that one humble strawberry had more power than all my pompous inanities.