Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging (7 page)

Experientially, the inner healing of the heart is seldom a sudden catharsis or an instant liberation from bitterness, anger, resentment, and hatred. More often it is a gentle growing into oneness with the Crucified who has achieved our peace through His blood on the cross. This may take considerable time because the memories are still so vivid and the hurt is still so deep. But it
will
happen. The crucified Christ is not merely a heroic example to the church: He is the power and wisdom of God, a living force in His present risenness, transforming our lives and enabling us to extend the hand of reconciliation to our enemies.

Understanding triggers the compassion that makes forgiveness possible. Author Stephen Covey recalled an incident while riding the New York City subway one Sunday morning. The few passengers aboard were reading the newspaper or dozing. It was a quiet, almost somnolent ride through the bowels of the Big Apple. Covey was engrossed in reading when a man accompanied by several small children boarded at the next stop. In less than a minute, bedlam erupted. The kids ran up and down the aisle shouting, screaming, and wrestling with one another on the floor. Their father made no attempt to intervene.

The elderly passengers shifted nervously. Stress became distress. Covey waited patiently. Surely the father would do something to restore order: a gentle word of correction, a stern command, some expression of paternal authority
 
—anything. None was forthcoming. Frustration mounted. After an unduly generous pause, Covey turned to the father and said kindly, “Sir, perhaps you could restore order here by telling your children to come back and sit down.” “I know I should do something,” the man replied. “We just came from the hospital. Their mother died an hour ago. I just don’t know what to do.”
[7]

The heartfelt compassion that hastens forgiveness matures when we discover why our enemy cries.

…

In 1944
Life
magazine published a photo essay of a foxhunt in Holmes County, Ohio. The foxes lived in the woods and ate mostly mice and crickets, but sometimes also chicken and quail. This, the story explained, “made the brave men of Holmes County angry because they wanted to kill the quail themselves.”
[8]
So one Saturday about six hundred men and women and their children got together and formed a big circle five miles across. They all carried sticks and started walking through the woods and fields, yelling and baying to frighten the foxes, young and old, out of their holes. Inside this diminishing circle the foxes ran to and fro, tired and frightened. Sometimes a fox would, in its anger, dare to snarl back, and it would be killed on the spot for its temerity. Sometimes one would stop in its anguish and try to lick the hand of its tormentor. It, too, would be killed.

Sometimes, the photo showed, other foxes would stop and stay with their own wounded and dying. Finally, as the circle came closer together, down to a few yards across, the remaining foxes went to the center and lay down inside, not knowing what else to do. But the men and women knew what to do. They hit these dying wounded with their clubs until they were dead, or they showed their children how to do it.

This is a true story.
Life
reported and photographed it. It happened for years in Holmes County every weekend.

Today we cringe at such cruelty, yet we have a foxhunt of our own . . . just ask those who are part of the LGBT community. Sadly, too many have wondered if they had any alternative but to go to the center of the circle and lie down and die.

Where are we in that circle? Where are you? Where would Christ be?

Our hearts of stone become hearts of flesh when we learn where the outcast weeps.

Whenever the gospel is invoked to diminish the dignity of any of God’s children, then it is time to get rid of the “so-called” gospel in order
that we may experience the gospel. Whenever God is invoked to justify prejudice, contempt, and hostility within the body of Christ, then it is time to heed the words of Meister Eckhart: “I pray that I may be quit of God to find God.” Our closed human concepts of gospel and God can prevent us from fully experiencing both.

“But what should the Christian posture be toward the gay community?” one evangelical demanded of me.

“In one of Jesus’ parables,” I replied, “He enjoined us to let the wheat and the weeds grow together. Paul caught this spirit when he wrote in 1 Corinthians, ‘There must be no passing of premature judgment. Leave that until the Lord comes.’ The sons and daughters of Abba are the most nonjudgmental people. They get along famously with sinners. Remember the passage in Matthew where Jesus says, ‘You must therefore be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect’? In Luke, the same verse is translated, ‘Be compassionate as your heavenly Father is compassionate.’ Bible scholars say that these two words,
perfect
and
compassionate
, can be reduced to the same reality. Conclusion: To follow Jesus in His ministry of compassion precisely defines the biblical meaning of being perfect as the heavenly Father is perfect.

“Besides,” I continued, “I am reluctant to push God off His judgment seat and take my place there to pronounce on others when I have neither the knowledge nor the authority to judge anyone. No one at this table has ever seen a motive. Therefore, we cannot suspect what inspired the action of another. Remember Paul’s words after his discourse in Romans 1. He begins chapter 2, ‘So no matter who you are, if you pass judgment you have no excuse. In judging others you condemn yourself, since you behave no differently from those you judge.’ I am reminded of a statement by the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy: ‘If the sexual fantasies of the average person were exposed to view, the world would be horrified.’

“Homophobia ranks among the most shameful scandals of my lifetime. It is frightening to see the incessant intolerance, moral absolutism, and unbending dogmatism that prevail when people insist upon taking
the religious high ground. Alan Jones noted that ‘it is precisely among those who take their spiritual life seriously that the greatest danger lies.’
[9]
Pious people are as easily victimized by the tyranny of homophobia as anyone else.”

My identity as Abba’s child is not an abstraction or a tap dance into religiosity. It is the core truth of my existence. Living in the wisdom of accepted tenderness profoundly affects my perception of reality; the way I respond to people and their life situations; how I treat my brothers and sisters from day to day, whether they be Caucasian, African, Asian, or Hispanic; how I react to the sin-scarred wino on the street; how I respond to interruptions from people I dislike. How I deal with ordinary people in their ordinary unbelief on an ordinary day will speak the truth of who I am more poignantly than the pro-life sticker on the bumper of my car.

We are not for life simply because we are warding off death. We are sons and daughters of the Most High and maturing in tenderness to the extent that we are for others
 
—all others
 
—to the extent that no human flesh is strange to us, to the extent that we can touch the hand of another in love, to the extent that for us there are no “others.”

This is the unceasing struggle of a lifetime. It is the long and painful process of becoming like Christ in the way I choose to think, speak, and live each day. Henri Nouwen’s words are incisive here: “What is required is to become the Beloved in the common places of my daily existence and, bit by bit, to close the gap that exists between what I know myself to be and the countless specific realities of everyday life. Becoming the Beloved is pulling the truth revealed to me from above down into the ordinariness of what I am, in fact, thinking of, talking about, and doing from hour to hour.”
[10]

The betrayals and infidelities in my life are too numerous to count. I still cling to the illusion that I must be morally impeccable, other people must be sinless, and the one I love must be without human weakness. But whenever I allow anything but tenderness and compassion to dictate my response to life
 
—be it self-righteous anger, moralizing,
defensiveness, the pressing need to change others, carping criticism, frustration at others’ blindness, a sense of spiritual superiority, a gnawing hunger of vindication
 
—I am alienated from my true self. My identity as Abba’s child becomes ambiguous, tentative, and confused.

Our way of being in the world is the way of tenderness. Everything else is illusion, misperception, falsehood.

The compassionate life is neither a sloppy goodwill toward the world nor the plague of what Robert Wicks calls “chronic niceness.” It does not insist that a widow become friendly with her husband’s murderer. It does not demand that we like everyone. It does not wink at sin and injustice. It does not accept reality indiscriminately
 
—love and lust, Christianity and atheism, Marxism and capitalism.

The way of tenderness avoids blind fanaticism. Instead, it seeks to see with penetrating clarity. The compassion of God in our hearts opens our eyes to the unique worth of each person. “The other is ‘ourself’; and we must love him in his sin as we were loved in our sin.”
[11]

…

I grew up in a lily-white neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. In 1947, when Branch Rickey, president of our beloved Brooklyn Dodgers, broke the color line by inviting Jackie Robinson to play in the major leagues, we summarily branded him “nigger lover,” and many of us switched our allegiance to the New York Yankees. Particularly obnoxious to us was the educated, truculent African-American like Malcolm X, who did not know his place and whose voice rose in what I felt was unjustifiable anger as he challenged white supremacy in the face of black beauty, black need, and black excellence. For Irish Catholics, it was the language of stereotype, the American shorthand still raging today
 
—Willie Horton, law and order, welfare cheats
 
—that whips up fear, ignorance, and votes and keeps discussion, dialogue, and minorities circumscribed.

Along with orthodox Christian beliefs, defense mechanisms against loving
 
—like prejudice, bigotry, false beliefs, and racist and homophobic feelings and attitudes
 
—have been programmed into the computer of my brain since my childhood.

The wounds of racism and homophobia from my childhood have not vanished through intellectual enlightenment and spiritual maturity. They are still in me, as complex and deep in my flesh as blood and nerves. I have borne them all my life with varying degrees of consciousness, but always carefully, always with the most delicate consideration for the pain I would feel if I were somehow forced to acknowledge them. But now I am increasingly aware of the opposite compulsion. I want to know as fully and exactly as I can what the wounds are and how much I am suffering from them. And I want to be healed. I want to be free of the wounds myself, and I do not want to pass them on to my children.
[12]

I have tried to deny, ignore, or repress racist and homophobic prejudices as utterly unworthy of a minister of the gospel. Moreover, I felt that to acknowledge their existence would give them power. Ironically, denial and repression are in fact what gives them power.

The impostor starts to shrink only when he is acknowledged, embraced, and accepted. The self-acceptance that flows from embracing my core identity as Abba’s child enables me to encounter my utter brokenness with uncompromising honesty and complete abandon to the mercy of God. As my friend Sister Barbara Fiand said, “Wholeness is brokenness owned and thereby healed.”

…

Homophobia and racism are among the most serious and vexing moral issues of our day, and both church and society seem to limit us to polarized options.

The “anything goes” morality of the religious and political Left is
matched by the sanctimonious moralism of the religious and political Right. Uncritical acceptance of any party line is an idolatrous abdication of one’s core identity as Abba’s child. Neither liberal fairy dust nor conservative hardball addresses human dignity, which is often dressed in rags.

Abba’s children find a third option. They are guided by God’s Word and by it alone. All religious and political systems, Right and Left alike, are the work of human beings. Abba’s children will not sell their birthright for any mess of pottage, conservative or liberal. They hold fast to their freedom in Christ to live the gospel
 
—uncontaminated by cultural dreck, political flotsam, and the filigreed hypocrisies of bullying religion. Those who are bent on handing gays over to the torturers can lay no claim to moral authority over Abba’s children. Jesus saw such shadowed figures as the corrupters of the essential nature of religion in His time. Such exclusive and divisive religion is a trackless place, Eden overgrown, a church in which people experience lonely spiritual alienation from their best human instincts.

Buechner wrote, “We have always known what was wrong with us. The malice in us even at our most civilized. Our insincerity, the masks we do our real business behind. The envy, the way other people’s luck can sting us like wasps. And all the slander, making such caricatures of each other that we treat each other like caricatures, even when we love each other. All this infantile nonsense and ugliness. ‘Put it away!’ Peter says. ‘Grow up to salvation!’ For Christ’s sake, grow up.”
[13]

The command of Jesus to love one another is never circumscribed by the nationality, status, ethnic background, sexual preference, or inherent lovableness of the “other.” The other, the one who has a claim on my love, is anyone to whom I am able to respond, as the parable of the Good Samaritan clearly illustrates. “Which of these three, in your opinion, was neighbor to the man who fell in with the robbers?” Jesus asked. The answer came, “The one who treated him with compassion.” He said to them, “Go and do the same.”

This insistence on the absolutely indiscriminate nature of compassion within the Kingdom is the dominant perspective of almost all of Jesus’ teaching.