The aching soul question and the scandal of the cross.
Amidst the purest joy and sweet melodies of belly-aching giggles; within the soft breeze that blows through lush greenery and in body movement that restores and praises; in thunder rumbles and drizzle downpours; in the rejoicing of a friend, long gone, now returned home; in the ever fleeting beauty of moments still in time, we taste hints of a more true earth - a place yearned for, a home yet to be.
And as all our being longs for this place yet unseen – emptied and carved to be filled once again, we feel a certain wholeness when we experience the glimpses of Beauty on the earth as it is. As we wait for the wholeness to be restored, the carved out space in our souls is only satisfied by One.
As I sit to reflect and write, months passing by, sometimes I glaze over the broken. Sometimes I want to walk by and not stop. Sometimes I want to close my eyes to deep sorrow and pain and not think about the eyes looking back at me – the hurting, the saddened, the aching for something better. And sometimes, I don’t want to write. I don’t want to acknowledge the reality I’m seeing – to share it, to expose truth, to reveal the pain of others through writing on a screen to be read by many across oceans and seas. But maybe, more truly, I want to hide because the broken and battered pieces of my own soul are often reflected in that which is broken around me. Maybe that is the reality that cuts the deepest – the recognition of my own internal ugliness; the wanting to close my eyes.
Because all in one day you meet a boy, hungry and desperate, begging for food; a man, yearning for a sip of water; a body, limp and lifeless, lying face down on the highway; a child, sick but unable to find treatment; a person, walking as their only means of transportation, with a leg replaced with a stick. And all in one day, in the moments passing by and by, you do what you can - you offer a drink, you give a banana, you say a prayer, you look straight into the eyes of the beaten and trodden down, you don’t look away. You don’t close your eyes.
So here is the question, the quarreled and aching question deep within; the burning soul question:
If God is so good, why is the world so broken? So beaten and bashed? Filled to the brim with impoverished souls and aching hearts and bodies bound with infirmities?
If God is good and He loves His people, His creation, would He not provide and protect them? Would He not heal them? Would the Almighty, the one they say that created Heaven and Earth, provide a way?
The world is tainted and torn to tatters and we are left wrestling in our hearts and in our minds to believe the scandalous promises of God. But what if instead of looking first at our reality – at the world which we experience daily – we start from beholding an Almighty and Holy God?
What if we, as we wrestle with our soul questions and quarrel with God, walk away limp and hurting but knowing more fully the One with whom we wrestle? What if we believe that when we walk away still broken and limp that God is still good and His blessings are true (Genesis 32:24-31)? And if He chooses to not deliver us from the flame, that He is still God (Daniel 3:17-18)?
What if we search for God? The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the Amen; the Beginning and the End – whose name is too sacred to touch our lips as we utter with sincerity and awe:
Yahweh.
God, our God, is Holy; perfect and blameless.
In the beginning, when darkness covered the face of the Earth, God spoke and there was light. God breathed, and from dust He created man and filled his soul with breath of His own. His creation was good and holy.
And many know, as the story goes, Adam and Eve find themselves hidden and hiding. They recognize their nakedness; stained and ashamed as sin entered the world on their account. The knowledge of good and evil entering in by reckless force, unhindered and unleashed. Sin entered the world. Every moment prior the world mirrored in image its Creator. Sin was not created by God, but rather came to fruition by Adam and Eve in disobedience to God.
So we have the beginning – a good and perfect creation formed and molded in the image of The Most High, fallen lowly.
So then what?
That which is in darkness cannot touch Light; a tainted creation cannot regard Divinity.
We behold God. We envelop ourselves in His character. He desires relationship with His creation – that which He loves. So, to reconcile His people to Himself, God sent His one and only Son. Jesus came in the flesh – fully human and fully God – to live a perfect live to reconcile God’s people to God Himself. God sent all that He is, Himself, in fleshly spirit to save His creation for eternity.
Our God is in the business of reconciliation and redemption.
And if that is true, if that is the Truth that reigns in our lives, that we believe at the core of our being, then the world is filled with pride, brokenness, sorrow, and destruction as a result of sin, not as a result of God.
God is reconciling all these things through Himself by His Son. God is restoring the whole of creation. He is the cornerstone, the firm foundation, on which all things are built.
And we know that this is the true character of God and love for His people because Jesus came. He lived a perfect life and fulfilled each prophesy, and He died so that sin and death would be defeated.
And it was. And it is.
In Jesus there is freedom and grace; there is hope; there is a new Earth coming – that which is perfect and holy as it was in the beginning.
The end is written and we wait in eager anticipation for that which too will be fulfilled.
A Liturgy for Those Who Weep Without Knowing Why
There is so much lost in this world, O Lord,
so much that aches and groans and shivers
for want of redemption, so much that
seems dislocated, upended, desecrated,
unhinged – even in our own hearts.
Even in our own hearts
we bear the mark of all that is broken.
what is best in this world has been bashed
and battered and trodden down.
What was meant to be the substance has
become the brittle shell, haunted by the
ghosts of a glory so long crumbled that only
its rubble is remembered now.
Is it any wonder we should weep sometimes,
without knowing why? It might be anything.
And then again, it might be everything.
For we feel this.
We who are your children feel
this empty space where some thing
should have rested in its perfection, and we pine
for those nameless glories, and we pine for all
the wasted stories in our world, and we pine for
these present wounds. We pine for our children
and for their children too, knowing each will
have to prove how this universal pain is also
personal. We pine for all children born into
these days of desolation – whose regal robes
were torn to tatters before they were
even swaddled in them.
O Lord, how can we not weep,
when waking each day in this vale of tears?
How can we not feel those pangs,
when we, wounded by others,
so soon learn to wound as well,
and in the end wound even ourselves?
We grieve what we cannot heal and
we grieve our half-belief,
having made uneasy peace
with disillusion, aligning ourselves with a
self-protective lie that would have us kill our
best hopes just to keep our disappointments
half-confined.
We feel ourselves wounded by what is wretched,
foul, and fell, but we are sometimes wounded
by the beauty as well, for when it whispers, it
whispers of the world that might have been our
birthright, now banished, now withdrawn, as
unreachable to our wounded hearts as ancient
seas receding down some endless dark.
We weep, O Lord,
for those things that,
though nameless, are still lost.
We weep for the cost of our rebellions,
for the mocking and hollowing of holy things,
for the inward curve of our souls,
for the evidences of death outworked in
every field and tree and blade of grass,
crept up in every creature, alert in every
longing, infecting all fabrics of life.
We weep for the leers our daughters will endure,
as if to be made in reflection of your beauty
were a fault for which they must pay.
We weep for our sons, sabotaged by profiteers
who seek to warp their dreams before they
even come of age.
We weep for all the twisted alchemies of our
times that would turn what might have been gold into crowns of cheap tin and then
toss them into refuse bins as if love could ever be a
castoff thing one might simply be done with.
We weep for the wretched expressions of all
things that were first built of goodness and glory
but are now their own shadow twins.
We have wept so often.
And we will weep again.
And yet, there is somewhere in our tears
a hope still kept.
We feel it in this darkness,
like a tiny flame,
when we are told
Jesus also wept.
You wept.
So moved by the pain of this crushed creation,
you, O Lord, heaved with grief of it,
drinking the anguish like water and sweating it out of your skin like blood.
Is it possible that you – in your sadness
over Lazarus, in your grieving for
Jerusalem, in your sorrow in the garden –
is it possible that you have sanctified
our weeping too?
For the grief of God is no small thing,
and the weeping of God is not without effect.
The tears of Jesus preceded
a resurrection of the dead.
O Spirit of God,
is it then possible
that our tears might also be
a kind of intercession?
That we, your children, in our groaning
with sadness of creation, could
be joining in some burdened work
of coming restoration? Is it possible
that when we weep and don’t know why,
it is because the curse has ranged
so far, so wide? That we weep at that
which breaks your heart, because it
has also broken ours – sometimes so deeply
that we cannot explain our weeping,
even to ourselves?
If that is true,
then let such weeping be received, O Lord,
as an intercession newly forged of holy sorrow.
Then let our tears anoint these broken things,
and let our grief be as their consecration –
a preparation for their promised
redemption, our sorrow sealing them
for that day when you will take
the ache of all creation,
and turn it inside-out,
like the shedding of
an old gardener’s glove.
O Lord, if it please you,
when your children weep
and don’t know why,
yet use our tears
to baptize what you love.
Amen.
Every Moment Holy (p. 241-246) by Douglas Kaine McKelvey
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