the pure diamond within...

These words from Jean Vanier have been swimming around my head and heart as both blessing and challenge over these past few days. 

Somewhere (within) we are hiding our weaknesses. And yet weakness is an important part of our reality. We are born weak. We needed unconditional love... We all have a deep fear of our own weaknesses because my weakness is what makes it possible for someone else to crush me... There was a little boy with a disability who was making his first Communion in a church in Paris. After the liturgy a family celebration of tea and coffee took place. The little boy's uncle went over to the mother and said, "Wasn't it a beautiful liturgy? The only sad part is that he didn't understand anything." The little boy heard and with tears in his eyes said, "Don't worry, momma, Jesus loves me just as I am." (That is what Jesus teaches.) It's OK just to be myself... And we are called to meet people just as they are and to know that each one of us is precious and important. (Jean Vanier, "The Vision of Jesus," in Living Gently in a Violent World, with Stanly Hauerwas, pp.68-72)

It is my deepest conviction that Vanier is right about both the calling and the meaning of following Jesus: we are invited to meet people just as they are and love them. Not change them. Not fix them. Not anything else with or for them: just meet them and be with them. 

As you might expect, this upends most of my theological training and all of my social activism. Not that the quest for liberation and real social and economic justice is wrong. Not at all. The current regime is living proof that advocacy, organizing and politics matter. Yet, as I look backwards, even the most stunning victories pale in comparison to the bounty realized by living into and celebrating the gift of grace made flesh in the way of Jesus. Vanier continues:

Jesus came to change a world in which those at the top have privilege, power, prestige and money while those at the bottom are seen as useless. Jesus came to create a body. St. Paul in I Corinthians 12 compares the human body to the body of Christ and says that those parts of the body that are the weakest and least presentable are indispensable...We must not get caught up in the need to have power over the poor. We need to be with the poor... and it looks crazy because being doesn't look like a plan to change the world. But maybe we will change the world if we are happy. Maybe what we need most is to rejoice and to celebrate with the weak and the vulnerable. Maybe the most important thing is to learn how to build communities of celebration - and then, maybe, the world will be transformed when we learn how to have fun together. Maybe what our world needs more than anything is communities where we celebrate life together and become a sign of hope for the world. (p. 71)

We who yearn for justice KNOW how to organize for power. We know how to advocate, govern and exercise control, too. But most of the time we don't know how to simply be. How to celebrate. How to rejoice and be glad. The same is true for conservatives. I have been doing organizing of one type or another since 1970; first, in opposition to the Vietnam War, later with Cesar Chavez and the farm workers, and later still with folk in rural Mississippi, the border lands of the desert Southwest and most recently among people living in the shadow of a de-industrialized  New England. Important accomplishments have taken place. But our communities remain glum,  depressed emotionally, spiritually and economically to such an extent that Jaco Hamman coined an appropriate description for our area: the place where steeples cry.

My heart now trusts that beyond all our advocacy and organizing, the time has come for us to reclaim a commitment to rejoicing. We have become human do-ings rather than human be-ings. So in whatever days I have left, I am actively unplugging from organizing. And politics. And a life of fretting. And stewing over what still needs to be accomplished. Not that I am any GOOD at this, mind you: I am still addicted and caught up in the whirlwind, the intrigue and buzz of this over-stimulated and too demanding culture.

But Jesus was neither cynical nor burned out when he told his friends, "You will always have the poor with you, but not me!" (Matthew26: 11) This wasn't a prediction or prophecy. And it certainly was not an endorsement of trickle-down economics or any socially conservative fiscal agenda. No, what Jesus was teaching had to do with knowing when the feast was the most important act of resistance we could experience. I remember the late Elie Wiesel writing that sometimes all an aching soul could do was dance. To everything there is a season, right? Could it be that this is our season for celebration? And being? And conversation? And meeting one another in love with laughter and love?

After wrestling with the theology of my Reformed tradition for 40 years - and learning to let most of it slip away - let me unequivocally confess that Thomas Merton got it right. Like many mystical Roman Catholics who live a sacramental theology that honors the flesh and creation, Merton teaches that Jesus asks us to see one another as God does: not as broken, flawed or wounded, nor needy or sinful. But as beloved.

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely ... I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.  (Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander)