small is holy...

For what its worth, these words from Henri Nouwen strike me as foundational given the anger, angst and exhaustion so many of us are experiencing living at this moment in history.

To start seeing that the many events of our day, week, or year are not in the way of our search for a full life but are rather the way to it is a real experience of conversion. We discover that cleaning and cooking, writing letters and doing professional work, visiting people and caring for others, are not a series of random events that prevent us from realizing our deepest self. These natural, daily activities contain within them some transforming power that changes how we live. We make hidden passage from time lived as chronos to time lived as kairos. Kairos is a Greek word meaning “the opportunity.” It is the right time, the real moment, the chance of our lives. When our time becomes kairos, it frees us and opens us to endless new possibilities. Living kairos offers us an opportunity for a profound change of heart.

Nouwen's contemporary invitation to be changed incrementally by cumulative acts of tenderness in our ordinary lives sounds to me a lot like the wisdom the 12th century mystic, Meister Eckhart, insisted upon: "Reality is the will of God. It can always be better, but we must start with what is real." Like other mystics, it is my conviction that what is real at this moment in time is challenging for it includes: 1) a collapse of our old order; 2) a scramble for clarity within the current chaos; and 3) the creation of a new culture. In my inner vocabulary, we are witnessing both the death of white, male bourgeois privilege in the West and the birthing of a spirituality of tenderness and solidarity Valerie Kaur calls it the Revolutionary Love Project. William Barber speaks of the Beloved Community rising up with justice and compassion among all hurting people. And I believe it is a maturing of radical love nourished by simple acts of everyday kindness.

My head and my heart know experientially that love is stronger than hatred, water is stronger than rock, and soft is stronger than hard. (Herman Hesse) To build upon the insights of Jean Vanier, we in the West are beginning to know that the brokenness of our world is healed by owning our own inner wounds and sharing our lives with those who have been shut out of the mainstream. Nouwen himself learned this at L'Arche and put it like this: 

God chose to enter into human history in complete weakness. That divine choice forms the center of the Christian faith. In Jesus of Nazareth, the powerless God appeared among us to unmask the illusion of power, to disarm the prince of darkness who rules the world, and to bring the divided human race to a new unity. It is through total and unmitigated powerlessness that God shows us divine mercy... It is very hard—if not impossible—for us to grasp this divine mercy. We keep praying to the “almighty and powerful God.” But all might and power is absent from the One who reveals God to us saying: “When you see me, you see the Father.” If we truly want to love God, we have to look at the man of Nazareth, whose life was wrapped in weakness. And his weakness opens for us the way to the heart of God.

Tenderness - and joyfully living into our small stature withing reality - is an upside down existence. In a culture that venerates winners and speed, the new realm moves at the speed of love. It finds time what real encounters and honors each moment. But please do not conclude that tenderness and being small means staying silent in the presence of evil. Or fearfully hiding away in our bourgeois privilege. Or just fuming, fussing and sputtering to anyone who will listen to our ethical indignation about the status quo knowing all too well that our noise is ultimately sound and fury signifying nothing. Rather, embracing the practice of tenderness asks us to quit trying to be heroes. And saviors. Or anything else puffed-up except who we are: wounded, beautiful, cautious and precious children of God. Leonard Cohen got it right when he sang: "there is a crack, a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in." We are broken - and this is precisely how the world is healed.

Living into the light of tenderness means facing our own wounds. It invites us to trust God's light and make our days count. Again, Nouwen tells us that "all action - whether visiting the sick, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked or working for a more just and peaceful society - must be a manifestation of the human solidarity revealed to us in Christ."

(Ours) is not an anxious human effort to create a better world. It is a confident expression of the truth that in Christ, death, evil, and destruction have been overcome. It is not a fearful attempt to restore a broken order. It is a joyful assertion that in Christ all order has already been restored. It is not a nervous effort to bring divided people together, but a celebration of an already established unity. This action is not activism. An activist wants to heal, restore, redeem, and re-create, but those acting within the house of God point through their action to the healing, restoring, redeeming, and re-creating presence of God.

The road of revolutionary love - the practice of the Beloved Community - the ascent of tenderness is born of our inner experience with the love of God that is stronger than death. I don't hear a great deal of that assurance being shared by many in my world these days. I hear fear. And disgust. I hear anger and righteous judgment, too. And there is good reason for all of this: the current regime is a fascist, racist kleptocracy hellbent on beating the people of solidarity into timid submission while they plunder creation. Sadly, in opposing this evil - and it is clearly evil - there's too little trust in God's grace and love. I hear blustering and weeping. I see political opponents pontificating and huffing and puffing. But not a lot of mystical, born-from-within experience with grace. I think Richard Rohr is on to something when he tells us:

If you want to find God, then honor God within you, and you will always see God beyond you. For it is only God in you who knows where and how to look for God. When you honor and accept the divine image within yourself, you cannot help but see it in everybody else, too, and you know it is just as undeserved and unmerited as it is in you. I call this the “Principle of Likeness.” From this frame you stop judging and start loving unconditionally, without asking whether someone is worthy or not. The breakthrough occurs at once, although the realization deepens and takes on greater conviction over time.

Incrementally and quietly, I am seeing a small but potent mystical revolution that is being born from out of the hurt, anger, chaos, violence and evil of these days. Not perfectly, and not completely. Not without its own faults and wounds as well. But in ways that are changing hearts and lives everyday, a new way is taking shape all around and within us. It isn't being celebrated on TV or cable news. And not much is being published in even our best mainstream new outlets. Rather, it is becoming flesh in houses of worship where ordinary people are going out to stand witness on the Southern border of the US. As they call out the brutality of our immigrant concentration camps, hearts are being changed. I heard one soul confess: "I used to think that Rambo was what was needed on the border, but now I realize it is Mother Theresa." 

I've seen it, too in local poetry conversations where people who have historically been denied a voice find ways to speak their truth with depth and integrity. Playing music around the area has also convinced me that more and more of us are letting go of the old order and opening our hearts to a new way of living. It is a way that is small. And weak. And holy. It is a way of being spiritual without being religious. It sees Christ in everything and everyone - including this grand and frightening moment in history - because the people within this movement have experienced the sacred within and trust that like embraces like. 

In a style that is quiet and even humble, this new mystical tenderness and cultural revolution believes that God's timetable is right. Nouwen wrote:

"Exhaustion, burnout, and depression are not signs that you are doing God’s will. God is gentle and loving. God desires to give you a deep sense of safety in God’s love. Once you have allowed yourself to experience that love fully, you will be better able to discern who you are being sent to in God’s name." Like Jesus taught: look at the flowers in the field or the birds in the air; God cares for each and all of them without anxiety. You are precious to the Lord, too so trust that! Tonight I give thanks for shutting of the cacophony that passes for news at the start of Lent and not returning. Tonight I can returning thanks for the social, cultural, spiritual and political change for the long haul that is taking root among us.