You should know that. You know that when you were born in the world, your parents thought you were…special. That there was no one else like you in the world. That many of their hopes and dreams for themselves would come to realization through you.
There are a few people born in the world who do not experience that welcoming love upon their birth. And it is up to the rest of us to tell those people over and over and over that they are beloved, too.
When I was born, my brother named me Amy. And various people over the years have given me little trinkets and things that describe the meaning of my name–Beloved.
At the end of a hard day, I can remember that I am Amy, beloved.
But what about all day every day? Henri Nouwen takes this idea of being beloved even further. He says that we are beloved by God and we need to become beloved (take hold of our identity as beloved). We are “taken,” “blessed,” “broken,” and “given.”
Nouwen on “taken”:
I am seen as special person.
Others are included not excluded.
Then, an exercise we used in Liturgy @ New Leaf yesterday:
Centering Prayer
Repeat this prayer or any other prayer you feel comfortable with.
“Long before any human being saw, we were seen by God’s loving eyes.”
I remember seeing a poster outside my college dining hall “Don’t read the Bible alone.” It was a funny sign, given that reading the Bible alone is what I and many other Christians do every day.
Below this edict by one of the college’s most respected professors was an article about why. And after I read the article, I couldn’t have agreed more with the man.
He was talking about how people read the scripture in their own personal vacuum, and then apply in to their own lives and the lives of other people. But the problem was that scripture was meant to be understood in community—that the language of the bible is not “you”
singular but “you” plural, implying that the hearers are a group in community.
In my years of living in Christian communities (count ‘em–1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7….it goes up to 25) of varying degrees of commitment, and most recently living in community as an independent adult has taught me a lot about my tendency to seek my own truth rather than God’s. I like my ideas and I want other people to hear them.
But if I only hear my own thoughts or ideas, I miss out on what everyone else has to say.
So, that is my challenge to myself today. My thought is that people in learn about in community. What about the people who don’t have community?
Annie Dillard is a writer I admire. She has a way of saying the most profound things in the most mundane yet artful way.
I’ll share here a bit of her elegant work that I used for a liturgy yesterday:
We are here to witness.
There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need.
All we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it.
We can stage our own act on the planet—build our cities on its plains, dam its rivers, plant its topsoils—but our meaningful activity scarcely covers the terrain.
We do not use songbirds for instance.
We do not eat many of them; we cannot befriend them; we cannot persuade them to eat more mosquitoes or plant fewer weed seeds.
We can only witness them—whoever they are.
If were were not here, they would be songbirds falling in the forest.
If we were not here, material events like the passage of seasons would lack even the meager meanings we are able to muster for them.
The show would play to an empty house, as do all the falling stars which fall in the daytime.
Her ideas about meditating on nature have taught me to turn off the radio and pay careful attention to things like trees and the sky instead.
I took that excerpt and wrote it for my church community (New Leaf Church) yesterday as we celebrated 3 years of life together:
We celebrate what God has done and will do
Through us and in spite of us.
We are here to witness and to share.
There isn’t much else we can do.
We can make plans
But the meaning in our activity–that is something we find
in others, in each other, in what God is doing in our world.
I have been reading Toni Morrison’s A Mercy. Let me say, if you read this book, your heart will want to break. It has been a long time since I’ve read such a vivid, nuanced portrayal of humanity.
Of all that is in this book, you see how people given their circumstances come together and later turn against each other. One of the things that she identifies as a source of this human dilemma is implicit pain and hurt and brokenness and deception in a common bond. For example, in the book, Lina, a slave and Rebekah, a free person, become friends out of necessity, later on Rebekah forgets that she once needed Lina. The bond they formed was under the false presumption…that Rebekah would not otherwise be in a relationship with Lina.
This relationship reminds me of others in literature, particularly that of Huck & Jim in Huck Finn.
But, I think about my relationships with people who are “other” to me, and wonder…
My mother & father went to the Paul McCartney concert this weekend, and I’d like to say that I’m proud of them for it. It seems important for people to hold onto what was good and beautiful about their youth and remember it. My dad got this great picture of my mother which. I won’t post it here for her…own…sake.
That is what summer is about to me: being taken, given, blessed, and broken as Henri Nouwen says. But mostly, I’m talking about the being blessed-remembering who I am. Remembering all that is good and beautiful in the life I’ve been given and celebrating it. We go outside, take walks in Greenbelt Park, play in the fountain, watch movies–things that feed us for the rest of the year that seems so unpredictable.
The summer also takes me back to things I don’t really want to remember–something like Forrest Gump must do for people my parents age and old “burnt out” hippies.
At the end of the day (or at the beginning or at midday when the noonday devil appears), what I want to do is sit out front on the porch, breathe in and out, and eat….an artichoke, good old ’70s style.
