There are no lessons, but we should be open to learning. This pandemic has no purpose, but we should still be attentive to God’s leading. I admit that I sometimes get frustrated when people grasp for easy moral lessons from misfortune. In the early days of social isolations such memes were circulating everywhere. I saw one meme suggesting that Mother Nature was sending us all to our room to think about our carbon footprint. A lot of people are saying that this is a time to think about what is truly essential. I might have even written something similar yesterday.
Searching for moral lessons is one of the ways we deal with the problem of pain, but it not a method that I extract much comfort from.
I believe that the good news of Jesus Christ can be summarized in the Angel’s proclamation: God is with us! God accompanies us in our sufferings and, in Christ, God has suffered with us. We are not left alone.
The question of purpose begins with this miracle of incarnation and presence.
The song that I had on repeat three years ago when my dearly beloved Dad was dying was Leonard Cohen’ Come Healing. I even convinced some people to sing it for Easter Sunday. Leonard Cohen’s own spirituality is an admixture of Kaballah, Buddhism, and Jesus. Yet, I think this song really resonates with a theology of Gregory of Nazianzen summarized by his statement: “What has not been assumed has not been healed.” Gregory was reflecting on the mystery that all things will be redeemed in and through Christ. God is reconciling all things through Christ.
I wasn’t hoping for physical healing for my Father, but I was longing for healing.
Cohen leads with the line:
O gather up the brokenness/ And bring it to me now/ The fragrance of those promises/You never dared to vow/ The splinters that you carry/The cross you left behind/ Come healing of the body/ Come healing of the mind.
I was hoping that my Dad would find a complex reconcilation in his last days and fittingly Cohen beacon his listeners to:
Behold the gates of mercy/In arbitrary space/And none of us deserving/ The cruelty or the grace
Cohen song speaks to so many situations that require resolution. What does it mean for healing to come to our world? Our communities? Ourselves? Cohen words remind me that even as we long for justice, or, to get “what we deserve” we so often don’t. Our lives are lived bouncing between undeserved cruelty and undeserved grace. Some people get more cruelty... other more grace. I have received more grace and it has made the difference in my life. I am a debtor. This grounds me even when I personally feel the sting of injustice or undeserved cruelty.
The name of Jesus has always been shorthand for me when I have tried to name my undeserved graces. It is through the lens of Jesus that I hear the following line from Cohen: O troubled dust concealing/An undivided love/The heart beneath is teaching/To the broken heart above
I think that there are things we might learn from this pandemic, but I suspect that these lessons might all echo what Paul tells us in Ephesians--nothing, no nothing, can separate us from the love of God that we find in and through Jesus Christ. We might find purpose in these dark times, but I contend that purpose is best charted out as we listen for the sound of Jesus’ steps by our side. This being with Jesus is the purpose, to have our lives hidden in God through Christ is the purpose. . .
No comments:
Post a Comment