What Child Is This?

 "I was given nothing to help me learn to live as the person I was created to be."

                  --Richard Wagamese, Walking the Ojibwe Path, p.43

This statement caught me short, and I had a loud, resounding question pop up in my brain: Do any of us know the person we are created to be?  If we consider all the accouterments of culture, education, family, and religion does anyone really know themselves, I mean in God's sight, as we're created to be?  I suppose it is impossible to spin time back to the moment of our birth and look at "Who is this child?" Likewise, few of us get born with a predetermined purpose - like Jesus' beginnings of the angelic" Son of God" proclamation to his mother-to-be. People who wind up doing big things with their lives, tend to get biographies written that imply they were "called" to be great in their early beginnings.  But do the majority of us?  Most of us go to public (cookie-cutter) schools receiving the same culturally pre-determined education that curriculums are based upon.  Those K-12 packages supposedly send us all out into the world on a "level playing field" - even though, in truth. they can't possibly. So what happens to any self-actualizing goal "to be the person I was created to be?"

Sure, some families put strait jackets on their offspring at early ages to follow in a parent's or grandparent's footsteps.  Then, depending on the child's created disposition, they'll take on the assignment with gusto or alternatively, go complete rebel and wind up in a wildly different place. That is what I am getting at -- how do we learn to live as we're meant to?

At its heart, I am addressing a profoundly spiritual question: who/what does God intend for humans to be?  Through the ages, undeniably, humans have veered off the "humane" track.  The laundry list of sins cataloged and treated by religion(s) as an illness needing correction reflects the course of departure from loving, peaceful, generous, cooperative, helpful, courteous... basics of the human soul that God likely intends.  While some social structures work at furthering these "positive" ways we are created to be, their commonality across the board is rare. 

For humanity to aim toward a more egalitarian, magnanimous world it would be necessary to change many of the assumptions on which our world's economic and legal systems are based. We would need more effective (and more widely available) methods for addressing mental illness, improved methods of breaking generational trauma, concerted means of addressing homelessness and poverty, and refined educational strategies to support self-esteem and self-actualization. 

All of these and hundreds of other ideas fly 180 degrees against the "traditional" social and religious attitudes reflective of crime and punishment and "making a living." So politically the leap to a New World remains impossible.  Still, there is a peace-filled place for dreaming the God-hope in our meditative imaginations and seeing in our souls the purity of divine intent for our existence. 

Faith

Faith is one of the simplest words in the Christian lexicon.  Yet it also seems to be one of the biggest stumbling blocks thrown into the Christian Church. Why? Largely because The Church, long ago, got in its own way racing to define what one needed to believe if one was going to have "faith."  So, rather than faith being the experiential thing it is, it became prescriptive by order of the educated, who possess a well-honed recitation of narrow beliefs according to catechism and creed.  The Church said, "We will provide you with the right belief(s) so you can have the right faith" (And then if you don't hold precisely to the line, we can burn you at the stake as a heretic.)

Jesus never knew any kind of "catechism."  The closest he came was having a solid knowledge of the Law on which Judaism was founded. He could answer the questions when the synagogue/temple lawyers showed up to trap him, but he did not preach to his followers about them. In fact, he provided his own set of suggestions on how to live one's life through the Beatitudes. (I like to use the word play Be-attitudes for these.)  Jesus played up the power of faith (if you have the faith of a mustard seed you can move mountains) and downplayed the difficulty of faith (you need only the faith of a child.)

Simply, faith is a trust that we will have a tomorrow. Kids have faith that their parents will be there when they wake up.  We can have faith that even in death, life does go on. There are scads of people who spend their lives building guarantees into their faith whereupon their faith becomes grounded in the security of their investments, But that becomes an extremely thin line between "faith" and idol worship. Faith doesn't operate in the realm of guarantee nearly as powerfully as it does in the realm of hope. On the spiritual plane hope and faith keep us going (treasure kept in our hearts) far more than our investment portfolio (where moth and rust can steal or be lost.)  

In what do we have faith?  The four Sundays of Advent often include a weekly focus on four spiritual words that usually include peace, joy, love, and hope.  These four words strongly connect to the personhood of Jesus - his life, teaching, and ministry.  Likewise, they can be our words.  While there can be some instruction involved in teaching children the how-tos, the actual practice of them is a life-long laboratory of experiencing what they mean in the contexts we find ourselves in with each relational interaction. When we give/receive joy, when we practice/experience peace, when we give or receive hope or love we meet the elements of faith that radically alter our lives and those of the people we interact with. We don't need stuffy theological Ph.D.s cramming quilt and atonement and hell down our gullets - nothing about those elements fosters a speck of faith (far more worry if you ask me!).  They're just intellectual snobbery.  As the Apostle Paul ends 1 Corinthians 13: "Faith, hope, and love abide." Let your faith abide in you.  Have faith in the eternity of tomorrow. (Spoken like a great procrastinator, eh?)  

A Vulnerable Suggestion

At Christmastime, most Christian churches recognize and celebrate the belief that God came down to be with us humans. As the story goes, Jesus came as a lowly infant in God's swaddling clothes.  Like all babies, he was vulnerable, at first unable to hold up his head - a remarkably humble in-breaking.  That vulnerable way didn't change throughout his life.  Even at his trial with Pilate and the moments of his death reflected his open vulnerability to all aspects of the human lives around him. When I look at Jesus, it invites me to look at people differently, with a more discerning sympathetic eye. 

Being vulnerable is not something that is valued in American culture. Vulnerability is not seen as an attribute in the business or industrial world.  It's challenging to outfox one's competition with vulnerability.  Sports also do not encourage holding your opponent in mercy or compassion.  The word "success" immediately calls us to win at all costs.  To see the U.S. political climate, one quickly grasps that winning comes by doing whatever it takes, including cheating, lying, and even breaking the law if that helps you achieve "the goal."

When we look at Jesus' life, however, we don't see this kind of success or winning at play. Another set of values is at work: compassion, careful listening, and empathy for another's situation. He doesn't view a relationship as transactional—"I'll give you this if you give me that."  Jesus doesn't see "losers," and even among those of the times considered social "winners," Jesus sees them on the same even playing field with their own "logs in their eye" to be understood and healed.

The majority's extraordinarily high levels of stress are caused by the innate pressure to succeed and get ahead. Daily life is geared toward being in competition to achieve something - grades, life partner, income, career, outward appearance, power, among so much more.  What would our life be like without pressure on that level and only Jesus' goal to be kind, listen, and offer a hand?  Obviously, we would still need to consider our basic needs - food, shelter, clothing, etc.  But what would society look like without the "dog eat dog" mentality?  Without going whole hog off one's rocker, how could you start working to develop the simple habit of noticing others and offering the kindness of letting them know they matter?  Would the world be different?  It would be different for that one who is noticed, person by person until it hits a critical mass, which is how reality is changed.