Life is so beautiful. I look into so many people and see within their faces something miraculous. It is something I truly do not believe I could see if it weren't for the Gospels. Not as I see it. For in each person I see beauty and wonder without measure. There is this radical vulnerability, the edge of life and death and sitting on it is a revelation of the divine. In most of the people I meet, not all (damn my sinful nature) but most, I encounter something truly miraculous. In one look all their hopes, and all their fears, and all that they are, and all they are not are summed up in one place, at one time and glory reigns.
It is like all the ancient myths and stories are true, and there is some vital and eternal force, some invitation to believe in forever and it confronts me directly. I stare in the face of each person and I stare into the face of God. I live Genesis 33:10, and John 20:28. God visits me as incarnate in the face of the other. So beautiful and wonderful is all this that I have to filter it lest I do and say things that would make people uncomfortable, like, all the time. I mean you wouldn't want to see my balling my eyes out every time I looked into your eyes, would you? The truth that confronts me is that my Father, that Love Eternal, that Infinity itself lives a particular existence in the confrontation with another person.
This experience extends far beyond human relationships. I feel the same thing when I look into my dog's eyes, and when I look at the swirling galaxies. I experience it when I hear about some new scientific fact, or learn some new truth about myself. It is as if the Eternal comes to me again and again all around, all the time, until my very self is drowned out in the ocean of wonder.
Life is terrible. There is this scene in the film THE GREEN MILE where William Wharton keeps two little girls quiet before he kills them by threatening the other one. They are twins, and he tells one little girl that if she makes noise she'll kill her sister. He tells the other sister the same. John Coughy, who plays a Christ figure in the film, says it succinctly, "He killed them with their love. They loved each other. That's the way it is every day. That's the way it is all over the world." That's about right.
Each day, I take this wonderful gift of God's very eternal self and flush it down the toilet. Each day I see people do the same, on scales both large and small. We tell Jesus Christ how wonderful He is as we nail His hands to the Cross. So much is given, and so little is received. I know of the horrors we visit on our Lord in our hearts and in our world.
Where is the human consequence of God's presence? Where is the thankfulness, in myself and in others when we truly need it? A moment of anger murders all that God is for me. A single temptation and I sell forever for a moment. Christ is dying on the Cross, and we don't care.
Where is the human consequence of God's presence? In Jesus Christ, ever...always. He is the only hope we have, and the only image of God that I've known that expresses the fullest range of my encounter with life itself. God is dead. God is alive. God is forever. Christ has died. Christ is Risen. Christ will come again. All of these things, all the wonder, and all the greatness, and all the terror, and all the emptiness, all of it is itself and encounter with God. All of it is true, all at the same time and I cannot give up any part of it without cutting out a part of my soul, and denying the truth. I see them because I have come to know and believe that Jesus Christ is Lord. As CS Lewis said, I do not only see Him, but by Him I see everything I can see. All of reality, revealed in a moment in time. In a single person. The Incarnation of God is not only experienced, but revealed.
At the base of all of this is the experience of vulnerability. Vulnerability is Love. God is Vulnerability/Love. All the good and all the bad flows from this. All the horror and all the wonder. This is what God is. Can we face it? We better. If we want to know Jesus Christ and what He really was and is and can be for us, we must.
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