“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
G.K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World, “The Unfinished Temple”
We were Born in Exile
We are sojourners on this earth. We were born in exile. Our home is not of this world. Being exiles, we constantly yearn for home, which is a longing that cannot be fulfilled in this life. That yearning brings pain, but the pain brings hope because it means we do in fact have a home.
Added to these yearning pangs is the pain of knowing that our exile resulted from our open rebellion against our Creator. This, too, brings hope because the pain we feel in betraying Him implies that we desire to be reconciled with our Him, to be made worthy of seeing Him face to face.[1]
But what if we don’t? What happens when we forget that we have a true home that is not of this world? What happens when we turn our back to God for so long that we forget He’s there? When we become so conditioned to our exile that we consider the world our home, then we have chosen to stand with the world. When we stand with the world, God appears as other. When we stand with God, the world appears as other. As such, we must always remember that the world is not our home, that the world is other.
While in exile, we are called to a great mission, a mission ad crucem (Latin for “to the cross”). In a world that values time, money, power, leisure, luxury, beauty, pleasure, and bodily autonomy, we are called to deny ourselves all of it. We are called to take up our cross and to follow Christ.
This is the ultimate counter-cultural choice, because it cuts against the grain of every human culture. In taking up our cross, we empty ourselves in acknowledgement that everything we have is a gift from God and is owed back to Him.
Like returning borrowed tools to a kind neighbor, we do this with no expectation of return or further favor, but rather in a joyful spirit of gratitude for undeserved generosity. We borrowed God’s tools, and we used them to build our cross to His specifications. As we return His tools to Him, we thank Him, and then, somewhat sheepishly, we ask what we can do for Him.
His answer is at first puzzling, and perhaps a little bit horrifying. He asks us, now that we’ve taken up our cross, to bring Him to His cross. Yes, we are called to bring Christ to the cross. It is our choice whether that will be in glorious victory like the donkey who carried Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, or in utter defeat like Judas who betrayed Him in the garden of Gethsemane.
No matter our choice, death will precede our return from exile. We will die incomplete, having never been able to satisfy our yearning for home during our sojourn in this world. Our home exists, we know it exists, we know it is beyond our grasp, and yet we long for it. The unsatisfied longing is what proves to us that it exists. In that we can take comfort and be resigned to our incompleteness in this temporal life. As C.S. Lewis put it:
“When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of ‘No answer.’ It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, ‘Peace, child; you don’t understand.’”
Rebellion of Obedience
In a world where rebellion is marked by resisting authority, often loudly and often violently, we are called to rebel against the authority of the world through a radically docile, quietly determined, obedience to the will of God.
When the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary and told her that she would conceive Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit, her ‘yes’ was a complete giving of herself over to the will of God: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”[2] Gabriel’s visit to Mary is called the Annunciation.
We are called to see annunciations everywhere we go, and to say ‘yes’ like Mary, unflinchingly and without hesitation. This is radical subservience to God’s will. This is also true freedom. If you don’t believe me, then ask whether humanity had more freedom or less freedom after the Fall in the Garden of Eden? I rest my case.
The world is fickle. What brings fame and fortune today brings disgrace and ruin tomorrow. Chasing fads and fashions is not only exhausting and unfulfilling, it also leads further and further away from God. After a while, we don’t remember His voice. How can we say ‘yes’ to God if we can’t even discern what He is asking.
Jesus underscored the importance of radical obedience as a way to stay close to Him. When we stay close, we will recognize His voice because it is the voice we have always heard.
“Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit. The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.”[3]
Turned Upside Down
In Heretics, Chesterton said that, “many things are made holy by being turned upside down,” referring specifically to the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. When the traditional family is viewed in terms of the traditional hierarchy of father, mother, child, it seems ordinary if not somewhat antiquated. But when viewed “upside down,” that is child, mother, father, it reveals the divine nature of Jesus and the unique role of Mary.
Before we can fathom what it means to become holy, we must learn to look at the world upside down. This means embracing paradox in a world that demands answers.
Of course, flipping everything upside down is really just restoring things to their proper place. It is undoing Original Sin’s reversal of Original Justice. The prophet Isaiah spoke about this, saying,
“You turn things upside down! Shall the potter be regarded as the clay? Shall the thing made say of its maker, ‘He did not make me’; or the thing formed say of the one who formed it, ‘He has no understanding’?”[4]
Too often, what the world considers normal is perverse, and what the world considers healthy is sick. Can anyone truly look at the state of societies around the world and claim that humanity has its priorities in the right order? We live in disorientation when we put ourselves before God, and when we put ourselves before God, it is as if God does not exist.
Recall Dostoyevsky’s warning that, “If God does not exist, anything is permissible.”[5] It is also true to say that if God does not exist, anything can be forbidden. Eliminating God from society and from our lives will never lead to freedom, but only to intense oppression.
There is no other basis for inherent human dignity than God. If God doesn’t exist, then there is no basis to choose one value system over another, and therefore any value system will be imposed at the whim of whomever has power. Such arbitrariness can never be just. Such arbitrariness can never be holy.
Separation from the World
In following the example of Christ, we are called to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. This entails loving Creation, this entails loving the world, despite its upside-downness. In loving the world, we are called to become separate from it, which does not mean rejecting it.
In loving someone, we desire their highest good; so too with loving the world, and so too with loving ourselves. In desiring our own highest good, we desire the upside-downness in ourselves to be reversed. Before the Fall, our spiritual and bodily natures existed in harmony, properly ordered to the will of the Creator. After the Fall, our spiritual and bodily natures became severed, with our bodily nature always seeking to dominate our spiritual nature.
To undo this reversal, we require a further separation, this time of ourselves from the world, so that our bodily and spiritual natures can be rejoined in the proper order. Separating ourselves from the world involve total surrender of self to God. This is what it means to love yourself, and this is what we are called to desire for our neighbor, and for the world.
In saying that, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself,” Christianity presupposes proper love of self. In other words, loving your neighbor as yourself implies that you love yourself in the right way. If you are unwilling to love yourself in the right way, you cannot love your neighbor.
Thus, the command to love becomes an upbuilding strange loop, something like: “Love yourself in the same way as you love your neighbor when you love your neighbor as yourself.”
The command to love your neighbor as yourself is just that, a command. Only love that is obligated, that is duty-bound from our Creator, can be free of preferences and therefore perfected. Love being obligatory removes all possibilities other than love. If love is not an obligation, then it is subject to other factors such as our emotions and whims. Only by loving without preference or distinction can we begin to love like God loves.
In separating ourselves from the world, we can start to recognize that difference is a façade, that difference is a disguise that prevents seeing Christ in our neighbor. Being separate from the world means clothing yourself in Christ, and to see Christ in all others, because likeness to Christ is the eternal likeness we are all meant to share.
Courage and Fear
Stephen Hawking, the brilliant theoretical physicist and cosmologist, once quipped that belief in God is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark. In response, the scientist and Christian apologist John Lennox countered that, “Atheism is a fairy story for people afraid of the light.”[6] How very clever, and how very true!
Our call to adventure as sojourners on this earth seeking God’s will in the light of Christ is not for the faint of heart. As Jesus simultaneously warns and comforts, “In the world you will have trouble, but take courage, I have conquered the world.”[7] Because we trust in God’s plan and in His inevitable total victory, we can advance on our trials and tribulations with confidence and courage. Suffering becomes something not to fear but rather to seek and rejoice in.
Suffering is the most commonly shared human experience, and yet it can be the most isolating if we face it without Christ. By confronting our suffering in the full light of Christ, by joining our suffering to His, fear, anxiety, and isolation melt away. To do this, we must trust God completely, to the point of total surrender. To the world, such surrender is weakness. To God, it is courage.
Humanity is enslaved by fear of death, which in the final analysis is tantamount to fear of life. So much of the chaos in the world can be attributed to a preoccupation with seeking immortality, avoiding the thought of death altogether, or even fetishizing morbidity to the point of secular sacramentalization of practices like abortion and assisted suicide.
All these are inherently disordered because they deny the dignity of human life, which extends from conception to natural death and includes both. All these are intrinsically centered around the unreasonable and sometimes dogmatic denial of a transcendent existence beyond this life. We know them by their poisonous fruits, which include the horrors of eugenics, the emptiness of hedonism, and the pandemics of anxiety, depression, and self-loathing.
A life lived merely to extend it is wasted in foolish pride. A life lived merely to experience all possible pleasures is meaningless and vacuous. A life lived to advance a culture of death is demonically narcissistic. So what is the purpose of living this life?
The person who knows that our home is elsewhere, who knows that this life is lived as a sojourner in exile, has a deep-rooted sense that we live this life to demonstrate that we can be trusted with small things so that in the next life we are trusted with great things.
Those who fear death are like the servant in the parable of the talents who buried his master’s talents because he was afraid to lose them.[8] Rather than taking the gifts his master gave him and using them courageously and productively, the servant squandered his talents by fearfully hiding them away.
We were meant to use the gifts of love and life that God gave us and multiply them by investing them, developing them, and sharing them. That can only be accomplished by overcoming the fear of loss, which is fear of death. After all, in imitation of Christ, one of the purposes of our lives here on earth is to die, and we can’t do that well when we are afraid.
If you doubt that the parable of the talents is really about fear of death, then consider that, in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew in which it appears, it is the last parable that Jesus tells before entering Jerusalem to face His death. Jesus faced His death of the flesh with courage so that we could do the same. Jesus died so that we might be free from the moral slavery known as fear of death.
“Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.”[9]
Wrestling with God
Ultimately, the path to sainthood involves obedience unto death. We must always seek God’s will, and not let our own certainty get in the way. Paradox teaches us how to do this.
Oftentimes, and surprisingly so, striving for radical obedience feels like wrestling with God. But this really shouldn’t be so surprising. After all, God Himself gave His chosen people the name ‘Israel,’ which means ‘wrestle with God.’ We were intended to writhe and struggle, even when cradled in His arms. That is the function of mystery, and that is the function of paradox.
Only through the struggle do we learn the futility of the struggle. When faced with resistance, our instinct is to fight, because to give in is to give up. Paradox is a different beast, however, and the only way to defeat it is to surrender.
In those times when God’s will sits agonizingly out of reach behind the veil of paradox, surrender is the best option. Surrender means that I don’t need to figure out God’s will for me in this moment, because this moment and these circumstances are God’s will for me. Discerning God’s will is not an exercise of tending to the cares of God, but rather is an exercise of casting our cares on God, of ‘letting go and letting God,’ as they say.
“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God — what is good and acceptable and perfect.”[10]
[1] The word “reconciliation” means to be brought “eyelash to eyelash,” owing to the Latin root “cilia.”
[2] The story of the Annunciation of Mary is found at Luke 1:26-38. Mary’s yes echoes Isaiah’s acceptance of God’s call for a prophet, “Here am I; send me!” which was also precipitated by an angel. See Isaiah 6:6-9.
[3] John 10:1-5, NRSV-CI.
[4] Isaiah 29:16, NRSV-CI.
[5] Said by the character Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov.
[6] John Lennox, Can Science Explain Everything?, p. 30.
[7] John 16:33, NRSV-CI.
[8] See Luke 19:11-27.
[9] Hebrews 2:14-15 NRSV-CI.
[10] Romans 12:2 NRSV-CI.