In my counseling session last night, my therapist said something that has been tumbling around in my head like tennis shoes in a dryer: "I don't want to see myself through a cracked mirror."
Her comment came as I processed the messages of worthlessness I internalize from the behavior of those around me.
(But not all those around me, mind you. Why is it that the one person who treats me like refuse is so much easier to believe than the dozens who treat me like a diamond, even if a diamond in the rough?)
Sitting at the keyboard tonight, her words remind me of I Corinthians 13 which my High Road leaders had us memorize. (Thank you, Anita and Kathy!) Verse 12 reads, "Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known."
It has been my habit, I think, to believe that those around me see me "face to face." I am a pretty transparent individual, after all. There isn't much mystery here! So when my honesty and openness is met with derision, confusion, rejection, betrayal, or just plain disdain, I believe that to be a fair and accurate evaluation of my self and my character.
What I never take into account is the fact that the other person is a cracked mirror.
Well, almost never.
If my sister tells me I'm pretty, I discount her words as those of a too-kind best friend and sibling. If someone in church compliments my trumpet playing, I tell myself they have not heard many trumpeters. If someone tells me I'm a good writer, I quickly remind myself of my stack of rejection slips.
Why do I dismiss these people? It is because I believe them to be, in some way, a cracked mirror. But my critics? Somehow I give them credit for complete honesty, perfect vision, infallible judgment.
You know what the kicker is? The people in my life that I respect the most, the ones I most want to emulate, the ones who have proven themselves to be faithful and true in every aspect of their lives, those are the ones whose opinions I find so hard to trust. I think they are just being kind because, for some unfathomable reason, they love me.
There is something to that. Love does cover a multitude of sins, allowing us to forgive foibles . . . even ignore them . . . in those most valuable to us.
It is also true that all of us, in our own unique ways, are cracked. All of us see but dimly at times.
However, there's a difference between a mirror with a hairline fracture along the outside edge and one with a spiderweb radiating from the center and reaching to the outermost edges. The first may distort a couple details; the second will render an image virtually unrecognizable from the original object.
I am finished with the spiderweb reflection. With God's grace, I am going to look deeply into the reflections I receive from my family (most of the time!), my dearest friends, my spiritual mentors (who are often my dearest friends as well) and trust their images, as I know I can trust their character.
Most importantly, I am going to trust the words of the One who knows me better than anyone, the One who made me, the One who redeemed me. He says I am fearfully and wonderfully made. He says I am a princess: the child of the King of Kings, the younger sister to the Prince of Peace. He promises that He has plans to prosper me and not to harm me, plans to give me a hope and a future.
I am tempted to doubt. It is so easy to doubt. BUT, my God cannot lie. It is against His nature to do so. He could not lie even to cover up my sin and spare the life of his beloved Son.
So who am I going to believe? The Creator? Or the Destroyer? The Truth and the Light? Or the Father of Lies and the Prince of Darkness? The One who Forgives? Or the One who Condemns?
This night, who are YOU going to believe?
Part 1:
ReplyDeletePlease indulge your gadfly a little longer.
We have grown up in a civilization, which has inculcated in us, from our very youth, the notion of valuation: that we somehow need to place a value on everything, including ourselves and others.
I see, in all your struggles to come to terms with love, labor, and rest, a misdirected struggle to assess your worth. Especially since your divorce, you have struggled against the profane reduction of your life and all that you are into the dual phrase that haunts any divorcee: "you are not worth being with; another is more worthy of my affection and time." This is compounded by other themes and messages which have reinforced the absurd notion that necessity demands you prove your worth at work on the farm, in assiduous study at school, in your work at teaching English, in your work at giving birth and raising children, in what you can contribute at church, etc.
I see the same bitter cup Lucy Snowe described, poured into your soul by two destructive lies:
1) Valuation. Humanism now pervades every corner of civilization with its profane cry that people have "intrinsic worth," that they are "worthy of love," that Jesus assessed our worth so high that he died on the cross, etc. But the reality of humanism is that it reduces us to a valuation system that profanes the very genesis of life by a God who is so overflowing with life, love, justice, etc, that creation was born in creative delight and song, which cannot be measured or valuated, but which evoke the simple, child like response from God, The Holy Spirit:
"I was filled with delight day after day,
rejoicing always in his presence,
rejoicing in his whole world
And delighting in the children of man." (Prov 8:31)
The Creator of heaven and earth, by His very creativity, disdains any idea that necessity and valuation govern life. As Jesus himself taught, life is more than apparent necessities: more than even food and clothing.
As the God who gave us the narratives in the Law taught us, work, rest, and love are fundamentally about responsiveness to the beauty and bounty of God, a beauty he has bestowed on creation, and on you.
This responsiveness is clarion clear in the book of Ruth. She and Boaz teach us two key truths:
First: work isn't about proving your worth to "build up the community," "build up the nation," build the Tower of Babel. Such is the confusion ("babel") of Cain's descendants. Work IS about responding to the bounty of God's provision, and responding to those we work alongside. Labor is first of all a labor of love with and for those pearls God has placed in our lives.
Second: Love is a matter of responsiveness, not quid pro quo. Ruth responds to Naomi when her sister-in-law desponds. She is as amazing as Ittai and the Centurion who astounded Christ.
Boaz is so overcome by the love Ruth lavishes on Naomi, that he responds by reinforcing her strength and determination: lovingly providing sustenance, guiding her to rest in the heat, and easing her task by the instructions he gives to his reapers. Boaz does not value her for her diligence per se, but simply and wisely responds to the love which foments her diligence.
The rest of the story demonstrates the parable of the man who finds a pearl beyond price: Boaz is willing to exchange wealth and reputation to marry a Moabitess, whom the Law itself has banned from the temple for 10 generations (Boaz being but the 2nd generation), and who is so low in the eyes of shallow moralists, that Boaz actively protects her against rape and denigration. She is beyond valuation to him: invaluable as is the wellspring of life. I suspect Solomon was thinking about this couple, and Rahab and Salmon, when he penned Proverbs 5:15-19. Note that the final response comes from the community which surrounds them-a love which started between two people spreads to three, then an entire community.
Part 2:
ReplyDelete2) Denigration. You and I have grown up in a church which consistently presents the lie that sin is a nature, a lie which ties back to the same squalid thinking of Greek philosophers who gave us humanism's crude valuation paradigm. This lie convinces us that we, being “naturally” lazy or wayward, must work doubly hard to prove our moral worth against our "natural" inclination to sin.
This lie is a blasphemy, for God is Creator of all natures, and certainly not the author of sin. Therefore embrace the truth: the created order is not dualistic, mainly because the cosmos, made from nothing, does not have any inherent value per se. It is neither inherently good nor inherently evil. "God alone is good," and all he does is good, including the creation, preservation, and reconciliation of the cosmos and everything in it. Indeed he "fills all things in every way."
God has no opposite, which is precisely why sin is presented as self-defeating vanity ("nothingness") and folly in the Scriptures. The God of Isaac ("laughter") persists in telling us that he laughs foolish people to scorn (Psa 2, 37, 52) and to destruction (Prov 1), because nothing he has created will be undone by sin (Eccl 3:11), and because it is absurd that men and women should call the annihilating nothingness of sin a something.
God created all things from nothing, so that evil cannot be a positive nature, but is merely the result of a creature turning away from God back to nothing. Sin does not stick or stain like a moral stigma, but corrodes and disintegrates. Athanasius called sin "a nothing," and Augustine identified it as annihilation.
Think carefully about God's delight in creating all natures, including yours, and you will find that sin, like nothing, is not a problematic barrier to God's delight in you, anymore than nothing was a barrier to His creating you. The reason God takes such displeasure in sin is because sin annihilates the good nature He created in each one of us. How grievous to Him that we should be so foolish as to disintegrate our good natures and call such corroding folly a good. Hell, wrath, and suffering are really expressions of his insistently loving preservation of our nature against the erosion of sin.
This is why the Creeds and the Scriptures begin with him as creator, and define our truest (ontological) relationship with Him as creatures to creator. Look carefully in Paul's epistles and you will see this ontological relationship is far more primary than the analogical relationship of judge to convict, a relationship Paul used against a very specific group, the Judaizers (Rom 2:17).
In contrast to the banal assertions of toxic, illiterate blasphemers, who have filled our churches with lies, please recognize that God delights in who you are by nature (the nature He delightfully created and faithfully sustains), and invites you to recognize and embrace the beauty he has bestowed upon you, and responding in thankfulness, an overflowing cup which also evokes a response of thankfulness from fellow pearls.
Thus have we dispatched with your two arch enemies: valuation (humanism) and stigma (moralism), both of which seduced that restless overachiever, the builder of cities and founder of civilization, who brought his offering not with the contentment of a thankful sojourner, but with a mind made squalid by valuating himself against his brother. When he could not prove his worth by offering the sacrifice of fools, he sought to prove it by erasing the life of his brother. How Cain's pride and despondency still work themselves out in oppressive structures, over-demanding restlessness, and murderous, even genocidal ambitions.
Part 3:
ReplyDeleteRather than drawing near to offer a foolish sacrifice to prove your worth, draw near to listen: the message you most need to hear, but which you are drowning in your search to find your "worth," is not that you are "a person worth loving or spending time with," but that you are a delight by your very nature, and that it is good to be in your presence--so good, that even a lifetime is not enough to quench one's thirst for such delight. One needs endless lifetimes to discern and wonder at what precious name is written on your little white stone.
You were formed in beauty and delight, knit together in your mother's womb by the same triune God who delighted in creating all things visible and invisible, and specifically delighted, before time and space, in contemplating you as part of the unfolding delight of creation: a cosmos where God "makes all things beautiful in their time," especially His pearls.
To reduce all of that to "value" is an utter profanation. For, "if one were to give all the wealth of his house for love, it would be utterly scorned." That is equally true of all the valuated wealth of the world of men, which is nothing but a reduction of the invaluable delight of Creator and creation to profane and squalid quantification.
You are beyond value.
You, Kristen Marion, are a delight to know, to contemplate, to hear, to see, to be in the presence of. No profane valuation of you, communicated by the rejection of treachery and divorce can alter that truth, just as darkness cannot overcome light. Therefore, please stop trying to valuate yourself through other's eyes, or even through your own. Learn, rather, to embrace the message of Proverbs 8:31. Learn to respond to your Creator, to "remember your Creator in the days of your youth." Sub specie aeturnitatis, you still are quite young...
Take a hint from the meaning of your middle name which you have overlooked: "star of the sea." What an absurdity to valuate a star, as if transfixing light could be reduced to an arbitrary numerical value and appropriated in some banal system of transactional exchange. We gaze at stars with awe and wonder which transcends all thought of necessity, comparison, and worth.
So it is with you, "star of the sea," for in the churning sea of life, which seems indifferent at best to peace and beauty, one need only transfix one's eyes on but one star to remember that beauty and light still transcend the roiling and restless troubles of everyday struggle and toil.
May the Creator of Heaven and Earth open the eyes of your heart to see, with knowledge and depth of insight, His love beyond all measure, and may your cup over-brim in Him. May you find contentment and rest in Him, that your heart may no more be afflicted with accusing thoughts from those who would arrogate to themselves the authority to measure you, but who are bereft of wisdom and knowledge because they are darkness. May your fountain be blessed in that fountain of life which is light unending. May you shine brightly, oh "star of the sea," in Wisdom's crown, and be a joy to those fellow stars who yet shine in this dark age.