Being Right and the People Jesus Loves

 

I'm thankful for women like Sara Kay Mooney who share poetry that helps keep us alive. I never read much poetry up until maybe a couple years ago. That's when I needed something that wasn't neat and orderly because a Pandemic will teach you that. I liked the otherness of it...the freedom of words that  could mean this or that but then suddenly, you know exactly what it means.

In her recent weekly Lent email, where she writes a short reflection and shares a poem, Sara brings up the question, "Do I want to be right or do I want to be healed?"

I suppose this is something I'll always battle. I too, have lived and walked in too many circles where it's just easier to pull that fruit right off the tree and say to God, "Look, I can help you out just a little. I have great ideas! I don't know if You know this but, those people over there have really let themselves go and they're being such horrible witnesses for You!"

But what happens when just one thread of that intricate quilt we've made, holding us tight, keeping us in the right, gets pulled?

It unravels. And we're left naked in the Garden with a God wondering where we've gone.

Henri Nouwen says, "It seems easier to be God than to love God, easier to control people than to love people, easier to own life than to love life."*

And then I remember that power was a temptation for Jesus too in His 40 days in the wilderness. But He did not give in to Satan's manipulation like we did.

Because He came to heal. There is rightness in the healing, but there is no healing without the shedding. I have felt that quilt unravel in my own life and I've seen it unravel in those I love dearly. It is painful, vulnerable, alarming, and disarming. Instead of rushing to clothe ourselves again, what if we waited for God to find us? He was looking, after all.

And there, His gaze will meet ours, desperate and ashamed, and we'll know that He was vulnerable and naked too. And that by His wounds we are healed. We'll touch them to make sure they're real, and He'll see our wounds and know they're real too.

No more cover ups. We'll find the other ones who's quilt has unraveled, and they'll know too, that healing was worth it. 

THE STAR MARKET

By Marie Howe

The people Jesus loved were shopping at the Star Market yesterday.
An old lead-colored man standing next to me at the checkout
breathed so heavily I had to step back a few steps.

Even after his bags were packed he still stood, breathing hard and
hawking into his hand. The feeble, the lame, I could hardly look at them:
shuffling through the aisles, they smelled of decay, as if the Star Market

had declared a day off for the able-bodied, and I had wandered in
with the rest of them—sour milk, bad meat—
looking for cereal and spring water.

Jesus must have been a saint, I said to myself, looking for my lost car
in the parking lot later, stumbling among the people who would have
been lowered into rooms by ropes, who would have crept

out of caves or crawled from the corners of public baths on their hands
and knees begging for mercy.

If I touch only the hem of his garment, one woman thought,
could I bear the look on his face when he wheels around?

(The New Yorker, January 7, 2008)

*Henri Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership