Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging (14 page)

The root meaning of infatuation derives from the Latin
in-fatuus
, “to make foolish.”
[14]
Experience tells us that life is not always lived to such a lyrical beat. Excitement and enthusiasm must eventually give way to quiet, thoughtful presence. Infatuation must weather separation, loneliness, conflict, tension, and patches of boredom that challenge its capacity to endure. If it is to survive, the illusory intimacy of the first fascination must mature into authentic intimacy characterized by self-sacrifice as well as appreciation of and communication with the beloved.

Many of us can recall an utterly unpredictable moment in which we were deeply affected by an encounter with Jesus Christ
 
—a peak experience that brought immense consolation and heartfelt joy. We were swept up in wonder and love. Quite simply, we were infatuated with Jesus, in love with love. For me the experience lasted nine years.

Then shortly after ordination, I got shanghaied by success. Applause and acclaim in the ministry muffled the voice of the Beloved. I was in demand. What a giddy feeling to have my person admired and my presence required! As my unconditional availability increased and intimacy with Christ decreased, I rationalized that this was the price to be paid for unstinting service to the kingdom enterprise.

Years later, the fame faded and my popularity waned. When rejection and failure first made their unwelcome appearance, I was spiritually unequipped for the inner devastation. Loneliness and sadness invaded my soul. In search of a mood-altering experience, I unplugged the jug. With my predisposition to alcoholism, I was a raging drunk within eighteen months. I abandoned the treasure and took flight from the simple sacredness of my life.

Finally I went for treatment in Minnesota. As the alcoholic fog lifted, I knew there was only one place to go. I sank down into the center of my soul, grew still, and listened to the Rabbi’s heartbeat.

The ensuing years have not been marked by uninterrupted awareness of present risenness; my life has not been an unbroken spiral toward holiness. There have been lapses and relapses, fits of pique and frustration, times of high anxiety and low self-esteem. The good news is that their hang time grows progressively shorter.

What is the purpose of this self-disclosure? For anyone caught up in the oppression of thinking that God works only through saints, it offers a word of encouragement. For those who have fulfilled Jesus’ prophetic word to Peter
 
—“Before the cock crows you will have disowned me three times” (John 13:38)
 
—it offers a word of liberation. For those trapped in cynicism, indifference, or despair, it offers a word of hope.

Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8). The way He related to Peter, John, and Mary Magdalene is the way He relates to us. The recovery of passion starts with reappraising the value of the treasure, continues with letting the Great Rabbi hold us against His heart, and comes to fruition in a personal transformation of which we will not even be aware.

Not surprisingly, the impostor shrinks as he discovers that, apart from Christ, his alleged virtues are but brilliant vices.

•
8 •

Fortitude and Fantasy

ANTHONY DE MELLO IN
The Way to Love
wrote bluntly,

In John’s gospel, the Jews are said to be incapable of believing because they “look to one another for approval” (5:44). There appears to be a radical incompatibility between human respect and authentic faith in
Christ. The strokes or the scorn of our peers become more important than the approval of Jesus.

As I wrote earlier, the dominant sin in my adult life has been my cowardly refusal to think, feel, act, respond, and live from my authentic self, because of fear of rejection. I don’t mean that I do not believe in Jesus anymore. I still believe in Him, but peer pressure has set limits to the boundaries of my faith. Nor do I mean that I do not love Jesus anymore. I still love Him very much, but I sometimes love other things
 
—specifically my glittering image
 
—even more. Any self-imposed limit to my faith and love for Jesus inevitably initiates a betrayal of some kind. I march in lockstep with the intimidated apostles: “All the disciples deserted him and ran away” (Matthew 26:56).

The opinions of others exert a subtle but controlling pressure on the words I speak and the words I stuff; the tyranny of my peers controls the decisions I make and the ones I refuse to make. I am afraid of what others may say. Peter G. van Breeman identified this fear:

…

When we freely assent to the mystery of our belovedness and accept our core identity as Abba’s child, we slowly gain autonomy from controlling relationships. We become inner directed rather than outer determined. The fleeting flashes of pleasure or pain caused by the affirmation or deprivation of others will never entirely disappear, but their power to induce self-betrayal will be diminished.

Passion is not high emotion but a steely determination, fired by love, to stay centered in the awareness of Christ’s present risenness, a drivenness to remain rooted in the truth of who I am, and a readiness to pay the price of fidelity. To
own
my unique self in a world filled with voices contrary to the gospel requires enormous fortitude. In this decade of much empty religious talk and proliferating Bible studies, idle intellectual curiosity and pretensions of importance, intelligence without courage is bankrupt. The truth of faith has little value when it is not also the life of the heart. Thirteenth-century theologian Anthony of Padua opened every class he taught with the phrase, “Of what value is learning that does not turn to love?”

With biting satire, Søren Kierkegaard mocked the pursuit of biblical and theological knowledge as an end in itself:

The one great passion in Jesus’ life was His Father. He carried a secret in His heart that made Him great and lonely.
[4]
The four evangelists do not spare us the brutal details of the losses Jesus suffered for the sake of integrity; the price He paid for fidelity to His passion, His person, and His mission. His own family thought He needed custodial care (Mark 3:21), He was called a glutton and a drunkard (Luke 7:34), the religious leaders suspected a demonic seizure (Mark 3:22), and bystanders called Him some bad names. He was spurned by those He loved, deemed a loser, driven out of town, and killed as a criminal.

The pressures of religious conformity and political correctness in our culture bring us face-to-face with what Johannes Metz called “the poverty of uniqueness.”
[5]
On the desk in the study where I wrote this book stands a picture of Thomas Merton with this inscription: “If you forget everything else that has been said, I would suggest you remember this for the future: ‘From now on, everybody stands on his own two feet.’”

The poverty of uniqueness is the call of Jesus to stand utterly alone when the only alternative is to cut a deal at the price of one’s integrity. It is a lonely
yes
to the whispers of our true self, a clinging to our core identity when companionship and community support are withheld. It is a courageous determination to make unpopular decisions that are expressive of the truth of who we are
 
—not of who we think we should be or who someone else wants us to be. It is trusting enough in Jesus to make mistakes and believing enough that His life will still pulse within us. It is the unarticulated, gut-wrenching yielding of our true self to the poverty of our own unique, mysterious personality.

In a word, standing on our own two feet is an often heroic act of love.

In the name of prudence, the terrified impostor would have us betray our identity and our mission, whatever it might be
 
—standing with a friend in the harsh weather of life, solidarity with the oppressed at the cost of ridicule, refusal to be silent in the face of injustice, unswerving loyalty to a spouse, or any lonely call to duty on a wintry night. Other voices clamor, “Don’t make waves; say what everyone else is saying and do what they’re doing; tailor your conscience to fit this year’s fashion. When in Rome, do as the Romans do. You don’t want to raise eyebrows and be dismissed as a kook. Settle in and settle down. You’d be overruled anyway.”

Metz wrote,

Anyone who has ever stood up for the truth of human dignity, no matter how disfigured, only to find previously supportive friends holding back, even remonstrating with you for your boldness, feels the loneliness of the poverty of uniqueness. This happens every day to those who choose to suffer for the absolute voice of conscience, even in what seem to be small matters. They find themselves standing alone. I have yet to meet the man or woman who enjoys such responsibility.

The measure of our depth awareness of Christ’s present risenness is our capacity to stand up for the truth and sustain the disapproval of significant others. An increasing passion for truth evokes a growing indifference to public opinion and to what people say or think. We can no longer drift with the crowd or echo the opinions of others. The inner voice
 
—
Take courage. It is I. Do not be afraid
 
—assures that our security rests in having no security. When we stand on our own two feet and claim responsibility for our unique self, we are growing in personal autonomy, fortitude, and freedom from the bondage of human approval.

A tale often told in Irish pubs catches this spirit of liberation. A tourist was exploring some back roads in a remote corner of Ireland. Rather than risk getting lost, he decided to remain in his car and wait for a local inhabitant to arrive. After a considerable length of time, a local man approached on a bicycle. The tourist greeted him warmly and said, “Well, Paddy, am I glad to see you. I want to know which of these roads will take me back into the village.”

“How did you know my name is Paddy?” asked the local man.

“Oh, I just guessed it,” replied the tourist.

“Well, in that case, you can guess which is the right road!” said the local man as he rode away angrily.
[7]

…

In the past twenty years, both psychology and religion have laid strong emphasis on the primacy of
being
over
doing
. We are often reminded by pastor, therapist, and next-door neighbor, “It is not what you
do
that matters; it is who you
are
.” There is certainly an element of truth in this statement
 
—who we are in God is of ultimate significance. Who one
is
transcends what one
does
or what one
says
or what descriptive traits and qualities one
has
.
[8]

In religious circles, we have reacted sharply against the heresy of works and the pharisaical focus on the endless doing of ritual acts, which is the undoing of authentic religion. We have been cautioned not to identify ourselves with our career or ministry because when change comes through old age, sickness, or retirement, we will feel worthless and useless and without a clue as to who we are. We reject our Christian culture when it seems to equate holiness with doing. We know that the practice of conferring and withholding honors in the local church is often based on dubious accomplishments.

Again, there is undeniable wisdom here. The tendency to construct a self-image based on performing religious acts easily leads to the illusion of self-righteousness. When our sense of self is tied to any particular task
 
—such as serving in a soup kitchen, promoting environmental consciousness, or giving spiritual instruction
 
—we take a functional approach to life; work becomes the central value; we lose touch with the true self and the happy combination of mysterious dignity and pompous dust which we really are.

And yet . . .

While acknowledging the truth contained in the foregoing paragraphs, I want to affirm that what we
do
may be far more decisive and
far more expressive of the ultimate truth of who we
are
in Christ than anything else. I’m not suggesting stockpiling righteousness points to earn a seat at the heavenly banquet through vigorous effort. But who we are is elusive, even to the most sophisticated, therapeutic probing of the human psyche.

Faith tells us that we are Abba’s beloved children. Faith persuades us of the present risenness of Jesus. But, as Sebastian Moore noted, “In religion there always lurks the fear that we invented the story of God’s love.”
[9]
Genuine faith leads to knowing the love of God, to confessing Jesus as Lord, and to being transformed by what we know.

An old woman lay seriously ill in a hospital. Her closest friend read Isaiah 25:6-9 aloud to her. Wanting the comfort and support of faith, the sick woman asked her friend to hold her hand. On the other side of the bed, her husband, who considered himself a deeply religious man and who prided himself for his boldness in having a “Honk if you love Jesus” bumper sticker on his car, reached out to take her other hand. His wife withdrew it, saying with deep sadness, “Herbert, you are not a believer. Your cruelty and callousness throughout the forty years of our marriage tells me that your faith is an illusion.”

Suppose you have a keen dislike for the used-car salesman who knowingly sold you a lemon. You learn that he is in the hospital recuperating from a heart attack. You call his wife and assure her of your prayers and then visit the salesman in the hospital and leave a get-well card with a batch of homemade cookies on his nightstand. You still dislike him and disapprove of his shady tactics. When you lay your head on the pillow that night, why should you dwell more on your dislike and disapproval of him than on the fact that you did a stupendous act of kindness that transcended your feelings? In this case, what you
do
matters more than who you
are
.

Simon Tugwell remarked, “What we do can be much more versatile and worthwhile than what goes on behind the scenes of our psychological life. And it may be of greater significance for our being in God,
because it may express his true purpose, even while it does not express anything we could clearly call our own purpose.”
[10]

Someone might protest, “But to visit the salesman in the hospital is false, two-faced, and hypocritical.” I submit that it is the triumph of do-ness over is-ness. When Jesus said, “Love your enemies,
do
good to those who hate you” (Luke 6:27, emphasis added), I do not think He meant that we play kissy-face with them.