Living as the Beloved
*My soul is restless until it rests in You, O God.”
St Augustine
Several years ago I committed to a methodical study of scripture and a morning meditation of a psalm. The Bible has confounded me throughout my life and I needed to make peace with it. As I studied, largely guided by the Bible Project and their recommendations, I fell in love with the scripture once again. Curiosity drove me deeper and led me to an on-line course by The Bible Project on the letter to the Ephesians. I was about to sign up for another course in January, but I stopped. They do an incredible job and I will definitely take another course, but I realized that my study of scripture was becoming obsessive, an academic and intellectual engagement. I needed to shift gears.
The Spirit was prompting me to do something new. Like Thomas, I prayed to touch Christ’s wounded hands and side. I need to see and experience something in order to believe. What I hear from the church today and what I see are not worthy of my life. They worsen the human condition rather than heal it. When Dr Howard Thurmond travelled to India, he was asked “what are you doing here”? We see your Jesus religion and how you treat one another in the United States (circa 1940), we do not need that here. The Jesus religion was used to control and manipulate, to wield power and dominate others. Dr Thurmond had to interpret Jesus rightly, a Jesus wholly unlike the religious institutions he knew. The Jesus of scripture identified with the broken and “disinherited.” The Jesus of scripture offered Good News in response to the human condition.
I looked for Christ followers whose lives have produced the fruit of Christ. Some are people I know; some have passed on. Some have written books. The books I am looking for now are books that describe the thinking behind a beautiful life. I read their life before I listen to their words. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is one such person. His life is the fullness of his words. Corrie Ten Boom is another. I continue to read the Bible each morning and put more emphasis on meditation of a psalm, but I intentionally relented from constant excavation of the text. For my life to conform to the good and beautiful lives of those who best reflect Christ, I need discipleship. My hope now is to enter the wounds and affirm the resurrection power of Christ. It is time for Christ to bear fruit.
Disciples learned from their Master by watching how they lived and emulating it. Their words informed them, but the words explained why they did what they did. The words did not teach something unrelated to who they were. Life of the Beloved by Henri Nouwen is one of the books I am reading this year. He is a good bridge for me. He was an academic, a professor of theology at Notre Dame, Harvard, and Yale. However, he left these comfortable posts to live among the poor in Latin America. He lived in a L’Arche community in Toronto (a community of the “disabled”). He cites the residents here as his greatest teachers. How does a man like this read scripture?
Life of the Beloved is an address of the human condition. A faith that does not adequately understand and describe the human condition cannot offer healing. Nouwen breaks this up into four movements. I offer notes along with four musical accompaniments that I hope touch your biblical imagination. The psalms and prophets are products of performance artists (see Eugene Peterson and Bono video regarding the Psalms and the book Run with the Horses of more one this). To be human is to navigate the landscape of the longing heart.
Being the Beloved
“When we have come to believe in the voices that call us worthless and unlovable, then success, popularity, and power are easily perceived as attractive solutions. (p 32).”
One of the biggest struggles is the feeling of being unwelcome in the human community. The call to prove your worth becomes an overwhelming voice. All the while, a “soft, gentle voice (that) speaks in the silence and solitude of my heart.” Attuning our hearts to the voice our the Beloved frees us from being governed by fears of rejection and worthlessness. The Lover of our soul reanimates us with His breath.
“Becoming the Beloved means letting the truth of the Beloved become enfleshed in everything we think, say, or do.” (p 45)
The book aims to describe the manifestation of the Spirit within our daily struggles as developed disciplines enable us to recognize the Spirit and actively respond.
Communion is the relationship that he uses to describe this process. Jean Vanier uses the same idea related to our interaction with another. Communion is to be taken, blessed, broken, and given.
TAKEN
To be “taken” is to be chosen. The first response to the pain of the human condition is this understanding. The Beloved has noticed your uniqueness and desires to be with you. Being chosen does not exclude others, rather it is the nidus from which we can embrace the uniqueness of others as well. Our heads will get lost. The voice of fear, rejection, hate…would woo us away from our Beloved. Hear Sting sing of a Beloved desiring union and longing for her return from the arms of another. This is the response to the human condition: your heart has a home in the Beloved.
The world is the realm of “the powers.” These powers accept or reject us based upon its agenda and control. Capitulate and you are welcomed. How do we get in touch with our chosenness?
Unmask the powers. The powers are manipulative, controlling, and power-hungry.
Encouragement. Surround yourself with people who will remind you of your identity as the chosen of God. Those whose lives resonate with the Beloved, whether alive and with us or from history, will remind us of whose we are if we cultivate a listening ear.
Celebrate. To celebrate is to offer a gratitude that deepens the consciousness to being chosen, and not an accident. There is always a choice for bitterness or gratitude. Pursue concrete expressions of thanksgiving. “Gratitude begets gratitude, just as love begets love. (p 62).”
Along with accepting this love for ourselves, we reveal it to others as well. If our guide is fear and self-doubt, there is no room to help others see their beauty. Fear is equivalent to having another lover. God’s desire is for us to be His. He has chosen us for this purpose. Taken as the Beloved opens us to God, ourselves, and each other.
Blessed
Benedicere is latin for “benediction.” Literally is means to “speak (dictio) well (bene) .” To bless is to affirm another’s Belovedness. We need to hear, often and in new ways, that we are precious in the eyes of God, that in His eyes we are complete. The waves on the surface of our existence can toss us around, but the deep currents call to us. “Good words are being spoken to you and about you- words that tell the truth. The curses- noisy, boisterous, loud-mouthed as they may be- do not tell the truth.”
How do we see experience the truth of our Blessedness?
Prayer. Prayer is a way of listening to the blessing. It requires silence to hear the voice that says good things over you. It requires a stillness and intention to see yourself in His eyes. Solitude and silence are disciplines that foster presence with God. “The movement of God’s spirit is very gentle, very soft- and hidden (p 78).” In Hebrew, the word for mediation means “to mumble.” Meditating upon a psalm, for example, creates space for active attentiveness to the voice of love speaking over us. The prayer of St Francis, “ Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace…”, can move the mind to the heart in such a way that you can actually experience the peace an love beyond the anxious and restless voices of the world.
Presence. Attentiveness to blessings all around us is the practice of presence. Beauty and Truth surround us, but we must notice them. From the vitality in Nature to the harmony of music, becoming hospitable, rather than hostile, sets a table to graciously receive these gifts.
Blessedness leads us to a deep desire to bless others. Noticing the Beauty and Truth around us, within us, heightens our senses to its presence in those around us. If we see it, we can speak it and call to it. We can draw their attention to the One in whom we are complete. But “the blessing can be given only by those who have heard it themselves (p 84).”
Broken
Our brokenness is that sense of isolation and loneliness. It is the fear and insecurity that govern us. These are “the powers,” the voice of another lover. The most radical manifestation of our brokenness is Death. Our suffering and pain touch us uniquely. The way we are broken tells us about who we are. It is uniquely intimate and personal. None of us experience it exactly the same way. Jus as we claim our unique chosenness and blessedness, we must accept our unique brokenness.
A broken heart, the inner brokenness, is our most common experience. “In the Western world, the suffering that seems to be most painful is that of feeling rejected, ignored, despised, and left alone (p 89).” Lack of intimacy, feeling unknown, unwanted, without value, with nothing to offer anymore- these reveal both the commonness and uniqueness of what we experience as being broken. When we become most needy and most vulnerable, this pain climaxes. This world overstimulates and overextends us, fragmenting and monetizing the need to belong. However, its competition just exacerbates the chasm.
What are we to do?
Befriend it. Rather than stepping away from the pain, step towards it. It is common and shared. Become familiar with the singular qualities of the hurt gripping your heart. Healing occurs in passing through it. The agony of separation, isolation, rejection, neglect, and abuse has its power in our fear of the pain. The collateral damage in life propagates from refusing to accept it. As friends, we need to stand alongside those in anguish, remind them they have the strength to stand, and assure them there will be peace. As Rachel Held Evans wrote, there is a difference between healing and curing. We don’t make it all go away as if nothing ever happened. We are called to help heal, which is to tend to needs as the injured recover.
Put it under the blessing. Living out our brokenness under the curse serves to confirm the negative feeling about who we are. When we curse ourselves or allow others to curse us, all of our brokenness seems validated by life experience. The powers of darkness are strong and manipulative and move us toward our own destruction. The challenge is to listen well to the voice of the Beloved, rather than the voice of the powers, who transforms feeling of uselessness into a deeper sense of abiding. Gradually, brokenness becomes a doorway to fully accepting ourselves as the Beloved. A deeper communion is formed. “Here, joy and sorrow are no longer each other’s opposite, but have become two sides of the same desire to grow into the fullness of the Beloved (p 99).”
Addictions are like tentacles of the powers that enslave us. When our powerlessness is acknowledged and we call on God to liberate us, then “the source of our suffering becomes the source of our hope.” Rather than living in shame, we can receive the invitation to God’s unconditional love. The pain will not necessarily lessen or go away. The lesson of living in a community of mentally handicapped people was the realization that our brokenness becomes an essential part of who we are. (Neither Jean Vanier nor Henri Nouwen would characterize the handicapped as broken because of mental or physical differences, but because of the pain of isolation thrust upon many because of it.) Embracing the pain of rejection, isolation, not measuring up, or feeling useless, and bringing it to the light of the One who calls us Beloved transforms something ugly into something unimaginably beautiful. Our brokenness becomes a gift of grace to others.
Given
Joy comes from being able to do something for someone else. This speaks to our purpose and belonging to one another. Our deepest and purest desire is to give. “It is sad to see that, in our highly competitive and greedy world, we have lost touch with the joy of giving. We often live as if our happiness depended on having (p 109).” When we share our brokenness, a deeper and purer communion with one another is formed. We give each other encouragement and hope. We give belonging and value.
How can we nourish one another in this way?
Giving oneself in life. We have unique talents, abilities, and sensibilities to offer. But, our real gift is not what we do but who we are. “Who can we be for each other?” We can be peace, joy, patience, friendship, kinship, kindness, silence, solitude, gentleness, love…to each other. By being the Beloved and offering this life to others, we can be most helpful. Our gifts are the ways we express our humanity. Nouwen writes of the gifts that those with mental handicaps were to him. Bill, who suffered intensely from shattered family relationships had a gift for friendship. Linda, who had a speech disorder, had a gift of making others feel welcome. Adam, who could not speak, walk, or eat without help had an amazing gift of bringing peace to those caring for him. Those without these handicaps often bury their gifts beneath their talents. Their visible brokenness has enabled them to live life more fully as a gift.
Give oneself in death. Final brokenness, death, is a means to our final gift of self and is to be accepted and befriended. Dying is the pathway to becoming a pure gift. “If love is, indeed, stronger than death, then death has the potential to deepen and strengthen the bonds of love (p 117).” The needs and wounds that held the dying captive no longer inhibits them from freely giving their full self to us. This requires preparation. The bitter and frustrated never become a full gift. If our deepest desire is to give ourselves to others, then death becomes the final gift. He shares the story of St Francis of Assisi who died in 1226. His life informs those who continue to follow his way of life and continues to inspire those who yearn for a richer awareness of Christ. His life lives on.
For the seed to bear fruit, it must die. “How different would our life be if we were truly able to trust that it multiplied in being given away (p 123)?” The death of the Beloved bears much fruit in many lives (p 120). This speaks to why I look to those who became gifts. Their lives reveal the glory and beauty of God (see Leviticus, as this is the meaning of worship in the tabernacle) They lived life as the Taken, the Chosen of the Beloved. The lived life as a Blessing to accept with gratitude. They were Broken, but open. They were Given to nourish others in a shared communion. Their lives reveal the good and beautiful story of Jesus, especially where He says this is My body, take and eat.
Living as the Beloved
This world is governed by powers that are evil when they enslave you. This describes the human condition. As the Beloved, we are governed by the love of Christ. We can enjoy the culture and beauty of this world in gratitude as a sign of being the Beloved. We are sent into the world as those loved from before the world began. The world is not the source of its own life, nor is it ours. The source of life is our Beloved. All of culture, music, literature, art, history, science…all of it points us to where we come from and to where we will return (p 132). The question, in every moment, is if we will say “Yes” to the Beloved. This is the heart of the shema- “do you love Me with everything?” It is in this that both joy and sorrow become a unified opportunity to say “Yes, I will be your Beloved.”
“There is no clearer way to discern the presence of God’s Spirit than to identify the moments of unification, healing, restoration, and reconciliation. Wherever the Spirit works, divisions vanish and inner as well as outer unity manifests itself (p 135).”
The eternal life we hope for is the eternal now. It is not the cap of our existence, “it is the full revelation of what we have been and lived all along (p 137).” So, as I look to walk more fully as the Beloved, I look to scripture and the lives of those who bear the fruit of Christ described therein. If their life has become a gift, I will take and eat. If their life and use of scripture is bitter and frustrated, I decline. Jesus put it something like this: “My sheep will hear My voice and to another they will not listen.” Consider the music offered as stimulation for the imagination. Ultimately, living as the Beloved looks like something beautiful.
