If you want people to build a ship, don’t summon people to buy wood, prepare tools, distribute jobs, and organize work; rather teach people to long for the endless immensity of the sea. - Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
After contemplating beauty last month via some of my favorite works of art at a local museum I announced to a friend at dinner recently that I was now going in search of the messiness of life. Reminding me that it’s everywhere, pointing in particular to his heart to indicate foremost that it’s inside of us, he then asked me why. I told him it was the way I was going to prepare this year for Christmas. Life goes in many different directions, not always to our liking, but I’m coming to realize that God truly is in all things, even the messiness of life, and perhaps, most especially in the messiness.
After my husband died many years back I was suddenly with out a source of income, having just quit my job to return to art full time. Plunged into debt in the span of an hour (we had no insurance), and without a job, I again had to abandon my art to get my life back on track. It was only recently that I could write to a friend and say I now am really grateful for the direction my life went, something I couldn’t have said in the messiness of my life at the time. I look back now and see that I had awakened to grace that day, but it was a gradual and painful process that took many years to see, and accept, the good that our Lord was, and is, doing in my life. The realization of that grace is only now, in the past couple months, really sinking into me that I can more clearly articulate it. This, I’m sure, is where my focus on beauty and messiness these days is coming from.
So, in search of messiness I went, and as my friend said, I didn’t need to go far to find it anew. As I sat down to work on this I, ironically, was doing so after the shootings this morning in San Bernardino and a long afternoon waiting to hear that our parents who work at the place where the shootings had happened were ok. Then if that wasn’t enough as I was typing this evening I started getting texts from my sister-in-law, and later my youngest brother, who both live out of state, asking if I was ok because the police were searching a house in my town. Good grief, what was she asking about, last I heard only San Bernardino was in the news. Now my sister-in-law, a thousand miles away, was informing me that messiness had gotten even closer. It was a bit unnerving and I went to my neighbors for over an hour so as not to be by myself as I called my friend, who is only two blocks from the condo being searched, and mum to make sure they were ok.
Messiness is indeed everywhere, but more importantly, so too is our all-loving God. We, however, have to make room for Him, let Him into the messiness to fully realize His presence and be transformed by it. He is here, but he awaits our invitation to walk with us. All too often, though, we do precisely the opposite and turn away, angry, confused, discouraged. We have a tendency to “compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident of a certain type of life only,” as Flannery O’Connor saw it. The Christmas message takes us beyond such limited thought. The Christmas story lets us see that God brought redemption by coming into the sin and suffering of the world, walking with us in whatever situations of life that come our way, both delightful and good or messy and painful.
In light of the senseless shootings that happened today it reminded me of a South African movie I had seen several years ago that is a story of redemption and a painfully slow awakening to grace that took me several days to wrap my head around as I struggled to see the good happening within the violence. Tsotsi is a disturbingly violent movie in which we see God step quietly into the life of a young black man lost in a world of chillingly casual, continual violence devoid of any remorse. Our Lord quietly steps into his life in the guise of a helpless baby unintentionally kidnapped during a botched robbery. It doesn’t end on a clean, happy note with a charmingly bumbling angel such as in It’s a Wonderful Life, an enjoyable classic movie easily found during the Christmas season, but assuredly grace and redemption came, even through the violence. The changes in the young man are slow and subtle and since violence and despair are what he heretofore knew, his response to grace comes through the same avenue. However this actually is what is moving him away from his former self to someone who is beginning to desire the good as he struggles to understand what that is. But before redemption there is sin, and if we stay focused on the sin (violence) we will only see sin and miss the beauty that is there before us always—a beauty that is more powerful in the end than the messiness of our concupiscence.
Advent, indeed everyday, can be a deep, emotional renewing of ourselves if we but surrender to the newborn babe—the peace-giving Love that has entered into our world. Rejoice!
Whatever did not fit in with my plan did lie within the plan of God. I have an ever deeper and firmer belief that nothing is merely an accident when seen in the light of God, that my whole life down to the smallest details has been marked out for me in the plan of Divine Providence and has a completely coherent meaning in God’s all-seeing eyes. And so I am beginning to rejoice in the light of glory wherein this meaning will be unveiled to me. - Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross -
When we turn Jesus out of our lives through whatever excuse we conjure up we have closed our hearts to the beauty of truth and this, too, speaks of the messiness of our lives. The link below is to the short Our Father video made by the Church of England to be played in the cinemas there during the previews this month. Originally given the ok to be played this was later revoked and only a handful of smaller cinemas will be showing it.
2 December 2015