Not just pretense (Looking for beauty in dereliction)

"This is a pleasant fiction".
Lucilla - Gladiator

I'm sorry I haven't been posting much of late, but I've been going through the harsh reality of facing possible redundancy from work this month, and I'm still none the wiser at present as whether I'm being kept or not, so weeks of uncertainty are, as you can imagine, not making the everyday things particularly easy.

Yesterday, I attended a farewell meal for my manager, who has been made redundant already, and it was a pretty awkward affair. On the surface, my work associates sought to be pleasant even merry, but just below the chuckles and smiles, there was far deeper truths in play regarding anxiety and frustration, fear and pain. It was there in some of the freer statements made as well - truth beneath the surface.

It made me ponder about how much spirituality comes into the same realm. How often do we go 'through the motions' of projecting what is deemed as acceptable in our 'ministry' (mailings, messages, worship) as Christians as a way to avoid people touching on the deeper truths or troubles within?

In the song of songs, we read how the lovers revel in foods, perfumes and spices to adorn their love play, but this is never a problem because of two vital things the story shows. The man loves the woman in her wild natural beauty (see chapter 4) and she cannot live without him (chapter 5), so everything else merely feeds into the depths of their longing for the other, enhancing what is genuinely present at the core of their affections.

In this story, then, we truly encounter a love that cannot be dulled or assuaged by trial or times when they are far apart, even death is deemed small before the strength of their passion. What happens, however, when such vitality is absent and all there is to feed our busyness is the peripheral  - the things we deem to adorn our belief and practice become paramount at the expense of putting aside the gifts and affection God provides to us in Christ in His Word and Sacraments?

We love Him because He loved us, but that primacy of God's love isn't merely seen in some conjectured exchange we think occurs because we "do" something (however "spiritual" we consider what we're doing at such a moment to be) - it's purely because His nature, His deepest desire, His entire sphere of actions towards us is to convey, express and unite us with the love that brought Him to us in the midst of our misery and sin. That and that alone is what saves us, holds us, brings us home. It is the Father running to us, adorning us in such affection, reveling in our safe return that makes His word our sure hope, His offering up our certain life, His union to us our full assurance. What we do, all we do, is become recipients of such unmerited, overwhelming mercy and grace.

We should therefore rest in Christ's astonishing giving of this love, and only find solace there - as His word and table and our union in baptism confirm. If our practice, our expression of Christianity becomes about the cosmetics of what we have done or say - because we 'made a decision', made a public witness, made a fair show of ourselves, we are 'doing' something worthy of merit or spiritual commendation - then we can find ourselves easily heading for the folly of self righteousness. Expression of service, we are warned on various occasions, can be entirely empty unless this springs wholly from the life God the Father so ravishes us with in the pouring out, for us, of His beloved - that is the life, the fragrance, the beauty, that we all so need to have.

It is so very easy in our times to miss what truly counts and hold on to what leaves us less.

These lines by Thomas Merton touch upon the essence of what scripture is seeking to reveal:

For, like a grain of fire
Smoldering in the heart of every living essence
God plants His undivided power —
Buries His thought too vast for worlds
In seed and root and blade and flower,

Until, in the amazing shadowlights
Of windy, cloudy April,
Surcharging the religious silence of the spring,
Creation finds the pressure of its everlasting secret
Too terrible to bear.