with the grain of the universe

"To love others well we must first love the truth....One who really loves another is not merely moved by the desire to see him contented and healthy and prosperous in this world. Love cannot be satisfied with anything so incomplete. If I am to love my brother, I must somehow enter into the deep mystery of God's love for him." --Thomas Merton

"Do not make any oaths at all....not even by your own head, for you have no power to make a single hair white or black. But let your word be yes for yes and no for no, for anything beyond this comes from evil." --Jesus

Someone told me recently that if anything bad ever happened to me, all her positive memories of me would turn into negative memories. I certainly hope that's not the case. One shouldn't have to become invincible to give something good to one's friends.

To be like God--or better, to attain to a distorted picture of God: to be free of limitation, in control of one's surroundings, unaccountable and invulnerable to suffering--was the first temptation to present itself to humankind, and it's been a bad idea ever since. It lies at the heart of the mentality that reduces persons to consumers and human community to a network of market exchanges: your life--like your car, your iPod, your television, and your beer--is only as good as the ad campaign that sells it and the warranty that backs it up. But this belief forces us to lie to each other. It tells us that we have nothing to give unless we can be something that we are not.

This is one reason I think the message of Christ's cross and resurrection has something important to tell us. For one thing, it corrects the notion of God as the sovereign string-puller and reveals instead a covenant partner who willingly enters into human experience with all its contradictions: "He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows." Divine power here is not construed as the controlling of human events so that they all conform to a perfect plan, but as the freedom to suffer patiently and lovingly for the sake of the world, in order to summon creation to its true identity. This is not a God who conquers opposition with a flash of irresistible force, but who befriends creation, even though it means receiving in human flesh the violence and hatred of a race that has overthrown its creaturely status, and refusing to hate it in return.

In this light, the resurrection signifies much more than an invitation to go to heaven and be with Jesus when we die (an image that I've never found very compelling). What it signifies is that God's final word to humankind is Yes and not No--that the fear that dominates us by virtue of our limitations and proneness to suffer and die is not ultimate, that history belongs not those who pretend by force or manipulation to rescue us from chaos, but that, to quote John Howard Yoder, "those who bear crosses are walking with the grain of the universe." The resurrection means that we no longer have to be afraid of the truth--even if the truth detroys all our images of what life ought to be like--because the truth finally belongs to God, who is for us and not against us.