Walking wounded - 5 August 2011

Suppose it makes not one whit of difference to God that we are actually quite weak and fallible persons; that while we may not know ourselves very well and puzzle ourselves at times, what we do know well is that we are rarely as good on the inside as we hope we appear on the outside. Suppose God is actually not as upset about our apparent sins as we are. Suppose, as we are getting on in life, as it were, we are increasingly concerned that we have not improved to quite the same extent as we had hoped, and we are unsure how much time there may be left to make a few necessary renovations and display a better version of ourselves to the world.

Contemplatives know that all that may be true, and perhaps rather more than that. We are more interested however in God, as we encounter God in stillness and silence, who is not condemning us, God who is flatly declining to take one side of things against another, God depicted in Jesus (St Paul says Jesus is the icon of the invisible God) who was one with our mortal and fallible flesh, the God whose presence is always love.

Contemplatives understand the church perfectly well to be the community of the walking wounded. We are, each of us, bruised and scarred, often from early in childhood, as we know. We also know that the last thing we now choose in our mature understanding is to live as victims of our life, history and circumstances.

So we appear with our wounds in the silence and the stillness, not parading them of course, but bearing them, because they are the truth about us and about our history. Not dwelling on them, but simply acknowledging them.

What God sees is the heart that was always reaching, perhaps feebly, for faith, always actually loving, the real motivations even of the mistakes and deliberately wrong choices. It seems to me that the church has never taken seriously the wisdom that God looks on the heart. In an age of utter superficiality and sentimentality, when people spend thousands on appearance and being free of wrinkles, it is probably incomprehensible anyway. St Paul has this lovely phrase: The eyes of your heart being open, that you may know... The eyes of your heart. In the silence and the stillness we seek by grace to open the eyes of the heart.