HELP!

One of the tragedies that I have observed in my fellow humans, and in myself, is our fear and shame.

The shame that arises from the root of what it means to be a human being.

And the tragedy is not that we have wounds, although those are also tragic in their own way, but the tragedy that I’m observing is our fear of discussing and before discussing the fear of recognizing or the fear of even thinking about recognizing the things that are inherent in being human.

We’re born into this world as tiny infants, not able to care for ourselves at all, completely dependent on other humans for everything.

And I’m not going to speak about developmental psychology and all those things that are not in my knowledge base.

There is the whole becoming an adult and becoming responsible and all that kind of stuff.

But I’m just saying that fundamentally, existentially, human beings are radically dependent on others for their survival from the very beginning.

And so, at some point on the journey, we have to get back in touch with, and I’ll just speak from my own experience.

I’m not going to try to use pop psychology or even theology.

I’ll just say that in my own experience, I got to a point where I had to look to others for help.

Now, setting aside issues of bad actors in caregiving roles, I’ll say that it is wise to face the reality of our dependence.

Our dependence for everything.

The spiritual life, at least as I’ve experienced it, is all about coming closer and closer and closer to Christ.

And His Father, who is our Father, and the good news is that we have a loving father.

We have a father who, as in the parable of the prodigal son, says to hell with convention and decorum, he runs to meet his son who is coming back to try to offer himself as a hired hand.

But no, the father goes out of his way and basically embarrasses himself in his joy at being able to go and embrace his son.

That’s the father we have.

We have a father that Christ revealed.

A father who loves us so much that we can’t even begin to fathom.

It’s so overwhelming.

The love of God for us is so overwhelming.

For me, I tend to kind of forget about it.

It’s just too much.

Jesus says, what father, when asked by his child for a loaf of bread, will give him a stone?

Or a snake.

In other words, Christ says, if you wicked human beings know how to give good things to your children, how much more will your father in heaven give you?

And I think that this is where the Henri Nouwen video that I love so much about being the beloved.

This is where it comes in because Nouwen presents God’s love in this enveloping total.

He makes the point that God loved us.

God began loving us before any human ever laid eyes on us.

And Rowan Williams, one of my other favorite thinkers, talks about how the Trinity, which I have no interest in trying to play pretzel logic games about theology with the Trinity, but the point is that Rowan Williams is making, if I remember it half way, is that there is a communal love within God.

God is not this monad.

He is a community of persons.

And there is this love, this self-giving love, this overflowing, constantly overflowing love among the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit.

And we are drawn into that.

We’re drawn into this community, this supernatural community of overflowing love.

And that is where our identity is, not in being a sales rep of the year, or a teacher of the year, or a billionaire of the year, or even anything.

Pick your trinket.

Our identity is in this overflowing, divine, supernatural love.

That is where we spring forth from.

We spring forth from the Trinity, this union, this cosmic overflowing of interrelational love.

And that is what Christ is bringing us into, bringing us back into.

Christ has crashed into reality, as I’ve said before, with his incarnation and his Way, his life, is all about bringing us back into that overflowing, triune love.

And that’s where our identity is.

And once we get that, once we get that that’s where our identity is, it doesn’t matter what anybody says about us, what names they call us, whether they exclude us, in other words, if we recognize, as Henri Nouwen would say, if we can claim, if we can go on the journey so that we can claim the love of the Father for us, if we can go on the journey, the messy, brutal, horrifying, scary, existential journey, and claim in our gut that that is who we are.

We are created, sustained, loved by this overwhelming, overabundance of love, and nothing can change that, nothing can change that.

But the shadow, not the shadow self and all that Jungian stuff, I’m talking about the shadow of evil, the devil.

And let me tell you, I was reading a book of sermons one time by Louis Évely, and I gave the book away as a book of homilies, and Louis Évely is not some fantastical, he’s about as demythologized as you can get.

He wrote a book called The Gospel Without Myth, which was an important book for my development, although I don’t agree with everything in it, it was really helpful.

But even Louis Évely, who was this Belgian priest in the Catholic tradition, he was really popular in the 60s, but he said in one of his homilies in that book that evil, (it’s not wise to think about evil and dwell on evil, that’s something I learned from Thomas Hopko and his 55 Maxims), but Louis Évely was reflecting on the nature of evil in the world and how it has a personal quality to it.

There’s a personal quality to the evil that we experience.

It’s not just random.

And so again, you don’t have to believe in a cartoon figure with a pointy tail and a pitchfork or even some kind of fantastical Baroque art or whatever the hell civilization has produced or whatever, but the reality is there is a personal quality, there is an evil, a personal evil at work in this world.

Now the good news is that Christ has already kicked his ass.

Christ has already put him down and crushed him.

The Roman Catholics will talk about how Mary, the new Eve, Mother of Jesus crushed the serpent with her foot.

So the thing is we have to tap into that.

We have to tap into that victory.

And the enemy, the evil one, wants to make us forget that or get us to not see it.

He wants us to stay locked in ourselves and to be ashamed, to be ashamed that we have some problem.

Well, guess what?

Of course we have problems!

We’re humans.

We’re not self-sufficient entities.

We are dependent on God and the Trinity and the Holy Spirit, Jesus, God.

Again, I don’t need to get into all the theological gymnastics that people try to debate about the Trinity.

The point is that there’s a communal love that brought us into being and that keeps us in being, but the tragedy of the human condition is that we’ve been cut off from that.

And you can analyze it whatever way you want.

I personally like to read, there’s a Catholic study Bible that I like that looks at the different books of the Old Testament and how they are almost like a proto-psychology in a lot of ways.

They explain these stories in the Old Testament books.

They kind of explain the human condition.

And so even if you do take them literally, I don’t think it even matters if you take them literally, but even if you do take them literally, and I’m not saying I don’t, I don’t know.

I haven’t really put a lot of thought into it, but the point is that they have a deeper meaning.

I can’t think of examples, but I was reading about Cain and Abel and these different developments, but the point is that even going back thousands of years to the Old Testament, humans have been trying to grapple with this reality that we are self-destructive and that we hurt each other and that we do things that don’t make sense.

And just look around.

I mean, look at the world.

I put a message on BlueSky recently about how I was thinking about those young girls out there who were trying to decide between a toxic family or homelessness or prostitution.

I never saw that presented as starkly as it was to me.

I happened to see a sign in a hospital, in a hospital restroom that was basically saying, hey, it was basically a sign that was alerting potentially vulnerable populations who may be in the hospital that says, hey, are you a victim of human trafficking?

Are you a part of forced prostitution?

If you are, we can help you, and it’s apparently like an ongoing problem.

What kind of world is it?

And this is just one example.

I mean, you can look at the for-profit prison industry.

You have a corporate interest that has a corporate motivation to keep people behind bars regardless of the justice or injustice of that.

I heard I was having a meal with a friend of mine recently and he was telling me about Ukraine in the 1930s and how there was cannibalism.

I don’t know the historical particulars, but apparently the situation had something to do with Ukraine had been a great producer of wheat or something, and then somehow there was some global power that took it all away from them.

The upshot was that you basically had to keep an eye on your kids because if you let your kids get away from you, somebody would eat your children.

They would eat your children because there was no food, and nobody was paying attention to that, but less than 100 years ago you had a situation in Ukraine where people were eating their children because they couldn’t get any food.

And you’ve got to step back and say, what is it about the human condition that creates these things?

Something’s wrong, and there’s an evil, personal evil force in the world.

And again, I’m not looking to go into some kind of abstract, like how did this happen, how do you reconcile evil with good, God, all that stuff.

I’m just saying, on the ground, in the trenches, in our day-to-day lives, we have to recognize, we don’t have to fear, but there’s an evil at work.

And the whole thing about Jesus and the Way He revealed, which culminated in His passion and resurrection, is that God did not stand by and watch his children self-destruct from a distance.

No, God became incarnate in Christ and rescued humanity, rescued His children from their self-destruction.

But it’s a counterintuitive rescue.

It’s not the kind of thing you would expect.

And that’s why we have to spend our whole life meditating on Christ, listening to Christ, being in community with others that are trying to listen to Christ.

We have to dedicate our whole life to this, because if we’re not obsessed with following Christ, it’s funny, I remember listening to a history of Christianity by Philip Carey, who’s a professor at Eastern College, I think, I think he had his PhD from Yale.

It was an audio course, and he introduced the course by saying that Christianity or Christians were obsessed with Jesus Christ.

And he’s a Christian, but I think that’s an appropriate way to put it.

I think we have to be obsessed with Christ, and that’s why I keep going back to the idea of being a fool for Christ.

St. Paul talks about if you follow Jesus, people are going to think you’re crazy, and they’re right.

You’re crazy in the sense that you’re not following the ways of the world, you’re not following the conventional wisdom.

But guess what?

Look what conventional wisdom does.

Conventional wisdom puts girls in forced prostitution.

It makes people have to eat their neighbors’ children to survive.

It imprisons people falsely and doesn’t let them out because there’s a profit to keep them in.

It’s just horrible thing after horrible thing.

And I think that the problem is, and the tragedy is, the thing that made me start this meditation is that we try to pretend that if we just keep up appearances, if we just scramble enough that we’re going to get it all together and we’re going to be okay.

But that’s not true, and that’s okay.

It’s okay not to be okay.

In fact, the first step in healing, the first step to sanity is to recognize that we’re wounded, we’re isolated, we’re confused, our desires are disordered, we’re going after the wrong things, we’re lost, we’re sheep.

But Christ, the Good Shepherd, says there is more rejoicing in heaven over one lost sheep coming back into the fold than 99 other people who need no repentance or whatever.

Christ is leaving the 99 sheep to go look after the one.

We’re the one. 

He’s coming after us.

He cares about us individually.

There’s a church father who said that God loves each one of us more than all the galaxies.

If you look at all these grand pictures of space and these beautiful, you know, intergalactic, you know, stars and, you know, that each one of us is more than all of that.

And that God, that Christ, I mean, one of my favorite spiritual books goes so far as to say, and this is not some out there book.

This is a mainstream Roman Catholic daily reader, and it says that Christ had each one of us in mind on the cross.

And that’s hard for me to believe.

But according to this mainstream Roman Catholic down to earth daily reader, like Christ was thinking about me, he was thinking about you, he was thinking about each one of us individually.

And he went so far as to say that we can, we can participate in Christ’s crucifixion.

Like, again, this is not some airy fairy, like…

This is like standard, like everyday Roman Catholic, you know, mid-century, like, you know, and it was talking about this, this ability that we have to kind of access, like Christ can access us.

We can access Christ’s crucifixion, you know, we can kind of become part of that.

I wouldn’t call it time travel, but it’s more like somehow in this mystical way that we can partake, and we can be there at that event.

And that’s the thing, we have to be so dialed in to Christ on the cross, and listening to what he has to say, that’s how we’re going to survive.

That’s how we’re going to find eternal life.

That’s how we’re going to not be insane, like this society we live in, like this world.

Again, this world has been producing horrors, you know, from the beginning of recorded history, and the way the capital W-A-Y of coping and transcending that has been revealed by Christ in his life.

But again, the first step is to recognize that we need help.

And if we’re going to stay closed in, if we’re going to try to keep up appearances and try to pretend like we don’t have any problems, like we can handle it ourselves, like the people are going to think less of us if we share our problems.

Like, well first of all, if you’re trying to do that, the only people that you’re fooling are the people that are also doing that.

Because anybody that has a clue about being human and is willing to recognize it and deal with it, you’re not fooling them… you’re not fooling anybody.

But that’s good.

Because, you know, the key is that our wounds, you know, I think it’s the Bible or somewhere in the tradition that says, you know, by his stripes we were healed, like, you know, there’s a Henri Nouwen blog post that just put up recently that I reposted.

But the idea is that we connect with others through our wounds, through our shared problems.

When we find somebody that’s going through the same kind of shit that we’re going through, or even that’s just going through being human in general and is willing to admit it.

That’s how you have real connection.

You don’t have real connection by trading resumes, although that can be a way of building connection too.

That’s an inside joke I can talk about another time.

But you don’t, you know, in other words, it’s like, when you get wiser and deeper in life, you don’t, the way that you connect with people is through your wounds.

And you got to do this with safe people that are not going to abuse you and take advantage of your vulnerability, but you have to get real.

And we have to recognize that we are wounded, we are isolated, we are self-destructive, we are addicted to false hopes, and we are looking at all the wrong places for a way out of being human and the pain of being human.

And the answer is a person, the answer is Christ crucified and incarnate in his church and, you know, you have to connect, you have to let your guard down.

And the thing is, the tragedy is that the lie of the devil is, the lie of the devil is that if you keep your guard up and you keep a stiff upper lip and you keep your cards close to your vest and you don’t let on to anybody that you’re having these problems, you don’t even let on to yourself.

You’re just kind of, you’re trying to keep it all together, keep it all together and keep going and keep calm and carry on and bare knuckle it.

Like, that is a recipe for disaster, disaster.

That is a recipe for implosion and destruction and tragedy.

And the evil one, the devil, the liar, the accuser, he gets in our head.

He tells us, hey, if you let anybody know what’s going on with you, they’re going to turn against you.

They’re going to mock you and make fun of you.

But guess what?

Christ has already absorbed all that.

Christ has become a curse.

They mocked Christ, Christ, they mocked Christ and Christ absorbed all that bullshit and his divinity destroyed it.

So anything that comes at us, any kind of mocking that comes at us, that becomes part of Christ.

We complete the sufferings of Christ.

Christ is right there with us.

There’s nothing they can do to us that they didn’t do to Christ and that Christ has not already had victory over…he’s already been resurrected from that.

And we can eat his flesh and drink his blood and we become part of the body and that’s what matters.

That’s the real victory.

But even forget the end of the life and looking back on your life and what really mattered.

Let’s talk about right now, right here in the moment.

If you are walled up in your head and if you are keeping your guard up and you’re not letting anybody deal with you and know what’s really going on, you’re being attacked.

You’re being lied to.

That is the lie of the devil.

The lie of the devil says, don’t let your guard down.

Don’t tell anybody what’s going on.

And the devil is saying, if you let your guard down, you’re going to be ashamed.

You probably don’t even know that word shame.

I didn’t know that word shame really was until I got on the journey.

But it’s a way of keeping you in prison.

It’s a way of keeping you in prison and it’s tragic.

It’s tragic because God the Father, just like the prodigal son, the prodigal son is coming home and he just wants to be a hired hand.

But God is dropping all decorum to go out of his way to run and greet his son.

God is standing there waiting for us.

He’s waiting for us to let our guard down.

He’s waiting for us to allow his church to allow his body to help us.

And the great mystery is that our wounds, this is the mystery of the crucifixion.

Like even Christ had his wounds after his resurrection, like somehow in this weird cosmic way that our wounds become the most valuable thing we have.

They become the access point.

Our wounds become the access point, the gateway for us to really have a visceral encounter with God.

But until we’re willing to admit that to ourselves and to other people, or just to let our guard down enough to even get our head around things.

In my journey, one of the things I’ve learned is that I don’t even know what I don’t know.

And one of the things that I do right away when I have a big problem now is I try to say, hey, I want to get as many responsible adult human Christians that I can, and I want to tell them about my problems.

And if they just have a prayer, or an atta boy, or they’re willing to help me problem solve, or they might have a perspective, like whatever, like the more the merrier.

And it’s like that’s the strength, that’s the way to get true strength.

The cowboy way, the lone ranger way, and it’s not easy to find people that you can trust.

That’s a gift.

Those people are gifts.

But the tragedy I see is that there are people who are surrounded by people who could help them, who love them, who want to help them.

But for whatever reason, and I’ll let the psychologists figure out the details, and the priests, and the healers, but my main point is there is a cultural and there is a spiritual lie, and it’s not unique to us.

It’s been baked into the human condition from the beginning.

And that is this lie that says if you admit that you need other people, if you admit that you need other people, if you admit that you have failed in some way, if you admit that you have not lived up to some stupid cultural standard, that you are going to collapse in shame and be ostracized and your life will be over.

There will be too much pain to bear.

That’s a lie.

You have to bring it to the light.

You have to recognize, hey, I’m human and we’re all human, and the sooner we recognize that, the sooner we admit that, the sooner we start getting help from other humans.

The sooner we get pulled into the body of Christ literally and we become healed, and then we can become members of the body of Christ and we can become channels of grace.

Our wounds can then help others’ wounds, and that’s how everything gets redeemed.

The redemption of the world is not a do-over.

It is not a reset.

It is a redemption of the world that was already there.

And I learned this more clearly from Rowan Williams on that homily that was on some website that he preached about the icon of the resurrection where Christ is pulling Adam and Eve out of the tomb.

And Williams makes the point that Adam and Eve in that story or in that icon were not young people anymore.

They were old.

They had been in hell, but Christ was pulling them out of hell.

And the significance of their age was that, again, Christ is, nothing’s being wasted as one pastor once told me.

Everything, all the shit that’s happened to us is going to somehow get reused and redefined and redeemed.

And I don’t even want to get into all that problem of evil.

Why did this happen to me?

How has God evil or not evil or anything?

I’m just saying that the point is that from a day to day level, it’s like we’re living in existential hell.

There’s all this shit.

What do I do now to survive?

Forget the big questions, but I’m saying that letting other people help us and you don’t have to do it all at once.

There can be baby steps, but you have to crack.

There has to be a crack in the mask.

There has to be a crack in the armor.

There has to be an admission.

There has to be a chance, even a small chance at letting a healthy person help us because if we keep trying to do it all ourselves, if we keep trying to hide reality behind an image, we’re just imprisoning ourselves.

If we’re trying to keep an image up, an image that we got everything together, like, first of all, anybody that has any sense knows that’s bullshit because that’s just not reality.

And second, we’re just imprisoning ourselves.

If we’re not letting people help us, if we’re trying to pretend that we got it all figured out and that we’re okay and that we don’t need any help, that is just a prison.

And that is exactly where the enemy wants us.

That is exactly where Satan wants us.

He wants us to be in our shell, afraid, trying to keep it all together on our own and cut off from Christ and cut off from the body of Christ.

And it’s a tragedy and it doesn’t have to be that way.

And I hope that if I ever actually get a real human reader that reads this blog instead of just bots, I hope maybe somebody somewhere will recognize that it’s okay to get help.

And it’s actually necessary and it’s actually human and there’s nothing to be ashamed of.

It’s just the nature of being human.

And at the end of the day, we are the child of God.

We are the child of God and nothing can change that.

And it doesn’t matter what anybody in this world does to us or says about us or anything.

At the end of the day, we are, we spring forth from the love of the Trinity, from this divine, abundant an overflowing love.

That’s where we spring forth from and that’s where we’re going to go back to at the end of the day, at the end of our life.

And nothing can change that.

So, the more that we let other people in, the more that we get help from other people that are healthy people…the more we become like God, the more we become like the Trinity.

And we become part of crushing this wickedness, this wickedness that would keep us isolated, this wickedness that would keep us focused only on ourselves and that would deceive us.

And this wickedness that is responsible for so many horrors in this world.

And we don’t want those, and one of the horrors that this wickedness in this world wants to further is this isolation.

This idea, even the idea that we can define ourselves apart from our relationship with others is a lie.

I guess I’ll end with the last of the 55 maxims of Thomas Hopko.

Unless I’ve misremembered, the last maxim is get help when you need it without fear and without shame.

Thank you.