From Bullets to Church hugs

Before you were born I knew you.

I remember going to school in bullet-shoes, tattered and judged as cheap and nerdy by my classmates. I remember in grade school that our identities were valued based on the price of our shoes, based on the icon that graced their sides. I remember desperately asking for Reebok Pumps like the other kids had – I didn’t have balls to steal the shoes from the stores, as others, and I didn’t have the strength to take them off a stranger - as others were doing. I remember isolation, identity packaged in shrink-wrapped plastic, doled out to us based on performance, looks, wit, and intelligence. I remember when a new level was administered by school teachers, reinforced by parents and the media, that identity was based on accomplishment and ability. Success in school, career, and retire! Climb up on the rat-treadmill and start running – never stop! Keep going, it is not a circle you tread, it’s just a big hill, and you’ll get there, someday.

I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid, so I hid.

I remember the look of the grass, in a large empty field, walking home, day after day with a mickey-mouse strapped backpack, climbing the fence between boundaries, all hard and cold and utterly alone. I remember that reality felt solid, stolid, and severe, not broken but utterly fixed, not movable. The rules that govern our lives were impenetrable. Alone. Winters are deaths to us. They scream metaphors of the haunting reality that all of life is a winter, cold and bitter, grey skies and stinging air. Dirty pavement scrapes our slick Reeboks as we shuffle along, living by the philosophy of progress and achievement, climbing over each other’s backs to get to a new level of success, a new level of isolation on precipices above all others.

Because I was naked.

We mix identity with accomplishment and we mix the promise of success with the attainment of self-satisfaction. We search for ourselves in all the categories given us from childhood, opening doors, looking for answers, all the while shaking off feelings of inadequacies that cling to our lives from childhood. Grabbing at things to let go of things, we try to outlive our pains, our betrayals, and fears. Be cool, smile a lot, trim the fat, carry yourself better, reinvent, and try to forget. Whatever you do, don’t sit and reflect, inverse your skin, and go back to the source of all these inadequacies, pains, and lies told as solutions. Whatever you do, don’t reach out to others and show them the inversed you.

Where do you come from and where are you going?

Picking up success in education, cars, and jobs, we travel along, increasing our speeds, trying to leave the noise of our pains, all the while entering newly desolated realities created in the wake. Where’d everybody go? How can I wake up in the morning by alarm, groom and travel in my little bubble on wheels, coffee in hand and music in play, rolling down the highway in my isolated and insulated image-mobile, enter the workforce and tread on my wheel, without seeing another blessed soul? Where is everyone? How come when I look in people’s eyes, I see image and illusion, glazy shields over the soul, bolstered and defended by armour, manufactured self-perception, delusions of value based upon thinly grasped meanings of life?

We self-medicate to avoid the obvious juxtaposition of it all. Human picaso paintings on legs, walking hear and there, looking for something to soften the contrasts, smooth the lines, create an image-of-God from the shattered stained-glass-window of our humanity. We inject illusions into our veins while we consume substances to numb our bodies – alcohol, caffeine, sugar, and success. Everybody likes me. I’ll be ok. We focus on the form and deny the underlying framework. We try so we don’t have to feel. We do so we don’t have to think.

“It is hard for you to kick against the prodding-stick” . . . . Who are you, Lord?

In a glorified throwback to old-war movies, we go in alone. Silent screams of isolation repressed, opening doors of chambers where other individuals lie, crouched in the corners of their bodies, we are shocked to see the look in their eyes when they glance up to see us, briefly standing at the doors of their souls. But we turn away, afraid to see how many of them lie in stone rooms of their own making, isolation chambers in a hall as long as the diameter of earth, a structure clearly visible from space. We are afraid that seeing them in all their rooms, row upon row, means that we too are in one. We can’t bear to look. Move on, past the pain of others, in search of hoarded solutions, willing to find satisfaction even if extracted from them.

As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins,
in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world …. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. …But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy,
made us alive with Christ even when we were dead ….And God raised us up

If we will give up the struggle and drop our hands, hear the words . . . .

For we are God's workmanship

Self-image not based on a reinvented self or a carefully choreographed stage show of “us.”

Therefore, remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth and called "uncircumcised" by those who call themselves "the circumcision" --
remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world . . .

Confess to the desolation and isolation lived outside of repentance.

But now . . . you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ. . . . For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility . . . . His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two,

Take a look around,

thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. . . . He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near . . . .For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit. . . . Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God's people and members of God's household,

Instead of arms length, combative jostling with our neighbours, trying to extract pieces of ourselves within the flesh of their lives,

built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone.
In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord.
And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.

We can relax our muscles, turn the tension of the grasp from the taking to the giving, the pushing to the embrace.

Joined together.

We can hold hands. Together, work through the weaknesses and the inadequacies of ourselves, face it all, and overcome. And miraculously, remarkably, when we truly confess to each other, see each other, and hold each other,

Where two or three are gathered I am with them.

We will see Christ in the midst of each other. And when we can finally see where Christ is, despite our past habit of always trying to find him in ourselves, in our carefully constructed, individualistic, autonomous selves, we will finally, effectively, powerfully, be able to show the others, just where he is. There is Christ – he’s over there. Here is Christ – he is right here. He is with us. We are gathered. He is here.

“Submit to such as these and to everyone who joins in the work, and labours at it.”