Holy Human Irony

The challenge in being human is finding a communal posture of loving God, loving others and loving ourselves in spite of our experience of failure, loss of hope in ourselves and others, war with difference (political, religious, cultural) and ignorance to the cultural conditioning which encourages us to remain wholly other.

There is a Holy Irony; the deeper we walk into our own “in spite of’s” with eyes wide open, with expectation of learning something new, with a willingness to be changed, the more we know the way of Love. As we shake the hand of the human condition we make room for the embrace of true humanity. I’m convinced that this is the love that leads us to experience all that is real and true. It is the pathway to peace.

When we can finally look ourselves in the mirror and see our warts of hatred towards a sister, the age spots of indifference and the scars of pain, we have then started down a path which brings the humanity in us together with the humanity of Christ. A new capacity for relationship deepens in us. Through this mysterious Christ-human union the human in us makes room to see the human in others. What would happen if the human in us could see more of the human in others? What a simple yet radical prospect--to learn to love in this way.

God remains and waits patiently in the worst of our humanity. He doesn’t pull out when everything looks beyond hope. He doesn’t abandon us when we’ve chosen a different way. God doesn’t force us to fit into his “God-mold” but rather he frees us to follow his human pattern in order create our unique human display of Him.

If only we’d notice Him in our “in spite of’s”, He’d guide us gently into a different knowing. He’d show us that we have within us the capacity to forgive. He’d help us to remember all that we’d forgotten of Him so that we’d still have reason to hope. He’d wait with us so we could begin to see how our own human heart beats to the same human rhythm as all the other hearts. If we could sit still with him long enough we might see a new vision of otherness; what makes a human “other” is their own capacity to incarnate beauty. There is goodness underneath all the “in spite of’s”. It is our true humanity waiting to be known again.

These glimpses of our true humanity, the glimpses of a redeeming and reconciling Christ at work in us, come few and far between. The arrival of our seeing is nothing short of God’s mercy and grace. Such sightings have the power to transform every aspect of human life; they change how we make room for ourselves in ourselves, how we love and cherish our family, how we love even those who have caused us pain, how we risk extending ourselves even to those we’ve lost hope in. Imagine if a community had the courage to sit together with their “in spite of’s” in order to learn the way of love. Imagine the capacity they’d have to love the world, to make true humanity present again, and to create a way for the peace we all long for. Oh the Holy irony of allowing our humanity to lead us to our true humanity….