Saturday, January 15, 2005
I've Fallen and I Can't Get Up
Automata 8.0
In our Sunday night class, "Journey Inward, Journey Outward", our group discussed what it means to be the Church. Though many of our discussions lean in that direction, this particular one drew from a book by Elizabeth O'Connor, which reads:
In a class in our School of Christian Living, Gordon Crosby was speaking on the subject of Christian vocation. He said in summarizing that the primary task and primary mission of the Christian is to call forth the gifts of others. "We are not sent into the world in order to make people good. We are not sent to encourage them to do their duty. The reason people have resisted the Gospel is that we have gone out to make people feel good, to help them do their duty, to impose new burdens on them, rather than calling forth the gift which is the essence of the person himself." He then said that we are to let others know that God is for them and that they can "be." "They can be what in their deepest hearts they know that they were intended to be, they can do what they were meant to do. As Christians, we are heralds of these good tidings."
How do we do this? "We begin," Gordon said, "by exercising our own gifts. The person who is having the time of his life doing what he is doing has a way of calling forth the deeps of another. Such a person is Good News. He is not saying the good news. He is the good news. He is the embodiment of the freedom of the new humanity. The person who exercises his own gift in freedom can allow the Holy Spirit to do in others what He wants to do."1
God created us with our deepest desires intact. The desire to be unique, the desire to create, and the desire to grow in and pursue the things we love, our gifts. Free from the confines of society and what we "should do", free from merely trying to survive among other people's expectations of us, and free to pursue those things that are rooted deeply within us, to become that unique soul who we were created to be. Sometimes those things have been so buried by expectations that we have lost sight of them, or have excused them as dreams and fantasies. We have let the very things we love the most become intangible and in a sense we have given up on living. Many of us have let ourselves become the walking dead, lifeless and surviving, holding onto just enough to fool ourselves into thinking that we are living.
Why did we ever let our gifts be buried for the sake of the crowd? Jesus made the call for us to not be a Quietist -shut off from the world, Conformist -going with the flow, or even a Zealot -militant, as much of Christianity is now. He called us to embody freedom, love, compassion, and happiness. In a world that so often seems hopeless, we can find happiness and rest in doing what we love to do.
"The kingdom of God is within you."2 It is set deep within each of us begging to be shown. "We ask to know the will of God without guessing that his will is written into our very beings. We perceive that when we discern our gifts."3 As the Church, we are the patron of gifts, the "light of the world", the very people to whom the world can look to see the face of God and the freedom he offers to them.
What are those things deep within you? What are those things in which you find yourself dreaming of? Who are you really... deep down, when all expectations are taken away? Look deep. Take time to really examine each desire, each gift. What things would you have to give up to develop these gifts? What could stand in your way?
What about within your family? Your close friends? What would help each of them to actualize their gifts and become real, true to themselves, and truly living?
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1O'Connor, Elizabeth. Journey Inward, Journey Outward. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.
2KJV, Luke 17:21
3O'Connor, Elizabeth. Eighth Day of Creation. Texas: Word Books, 1971.
