The thinking I am doing on formation is bringing me a few conversations that are worthy. Today I talked with a friend about grace, and the Wesleyan idea of participating with grace toward holiness. That last sentence is a bit much. Sorry. But basically we were talking about this - is the human person basically full of value, or is the human person hopelessly lost. Do we retain the image of God on us or is it a long gone characteristic, sullied entirely by sin. Does the work of God within us restore us to the essence at the core of our being or is there nothing there to restore.
Questions like these are not philosophic fantasies. They make all the difference in how we see others, ourselves, how we view God and holiness and hope, even. I have come to believe each of us stands out to God like my kid Ben stands out in this crowd in Indonesia. We are beautiful. Even when we are broken. Life is a miracle and we are beautiful.
7 comments:
This is more about the photo than what you wrote - If my kid were in this picture, he would stick out to me. It's a love thing, one heart seeking another.
Forgive me, I'm a visual learner.
Can we be both basically full of value AND hopelessly lost? Is that possible? It's a paradox, I suppose. Somehow, though, I think maybe it is and we are. Maybe.
The question is not about what is lost, but what is retained. Is there any good in us apart from what God does? Did the grace of creation and the image of God get wiped out? Or is there a false self that is distorted and broken, but hiding a flame of life that God Himself set into our being.
I guess I think that there is no good apart from God. Not just good in us, but good anywhere at all. But I think there's a false self that is fed by the world and can often overshadow the inherent God-given good in us.
For me when I think of having "good in us" it means will have all the built in know-how to choose the good, the values that make life better with and for each other. We can know good when we see it But in the way a drop of dye taints a cup of water so that there is no way to separate it gain, so do the sins of the world and the sins of ourselves taint us in such a way to skew what we see as good and to form the protection a false self seems to give us. WIthout God, I think we can so bury that "good in us" so deeply that we forget it's there. I don't however, believe it ever disappears. I just think it's really hard to get to do for many people. Does this make sense? I don't really know if it does.
There is, of course, the Wounded Self, too. The wounded self is what we hit when we get past the false self but haven't yet learned how to function out of the Imago Dei self.
If I am really being honest, and not answering what I have been told, but what I believe, I believe that we all carry the flame of life that God set into us, that there is something intrinsically good in us. I believe that the more you know God within yourself the more that you can recognize the divine in others.
MI - Maybe we should think further than the Creation of humans - how about all Creation. It was Good, capital G Good. Very Good. And then it was distorted and marred. The beautiful Canadian maple in your front yard - is distorted. So is the rose to bloom this Spring. So are newborn babies. Can you imagine what they would be the day they are Redeemed and Restored to original Goodness?
Obviously, I am not in the camp of utter poverty of Goodness. It all, we are all carriers of Goodness, with the grace of an occasional glimpse of what was and will be.
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