Letters for the Road: November 2020
Wounded by Love
Dear friends,
As November approached, and I began to think about this letter and what I might say, I felt unsettled for a number of reasons. I know you live all over the world, and that even though my mental space has been largely dominated by the American presidential election, that is likely not true for all of you. But for those of you who are American, I fretted about saying something that would be true and helpful for this moment. I want these letters to stick to their purpose — “reflections and refreshment for pilgrims” — and I have been wrestling with how best to do that this month.
And then I read James KA Smith’s first installment of his weekly newsletter, and things became very clear for me. Eschewing political talk for his newsletter, he wrote, “we will only have the capacity to participate in the common life of politics if we cultivate our souls with and for something more.” This does not mean that political life is unimportant, that we can withdraw and assume obliviousness with impunity — the opposite, I believe, is true. Instead, “While the political fanatic castigates anything else as either trivial or irresponsible, an incarnational humanism prizes the multifaceted richness of being-in-the-world: that I am made for more than voting or emoting; that I am made to make and revel in beautiful things; that I am most fully human when I am also delighted and mesmerized, provoked and caressed, when I dissolve in laughter with friends and weep at the end of a novel. I am always more than the pollsters would make me out to be.”
So take a deep breath, friend, and take some time and space to distance yourself from the latest news reports, wherever you are and whatever local and national news has had your attention. Prepare yourself a cuppa. Remember who you are, and whose presence has not only loved the world into existence, but loved us back into fellowship with himself.
I’ve been thinking about the fruits of the Spirit as ornaments to the Christian life. “Love, joy, peace, patience…” — by looking at some subcultures, you’d think this list was another addition in a guide to the perfectly cultivated life. Right there next to the Pantone colours of the year and this season’s hottest trends: the timeless style of the fruit of the Spirit. (This is, from my experience, more prominent among Christian women than men.)
Far too easily, I pursue a Christian life that looks stylishly curated, a kind of middle-class comfort that displays the right virtues: love, hope, peace, etc. We rightly identify these fruits, these virtues, as beautiful, insofar as they reflect the beauty of God and display the beauty of the new creation. The problem comes when we want the beauty of virtue for the outward appearance of it, for the way that they perfect the image we want to portray to the world. When we treat the fruits of the Spirit this way, we cut them off from true beauty and instead make them sentimental ornaments.
Sentimentality, as theologian Jeremy Begbie argues, involves avoiding appropriate costly action: “the sentimentalist wants emotion on the cheap, the pleasure of an active emotional life without the price…they are more often moved by strangers that by those close to them since the former require no personal sacrifice.” Sentimentality means thinking of love, joy, and peace as pleasant emotions that we feel towards God and others, that comfort us and decorate our lives to project a semblance of faith. While the fruit of the Spirit does relate to our emotional lives, it does not stop with our emotions: it works out towards others, in sometimes painful ways.
The Spirit-filled life has a shape that jarringly contrasts with sentimentality: it is wounded.
We see this woundedness when we look to the one who exemplifies a life perfectly bearing the fruit of the Spirit. Christ’s love, his kindness, his peace-seeking drove him to the cross, and he bears the scars still. As his followers, we should not imagine that union with him spares us this woundedness.
We rightly talk about salvation as a healing, a restoration of health from the wounds of sin. Jesus himself demonstrates this analogy through his ministry of healing the physical suffering of those who came to him. But there is also a sense in which the Christian life is marked by something that might seem to be antithetical to this healing: woundedness. Woundedness describes the Christian life as a continual opening of ourselves to the piercing sword of the Spirit — “pierced to the heart,” as Luke describes the crowd who responded to Peter’s first sermon (Acts 2:37). We willingly give ourselves to this piercing because we know that “wounds from a friend can be trusted,” as Proverbs tells us (Prov 27:6).
One of my guides to thinking about beauty over the past couple of months has been Natalie Carnes. In her book Beauty, she engages with Gregory of Nyssa, and connects beauty with woundedness. Carnes shows the difference between loving objects and loving Love itself — she argues that when a person loves objects, she can keep her self intact, unchallenged. But when she loves the God whose name is Love, “self’s illusion of sovereignty is toppled and any enclosedness of the self thrown open.” This is the wound of love, the woundedness that comes as a result of faith.
But our woundedness does not end there. It is also an opening of ourselves to others, a movement towards others in the same love that moved towards us.
And it is this woundedness that enables us to not only see beauty rightly, but also to become beautiful. When we are wounded by Love, when our selves are broken open and reoriented around him and not ourselves, our eyes are opened so that we can see clearly. Unlike those who despised Jesus because he had “no beauty or majesty to attract us to him” (Isaiah 53:3), we are enabled by the Spirit to see Jesus as the most beautiful person who has ever lived. Not only that, but that sight affects our transformation: “we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).
I wonder — did Eve’s creation leave a scar on Adam’s side? For most of my life, this scene has unfolded in my mind magically: no blood, no exposure of the inmost parts, just a shining bright light and a clean removal of rib from torso. Less intrusive even than laparoscopic surgery, if I may.
But given the symbolism, the function of Adam and the significance of Jesus as the second Adam, and the wounds that Jesus still bears (Rev. 5:6), I’m trying to push out of my mind the image of Adam as a blemish-free Apollos. Now, I find it much more likely that Adam carried the scar of Eve’s creation with him, a visible reminder of his calling in relation to her — a calling to deny personal sovereignty and instead offer his person, even his own body, as a gift to her. And a sign of the second Adam, the one whose side would also be wounded to form his own bride, the church.
It’s so easy to resist, this woundedness. So easy to try to wrap ourselves in a semblance of the fruit of the Spirit as a comfortable blanket that insulates us from the cold of the world, instead of throwing open our selves to the wounds of God and the cost that love requires. Mercifully, we are not left on our own: the fruit is the fruit of the Spirit, after all, reminding us that prior to all our obedience is the work of grace.
I was introduced to Phaedra Jean Taylor’s art last month through an online conference, and I’ve been enjoying following her work on Instagram. About this print she writes, “The Holy Spirit symbolized by a wild goose is something that we get from early Celtic Christians. It communicates a fierceness and strength with beauty that helps me. Layered over the wild goose are my thoughts of a protective mother goose. In this image she bears up the heavy pressure of the world on her broad wings in order to feed her child. If we ever needed this image it’s now. Both to connect with God as this mysterious, wild, protective, unpredictable, lithe, strong presence, and to connect into our own motherhood (& womanhood) as something that is needed right now- to bring the spirit of The wild goose God into our world through our hands and hearts. Here’s to looking forward with this wind of wild mothering at our backs.”
I’ve been trying to keep a “slow read” on my bedside table — a book that I read very slowly, maybe even less than one page at a time, before I go to bed. I’ve been choosing books that are more devotional or meditative rather than story or argument-based, since I’m reading in such small chunks. Most recently I finished Madeleine L’Engle’s memoir of her marriage, Two-Part Invention. L’Engle’s nonfiction is perfect for this kind of bedtime reading! She recounts with such joy and gratitude the richness of love.
Another marriage memoir I read this month, thanks to a book club, was Carolyn Weber’s Sex and the City of God. Weber’s prose is beautiful, and while I did quibble with some authorial choices, she offers profound reflections on Augustine’s concepts of the City of God and the City of Man, and the powerful pull that the latter has on us even after we have been brought into the former.
Aimee Byrd is a name that I think many of you know, and after years of following her blog, I’ve finally read her (most recent) book Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. She and her book have certainly been put through the ringer, and after reading it I am so frustrated at the criticism I have read that seems to miss the point of her book. I did leave with lots of questions, but it’s a conversation the church needs to have, particularly those who don’t ordain women.
And a must-read for you: Esau McCaulley’s Reading While Black: African-American Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope. McCaulley’s book has received a lot of praise in the past two months since it’s been released, and in my opinion it is well-deserved. McCaulley takes the posture of Jacob: clinging to the text of Scripture, determined to wrestle with it and not let it go without a blessing. He writes, “When it comes to the question of Black presence in the Bible, it is not a question of finding our place in someone else’s story. The Bible is first and foremost the story of God’s desire to create a people. We are encompassed within that desire.” There’s so much more I’d love to quote, but you can read an excerpt here, published recently in Fathom Magazine.
From Robert Farrar Capon’s Invitation to Introverts: “When my phone begins ringing, I’m not one to reach for it immediately. My heart rate increases, and I begin to think of things like: How long will this conversation last? What topics will we have to talk about? Will I still be able to go about what I was planning on doing right now? Instead, Capon shows us (and the Spirit does so as well) that an invitation to conversation is not an intrusion but rather a reflection of God’s grace to you. It’s not something to run from; it’s an opportunity to refresh your history as someone whose presence is wanted, desired, even if, in this troubling time, it is only digitally. This season might be a difficult one, but there are still invitations to extend and invitations to receive, and hopefully we might find ourselves full of the party spirit, accepting the invitation to God’s grand party of grace and mercy.”
From Third-Culture Kid: “Cultures, like relationships, are constituted by various kinds of love. And this includes the love we call eros: that love that seizes our soul with a passion that promises life in its very essence. As millions of radios around the world testify, eros writes the songs that thrill and mold us. Solomon’s Song of Songs endures as the supreme testament of eros’s beauty and priority. Renewed by desire, we sing new songs, caught up and transfigured by the splendor our loves reflect—whether love between two people or among a people. Absent this love our songs fade, and with them a part of us fades too. We’re left lonely for ourselves, for that communion that touched us and that we had touched, that made us and that we helped make. This diminished passion is something all lovers know. And fear.”
From We are Bound by Suffering and Love: “In Christianity suffering magnifies love and makes possible a closer communion with God. This is something that makes even devout Christians uncomfortable because suffering, especially suffering caused by pain, can be so debilitating and pitiless that it is hard to see how it can ever have a positive aspect. My own very moderate ailments have had me groaning in pain without any discernable spiritual benefits. Suffering is rightfully avoided by any sane person. Nevertheless, the Christian experience is dependent upon suffering. In John’s Gospel the crucifixion of Christ is described as God’s sacrifice made for love of the world, and the early Christians occasionally used the word agape to describe this sacrificial love that is so intertwined with suffering.”
In our family’s opinion, breakfast food is good at any time of the day, and that is especially true for breakfast casseroles. Here is my new favourite: a spinach and cheese strata from Smitten Kitchen. You’re welcome.
A couple of pieces that I wrote several months ago were published this past month — one, an essay on providence in the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Job, at Mere Orthodoxy, and another, a piece for Risen Motherhood about parents seeing their own sin reflected in the lives of their children. I also wrote a review of Gina Dalfonzo’s book Dorothy and Jack — such a delightful book!
O God of love,
giver of concord,
through your only Son
you have given us a new commandment
that we should love one another
even as you have loved us,
the unworthy and the wandering,
and gave your beloved Son for our life and salvation.
Lord, in our time of life on earth
give us a mind forgetful of past ill-will,
a pure conscience and sincere thoughts,
and hearts to love one another;
for the sake of your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
From St. Cyril
On the road with you,
Laura
P.S. I’d love to hear from you! You can leave a comment below or reply privately to laura@thecerbuses.com.