Take the Leap
“One
thing you learn when you've lived as long as I have—people aren't
all good, and people aren't all bad. We move in and out of darkness
and light all our lives. Right now, I'm pleased to be in the light.”
Neal
Shusterman (Unwind)
Ahhh...human nature.
Albert Camus famously said, “Man is the only creature who refuses
to be what he is.” We are such curious beings. Right this moment, I
am sitting on my porch watching a brand new, barely-out-of-the-nest
squirrel leap from limb to limb, from power line to tree branch. He
has no question whatsoever that he can leap across space, and land,
if not gracefully, at least solidly, on what ever he chooses. He does
not worry about dark and light, or whether he is a good squirrel or a
bad one; he just leaps. When darkness comes, he sleeps, when daylight
comes, he goes in search of food and chases other squirrels up and
down trees. From the tip of his nose, to the tip of his tail, he is
100% squirrel.
But we humans—we are
different. We worry about everything—whether we look good, whether
we are considered by others to be smart and attractive, whether we
are good in the eyes of God, who frankly must be mystified by the
manner in which we've evolved. From regular old, intelligent mammals,
to these bizarre city dwellers who live in skyscrapers and daily
devote our lives to the accumulation of wealth and power. Who concern
ourselves with the kind of car we drive, and the sort of people we
hang out with and how they may or may not enhance our standing in the
world.
And it certainly didn't
start with modern humans. In the lectionary reading for today, in the
Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 9, the powers-that-be have summoned a man
who was born blind, whose eyes Jesus has opened, and demand to know
by what magic this healing happened. When the newly-sighted man
tells them the truth, they hurl insults at him and throw him out.
That was thousands of years ago, but it sounds quite familiar,
doesn't it? If one of them had healed the blind man, I'm pretty sure
the response would have been different. We humans have difficulty
appreciating power in others, especially if they're not “one of
us.”
We had a conversation in
Spirituality Group this week about whether God is all good. Most
Christians are taught that God is only light, and that anything that
is not light is not from God. We really want to believe that there is
something in this universe that is all good. But there is not. We
have to account for darkness, and darkness is not separate from
light. God is the God of darkness as well as the God of light—God
is all. The Old Testament records it as Omnipotent, Omnipresent, and
Omniscient--all powerful, ever present and all knowing.
We are meant to wrestle
with our human nature, not reject it. We are meant to allow it to
teach us and make us whole. We are meant to acknowledge our darkness,
as well as our light. Like that confident little squirrel, we are
meant to take the leap, and trust that we are exactly as we are meant
to be.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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