Respecting Our Common Humanity

It will be useful for me to post abbreviated versions of the various addresses, sermons and classes that I present as chaplain of St John's. Even if you won't find it interesting now, keep it in the back of your mind for when you might want some ideas for addresses to young people in Years 7-12. The following was the address I gave at the assembly at which I was commissioned by the the Venerable Peter Stuart, Archdeacon of Adelaide early in Term 2.

[The reading was Genesis 1:26-31.]

Our reading today tells us that we share a common humanity, and that this common humanity is made in the image of God. We should always remember this great dignity attaching to being human together.

We also need to be respectful of that common humanity and its great dignity, as we live it and as we encounter it, in others. And I can think of three ways at least in which we can respect the great dignity of our humantiy here in this school:

1. By acknowledging each other. This might seem like a strange thing to suggest, but to acknowledge one another acknowledges our common presence to each other. When we acknowledge the other person we are recognising the right as a human being to be given space in our world to be human with us. And to give this basic right of existence to other people is to affirm their worth, a worthiness with its source in God.
   
   
2. The way we treat each other. The way we treat each other is the primary way we show respect to the common humanity we share. The problem is that this is precisely where we struggle as a race to be respectful. Jesus can help us here. This term in chapel we will be looking at some of the things Jesus says, and contrast this with what we ordinarily do. Jesus is a trustworthy guide of how to respect the dignity of each person we meet.
   
   
3. The third way respect for our common humanity can be practiced applies particularly to my role here as chaplain and priest. I will endeavour to provide a reason for us to be here that is more than compulsion, and more than self-interest. We respect the God in whose image we are made when we go beyond these things to discover the meaning and purpose of life, and to use this reason and purpose to live, study, and enjoy ourselves. The meaning and purpose I speak of here is to be found in the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus. So expect to hear a lot about him in the coming years!
   

NT Wright's Concerns About GAFCONish Claims

When I hear Peter Jensen say that ‘we are not self-selected; we are God-selected, because we are based on the word of God’; when I hear beloved and respected Jim Packer say that the ‘Jerusalem Declaration’ should be the basis of a new covenant to which all English bishops will be required to sign up; when I hear Vinay Samuel, one of the sharpest minds in the whole GAFCON movement, saying (unless he was misreported) that ‘we are not breaking away from the Anglican Communion – we ARE the Anglican Communion’; and when I see Bishop John Rodgers of AMiA saying that ‘we are the true and faithful Anglicans . . . the true representatives of the Anglican Communion’ – then it is time for someone, and it might as well be an old-fashioned Bible-believing evangelical like me, to stand up and say, with usual English understatement, ‘hold on, this seems to be somewhat over the top’. Just as the ‘covenant for the Church of England’ bore all the marks of sloppy thinking and hasty drafting, so the ‘Jerusalem Declaration’, though affirming more or less the doctrines that I myself have spent my whole adult life affirming and teaching, bears all the marks of similar haste. In addition to its embarrassingly obvious weaknesses, it has smuggled in, alongside the doctrinal affirmations, various open-ended formulae which basically mean ‘We will decide who’s in this new club and who’s out of it, and if we decide you’re out we claim the right to plant new churches in your territory, “authorize” them, and send in bishops to look after them’. This is not a ‘suspicious’ reading; it is more or less exactly what the text says. And I say to my fellow evangelicals in the Church of England: do not be taken in by this. This is not the answer. There are good answers to such problems as we face and this is not among them. (NT Wright)

For the full text of his comments see Stephen Bloor's post here.

Free AudioBooks Online from some of the Tradition's Best

Here

Rowan Williams and Consensus

Here is a good summary of Rowan Williams' strategy for the Anglican Communion, 'contrasted' with the GAFCONish type slurs we hear of him.

And Stephen reads him right here.

Talking About Sacraments (Part 2)

The church has found some sacraments particularly meaningful, and in the celebration of these particular sacraments we are opened up to the presence of God all around us, and within us. Seven of these sacraments are often listed: eucharist, baptism (and confirmation), anointing, ordination, marriage, and reconciliation (confession & absolution).

But why celebrate particular sacraments over and over again? If everything is sacrament, why not celebrate any or all sacraments? There are a few reasons. First, the ritual celebration of these particular sacraments is not meant to exclude the sacraments of everyday life. It is more that we need particular celebrations to remind us of our sacramental universe and lives. By celebrating these sacraments the church is encouraged to find God everywhere. If God can come to us in the humble form of eating and drinking bread and wine together, we are reminded to look for God in the smile of our neighbour.

Second, when we humans do not make particular celebration of what is always and everywhere around us, we soon forget. If we do not stop to find the beauty somewhere, we will not find it anywhere, even though it is all around us! If we do not celebrate and cherish our love by another, we will soon take it for granted or even forget it, even though we are always carried by that love!

Third, repetition brings fluency and skill in recognising and living the sacramental life. These particular sacraments become the doorway to sacramental living all the time. Moreover, intellectual familiarity with what we are doing repetitively allows us to get out of our heads and into our hearts. The problem with variety is that we never have time to get much further than intellectual analysis.

Of these particular sacraments, eucharist and baptism are the two most important, and this for at least two reasons. First, Jesus commanded us to practice them. (See Matt 28:16-20; 1Cor 11: 23-26) Second, they are the two crucial sacraments of initiation and sustenance in the Body of Christ, recalling for us in dramatic form the death and resurrection of Christ, and our participation in him.

Talking About Sacraments (Part 1)

John O’Donohue, in his book Anam Cara defines a sacrament as ‘a visible sign of invisible grace.’ He continues:

In that definition there is a fine acknowledgement of how the unseen world comes to expression in the visible world. This desire for expression lies deep at the heart of the invisible world. (pp. 72-73)

The threshold between God and the cosmos is paper thin. In traditional language we can say that we are surrounded by sacraments. The whole of the created order is sacramental. From constellations in the sky to the smallest seed, the created universe tells the glory of God. We live in a sacramental universe.

And it is not just ‘things’ that are sacraments. Touch is a sacrament. The caress of a lover carries with it more than a simple explanation of skin brushing skin. If it were not so, why did God become human, and could it have even been possible? It were not so how could we be ambassadors of Jesus Christ? How could we be the temple of the Holy Spirit?

African Bible Study

Here is a group Bible study method that requires no formal knowledge, but will deepen your life with God. it is truly confronting if done consistently over time. You could do it each week with a group of people using the Sunday readings. The important point is not to justify your answer or particularly explain it. The point is our transformation through engagin with the Word of God.

1. One person reads the passage slowly.

2. Each person identifies the word or phrase that catches their attention.

3. Each shares the word or phrase around the group. (NO DISCUSSION, TEACHING, JUSTIFICATION)

4. Another person reads the passage slowly .

5. Each person identifies where this passage touches their life today.

6. Each shares their answer: "This passage touches me ..." (NO DISCUSSION, TEACHING, JUSTIFICATION).

7. Passage is read a third time (another reader).

8. Each person names or writes "From what I've heard and shared, what do I believe God wants me to do or be? Is God inviting me to change in any way?"

9. Each person shares their answer: "God invites me to..." (NO DISCUSSION, TEACHING, JUSTIFICATION)

10. Each prayers for the person on their right, naming what was shared in the other steps.

Close with the Lord's Prayer and silence.

Prayer: Experiencing the Relentless Love of God

What we try to do in prayer is to experience deeply and consistently the undeserved, relentless love of God for us, despite everything. (Katherine Marie Dyckman & L. Patrick Carroll)

Desire

To desire God is to pray. (Rene Voillaume)

Going Dry

Going dry is a common experience in the life of prayer, and it is a great grace calling for some sensible discipline. We all have times when we feel our prayer life is going nowhere and achieves nothing. This is the time we might stop praying. And this is exactly the time not to stop praying. This kind of dryness is, more than likely, an invitation to go deeper. God is inviting you to a new level of relationship, which is why your usual way of relating just isn't working anymore. The newer, deeper level of relationship might be entered through a variety of ways, which might not include a new way of praying, but it will include praying (even if it is your current way of praying). The new depth of relationship might be forged through service, Scripture study, a more serious engagement at the Sunday liturgy. Or some other way. Don't expect some extraordinary experience in prayer to be the sign that you have gone deeper. (God will most likely be kinder to you than that!)

The above can apply to congregations also. People can drift away because nothing seems to happen for them like it used to. They blame the congregation or someone else. But, in reality, all that is going on is that the way they participate in the church and their relationship with God is being invited to be deepened. Go deeper, don't leave!Explore, take a few risks! God won't disappoint, especially if you let God have a real relationship with you, one in which God's relationship with you doesn't have to look how you think it should.

Eschew Extraordinary Gifts

The Christian tradition has consistently counseled avoiding extraordinary gifts whenever possible because it is difficult to remain humble when you have them. Experience teaches that the more extraordinary the gifts, the harder it is to be detached from them. It is easy to take secret satisfaction in the fact that God is giving you special gifts, especially when they are obvious to others. (Thomas Keating)

Saying Our Prayers

The problem with talking to people about prayer is that it can end up sounding so corny. It's embarrassing to say to people "Just say your prayers". You sound like a complete Christian sap. But it is so true!(I'm talking about the prayer bit not the sap bit.) If you've done some hard yards when it comes to prayer you know that it is important to say your prayers even when it is boring and nothing is happening. Why? Because our relationship with God is not at our convenience and need not play out how we think it should, or when we think it should. If you are not given the grace of the greatest prayer life in the history of Christianity, indeed, if 'nothing' ever happens, just keep going. In fact, according to the majority of the tradition, it is best to eschew the great moments for the more ordinary (and sublime) experience of humbly being before God.

Although, if you are thinking that your prayer life is 'boring' this might be a sign of something going on. But more on that in a couple of days.

To Pray

To pray does not primarily mean to think about God in contrast to thinking about other things, or to spend time with God instead of spending time with other people. Rather it means to think and to live in the presence of God. As soon as we begin to divide our thoughts into thoughts about God and thoughts about people and events, we remove God from our daily life and put him in a pious niche where we can think pious thoughts and experience pious feelings.

(Henri Nouwen)

Strength Out of Weakness

The most important thing, and that which will enable you and I to be disciples for a whole life, no matter one's own sense of inadequacy, alleged failures, or disappointment, is a sense, a familiarity with our own weakness and emptiness. But not just weakness and emptiness; weakness and emptiness as the great dignity of our humanity and the fount of grace in our lives and ministries.

A few observations and anecdotes to finish this series on emptiness.

First, contrast the training for ordained ministry current ordination candidates receive and that which I received. They are given opportunities to attain skills and competencies early in their ordained ministries that I did not. And I think the training now is busier and more intense. But because of the gaps in my training I had to rely on personal presence in a way that the newly ordained now might not. I am not advocating this as a desirable place for the newly ordained to find themselves in! But just to point out the potentially unrecognised danger competency brings.

The danger is a lack of depth covered over by competency. Those who train now are prepared for ministry in a much more productive manner than in the past, but the competencies can become the new bag of priestcraft tricks of the past. In the old days it was tempting for the priest to pull out his communion, or oil, or bible or prayer book, or mumble a prayer with his clerical collar on, and think this would suffice for real sacramental personal presence. A bag of tricks is not what priesthood is about, whether that bag of tricks is a prayer book, the sacrament, th Bible or a whole new range of competencies.

Second, I remember sitting in the Peterborough Rectory and looking at my books back in the mid-90s. I had just finished my PhD, and here I was up in the country with a PhD that nobody cared about or saw as useful, or even knew what it meant! There seemed no way to pursue that path of academia, to develop it, or if there was, it seemed like it would drag me from the task at hand. And the task at hand was to be the parish priest of Peterborough and the people in it. There seemed little overlap.

And third, for ten years a attempted a radical pursuit of material privation in obedience to the call of Jesus. (I have a fundamentalist past, but not of the right wing type so prevalent today.) In the end I had virtually nothing left, except a huge mountain of pride. The actions were commendable, noteworthy, saintly, but in spiritual terms they count for nought. When I obeyed Jesus radically, I distanced myself further from him.

These three stories/observations speak to me about the great dignity of our humanity (its weakness and incompletion) and the dangers associated with that weakness. They also speak to me about what it means to be a baptised Christian (and subsumed within this common baptism, a priest): refracting back to the world, church, and all creation our common destiny grounded in our createdness and God’s grace. All three stories warn us of making our discipleship to our strengths. Relying on our strengths, rather than allowing strength to arise out of our weakness. For example, my radical pursuit of the gospel should have been the result of a letting go of those things I was formerly filling the emptiness with, but instead I refilled the emptiness with my pride. Or in the case of my PhD, it became something I could stand on and rely on (or its knowledge, or the differential between my knowledge and most other people’s knowledge), rather than something I could offer humbly in service to God, not knowing where that offer might lead. And in the case of priestly formation and competence, the danger of a mechanical and human generated application of a ‘bag of tricks’ bearing little resemblance to the true iconic value of discipleship.

I am not suggesting that we can’t be competent and increase competency, can’t have PhD’s, can’t operate in areas of ministry in which we are comfortable and capable, or radically pursue the gospel in our lives. But let us do so always from the perspective of the great dignity of humankind. (That is, our incompleteness waiting to be filled by God). The simple humility that flows from knowing our great dignity can ensure that our skills and competencies, the radical choices we can make, the achievements we accrue along the way, can become means of grace for others rather than condemnation of ourselves.

Priests to the World?

But what of the world and being a priest? If ordination to the priesthood is grounded in baptism, then surely priesthood is directed out to the world just as baptism is? In my previous post in this series I spoke of how priests refract back to the people of God who we are because of our common baptism. So too, priests show the world our common source in God and our common destiny as creatures. This is the call of all the baptised, and in a particular way, the priest. We are to be that iconic display of the dying and rising Christ, or in the language I have been using, the great dignity of being human. Not exactly in the way the world would ordinarily think of that dignity, but instead as a human dignity grounded in our emptiness and openness oriented to God through Jesus Christ. We do this in all sorts of ways, in every part of our life. No different to what all the baptised should be doing, but as priests we are related to all the baptised in this mission in such a way that we are particular examples of this death and resurrection, emptiness and fullness, weakness and power made perfect.

In this sense we become priests to the world trying to make the connections to enable faith in the crucified-risen Lord. However, the goal is not, ultimately, for everyone to become Christian. It is much bigger than that. The goal of creation is for all of creation to be united with God in Christ. In this sense, hypostatic union is the destiny of everything. The whole creation is groaning in its weakness and imperfection as it awaits redemption through union with God. We are priests of this destiny for all creation. Not priests in the sense of mediating this salvation – that is the role of Christ the High Priest. No, we are priests in the same sense of refracting back to creation what it is, and what its destiny is. And again, what we refract back is our weakness and incompleteness – shared by all creation – which is, at the same time, the great dignity of creation waiting to be filled by God. As priests sharing in and reflecting back to the rest of creation our mutual weakness and hollowness as the point of God’s grace and fulfilment.

Thinking theologically: Creation can bear God in the most intimate manner, and the particular word of importance here is union. And so it fits together if we think of creation as an openness waiting to be filled by God, Jesus as fully human (made from stardust), baptism of those professing faith in Christ (receiving the Spirit in faith and discipleship of Jesus), and the use of sacraments as the outward sign of an inner grace. Ordination stands on these four foundational insights and is consistent with, and folds into, them. And for any priests reading this post, remember, the ‘stuff’ of the sacrament of ordination is you.

To read:

1Cor 15:20-28

Colossians 1:15-22 & Ephesians 1:3-14

Romans 8:18-25

1. Priests, how connected do you feel to your baptism and the vows you made (confirmed)?
2. Could you have the courage, and the humility, to be a priest living in grace and weakness?
3. Do you have eyes to see the coming unification of all things in the crucified-risen Christ in the world now? How could you live that ministry of unity through your ordination?

Solidarity in Sin to Solidarity in Salvation

And thus whoever simply refuses to shut his eyes to the abyss of hatred, despair, and depravity that can be seen in the life of men on earth, and thus who refuses to close himself off from reality, will find it difficult to contrive his own escape from this damnation through a purely individualistic conception of salvation, and to abandon everyone else to the grinding wheels of hell. Just as God so loved the world that he completely handed over his Son for its sake, so too the one whom God has loved will want to save himself only in conjunction with those who have been created with him, and he will not reject the share of penitential suffering that has been given him for the sake of the whole. He will do so in Christian hope, the hope for the salvation of all men, which is permitted to Christians alone. (Hans Urs von Balthasar)

Priesthood and Emptiness

There are two ways of looking at priesthood. One grounds it in baptism (presumably one reason for the necessity of baptism before ordination); the other sees it as a gift from a different realm of the Spirit than that of baptism (ARCIC II). I favour the first, but include the second. For me, ordination to the priesthood is about a refocussing and concentration of my baptism in a re-ordered relationship to the people of God. (Perhaps this is the gift from another realm of the Spirit, as ARCIC II puts it?) Through baptism priests are icons of Christ, and in ordination their relationship to the people of God is so reordered to be a perpetual living reminder of who we all are together. Priests refract back to the people of God our mutual identity as icons of Christ within the iconic Body of Christ.

Which might sound like abstruse theologising. What does it mean? It means that priests are to be truly human, refracting back to the people of God the great dignity of the human condition in all its weakness and failure. Priests are filled by the Spirit of God, yet the weakness and emptiness that is filled never leaves us. It is the weakness in which God’s power is made perfect. But it never ceases being weakness, and at times, failure. This is the mystery of the cross and resurrection – life and death – that we carry in our bodies as baptised disciples of Christ. As St Paul says, “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.”

To be a priest is to know one’s weakness, perpetually living it, so that the life of Christ might be made manifest. Priests know their sin, but not just as a point of self-condemnation. Indeed, no longer a point of self-condemnation, but a point of grace through faith, a sign of the weakness that brings grace abounding in our lives. Priests are called to direct others beyond guilt and forgiveness to the point of faith in the grace that fills out all human weakness and failure. We don’t ignore sin; it is transformed into a source of grace and the perfect expression of the power of God.

To read:

Rom 6:1-11

2Cor 4:7-12

2Cor 12:1-10

For Reflection:

1. Recall an act of ministry that was sourced from weakness but revealed God’s power. (Either you as minister or ministered to.)
   
   
2. Is your past sin sufficiently ‘dealt with’ for it to no longer be merely a point of condemnation but give you a sense of the great dignity of humanity and God’s grace in your life?

Prayer of Abandonment

Lord, I abandon myself into your hands, do with me what you will. Whatever you may do, I thank you. I am ready for all, I accept all. Let only your will be done in me and in all your creatures. I ask no more than this, O Lord. Into your hands I commend my soul; I offer it to you with all the love of my heart. For I love you Lord, and so need to give myself, to surrender myself into your hands without reserve, and with boundless confidence, for you are my Creator. Amen. (From Charles de Foucault)

Baptism and Emptiness

Baptism is the sacrament of hypostatic union, or the hope of it. That is,

· We are brought face to face with our inability to save ourselves (we receive in baptism what by nature we cannot receive)

· But remain manifestly human afterwards

· Living now in direct relationship with Christ,

· And receive the Spirit of Jesus to be his disciples

Whatever else we might want to say about baptism, it is the rite where we are brought face to face with our own need and God’s desire to fill that need through Jesus Christ: God responds to our failure and emptiness with the grace of Jesus Christ by filling our emptiness with the Holy Spirit. Baptism is the rite that celebrates the iconic identity between Christ and us whereby we become icons of Christ himself, yet in this iconic likeness we are nothing more than who we were uniquely always meant to be. Baptism is the sacrament of our becoming fully human and proleptically announces the crowning of our humanity through union with God in Christ and his Spirit. This is why we were created, and why God became Incarnate in Jesus and gave the Spirit into our hearts: we are an emptiness filled by God, but in being filled by God's Spirit we become who we are meant to be in utter freedom.

An Emptiness Made to be Filled in Christ

If Adam and Eve had not sinned, would Christ still have needed to come?

Most people reply ‘No’: Adam and Eve in Eden were plan A, and sin messed it up. Christ was the rescue plan to undo the sin. But most people also sense that this leads them where they do not want to go. Christ as plan B? They wriggle out of the impending theological problem by saying it is a theoretical question because God always knew that Adam and Eve would sin, and therefore Christ was not really plan B.

It doesn’t quite work. Hypothetical or not, Christ remains plan B. And that is not the Christian faith, as I understand it. It is just not Christocentric enough, and restricts Christ’s efficacy to sin alone. But for me Christ is much more than the antidote to sin. He is that antidote, but he is much more. Christ would have come even if we had not sinned. The fact that we have sinned just means that Christ’s coming deals with the sin as well. (That is, the salvation of Christ is conditioned by the needs of sinners in addition to the original purpose of creation and its crowning in Christ.) Christ was always going to come because we are made needing the Incarnation and the giving of the Spirit. We are made that way irrespective of sin. That is to say, we are created hollow, an emptiness made to be filled by God. That filling by God is achieved in the Incarnation of Christ and the giving of the Spirit. It is a pure act of grace – unmerited love. That is to say, unmerited in the sense that moral categories don’t apply.

Now, our sin is also dealt with in the Incarnation. The Scriptures focus on sin as the cause of the Incarnation because the Incarnation becomes the point where our natural emptiness is displayed, and where we can see the need for grace. But the grace we are given is the original grace always intended for us.

The majority tradition has perhaps missed this, and made creation and the coming of Christ more ‘plan A mucked up, now for plan B.’ But running from the scriptures through the Church Fathers and the theology of theosis on to modern exponents like Karl Rahner, is the understanding of the original need for the coming of Christ, despite sin.

And this need (because of our original emptiness) is a sign of the great dignity of being human. Humanity is made to be filled by God. Not filled in such a way that we are overwhelmed and dissolved into the great chain of being, but rather, filled by the God who is love, and in this love utterly united with God, yet in this union becoming who we were always meant to be, secure in our own identity as human persons. Our hollowness, our weakness, our emptiness, is our great dignity; it is in this weakness that we find the great dignity as creatures who can 'become God'. Because we are made lacking, God can fill us. And this is shown perfectly in the Incarnation. God can become human – fully human – and remain God. One person, two natures. Theologically, the hypostatic union.

This is paradoxical. Our very weakness is our strength, the point of our greatest dignity. If it were not so, Christ could not have come, and we would not be saved. We would either be divine already, or we would be damned. This is typically Christian and paradoxical. Strength and dignity in weakness and emptiness; just like life in death, power made perfect in weakness. This is the point of all the controversy of the first centuries around the nature of Jesus, and the point of the hypostatic union.

Sin remains sin, but it is the distorted result of our natural weakness and hollowness: unhappy in the dignity of being an openness to God, we try to be God by filling up the hollowness with things, people, ideas etc. and so we maniacally desire these and squabble, compete and kill to acquire and retain them. (Think here of Genesis 3 and the murder of Abel in Genesis 4.)

We think of our weakness and emptiness as a problem. When manifested in sin our weakness and emptiness is a problem, but it is also the pinnacle of creation. Indeed, the ultimate point of the hypostatic union in Jesus Christ is not only our personal union with God, but also the union of all creation with God. What we see in Jesus is not only our destiny, but also the destiny, through Christ and the Spirit, of all creation. We normally think of the dignity of humankind in terms of fullness and perfection, competence and completeness. This is not the original dignity of the human condition: the original dignity of the human condition is emptiness and weakness, an emptiness to be filled by God.

For Reflection:

1. Can you touch your weakness and emptiness? Can you also sense the great dignity of your humanity at that point of weakness?

2. Name one of your sins. Can you also see how this might be, or become, a point of sensing the great dignity of your humanity?

3. How might this change your attitude to yourself and others?

4. When and where do you feel God filling your emptiness?

The Weakness and Emptiness at the Heart of Human Being

Perhaps the most obvious feature of the human condition, but one often masked, is our weakness and imperfection. For example:

· Physically, we get tired, we get sick, we age, we die

· We cannot regulate human society in an equitable manner, control violence, racism, sexism, etc.

· Human history is a cul de sac of violence; particularly the 20^th, so far reproduced in the 21^st century

· The growth of our ignorance; the more we learn the more we know we don’t know.

· The triumph of technology, but a triumphant march ending in environmental damage or possible extinction.

· And in our personal lives, the difficulty we have in changing when we know we must.

· Gullibility, anger, obsessions, groupthink, etc., all these personal, psychological and sociological characteristics of humankind.

And if personal experience and observation isn’t enough, we have the great iconoclasts of the last 150 years, including Marx, Freud, Derrida, Girard. All these have unmasked the ways in which our weakness and failure are hidden from us.

And as the weakness and failure of human being is displayed to us in our experience, observation and in the great intellectual streams of our culture, so we realise that what we have based our lives on might be nothing more than an evanescence of limited lasting value. Our own existence, the reality of the world, truth, God, everything seems to disappear.

It can be hard to feel this at times and not mask it with our strengths and activities, or hide from it with the push of a button. But there are times in our lives when we get a sense of this lack at the heart of human being; disaster, relationship breakdown, death, failure; the encounter with beauty or nature, falling and failing in love; study; the encounter with God. I often have a sense of the chimera that is human being. We aren’t what we like to think we are; and when we strip away what we aren’t, we find an emptiness, a lack.

We fear this emptiness. Sometimes we try to define it away as abnormal, morbid, or perhaps a result of sin. We are not an emptiness, surely, so we fill our lives and our minds with great intellectual systems, busy ourselves with the practicalities of life, become owned by our possessions, and stuff our lives with relationships or the lack of them. And all to hide the hole at the centre of our existence.

But what if it was natural to be empty and hollow? What if, theologically speaking, we are made to be empty? What if our failure and sin as human beings was an indication that we are made hollow, empty, weak, beings that lack? What if sin is essentially the denial of our hollowness, and the result of our own efforts to fill the emptiness? What if our hollowness and emptiness is not to be feared, but the source of becoming who we truly are?

If any of this were true, it would change things. We would still have our weakness and emptiness, our failure and hollowness. These would remain experiences with the power to devastate our comfortable lives. But not only to devastate what is false, but also invite us to what is most real. Imagine if it were true that you and I, and the whole cosmos, were lacking something at the heart of our existence, and this lack was not just the result of sin, but also our original blessing?

Questions for reflection:

1. Where do you find your weakness/hollowness most visible?

2. What do you do with it? Fill it? Fear it? Run, mask it? Live out of it? (If this latter, how do you sustain this sense of weakness and hollowness without it overwhelming you?)

3. How do you sit with your own sin and failure? The sin and failure of other people?

4. If Adam and Eve had not sinned, would Christ still have needed to come?