God's Love (for you and everyone else) poured Into Your Heart and My Heart

Many have noticed that in the narratives of Jesus' resurrection appearances to his disciples, Jesus never says that, because he is risen, we also will rise. Jesus says this elsewhere (see, for example, John 11:25-26), as does St Paul. (See Romans 8:1; 1Corinthians 15:12-23) But the resurrection appearances in the Gospels are focused on mission. For instance, after appearing to his disciples and offering his peace to them, Jesus says to them, "As the Father has sent me, so I send you." (John 20:21) And at the conclusion of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus commands his disciples to, "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you." (Matthew 28:19-20) 

We read of this mission in the Book of Acts, following a pattern repeated time and again. The Gospel of repentance and forgiveness is spread through face-to-face encounters. Not with an air of superiority, but in humility, requiring the evangelist to open their heart to their neighbour as the good news of God’s love is spread. 

 It is a beautiful culmination of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. God sent the Son into the world to save the world. For no other reason than love. And through the love of God we see in the crucified Jesus, we are invited to fall in love with God. To let God’s love re-fashion our hearts and minds, so that we can know the height and depth of God’s love for us. That is part of what it means for us to have God's love poured into our hearts (through the Holy Spirit). The height, breadth, and depth of God's love for you poured into your heart. And with God's love for each of us in our hearts - refashioning who we are - we also have God's love for every other person poured into our hearts. And whatever else we do as we spread the good news of Jesus, all of it is based on us opening the door of our heart to our neighbour as we share with them (and live with them) God’s love for us all.

Falling in Love With God on Good Friday

When love meets sin, the cross is the result. But when love meets sin, the opportunity to fall in love is offered to us. This is why it isn’t so strange to say Good Friday. And not so strange for the cross (of Jesus) to become the symbol of God’s love. And for churches to have crosses in and on their buildings. The cross of Jesus is self-sacrificing love for us. There is no remainder. Jesus, out of love for us, endures the cross for our good. And because Jesus is a victim of what he saves us from – sin - we are loved at even this low point of crucifying the Son of God. Literally or metaphorically crucifying each other is a low point and does not earn anything but condemnation. But God’s love doesn’t just hold at this point; God seeks us out at our lowest point of failure and saves us. (We are saved by the death of Jesus, the low point of human sin.) 

 In John’s Gospel, the opposite of sin is faith. Faith that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son for us. Faith is how we fall in love. And when we fall in love with God because of the cross of Jesus, we are on the path of faith. Continuing down the path of faith will bring more to this initial falling in love (for example, hope), but what is added along the journey will never be contrary to the initial conversion to God’s love. To have faith in Jesus is to be overwhelmed with love. God’s love for us, a love that goes so far as to be sent into the world of sin and be cruelly tortured, crucified, and killed. To have faith is to know that we are loved as we are (even if it seems unbelievable), and to grow deeper into that knowledge and love. God loves you and has poured that love into your heart. Think about that. God’s love for you has been poured into your heart so that you might come to know the depth of God’s love for you. (Romans 5:5) And more than this, God gave the Son for us, as we are, so that we can become more than we are. And if there are times when that might seem unbelievable, and times you can’t see God’s love for you, then look to the cross. And fall in love with God’s love again. 

 Simultaneously, to have faith in God’s love crucified is also to see God’s love for all people. To fall in love with the cross is to be on a journey of opening our hearts in love toward others. God loves me and seeks me out even while still a sinner? Yes. This changes us. Being loved transforms the human heart. (See Ezekiel 36:26) To love God and Jesus is to love all those whom they love. As St John says: 

Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. (1John 4:11-12)

Resurrrection: A Reflection on Love, Judgment, and Obedience (Part 3)

 The Day of Resurrection

The cultural artefacts produced in the West because of the death on a cross of a Jewish man 2000 years ago is astounding. Art, poetry, literature, sculpture, Cathedrals, the rules of war, human rights, freedom of speech, secular space, the rise of Western science, and not to mention the Christian religion itself, are products of faith in Jesus of Nazareth, crucified and risen. It's easy to forget how much we stand on this legacy of Christianity in Western culture. And we forget what the Christian revolution meant to the pagan world around it. It was a revolution. And that is part of why the fading of Christianity - with its dead, pathetic, crucified Lord on a cross - is not recognised as the civilisational catastrophe that it is by very many people. (Although we'll have to wait and see what happens in the West - something is afoot, and I'm not being nostalgic here.) The general contemporary atheist of the West (e.g. the "New" Atheists of not that very long ago) seems ignorant of the original revolution and its continuing benefits and cultural richness. You probably have to go back to Nietzsche to find the atheist who understood that with the cultural death of God (and he meant Christianity) everything people assumed morally would vanish. There would be no reason to continue the accepted moral standards of the West, and instead, all would be negotiated by power (i.e. down the barrel of a gun).

The death and resurrection of Jesus together changed everything. Jesus died an outcast, rejected by all, judged a sinner and worthy of execution. And without the resurrection this is how he would have been lost to history: just one more failure, one more criminal, one more statistic, and then lost amongst all the other dead of history. But the resurrection of Jesus changed this. The resurrection is God's 'Yes!' to the sin that crucified Jesus. And although the resurrection of Jesus is about life after death, on its own this is too narrow an understanding. If the 'Jesus thing' is only about the resurrection, why does the risen body of Jesus still have nail holes? It's because the cross and its meaning cannot be divorced from the resurrection. The death is rolled up into his resurrection. These two features of the death and resurrection of Jesus - God's "Yes!' against human sin and the nail holes in the resurrected body of Jesus - were significant facets of the Christian revolution. However, why didn't Christianity end up a religion of revenge? That is, a movement of God's revenge for crucifying the Lord, directed at all sinners? Instead, Christianity is a movement (from its inception) of forgiveness opening up a way for forgiveness through repentance. Why forgiveness? Revenge is the usual human way.

 The reason is because Jesus died out of love, for us, without the self-righteous anger of the movements of change peppering all of human history. And he died in obedience to the one he called Father. And the Father sent the Son into the world out of love for us. And in this death initiated and ended in love, human failure (sin) is judged. It is love that judges us. And it is love that saves us. To follow the well worn path of revenge would be to betray the very reason for Jesus and deny the God who sent him. That is why Christianity is not a religion of revenge. The constancy of love (see Parts 1 & 2) demands nothing more (or less) than love. And we are disciples of that constancy of love.

The Cross of Jesus: A Reflection on Love, Judgement, and Obedience (Part 2)

 Good Friday

Judgement is less like the teacher telling you off and more like Jesus on the cross. 

 Jesus is on the cross out of love. Jesus on the cross condemns the sin that crucified him. In his innocence (Lk 23:47), sin is unmasked and its true nature shown: the absence of love. (And the darkness could not overcome it. Jn 1:5)

But this judgement is also a revelation. When Pilate brings Jesus out to the crowd he says, "Behold the man!" Or is could just as easily mean, "Behold humanity!"  This is what we do to each other, and this is what we have made ourselves into. Our fall is revealed to us in the flesh of one of us, Jesus Christ. But this is more than a revelation of who and what we are. This is a double revelation: who and what we have made ourselves into to be able to do this to one another, and also a revelation of God. 

"God so loved the world ..." (Jn 3:14)

Yes, God so loved the world that he sent his only Son. In Christ God suffers and dies at the hands of sinners to show us who and what we are. Christ's death wasn't a miscalculation or a mistake on God's part, to be corrected at the resurrection. Christ loved his own to the end - to the point of death on a cross - to simultaneously reveal the depths of God's love and our need for a saviour.

  But there is a third revelation. In the crucified Jesus, who dies for love, we see our true humanity. He revealed to us our distorted humanity in his wounds. Now his wounds (the price of love) reveal to us the love that is our true calling as humans.

Today we are invited to look at the cross. It is the revelation of love and our need of God's healing love. To look at the cross of Jesus this way is to be set on the path of faith and of healing the great need within us. Look and live. We see what we are now in the broken body of Jesus; but we also see on the cross the true humanity to which we are called: A faithful humanity, obedient to the loving will of God for the sake of others.

Let Us Love One Another: A Reflection on Love, Judgement, and Obedience (Part 1)

 Here is the first of three reflections used at Easter with a theme of love, judgement, and obedience. (Using John's Gospel as the prism to refract the light revealed to us in the cross and resurrection of Jesus.)

Maundy Thursday 

"Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end." (Jn 13:1)

 Jesus' walk to the cross wasn't a misjudgement on his part, or a miscalculation on the part of the Father, or the act of someone stuck between self-giving and self-flagellation. It wasn't the result of despair or frustration. The death of Jesus was the result of love. (Love on the part of Jesus - malignant violence on our part.) Jesus loved his own to the end. His death was for us and our good. 

 

And the death of Jesus was also because of his love for the Father. Jesus' love of the Father, shown in his obedience to the divine will, took him to the cross. (Jn 14:31; 15:9-10 ) But the cross was not only the result of Jesus' love of us and his love of the Father. The Father's love for the cosmos was the source of the Father's sending of the Son for our sake. ("For God so loved the world ..." Jn 3:16) And because of this constancy of love we know that God is love (1Jn 4:7-12, 16), the light of love. And although the darkness tried to overcome the light (Jn 1:5), we know that God is light in whom there is no darkness. (1Jn 1:5) 

 

Jesus symbolised his act of love and service on the cross in the washing of the disciples' feet at the Last Supper. Footwashing, the work of a slave, parallels the Son who emptied himself, taking the form of a humble slave, being obedient even to the point of death on the cross. (Phil 2:5-11)

 

But the footwashing is also about being washed by Jesus.  Peter could not conceive of his Teacher and Lord washing his feet. But it is because Jesus washes our feet/is crucified for us that he is our Lord and Teacher. (See Luke 23:35-38) And in this 'washing' we find the way to salvation. (Jn 6:68; 13:8; 14:6)

 

And our response? Jesus invites us into the constancy of the love of the Father and the Son through faith in him. (Jn 1:12; 11:25-26; 20:30-31) And we abide in this love of Father and Son through obedience to Jesus' command - to love one another. (Jn 13:34-35; 15:12-17) In this love we will know the Father's love, just as we will know the love of Jesus, the Son, and abide in their love. (Jn 14:21-24; 17:20-24) And with the presence of the Paraclete - another Advocate - within us, we will testify to the truth (of this constancy of love) and  receive all that the Father and the Son share. (Jn 16:13-15) And in this testimony we know the future: the glory of the love of Father and Son, abiding with us now, and eternally. (Jn 16:13) 

So let us love one another. To love one another is the master key to unlock the mystery of the cross and resurrection of Jesus. To love one another is the fruit of the cross and resurrection of Jesus. To love one another is to love Jesus and share in his love of the Father, and to enjoy their mutual presence of love in our lives. So, let us love one another.

The Lord our God, the Lord is One (Mark 12:28-34)

South Australian Year 12 school exams are just around the corner. When I sat for my Year 12 final exams over 40 years ago the outcome wasn't particularly noteworthy. I had already peaked at school, a year or so back. The problem for me was that I couldn't see the point of what I was doing. Not that the benefit of schooling was lost on me. And I could see possible pathways ahead. And there wasn't and still isn't anything wrong with any of those pathways. It's just that I wanted the answer to the "Why?" behind the options of life. I lacked a comprehensive meaning to bind it all together, a meaning that could infuse my life and make a more complete (rather than relative) sense of any particular path I would take. A way of sifting what was on offer, and finding my place in a deeper and broader meaning. 

It still reminds me of a few pages in Walter Kasper's, The God of Jesus Christ (1), on the ancient world's quest for 'the One' lying behind the multiplicity of the world around. Without a binding, unifying 'One' behind the multiplicity the plethora of 'stuff' around us teeters on meaninglessness, amounting to arbitrary and haphazard encounters. They might have a relative meaning, but without the meaning of a unifying force behind them, the bits of our lives eventually appear arbitrary or haphazard. Like the horizon which makes the foreground comprehensible, without a background of unity the multiplicity of the world 'would be nothing but a dust-heap piled up at random and lacking any order and meaning." (p. 235) That's what my future felt like, all those years ago. (I couldn't verbalise it like that back then.) 

Another example. Sometimes a young person attempts to consume as many experiences as possible, hungrily, voraciously, as though in the cumulative consumption of each experience one will find meaning. Sometimes this happens at the other end of life, after a realisation that one's days are numbered. Not necessarily anything wrong in any of the experiences, but in the end, a life of cumulative, relative experiences or meanings is, in my experience, not enough. Living is more than discrete experiences, no matter how many and varied.

And if we were to think of this unity behind the multiplicity as 'the One' (and we wouldn't be alone in the history of religion and philosophy), we would not be referring to a numerical oneness. It is the oneness of unity, completeness, providing an overarching meaning and purpose. Unity, but also uniqueness, for there can be no other, no other source, no other comprehensive meaning, or else we are back to multiplicity. And this 'One' is universal in its completeness and uniqueness, 'the One' for all peoples.

The above is not unrelated to Jesus' use of Deut 6:4-5 in answer to a question about the commandments: Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. (Mark 12:29) But my discussion above is not the source of Israel's affirmation of the oneness of God. Israel encountered God, and through that encounter over the centuries came to see that the God of Exodus and Exile is also the God of creation: one, complete, unique, and universal, transcendent if you like.

But there is more to the story of this encounter. In Christ God revealed to us that 'the One' is love. The unity and completeness that is the source and ground of creation is love, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. (Not just loving, but God is love. See 1John 4:7-12.)

And encounter is where my story after Year 12 took me. I encountered God in Christ afresh, and over the years have come to discover 'the One' behind the multiplicity, the God who brings a unity and completeness, meaning and purpose to what is otherwise teetering on the arbitrary. It was a  journey from both ends, in the beginning the implicit search from the dead-end of multiplicity without unity, and then from the other end the active encounter with God in Christ (who is the unity implied in the dead-end).

My story is not unique. Many people feel the "dust- heap piled up at random and lacking any order and meaning." But the One beckons at the end of the cul-de-sac of disparate multiplicity, if we can feel it with heart and mind. Then we have entered the ground of encounter.  We need encounter to break through the cul-de-sac from the other side, so to speak. And in and through that encounter (whatever form it might take) integrate the past of relative incoherence into a concrete meaning and purpose transcending any single experience or meaning. Coming to Christ is an encounter, for it was only in encounter - cross and resurrection - that we learnt that God is love, and that love is the sole criterion for meaning and purpose, as Jesus says in today's Gospel reading.

1. Kasper, Walter. The God of Jesus Christ. New York: Crossroad, 1988

Idolatry and Purity

Recently, on ABC Adelaide radio, prominent educationalist and author Kevin Donnelly was cut mid-stream from the broadcast for referring to or quoting from, Mark Twain. (Ironically Donnelly was being interviewed about his latest book on free speech in education!) I'm sure the purists of the ABC were satisfied. 

Purity and extremism often follow one another. Purity is important in a recent Sunday reading today. (Exodus 32:1-14.) The people of Israel make for themselves an idol, a golden calf.  When it comes to sins, it doesn't get much worse than idolatry. Idolatry is held execrable because, among other reasons, it leads to all kinds of inhumanity. The worst idolatry is to substitute ourselves for God, rather than maintain ourselves as made in God's image. This was Solzhenitsyn's criticism of the monstrous history of the Bolsheviks, and more and more the modern world. In response to the danger of idolatry, Christianity has sought to overturn idolatry wherever it is found. But while this pursuit is pure, purity, as I said, often leads to extremism. Purity has no grace, and no place for failure, or the sinner. And it easily becomes an idol.

It is ironic that the quest to prevent idolatry ends in all kinds of inhumanities. Purity makes new victims in its efforts to prevent the impurity. But let us not restrict such puritanical pursuits to Christianity or religion in general. It seems to be a general characteristic of human beings. Think of all the great movements of purity from the French Revolution through to the Bolsheviks, the Nazis, and Pol Pot. Good atheists the lot of them.

Irony abounds. The ranks of the new puritans in the West (including in the Church) are to be found in those who would claim to be dismantling old oppressive systems of purity or preventing their re-emergence. 

So, what is the antidote to idolatry? As I have said before, Christian faith does not develop by just trying harder. Purifying oneself of any skerrick of idolatry may have the opposite effect than the one desired. (By making an idol out of the pursuit of purity.)

Better to love God. Practice loving God, even if it comes hard, or we are imperfect in it. It is love that overcomes idolatry, not purity. 

A Children's Talk on the Holy Trinity

It can be difficult to know what to say to kids about the Trinity. Try this next time:

Can anyone tell me why they think the love we give (and receive from others) is imperfect?
I reckon it is because human love is always given with a good splash of our own needs mixed in. And our needs - most often legitimate - shape our love so that it is not actually for the other person. It is for me as well. No parent can love their child perfectly, just as no child can love their parent perfectly. So too with our friends and anyone else for that matter.

But not so with God. God is love already. God doesn't need us to have someone to love, or need us to have someone to love God back. God is love. A communion/community of love. That is what the language of Father and Son, and their mutual love of the Holy Spirit, is meant to signify. God doesn't need us. But this is exactly why God loves us. It is for us, not mixed in with God's own neediness. (God is needless in this sense, not in a frigid sort of cold and distant sense.)

This is why it is so important to let God be God, and ourselves and everyone to be less than perfect. So many people bear a grudge against a parent or child or friend or someone they hardly know because that person was human, that is, couldn't love them perfectly. But that is to ask them to be who they cannot be. Why ask people to be who they are not? What they are not?

See also:
God Alone is Good
You can Trust God
Further Thoughts on Transcendence

God Alone is Good

Jesus says that no one is good except God alone. (Mark 10:18) Well that’s a relief. It’s a burden to think that the task of our lives is to be good. (Which is to say, not being bad.)

Jesus makes the above declaration about God in response to a question from a rich man. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” So Jesus begins with the affirmation that God alone is good. “But anyway” says Jesus, “how you going with the commandments?” “Great” says the guy, “I seem to have them down pretty well.” This guy thinks he is good. And he thinks Jesus is good, and that Jesus thinks that Jesus is good. And so he tries to identify with Jesus, to build up a mutual back-slapping club with him for all those who are good.

No such luck for the guy. “Give up everything and follow me.” To give up his wealth would be to give up the evidence that he is good. (That is, God blesses the righteous, and the guy’s wealth is therefore evidence that he is righteous. We call this the prosperity gospel these days and it is alive and well not so much in the church but in society around us.) Jesus invites the guy to give up the burden of his (self-) righteousness and to follow him, Jesus. “No way fella”, he says, and off he goes grieving for (we are told) “he had many possessions”.

People can often feel guilty about their wealth when they hear this reading. And that would be to miss the point. Guilt about not being good? ("I feel guilty about my wealth", which is to in some way say that I am bad because of it.) Oh dear. But isn’t Jesus saying that God alone is good? Imagine if, having felt guilty about one’s wealth after reading this passage, one gave it all up. I suppose we could feel very good rather than guilty (bad). But would this be discipleship?

Only God is good.

The call to discipleship that Jesus makes to the man is not a better way to be good, that is, free from possessions.  The passage is consistent: Jesus says it’s not about being good (God alone is good), the man says that he is good, Jesus calls him to give it all up and follow him, surely not just to be good, but to escape being good. Discipleship of Jesus is not about being good.

It’s a call away from being good.

Here’s another way of looking at it. If I said I was showing compassion to someone because I was good, or if showed compassion because I felt guilty, that wouldn’t be compassion. That would make my ‘compassion’ be about me, not the person I am being compassionate toward. Being good to please God is about us, not God. Jesus asks us to love not be good.

God's Love and the Royal Wedding

The preacher at the recent royal wedding stole the show in a way. True to his roots, he preached a style of sermon that was refreshing and complemented the straight-down-the-line approach of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Touched off with a marvellous rendition of  Stand By Me gospel style. And with perhaps 2 billion people watching Bishop Michael Curry took the opportunity to speak of the transforming power of God’s love and the possibility of our mutual love seen in a couple about to discover this love in a life lived together in holy matrimony. It was a good sermon for a world of limited Christian understanding and showcased the Christian emphasis on love.

The bishop said many things, but here is my very short summary:

If we love each other we will transform the world.

As someone said, it was classic Progressive Christianity. Of course, if we could love each other the world would be different. A new creation. But the world isn’t different, so presumably (the awkward, unspoken inference of the sermon) we don’t love each other well enough. So try harder. And here we meet the soft underbelly of Progressive Christianity. Generally speaking, while so-called progressives begin with a concern for the excluded and for peace and justice, Progressive Christianity ends wagging the finger as much as its arch-rival, the conservative evangelicalism. “If only we loved each other more …” We don’t, so try harder. I find progressive Christianity as law-driven and critical of those who don’t measure up as anything it allegedly opposes. Progressive Christianity is adept at the backhanded compliment.

The readings for Trinity Sunday (Year B) have as the Gospel reading a great chunk of John 3. It narrates, among other things, God’s action in Jesus to change people and the world.  It is not a call for us to try harder, even to try harder with a good measure of aid from God. The traditional gospel affirms our neediness and inability to save ourselves, to contribute to our salvation at all. Our contribution is elicited, enabled, sustained, and fulfilled by God. We can’t even claim a tiny, little sliver of unaided contribution that was topped up by God.  Of course, we can call each other to greater acts of love. But how to do this without the implied criticism? Better to be honest about the criticism and see where you end up.

The preacher at the royal wedding got away with it because his ancestors were slaves and here he was preaching to the Queen of England. A good dose of irony in that, irony that sits very comfortably with Christianity. But, generally speaking, progressive Christianity has as much trouble with criticism and exclusion of those who don’t measure up as do any of the conservatives.

Love: Feeling and Action

"Is love a feeling?" I asked my Year 7s this question, and they thought love is a feeling. So I asked, "Is love action?" They also thought love is an action. "Can love be both feeling and action?" Yes, they thought love can be both feeling and action. "Can love be feeling without action?" Yes, they thought love can be feeling without action. "Can love be action without feeling?" Ah, that was a lot harder. I think the majority view was that love cannot be action without the feelings associated with love. Perhaps Jesus thinks otherwise though. His counsel is to love our enemies. I take this to mean that we might have warm feelings toward our enemies, or we might not. But without action we cannot love our enemies. As far as I can tell Jesus did not say we will never (or should not) have enemies, but that we should love them. Like most people I find it easier to love those who love me, especially those for whom I have a warmth in my heart. Like most people, I find it difficult to love someone I am in conflict with, or someone who shows no love toward me, and certainly difficult to love an enemy. But I remember that love is primarily action before it is feeling. I might start with my feelings when I consider someone who I am in conflict with, but I know that it is action that will change the circumstances between us, and action need not be ruled by feelings.

Rowan Williams on Augustine (Quote)

Undoing some cheap and easy criticisms of Augustine from Rowan Williams. I cut this from Ship of Fools...

What everyone remembers, of course, is the things you got wrong – or the things we're quite sure you got wrong.

How you painted yourself into a corner over predestination, God deciding before all time who was to go to heaven and who not. And women; we get very indignant that you had difficulty believing that women were really in God's image as much as men. We forget that this is what you did believe, and how difficult it was for you to square this with what everyone else in your age thought.

And we blame you for messing up Christian attitudes to sex, because for you it was an area of humiliation and tragedy – forgetting, again, that you truly thought sex between husband and wife had something of heaven in it.

We look for a scapegoat to explain why Western Christianity and Western civilization are so much of a mess. You wrote such a lot and so powerfully that I'm afraid you're a very good candidate for the position. But I think you would have turned around and challenged us: why the passion for a scapegoat? What are you refusing to look at in yourself?

In the City of God you explained the mechanisms: we're not sure in ourselves what we really love and value; we invest all our expectations in people and solutions inside this world, and they let us down cruelly. We feel restless and insubstantial because we don't know how and what to love. So we give ourselves a false solidity by pushing the darkness, the doubt and evil out there, projecting it onto some other person, some other group.

We get our solid identity from denying our own poverty and incompleteness. When I was teaching students about the City of God, I felt I really began to understand the Cold War.

So we can't learn to love unless we let go of the longing for solid, fixed identity. We start to grow up not when we become independent, but when we recognize that we shall always need the words and actions of others to give us life – and when we face that fact without resentment or shame.

Behind it all is the recognition that the only reason there is anything at all is the pure act of generosity that creates the world – it doesn't have to be there, God doesn't have to make it, but he wants his joy shared. When we know that, we know ourselves – not by introspection, because I shall always lie to myself about my motives, but by looking to the love that made me and remakes me.

Not a scapegoat, then, but someone who's taught me what I hope is the right kind of scepticism about myself and the world of power around me – and the right kind of trust in my maker.

The Two Great Elephants in the Room

... behind and beneath the smooth wheels of the socially constructed world are two abiding facts: unreconciled pain and unexhausted compassion, the history of men and women and the history of God with us. (Rowan Williams)